Transcendent Woman

Or maybe not quite. But a stride in that direction. Give it another generation, and an addict more serious about keeping their addiction a secret. If we can evolve pigeons to clean the garbage off city streets, we can evolve a person who doesn’t keel from guzzling gasoline.

I fail to see the long-term upside, however, given that gasoline is a fuel that is supposedly on its way out. But a person becoming more like a machine does sound like the wave of the future. The newest crop of chess grandmasters resemble computers more in their play, due to their exposure to them, and the ratings keep stretching upward.

I Might Have Played Chess with Anthony Sowell

By way of illustrating how his health turned drastically for the worse after he suffered a heart attack, Cleveland serial killer Anthony Sowell spoke of how he once was a good chess player who played all the time on the internet. He said that after the heart attack he couldn’t win a game. The description matches perfectly with someone I have played and briefly chatted with at the Internet Chess Club, and a smattering of other details makes the case stronger that it was in fact him. Regardless, my interaction with the mystery chess player has been one of the more significant of my life.

All Morgan Freeman had to do in Lean On Me was “stay black and die”, and for the longest time I had it in my head that my equivalent would be to stay brilliant and die, but my brush with this player taught me that this simply wasn’t true. The mystery chess player had been much stronger at his strongest than I’ve ever been, and a perusal of his statistics was a sight to behold. All Hot-Dog’s bests (and if that wasn’t quite his handle it connoted awfully close) approached master level, well above 2000, but when I met him he was struggling to maintain half as high. I assumed that some beginner kid had taken over his father’s account, but the guy said no, both were him. Both Sowell and my opponent had suffered silent attacks– neither knew what hit them when they were hit — and I recall that my opponent had contemplated giving up chess, but said “no, I will continue”. This would be just like Sowell; as a worker he definitely testified to being the type who would play through the pain.

Add Anthony Sowell to my growing collection of murderers who have fallen mentally from too high a place. I suspect that’s the real key with your paranoid schizophrenics and what have you. Murder as an outgrowth not of the disease or the trauma, but of the sane glimmer of a sharp mind’s former self, when a man looks on with impotent outrage at the shell he is becoming and has become. Herb Mullin was a valedictorian before he became schizophrenic, and Mr. Anime, Trey Sessler, used to be sharp as a tack. Sessler post-lobotomy would have been too lethargic; he killed his family with his last flicker.

Here I also insert myself as an honorable mention. I dropped about a full grade point between sixth and seventh grades, and in my book I list all sorts of reasons which I ultimately distrust, because I had too many reasons. It might have just been one of those forest fires of the brain– I did make a crack about my brain cells rapidly committing hari-kari.

I felt I was grade school royalty when I was dominating the classroom, and when I stopped dominating this didn’t alter my perception of being royalty, since royalty is a birthright and not something a person has to earn and re-earn anew. I became unrecognized royalty, walking around silently saying to everyone, “Don’t you know who I am?” Incredulously, no one did.

Fast-forward to 16:36 of Anthony Sowell, part two, to pick up from the chess comments. If you listen much beyond that point, you will have heard more than I have. I just had to stop after hearing him talk about chess.

Oh My Goodness

“Embedding disabled by request”. So a simple link this time around:

Ed Kemper Interview, 1991

Grander scale on Kemper’s part, his serial murdering versus my serial masturbating (27 years ago), and his oral communication is way better than mine though I would hope to beat him in writing, but otherwise peas in a pod.

One major surprise in his telling. That he was calling himself weak just before the co-ed murders began, for the fact that to this point he had played his game of picking up hitchhikers for three years without ever going through with his fantasy. The phenomenon is not a surprise. I had the same nagging voice spurring me in the direction of murder, a devil on my shoulder taunting me that I couldn’t harm a fly. What’s surprising to me is that Kemper had already crossed the line to becoming a murderer by killing his grandparents years earlier. Shouldn’t that have been sufficient to prove to oneself for all time that you’re not weak in at least one dimension?

I Love It

Embed a video and voila, instant graphics. Since I’m the only soul who has commented on this person’s video so far, their comment section can also double as my day’s deep thoughts in writing.

Good to find a simple commentary on the childhoods of serial killers; we need more of this. (By the way, I love your room’s background) Abusive childhoods are indeed key, though I’d like to see more acknowledgment that witnessing mistreatment can be as significant as experiencing it firsthand.

I was with you right up until you stated your belief that a genetic defect needs to be present to account for why some people do and some people don’t, given equally horrible childhoods.

I think it’s more the case in serial killer childhoods that nothing goes right developmentally, rather than that they experience a lot that is spectacularly wrong. Maleness is a huge factor genetically, though I wouldn’t call that a defect, and there are other traits a person can have that would seem innocuous or even positive by themselves, such as physical strength and intelligence, which can help a killer along toward his destiny if these traits become married to an anti-social outlook.

Potshots

Sending My Regrets

Please share the frothy hatred regarding ‘Titanic’. I loved that movie like almost no other. I think of the old couple in bed that didn’t even try to survive when I need a good cry.

But I’m with you about the uncalled for criticism of a killer’s gravedigging skills and what have you. I understand about not wanting to give a killer credit for anythng, but so often the mainstream look like idiots if you take them at their word that they actually believe their lines about the attributes of killers in areas having nothing to do with why they oppose them. The talking heads are idiots if they are honest, and dishonest if they know what they’re doing. If you’ve never harmed anyone and are idealistically against idiocy and dishonesty, and on one side you have somebody who did their best under circumstances you don’t understand, while on the other you have a fellow taking potshots, stuff like that can persuade the idealist to join the true Good Guys.

Birth Order Thoughts about Wichita’s BTK

Or maybe this is more about me.

What Your Birth Order Says About You

I’ve been meaning to do a proper review of Bind Torture Kill, or an assessment of Dennis Rader through the book which I just finished reading, but maybe it is meant to come dribbling out sporadically over a period of many days.

Often I have wondered what birth order has meant in distinguishing my experience growing up from that of my younger brother’s. We are similar psychologically, but why aren’t we even closer to being identical twins? And why, in the world at large, is a Ma Barker gang not the rule in dysfunctional families?

Dennis Rader was the eldest of five children, and in a book that offered next to no insight on the matter of Rader’s development (because it wasn’t and probably couldn’t be that kind of book), there was one tantalizing offering about his family environment. Namely, that while the mother was loving, the father was “strict but fair”.

Happens that words of this very sort have been used to describe my father’s father, who also had five kids. “Strict but fair” has been the testimony of all or most of his children, who at the same time acknowledge that he beat them often. An example of my grandfather’s ‘fairness’ was his now and then whipping his kids without cause on the grounds that they had probably done something wrong that he hadn’t caught them for since the last time they had been whipped. It is only recently that the mother of this clan has come forward with accusations that he beat her as well, but she is almost universally dismissed as being batshit crazy. I personally don’t find the charges too farfetched, knowing for a fact he could get a good laugh out of walking on my adolescent back while I was sleeping on his floor over a holiday.

Two things birth order related that could have tipped the scales, persuading the eldest Rader kid to veer down a criminal path. One is that Dennis more than anyone, as a first and briefly an only, was in position to partake in the drama of competing Alpha Males, ready to displace his father as Man of the House should his father be judged as unworthy. If Dad only won under protest– and a ‘good’ kid like Dennis might have had cause to protest that he didn’t do anything wrong in the periods between presumed beatings– then an entire childhood might have been frittered away, waiting for the decision to be reversed.

The other factor is really more about the age of the parents when a child is very young. The firstborn gets the youngest, healthiest, most energetic parents, and when we’re talking dysfunctionality, that means they get the parents who have the most piss and vinegar in them. How Rader experienced “strict but fair”, if that was indeed his take, might have been very different from how his siblings experienced it after their father had mellowed.

**********

A post script on descending IQs by order of birth. I have heard tales of one family with five children that illustrate this tendency dramatically. Fetal alcohol syndrome was at the root. The firstborn was MENSA material, the second toward the top of her field, but then the third kid wasn’t much more than functional, the fourth one retarded, and the fifth child unable to function outside an institution.

Mr. Anime– Reactions to Reactions

“I don’t even know how I’m supposed to feel about this.”

My, the most pressing concern a ‘psychopath’ or chameleon growing up deals with every day, and it takes a tragedy for a normal to visit the same desperate place. Could it be, just maybe, that my people are dealing with something existentially from one breath to the next that is on a par with what you go through only on your very worst days? Where do your qualifications for passing judgment come from, given the severity of your underexposure to the outlines of reality?

Trey Sesler hid virtually nothing about who he was. He hid in plain sight in your lie. Take a retrospective stroll through his history as a reviewer and tell me that you can’t see a murderer in the making. He shoots guns at people in his videos and shows the splattering blood, he ‘stabs’ himself and laughs– or wait– that is you and I laughing. He subliminally (ha ha) embeds the words “Fuck You All” in a video and compels you to rewind so that you will ‘catch’ him the second time around. You shoot toy guns in your own videos, but it’s just a gag. You stab yourself, or do you, but if you did you would find it hilarious, because it is just for pretend. You would make yourself out to be other than who you are; you are the liar in this picture.

Mr. Anime

Suspect in Deaths Studied Serial Killers

‘Serial killers’ is another of those terms. You can type it and have a good chance of finding what you’re after, even if you don’t actually find any serial killers. As far as I can tell from what has been revealed, this is really a story about a guy who watched way too much anime, but how many people would find the story if the anime angle received top billing?

I know a fellow who watched The Deerhunter, a movie that features extremely realistic repeated scenes of men losing at Russian roulette, I think three times a day for two weeks, and you would drop me like a stone and run into his arms if I gave you his address. Moreover, the resemblance between the two men, physically and in manner, is uncanny in every respect.

From Trey Sesler’s review of Gantz:

“I didn’t really know this type of violence and sexual content existed in animes. I mean, it’s been going on since the ’60s and ’70s, probably before that in animation, but this show really opened me up. This is a wonderful show.”

(Sesler docked it a point to a nine because of “issues some of the characters had with killing people.”)

Looks like I hit paydirt on my very first try in combing through his YouTube videos, if I wanted to find a sound bite that would help to string him up, or alternatively persuade his jailers to throw away the key. Strikes me as likely that many curiosity seekers had found the video before me, and had pushed it to the top of Mr. Anime’s collection in terms of relevance. But would anyone in the mainstream actually disagree with this Monstrous sentence fragment?:

You can’t get any hotter than linking sex with death…

I should point out that the above review was dated September 27th, 2007, so the guy had 4 1/2 years to go before his full flowering. The dude had plenty of fans eating up his tint of dark humor, and really there is no wonder. He was exceptional at what he did, exacting and precise in his craft. Searching carefully for just the right words, and scaling his reviews believably to the nearest half point, such that he was really working with a twenty-point scale. He would find creative ways to attack you from his remote location on the other side of the screen, and you would feel attacked. And then you’d rewind the video so that he could attack you again. I know this to be true because yesterday I became a big fan.

I came away with the impression that he was always pushing himself– or that something was pushing him— to become coarser, and in fact more into anime, than he actually was. In earlier videos especially there would be a hesitation before launching a swearing fit, and sometimes he’d back out of an obscenity stream and play it more like his actual self. Also, his natural interest in anime was being augmented by his needs to nurture and grow his fan base, to become his niche’s #1, to crank out more and more videos and accept his viewers’ requests.

“I love my mom, dad and brother.
Why did I do this?
God forgive me, because I cannot forgive myself”

‘William Heirens’ is another of those terms. That’s what I just now Googled, and it got me where I was going, though more accurate would have been ‘The Lipstick Killer’ for all the lingering doubts as to whether the one was the other. Contrast and compare the respective quotes left on their crime scene walls.

“For heaven’s sake
catch me before I kill more.
I cannot control myself.”

Could Sesler have been cheating halfway, as a ‘grader’ of serial killers (though in the end he’d decide on the mass murder route)? Does he take up killing pets and starting fires only after acquainting himself with the serial killer Triad? Should he have taken up wetting his bed at age twenty-two for the sake of being complete?

Rat Can’t Find the Cheese

Labyrinth of the Psychopath 2 Flattery

Good observations from the scruffy-faced man, the most wonderful/stupendous/fabulous observations ever made. But a certain level of confusion in putting pieces together. I should have been tipped off by the title.

‘Psychopath’, of course, is a fairly useless term so far as definitions…as an aside, did you know that morons are smarter than idiots, if IQ measures smarts? Still, I could do a search of ‘psychopath’ and proceed with some confidence that the results would lead me to the kind of material I was after. “…and he might want your sexual organs…” Yes indeedy dumdrops–I have come to the right place.

The real tip-off though, was in the use of ‘labyrinth’, because that’s what the Big Picture looks like to a confused mind. Where something not fathomed is accepted as unfathomable, then incredibly used as a building block to explain the next unfathomable thing.

There was an interesting moment in the video for me, when the lecturer slipped up and gave my people a compliment. (I have definitely been a chameleon in life, and many of the man’s descriptions did apply to me, or historical versions of me, though if I had to pick between my two choices of paper or plastic, I would have taken psychotic over psychopathic.)

Anyhow, what he said was that psychopaths are great students of human behavior. This was followed up so quickly with “Because they have no conscience” at the start of his next point, that it sounded at first like the lack of conscience was being used to explain what great students we were. So it’s me who was confused, right? Yeah, well, maybe…but I don’t think he minded the inference. It was such an erratic turn, such a desperate swerve to not allow the stink of his previous statement to hang in the air. He swerved and he missed…an opportunity.

I’m a great student personally because I observe straightforwardly, from an outsider’s perspective. I am a being before I’m a human– I do not have a pro-people bias. Yes, I am unbiased. And when you sit on the fence requiring that humanity show itself worthy before deciding to join their team, all indications seem to be that humanity does not win one over. You have to be warped, biased in favor of humans, to come down on their side.

**********

Now off-video but related, I remember reading something about Charles Manson’s “weird honesty”. What’s so weird about it? And in any case, why can’t a fellow just be honest and weird, instead of weirdly honest and weird? How does one get creepier the more that their negatives are tempered by positive traits?

On honesty in particular, I have always been singularly unimpressed with that of the good guys measured against the baddies. Honesty both in absolute terms for interviewees in prison who have given up The Game, and relative to how much a person has to hide while they are still Playing. Many a sadist in fact loves honesty for its brutality, and normals just don’t value the virtue nearly as high.

Innies and Outies

Are You an Introvert

17 outta 20, with some vacillation that would tend to put me closer to 100%.

I wonder if question 21 ought to be, ‘is your spouse the energizer bunny?’, because mine definitely is as well!

Also, I wonder, can a distinction be made between ‘extroverted’ and ‘outgoing’? I’m looking for work these days, and many times the employer has requested for outgoing people to apply. A recent paragraph addressing an employer’s desires began by saying, in part, wanted: outgoing only. Ah, damn– but wait! None of the specific manifestations of being outgoing, as cited throughout the rest of the paragraph, actually excluded me. They basically just wanted friendly, helpful people who got along well with all types.

Just let’s please not probe too deeply into my blogging as mentioned under the heading of “outside pursuits’, and what it is precisely that I like to blog about.