The world we live in occasionally brings me to tears. Sometimes, they're tears of amazement, joy, exuberance. Other times, like tonight, they're tears of sorrow, pain and shock. This just hits too close to home.

Dawson College is less than ten minutes away from me. I studied there for three semesters. I walked through these doors every day. Since I left school, I still pass by the area on a regular basis. In fact, I was right there last night. Had this happened five years ago, I'd likely have been in the Atrium, as I often hung out there between classes.

On a normal day, my girlfriend Faye would have been right across the street at work. She just took a sabbatical though, and was on her way to Toronto when the shooting happened. Her co-workers, however, including my ex and many friends, had a bird's eye view of the situation from their office. Just 8 minutes after the shooting began, my ex posted on a forum that she could see 23 cops car downstairs. Fifteen minutes later, her building was evacuated and they ended up directly across the street from the shooting. They were told to simply run.

My brother's girlfriend was in class at the time, in a wing far from where the shooting was happening. Her classmates started getting text messages and then a student burst into the class telling them to get the hell out of the building.

I passed by the area on my way home from work around 8:30. The blocks around the school are barricaded and the area is teeming with police and media. It was eerie to see a table with a pair of high heels on it and recognize it as the one I'd seen on the news earlier being used as a makeshift stretcher to carry a wounded girl away.

Watching the news tonight, I tried my best to fight back the tears. I failed. Though I didn't lose anyone close to and all those I care about got out safe, the whole even is shocking and sad. The only consolation is that the situation could have been a lot more serious had the police not responded with such breakneck speed.

I watched the news during Columbine. I read about the shootings in Taber. Though I felt pain during those events, I felt far removed from them. Columbine is across the continent. I'd never even heard of Taber. But this... this is different. This is literally right in my own backyard. True, it's not the first school shooting in Montreal, but I'm too young to remember the Montreal Massacre at Ecole Polytechnique in December 89 and I only have hazy memories of the Fabrikant shootings at Concordia in 1992.

It makes me wonder what kind of a fucked up world we live in where someone can truly believe that opening fire on innocent students is a fair, suitable and logical method of exacting revenge on their peers. It also makes me wonder how fucked up our world is when people can taunt and tease and judge someone so harshly, based on almost nothing but physical appearance, that this person would want to open fire on his peers. As I watched eyewitness reports on the news, I cringed when one of the first things that a young woman mentioned was the shooter's "retarded haircut", referring to his mohawk. I can't help but think that it's comments just like that which help fuel incidents such as this.

Maybe, when I wake up tomorrow, the world will be a better place...