and scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by?

the transient pleasures as a vision seem,

and yet we think the greatest pain's to die.

Distangled_web@hotmail.com

greetings Smith

Washington Post

The young men who opened fire at Columbine High School on Tuesday were members of a small clique of outcasts who always wore black trench coats and spent their adolescence deep inside the subculture of Gothic fantasy, their peers said.

Students at the Colorado school said the gunmen were a target of derision for at least four years.

"They're basically outcasts, Gothic people," said Peter Maher, a junior who had a confrontation last July 4 with the shooters and several of their fellow members of the "Trench Coat Mafia," the teens' name for their group. "They're into anarchy. They're white supremacists and they're into Nostradamus stuff and doomsday."

Several students said the shooters were obsessed with death -- talking, reading and dreaming about it. They described them as unkempt, wearing the same clothes day after day.

"They wore makeup a lot, powdered their faces white," said Chip Dunleavy, a junior.

Said John House, another junior: "They wore combat fatigues and boots. No one thought anything about it because it was an everyday experience."

Dunleavy said that members of the Trench Coat Mafia were continually at odds with athletes and racial minorities. "They knew who they were shooting at," he said.

"It was an ongoing thing," House said. "They hated the jocks, and we didn't like them."

Black trench coats are a consistent theme in the Gothic subculture that has attracted many teenagers to the poetry, music and costumes of a scene that ranges from benign fantasy to violent reality. Inspired by fantasy games such as Dungeons and Dragons, Gothic has become a fascination of many American high schoolers, some of whom simply dress in black and paint their fingernails black. Others immerse themselves in a pseudo medieval world of dark images.

One Web sites featuring poetry called "The Written Work of The Trenchcoat" and in political tracts and other elements of the conspiratorial imagination, trench coats serve as a symbol for everything from Hitler and the Nazis to mass murder to suicidal fantasies. Tuesday was Hitler's birthday, an occasion for demonstrations, mock funerals and other macabre commemorations among both neo-Nazis and groups within the Gothic scene.

When the young men started shooting Tuesday, 10th-grader Mindy Pollock was in the school parking lot. She saw two shooters firing their guns repeatedly, and she watched as her peers dropped to the pavement.

She said she couldn't believe it was real. She said she had once before seen one of the boys pull a gun on her friends. "The one with the handgun today pulled a shotgun on my friends once. He said he was sick of being made fun of," she said. "He said, 'I'll shoot you, I'll shoot you.' " Pollock said her friends tried to calm the boy and then ran from him.

Students said the members of the group wore their trench coats every day, regardless of the weather, even in class. Under the coats, they dressed in black -- military berets, T-shirts, jeans, combat boots. Red shoelaces and the occasional Confederate-flag patch were the only departure.

"They were kind of the freaks of the school," said Kendra Curry, a senior.

One group member reportedly had his own Internet site, listing the people he hated, glorifying violence. A parent of a Columbine student reported the Web site to local police, who, she said, did nothing.

And one of the suspects had a member profile on AOL listing his Personal Quote as, "Kill em AALLLL!!!!"

-- Star Tribune staff writer Pat Doyle and news services contributed to this report.

This site was very nice and I enjoyed to see fellow goths having fun in thier own special way. I miss that really. But Medicine Hat Alberta Canada is not really your ideal place for Gothic people.

-christian-

dark blessings to all

secretia