Behind every great eccentric is a story they should stop repeating to themselves. Here's mine:

It was raining one day in southern California in the early 1970s. So for seventh-grade gym class, we had to sit in the locker room until the period was over. This meant that a roomful of hateful, pre-teen energy focused itself on one unpopular boy after another, until it finally landed on one kid for good. Guess who that kid was. Guess. Come on come on come on come on come on come on come on, guess. The guys literally stood along a wall chanting, "We want Lank." Over and over. And yes, if someone had asked me right then whom I would kill first if suddenly everything were allowed, I still remember a few names that would have been on that list.

But I never even thought about that. Nobody did, in those days. And I've started wondering why not.

"We were at the tail end of an innocent age when certain taboos still meant something. Back then, it was still unthinkable to carry a gun to school. It was a huge deal to be caught with a knife," said Mel Swanberg, an academic researcher who has studied five generations of anger management. Nah, I'm kidding. Mel is just some guy I knew in high school. He used to get hassled because he hated sports and because, God help him, his first name is Melvin.

"At no time did I ever think about acting out against the more established cliques in a violent way," Mel said. "It was enough to occasionally verbally castrate some football jock in full view of his teammates. Even if I ended up getting slugged in the stomach, it was worth it."

There was also this girl in elementary school, Cece Molnar, who used to get called names, though I can't remember a single unpleasant thing she ever did, and she became highly skilled artist. "I was kind of a social inept," Cece said. "I didn't understand at the time that my belief that people wouldn't like me worked as a self-fulfilling prophecy." But Cece, who came from a religious home, "never would have dreamed of hurting anyone."

Cece now lives with her daughter in a small mountain community. The day she got my e-mail with questions for this article, a child in her area was caught bringing a loaded gun to school.

What's changed? Mel, who has a couple of sons, has managed to reflect upon this without any bitterness. "Since 90 percent of all people are completely hopeless morons and tend to act like sheep, the first high school shooting set off a rash of copycats," Mel said. "Things like that open the doors for others who may have the desire to lash out, but not the capacity for original thought to come up with their own method."

Cece said it's that parents are more selfish now. "Making the individual parent's needs more important than the kids', it gives the kids the message that looking out for yourself is Number One."

Me, I think what the shooters lack is perspective. My mantra used to be, "Someday, I'll get out of here," rather than, "Someday, I'll kill the entire swim team." So it won't help merely to fear the angry loners. Targeting the weird kids is something the bullies already are doing quite well without the schools' assistance, thank you. Instead, kids need to know that the best way to get through the rough years is simply to outlast them (though, I grant you, that concept would make for one phenomenally boring rap album). Sure, if you're an unpopular teen-ager, your life reeks. But once you've grown up and realized that "90 percent of all people are completely hopeless morons," no one can touch you again.

That's why those who've lived through the bad times are the most interesting people I know. Mel now supervises a government tech operation and likes to write down inexplicable things people say, along with the time and date in which they say them. ("How does a blind dog play fetch? Wouldn't it bump into things a lot?" Jan. 14, 2000, 11:46 a.m.) Cece lived for awhile in a teepee, and now makes jewelry, owns a couple of houses and loves her daughter to distraction. Cece did all right.

And me, well, I work at a newspaper, so people still insult me. But they can't say anything I didn't hear in a locker room on a rainy day in 1972. And anyway, it's been a good quarter of a century – a very good quarter of a century, indeed – since I gave a damn.