blogging for killers.

i've never truly blogged before.

back in the space age where myspace ruled the world, i blogged there. but we won't talk about that.

so this is my attempt at blogging. we'll see how it goes.

so, right off the bat, i'm going to blog about serial killers, because i have honestly spent today watching six episodes of criminal minds. part of that is the attraction of serial killers, and the other part is the fun that is spencer reid. but we won't get into the mystery of him and his good looks.

i don't think it's weird that i'm fascinated by serial killers. for one thing, it works as a great conversation starter, even if people do think i'm insane and don't talk to me afterwards. fascination with serial killers also leads to nightmares if i read about them too close to bedtime and paranoia when i run to the fridge at two in the morning. but i know what's out there. and it really is intriguing.

i honestly don't know when this strange fascination started, because i don't seem like the type. i'm paranoid in general. i'm afraid of the dark. i'm terrified of being murdered. but something about jeffrey dahmer and his apartment housing thirteen human heads makes me intrigued. their patterns, their lives, everything is just interesting. and taylor finn and ms. sculley got me rolling.

taylor finn, my wonderful high school swim teammate and fellow captain, and i ventured out in ms. sculley's english class to write a sixteen page paper about a societal issue. we picked serial killers, much to ms. sculley's astonishment. we backed it up with 'serial killers are a problem to society. they're out there killing people, aren't they?' you can't deny that.

the paper went about a standard route: definition, cause, effect, solution. as a two person group instead of a four, we each got two parts. i got stuck with definition and cause, and taylor landed with the effects (dead people, i presume) and the solution. which, if you're wondering, there really isn't one.

the definition of a serial killer is a person who kills three or more people over a period longer than a month. but there's so much more than that. they have patterns, a specific social disorder (most of them, anyway), trademarks, and trophies. jeffrey dahmer kept those thirteen heads and that full skeleton in his shower for a reason.

i dove into research headfirst, and i got some strange looks from the local librarian when i carried out nine books about the biggest serial killers of the recent decades. but the recent decades weren't enough, oh no. serial killers date back to the fourteen hundreds. they were just as sadistic back then too, let me tell you. the best part is, they keep cropping up more and more. there was a boom in the eighties, and we just keep going up and up.

serial killers are born. 19 out of 2500 people is born with sociopathic or psychopathic tendencies. these are buried in most people. it erupts in animal cruelty, being asocial, or being that kid that you swear one day will bring a semiautomatic to school. and one day, it'll snap, and someone will be dead. after the snap, the murder is generally driven by a need for power and dominance. most serial killers believe that they are the only thing that truly matters in the universe and therefore have no conscience and are incapable of human emotions. the killing is all about power and is sex driven. strangling someone, for them, is a sexual high.

it's highly likely that in these 19 out of 2500 people, this won't happen. nothing will erupt. nobody will snap. nobody will die. this is good for you, for me, for everyone!

taylor and i finished that paper, turned it in early, and got an A. when i handed ms. sculley the folder, she said, "i've been looking forward to reading this." she had intrigue. just like me.

i don't think that talking about serial killers should be taboo. it doesn't necessarily have to be disturbing. sure, it's creepy down to the core, but we're just talking about people with problems. everyone has problems. they just have bigger ones. i don't feel like my fascination with them is any different than following taylor swift on twitter. i know far too many people who do that, and nobody i know follows serial killers.

it's highly possible that writing my first blog about serial killers was a bad move. but i did it. i think i did okay.

now back to criminal minds.