Creepwatch

So most of America has heard the details of the PA Gym Killer, George Sodini and how it was all planned out for at least a year ahead of time. As he indicated, I am certain it will be studied as an example of the thinking process that leads someone to commit mass homicide.

One thing I garnered from reading this is it's hard to get it to fit our relatively rational analysis of the world. Have some of us felt 1 or more of these things in our lives? Certainly: Alone, misunderstood, sexually unfulfilled, angry at parents or religion or the relative 'injustice' of romantic availability? There are some days when these feelings juxtapose and you barely feel like getting out of bed, and I am sure most or all of it never involves the fleeting notion, hmm, someone has to die for making me feel this way.

Whatever we try to do to understand him, it's clear he clearly had an undiagnosed mental disorder, and in many cases they don't make for ease of understanding. Whether someone blames mom, brother, society, religion, well-hung white-girl-loving Blackzillas or 20something teases who wouldn't give the time of day (otherwise belittled their bedroom prowess), many of us have had to deal with one or more of the above issues or prejudices. It's the fact most of us haven't planned on gunning down a room full of women for over a year that separates us from him. The dispassion of his rant also lends to the air of scariness. His written 'struggle' with it, aside from chickening out early on, appears very distanced, almost robotic. Clean, calculating, with just enough emotion to indicate his resolve. He walked a fine line he could have stepped off of at any point, whether with the help of a safe relationship or the intercession of a friend or loved one.

I guess you could call that dividing line morality or sanity. I don't feel pity for this guy, because as someone who was also not gifted with many social graces in his youth, I nevertheless kept my wits about me and never used it as justification for some sort of murderous tirade against society. It's the difference between a misanthrope and a sociopath. The only guys I knew who thought that the fact women were not flocking to him in droves was THEIR problem--not his-- were ones who had a severe case of narcissistic personality disorder, in which case nothing any of us could say would have mattered (we're either wrong our out to ruin him). Sodini had the money and employability to be appealing to someone (even monsters like Richard Ramirez have a wife) but it seems he either chickened out of a real dating situation or sent up to many red flags from the getgo to attract the type of women he wanted (which I think were younger 20somethings who may have been a limited option to begin with).

It will be interesting as time progresses whether his blog was ever public before this, and if so why no one read it or called attention to it. I would assume those who knew him on a personal basis are still shaking their head, and I am curious whether media attention will bring his mother or brother into the fold, under some ludicrous title like "Architects of a Fledgling Killer". Then again, we may never know, and in the end it will just be like Detective Somerset's analysis of John Doe in Se7en: "just his mind, poured out on paper".