Silly site of the week! You thought Tamagotchi were all the rage? Sorry, but they've been gone one better. Try Tamagothi. Hysterical.
Can't see the pretty font I installed just for you? Then follow this link and follow the instructions!
Please be advised that this is a page about Goths and about the Gothic subculture.
It has nothing to do with the deplorable killings of students in Littleton, Colorado.
It has nothing to do with the so-called "Trenchcoat Mafia".
We disavow any linkage, media misrepresentation notwithstanding, between Goths, Gothic, and mass-murder.
Please see a page detailing "erroneous assumptions" and find out what Goths think about all of this, as well as what some people mistakenly believed about Goths.
Please see this very good page on The Goth Culture from the Religious Tolerance Organization
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Silly site of the week! You thought Tamagotchi were all the rage? Sorry, but they've been gone one better. Try Tamagothi. Hysterical.
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Please see this excellent page very well done by what you get "when Goths grow up". Please see Bratling's homepage.
Please see this page by someone who, if this is the work of someone not grown up, won't ever grow up into the casual way of the world that so often devours us: Let her remain as she is. (!) But that is a cruel wish and we can only hope that she will grow... but perhaps never grow up. Please see The Autumn Cemetery Text, by Lisly. She may be the last, best hope for a new generation of a thoughtful Gothic being.
Judging from the reporting, what we have here is a case of an emerging serial-killer who happened to get caught his first time.
Fortunately, this is more easily and properly attributed to the combined influences of mental-illness and the oneirotaxic effect of extensive Role-Playing Gaming, than to anything "Gothic".
Gothic in Washington DC
THE BIG, RATHER ESSENTIAL, LIFE-SAVING FAQS
If gothic's just not weird-enough for you, try taking a look at my Weirdness Page.
If you want both Goth and weirdness, take a look at the Washington DC area phenomenon of Psychotic Elves From Hell.
Unfortunately, after a certain number of years being amazingly harassed for putting on a hellacious Halloween show, I decided that I was getting a little too old for this, and now I look like anyone, more or less. But of course the legend lives on, distorted by time and passage through many mouths, and looking "normal" doesn't keep the neighborhood kids from screaming "Vampire Man!" at me when I go to the mall. I've even had little goth kidz in the 13 to 15 year old age-group (I think that's right about the age between when one becomes a grouper and when perception of irony sets it) scream vampire-man (or "vampiro") at me. Unfortunately for me, passage through many mouths tends to change from mindless gossip into transnational defamation of character when it goes from passage through many mouths and crosses the language barrier - idiocy and irony becomes danger and conspiracy to murder when the foreigners whisper: "P'o", or "alukah", or "el vampiro". One enters the realm of the truly surreal in the Nation's Capital when one hears a Korean ask a Latina "this one, he bloodsukah?" and the latina's nod is backed up by the arabess' hiss and the west african's mutter of assent. It's getting tough to be a little too pale around DC these days. Outside of outright assault with assassination tools mostly I don't give a damn... I knew being gothic was dangerous. It's always dangerous, even in a free country, to be outside the bounds of "acceptably different". I presume that what's "acceptably-different" is defined by media and marketing machines, and now that "Goth" is becoming trendy, I could probably more easily get away with being a goth once again.
I was always sort of a punker, and back when smoking herb was a felony, I was the first kid in the neighborhood to have long hair. When short hair was totally uncool, I cut my long hair and went with the buzzcut. When nobody would be caught dead in the 'hood wearing Army green, I went to paratroop boots. Before goths and vampires and all of that stuff was cool, I was loitering palely to all hours, and trying to figure out if it was really possible to live in the modern world as traditional draculoid of the type that catches fire and explodes at the slightest touch of daylight. No, I didn't sleep in a coffin or anything, I was just wondering if it could be done. (nope.) Believe it or not, I write quite a bit and was researching a novel, my first. No evil intent, just exploring the difference between suspension of disbelief and real-life possibilities, however outre or contrived. I made really weird acquaintances, not the sort of people who can be anyone's friends, but certainly people worthy of study if not incarceration or committment. I learned some interesting martial arts. I did manage to acquire the clearest complexion on earth. I was so pale that you could see the individual capillaries, and was one of the control subjects in a long-term study which determined that something like 80 percent of cosmetic aging comes from excessive ultraviolet exposure. Yes, it's true, I was of service to modern science without having to die first, both medical science, and comparative hominid behavioral and cultural anthropologies.
Eventually, though, I got tired of people waving crosses at me and occasionally chasing me around with pointed sticks, and said to hell with it, went out and nearly died of multiple sunburns and probably have a nice case of skin-cancer biding its time, and cosmetically I have aged maybe fifteen years in about five years, which has unfortunately done nothing to quash rumors of vampirism. Mounting my cyberpunk/SF/gothic-horror-romance novel on the Web has not really done much to quash the rumors either. It's all purely fiction, you should hope, and as is common with first novels, it shows a certain unrealized promise in some parts and baldly stinks in others. But it's staying on the web: there's lots of clues for anyone who doesn't want to have to go through what I went through to learn what I have learned about the darker side of life - and what have I learned? Seek ye the Light. But know you this - within us, without us, for half of all of our time on this earth there is Darkness, and while many of us will remain forever crouched within our technological caves basking in the glow of firelight real or artificial - without, for half of our lives, the darkness waits. You don't have to like it, but you do have to understand it. Believe me, it understands you much better than you can ever imagine, and yet it also knows nothing about the light within you. So light your candle and hide not your light under a bushel-basket, take it out into the night - not all the darkness in the world can extinguish the light that you carry, though they may take you and all that you are, the light travels on and will illuminate some soul who seeks with their spirit for the glimmer of the lights that forever travel through darkness.
What I'm saying is that it seems to me that no matter how I dress, I'll always be just a little bit in love with the night, with the real darkness if not the things which all too often hide within, in love with the comforting way that the night wraps itself around you... and though they can be difficult to see from the city, I know where quite a few stars are... and I know this about the stars: They might be cold, and uncaring, and a million miles away, but they'll always be there. The stars are my friends. I'll always be a bit of a gargoyle, I suppose, a watchman of the night. I really might be a bit too old to be hanging around on top of old marble buildings all dressed in black and being a pointlessly hideous figure that most people never notice (and so I don't do it), but once a Goth, always Gothic... sorta.
Believe it or not, I've got a "klaatu FAQ!"