the killer

The act of writing can be exhausting. One can emerge from a several hour session, panting and stiff from the hunched configuration of a soul dredging marathon. No one asked you to do it, no ones needs you to do it, no one ( in my case) is paying you to do it, but you know you have to. 

      So you do it. 

It’s like the pictures that I make, my urge to do art. Images gallop impatiently through my mind-scape until I can get them out. And the way I get them out is to hunch over a desk and cut pieces of paper into littler pieces of paper and glue them to a board until something beautiful emerges. My writing isn’t always so beautiful. At least, it is uncomfortable-feeling producing. I remember hiking with a friend in the Mud lake region, a tiny bio-diverse miracle us Ottawans in the know come to visit and escape concrete. A younger set of three, with our younger baggage, I sang out my willingness to comment on the sperm-like scent that certain trees give off at certain times of the year. One of us embarrassedly laughed at the outlandish nature of saying such a thing out loud, and she claimed she would never say such a thing to her boyfriend as I’d done. But to my way of thinking, if you smell sperm, you say you smell sperm.  

     That’s not to everyone’s taste. 

The way people handle uncomfortable-feeling producing subjects is they go silent. There is no accurate way to interpret silence, that is the nature of it. Brings to mind the old joke about the drunk who is on his hands and knees on a sidewalk, his crawling action lit up by an overhead streetlight. ‘What are you doing?’, asks a passerby. ‘I’m looking for my house keys’, replies the drunk. ‘Well, where did you drop them?’ demands the interlocutor of this parable. The drunk replies; ‘Somewhere over there’, gesturing into the darkness, ‘but the light is better over here’.  

    I’m going to break my rule of shunning the practice of using an allegorical account to demonstrate how the parable/joke applies to one’s own life, and here it is: I willingly confess the possibility of the keys being somewhere over there, in the mud and the weeds of that dark ditch, but I can’t see a thing over there.

   So I write over here, where I can see. 

I admit that I find human behaviour shrouded in mystery, or rather, I used to. I have since uncovered the simple incentive  behind most familiar patterns of behaviour. Money=security=connection. Easy formula. The method in which people chose to arrive at these things varies. Behavioural patterns are quantitative, in other words measurable, which brings us to the oft used and sometimes blurry term of ‘algorithm’. Algorithm is simply a set of rules which one can feed into a computer to produce an outcome. If I was to claim that your mind was a computer, and I was to feed a specific algorithm into your computer detailing a set of rules that consist of a list of the correct food items, you could then produce the chocolate cake that the set of rules indicated. That list, otherwise known as a recipe, stands in as an algorithm, your operational abilities as the computer, and the cake the delicious outcome. The set of rules, or algorithm, can also be seen as socially constructed and agreed upon values which in certain combinations, fed into the human mind produce a certain emotional reaction. Social media honchos can calculate your algorithm, your tastes and preferences, in order to feed you a friends list or a newsfeed that is tailored to the set of rules you present. Is this followable? Are we all together here? Because I want you with me when I make another one of my logical leaps. There is a numbers interpreter whiz, a homicide archivist by the name of Thomas Hargrove, who has created an algorithm to help catch serial killers. He has also worked with zoologists in examining the hunting pattern of great white sharks. And yes, there is a correlation. Hunters hunt (which is what a serial killer is; a hunter of humans) and kill in territory that is comfortable to them, in other terms, Hargrove has refined a way to geographically profile a killer by the location of their prey. This is by no means infallible, it is not always clear by the nature of the kill. Though all murder is murder, there is a distinct difference when an uncaught killer is indiscriminately killing individuals in an area, and when murder is committed as a result of interpersonal dispute and other means that are emotionally or financially motivated. Why this needs to be interpreted correctly is obvious: the identifying of and apprehension of the appropriate killer matched with the appropriate murder. As it stands, approximately 5,000 ( US) people kill every year and get away with it. This is an extreme allegory, and I’m not proud of the alarmist nature of discussing a very scary subject, (but it’s worth a look if you like to frighten yourself/arm yourself with knowledge, the website is called MAP, standing for Murder Accountability Project). 

    My point is that behaviour is traceable, and the average person does not leave bodies behind thereby creating a career for some numbers specialist to calculate the ‘probability cluster’ left by a potentially located S.K. But we do leave evidence behind, a chalk outline of who we are, what we like and what we do.

I didn’t even intend to get sidetracked by such vicious subject material, but I am fascinated by what frightens me, and by the possibilities education and knowledge offer which is a certain ‘containment’ of factors. This equates, to me, as having some measure of control ( while simultaneously understanding that control is an illusion). What I find most frightening about my little foray into serial killer research, is the discovery that serial killers overall aren’t that smart, they have an average I.Q. Of 94.5. What is frightening is that these dull minded killers use as their objective, the belief that they are free to rid the world of undesirables; and the undesirables are defined by the society that contains them. Immigrants, Promiscuous women, and Drug addicts top the American list of S.K. targets. See where I’m going with this? Society hand feeds the victims to these bottom feeders. We decide who is expendable, and the killers expend. Our attitudes are the fuel that lights the fires that harm the people. In Canada, we have hand fed First Nations women to killers, by a prolonged glance the other way as they were picked off, one by one. The sheer number of their deaths, who they were, their gender, background and occupation marked them as vulnerable. We make people vulnerable by agreeing to the reaction of silence at their on-going disappearances. There is an algorithmic confirmation of this correlation. 

Ah, where do I go with these written forays of mine? Somewhere uncomfortable. It’s my way of reconciling the heartbreak caused by the reality of numbers, the system of inequality I’ve been aware of since I was a child, of the human beings behind each digit, the promise that if we start listening to what they tell us, we can move beyond the starkness of facts into a reality that suits all members of the world we inhabit.