The Litblog Co-Op has announced its Spring 2007 Read This! Selection: Alan DeNiro’s Skinny Dipping in the Lake of the Dead.

My emotions are high.

What nobody has observed (at least as far as I can tell) is that this is the first American mass murder along these lines (at least that I know of) in which there was absolutely no ego involved. This madman did not want to be recognized. He didn’t carry an ID. Didn’t carry a cell phone. He willfully disfigured his face. He was not Charles Whitman shooting from a tower, knowing full well that his handiwork was going to be discovered. He was not Eric and Dylan getting vocal revenge on classmates. There was no ego.

And beyond the family and friends of the victims and the wholesale incompetence of the Virginia Tech Campus Police, who had jurisdiction here, to call in city, county and state police to contain this situation, that’s what creeps me out the most about this. There is absolutely no human component to this. This guy went in and, as far as we know, just started shooting the shit out of people. There is nothing that we can empathize with here. Not a common grievance that saner humans can identify.

I’m still sifting through the information, stunned that this happened and trying to find some trigger effect. But there’s nothing. I’m wondering if there was some kind of personal connection between the shooter and his victims. But the more articles I read, the more it looks like this was a carefully calculated plan of evil upon the human race.

And that’s what scares the hell out of me. That a person walking this earth would be incapable of even the tiniest sliver of good. That a person would butcher so many without even a warning. That the blood of this killer may very well be colder than a year in Eureka, Nanavut.

Christ. This is worse than Charles Whitman.

[UPDATE: ABC is reporting 29 dead.]

There is currently a tiny thatch of hair on the left side of my receding hairline. I thought it would go as swiftly as the others. But it appears to be clinging to the rock, like some leech that the finest blade devised by humankind couldn’t t even remove. It apparently didn’t get the memo that the other follicles got. Perhaps this thatch wishes to distinguish itself, but it seems to think that I’m still 28. It’s an area of hair on my head that wants to attend nightclubs again and maybe MDMA. Of course, I know those days are pretty much over, and my drug habits, for the most part, have been limited to the legal stuff. Drug-wise, I’m that garden-variety taxpayer you want to kick repeatedly in the ass. I’m sorry for being so unhip.

Mind you, I’m happily balding. I intend to be a badass bald motherfucker. I intend to tell people to get off my lawn, even if I don’t have one. There have been plenty of fantastic bald men, and I hope to be one of them. I just wish that the process had some kind of logic or consistency. There is no reason for this stubborn patch of hair to remain. Yet it does, with stunning resilience.

I only write about this because recent emails my way have suggested some confusion on the subject, when my hair should be a dead giveaway. While I am happy to be thought young, the truth is that, depending upon how you view the age spectrum (my own observational window conflates it with a value associated with Andrew Carnegie), I’m in the beginnings of early middle age. So I can’t exactly be called young or precocious. But I assure you that I’m still a silly person.

Now that we’re cleared up on that subject, let the balding commence!