green pushes through

Tuesday night and I had Keaton again – Sharaun’s volleyball game. Although it may sounds like Sharaun is a deadbeat mom (you know, for how often I’m left alone to tend to Keaton and all), I rather like our alone-time. We play trivia games while we listen to music (I quiz her on bassists and drummers and rock ‘n’ roll genealogy), we wrestle, we read books – we do all sorts of stuff. Besides, before Sharaun left, she cooked us a fine meal and fed Keaton – I can’t ask for much more than that. Oh, and while she was cooking, I headed out to do my 2nd daily check of my garden (I go out once in the morning, and once at night) and I was pleased to find that 90% of the corn seeds I planted have sprouted, as well as the okra. I’m happy to see the green push through, as it looks like the whole thing won’t be a miserable failure after all.

All this talk of the “violent” writings of the Virginia Tech shooter in the news lately brought back some memories for me. Back in middle school, I was pretty into the macabre, y’know, horror movies and Stephen King novels and specifically – into gore. Now, I have never been, and still am not, much for real-life blood – I’m pretty wimpy when it come to that – but I had then, and still have now, a penchant for writing. And, back then, I used to write all kinds of things. For a while there, and this is where this paragraph starts to close in on its topic-sentence, I swear, I started writing little ultra-violent “serials” that I would give to my buddy Joey every day. I would use typing class to do this, as we often had periods of just “free typing,” where you could do whatever you wanted as long as your hands banged the keys for forty minutes. So, I’d type all sorts of things: funny stories, song lyrics and poems I’d pass off as my own work, solid pages of random words for the patterns and shapes it generated, and, for a while, gore. It was that gore that got me thinking, as the news chatters on about the “disturbing” nature of Mr. Shooter’s writing. Well, for what it’s worth, what I’ve read seems rather tame compared to the twisted crap my 7th grade brain turned out:

After I had stabbed him about seven or eight times he stumbled off into the darkness, wandering, hoping a car might come down the road and save him. Blood was gushing out between his fingers and his eyes were turning pink. He begged me, “Please, no more, I’ll give you anything! Just don’t kill me please, leave me alone!” So I picked up my knife and proceeded to cut open his chest with the precision of a master surgeon. I couldn’t see anything but blood, all over my hands and drenching my body, dripping from my hair, and running down my legs.

After I had made a pretty big incision, he started to sit on the ground and twitch while sort of gurgling a little. I then felt the urge to plunge my hands into his open wound and pull out his pulsating heart. When I did this I found that is was not easy to discern if you are holding a man’s heart in your hand or just grasping at loose organs that were floating around inside. So I just grabbed the biggest handful of slop I could grab with my own two hands. I pulled it out and looked at it: some parts looked looked like little strands of spaghetti, but others looked like what you would see if you put a tomato in the blender and watched it whirl.

I brought the steaming pile of organs to my lips and pressed them against my face, the warm flow of blood trickling down my arms onto my chest, and the soft gurgling coming from this man I has just destroyed. All in all, I felt like it was a good kill, but I needed more to satisfy my sudden urge to watch death.

So I pulled a child about three or four years old off the street after school and into my car. He was asking me what I was going to do with him. I inconspicuously pushed the radio on, but also turned on the cigar lighter with it. In about ten minutes I pulled over to the side of the road and told the boy to take off his shirt. He wouldn’t do it though, so I hit him first and told hi I would kill him if he didn’t do what I wanted him to do. So he complied with my demands and removed his shirt. I pulled out the read-hot lighter and pressed it firmly against his soft back. His cries and screams of agony only fueled me to do even more gruesome feats to him.

After about three minutes with a cigar lighter pushed into his back the boy began to get tired of crying, so I took it off to reveal the scar that he would have to remember me by for years never to come. The boy then started to plead with me, but I would not break. I think picked up a huge rock off the ground and proceeded to hit him over the head with it until his face was covered with blood. Then I positioned him behind the rear left wheel of my car and got in the driver’s seat. I slowly backed up listening to every bone in his head pop and snap. I felt great. I stepped out of the car and looked at the damage I had done: the boy lay lifeless, his head splattered all over the ground and pieces of brain on my car wheel. I then cut his body up into nine small pieces and buried them in various places around me.

I drove home, went into the garage, got out my shotgun, put its loaded barrel between my lips and pulled the trigger. I felt a tingling sensation and that was it. I was dead.

Ouch. Several times while transcribing that, I hesitated. It’s worse than even I remember it being. But yeah, I saved the stuff, just like nearly every scrap of “writing” I’ve ever done (and I have no OCR-scanner here, I typed it all in by hand, old-school style). There’s more of it, but it’s all as bad as that and this is pretty much representative enough to give you the idea.

I bet – in today’s paranoid school environment – it’d be enough to get a kid kicked out of school for good, or arrested, or placed in counseling. I wonder what might have happened back then had we been caught passing these things around, because we surely did. I mean, even re-reading it now, I know I was going for shock value – but putting myself in the shoes of a modern day shcoolteacher or administrator, it’d sure sound the warning sirens loud and clear.

(I showed Sharaun this entry, to see what she thought, saying to her, “I wanted to show some of the stuff I wrote when I was kid, but it’s freaking me out even a bit. But, I never killed anyone, so I guess I turned out OK.” She replied, “You haven’t killed anyone yet, but you will eventually – and then they’ll go back and read that stuff and be like, ‘Well, duh.'” Thanks babe.)

I wrote a while back about how the newish Zodiac killer movie had unearthed some newfound “clues” which were causing quite the amateur-sleuth stir over at zodiackiller.com. Apparently, all this Encyclopedia Brown blodhounding has led the little online community, and the site’s owner and moderator, to identify a new “suspect.” They’ve apparently got this guy’s name and complete bio/profile. To be honest, I haven’t been following closely enough to know what connected the dots from the new evidence to this new POI, but I of course have ultimate faith the infallible collaborative force of the internet.

Goodnight.

Also written on this day...

• 5am - 2019
• vardaman - 2019
• stupid weekends - 2011
• YDF #3: Passing Notes - 2008
• all the better to hear you with - 2006
• still pooping taiwan - 2005