6/19/12

So I was going to tell y'all about the feely-meely, lovey-dovey, hippie-crap show I had to attend yesterday.  It was called… no, I'm not going to say what it was called.  It might pop this rant up on a search for the real thing.  E-mail me and I might tell you what it was called.  Apparently this dude’s daughter was killed at… um, let’s say a school shooting in Colorado thirteen years ago (again, I don’t want to make it easy for his lawyers to find this rant).  Well, to cash in on this tragedy, he takes excerpts from her diaries, and some essay she wrote about being nice to everyone, mixes it with tear-jerk tales of the shooting, and basically tells us, “Be nice to everyone.”  Now, I will admit that the guy has his shit together with regards to yanking on the sympathies.  I welled up a few times… I ain’t above admitting it.  But the more I thought about the thing as a whole, the more annoyed I got.  He didn’t say anything we didn’t hear EVERY SUNDAY IN SUNDAY SCHOOL since we were five years old!  His whole thing was, “Be nice to everyone… my daughter was!”  Ok, so she wrote an essay about it and said what her strategies for niceness were.  I'll buy that.  So she was nice to people at school… ok, I'll take that one with the stipulation that she might have just been an attention seeker who wanted everyone to like her.  What started me thinking he was a scam artist was when he began showing “quotes” from the diary where she was predicting that she would die at a young age by homicide.  Things like, “This is my last year lord…”  Last year of WHAT?  Last year of high school?  Was she a senior?  I don’t know.  Last year of wearing braces?  I don’t know.  Last year of virginity?  Was she going to hook up with her boyfriend at the prom?  I don’t know.  Taken out of context, within a year of her death, it does SOUND like a premonition.  And the way HE read them, they did sounds eerily like premonitions.  But, put the emphasis slightly differently and it was just BAD TEENAGE-GIRL POETRY!  I do not buy for one second that she would discuss how she didn’t expect to live to be very old as if it were just a passing thing.  No, it sounded to me like typical depressed teenage angst poetry… and not very good typical depressed teenage angst poetry… as if there were such a thing.  The final straw for me though was when it went from being a sympathy-wrenching “Why can’t we all be like (the image I’m trying to pass off of) my angelic daughter,” to the “Psychic Wonders Show.”  What do I mean by that?  First off is the “predictions” of her own death in the diaries.  I ain't buying it.  But the clincher was the tale of the guy on the other side of the country who, after watching her funeral, began to have a recurring dream.  He called the father and told him that he kept dreaming of a young girl’s eyes watering something growing with her tears.  He asked if this meant anything to the father.  “Nope,” said dad.  “Not a thing.”  The dreamer asked that dad call him if ever it DID make any sense.  Lo and behold, when her backpack was released from evidence, he found a drawing in the final diary, on the last page nonetheless, as if it were the last thing she ever did.  What was the drawing?  Take the wildest guess possible.  Yes, you in the back… no, it was not Edgar from “Twilight” riding a unicorn into battle with Napoleon Dynamite on a liger.  But that was a good guess.  It was a pair of eyes weeping tears, which turn into blood drops according to dad, and fall on a rose growing up from the bottom of the page.  Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit!  I'm not buying it!  By the way, this just occurred to me, when he was showing some of the “Challenges” she wrote on various things, one of them was on the cover of this very same diary.  He made a point to indicate that a bullet hole acts as an exclamation point to her statement.  Where was the bullet hole in this “Last page of the diary” drawing?  Unless it was right through one of the eyes, I didn’t see one.  Fortunately that was one of the last parts of the show, and probably why I remember it so well, because I might have gotten up and walked out had he gone on much longer.  I am disgusted at this charlatan’s exploitation of his daughter’s death to make a buck because I'm sure he charges a shit-ton of money to come make people cry and tell them, “Be nice to one another.”  I won't even go into how he compares her to Anne Frank.  Yeah, he goes there… several times.  I'm getting mad again just writing about it.  He did say one thing I will accept.  He said if we look for the good in people we will find it and if we look for the bad, even in him, we’ll find it.  I found it.  And it sickens me.