I just filed this to the gdn, and I am afraid that they will think the end, which is the whole point, is too strong. So I post it here anyway, below the fold, for tidyness, and also so my mother won’t read it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is one of those crimes that makes you feel dirty to be a human being. He had worked for a fast food restaurant for seven years, and, later as a shelf-stocker. People in both places remembered him as boring but not otherwise remarkable. He seemed to have had no special friends or enemies. But he left a life online. His blogs are shocking because they are so profoundly ordinary. He seems completely indistinguishable from thousands or millions of other nerds online. He talks about films:<\/p>\n\n “I had been planning on working on the web page today, since I was off work, but I didn’t. Instead I’ve been watching movies for the last five hours. I bought the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers DVD <\/span>today, even though I had been saying I wasn’t going to. I wasn’t going to buy it, I was going to wait until November and buy the 4-disc special edition. But I guess I’ll end up buying both versions, just like I did wth the first movie, even though I didn’t like this movie that much. I hated it when I saw it in the theater. I only saw it once I hated it so much, and I almost walked out before it ended. It was nothing like the book.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n He worries that masturbation is no fun any more.<\/p>\n\n “Here’s a cool remark that was on a web page: ‘Remember, pornography is Satan’s way of showing love-lorn losers what they’re missing.’ That’s so true. Maybe if I’d quit looking at porn so much, maybe I wouldn’t be so fucking horny. Maybe if I’d finally go out and get some damn Zoloft, or whatever the hell it is, I could actually go out and get laid.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n But he never did find the magic anti-depressant. He hated himself a lot of the time:<\/p>\n\n “Here’s a cool link, to a site about someone who’s almost as big a loser as I am. The Star Wars Kid You’ve probably heard about the Star Wars Kid, almost everyone has, though I hadn’t until recently. If you haven’t, here’s the back story. Some fat 15 year old geek was using the school’s video camera for something, and then, in his spare time, he also taped a video of him twirling around with a stick, pretending he was in a light saber duel … Anyway, click the link and laugh at the fat kid’s embarrassment.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n He kept a wishlist on Amazon, which has now disappeared, but is reported to have contained “The Vagina Monologues”; he read Manga comics; he sold things on eBay, where he bought items for an online game called “Kindom of Loathing”, most recently “Hell Ramen, and and an “Insanely Spicy Bean burrito.” He read Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut.<\/p>\n\n His list of interesting sites was absolutely mainstream nerd: a handful denouncing scientology, some cartoonists’ sites, a few denunciations of fundamentalism, Jack T. Chick’s fundamentalist cartoon strips, Slashdot.<\/p>\n\n In all this, there is no clue whatever to the crime he would commit. There is a sense in which we know almost everything about him. It is almost certainly true that you can find out far more about his personality from poking around the Internet than his co-workers ever bothered to do. But the more you find, the more it is not there. There is nothing particularly violent or horrible in the stories that he links to on his blogs, or in the things he writes, or asks to buy. There is certainly nothing horrible by the standards of the Internet — only yesterday, someone sent me a link to an animated cartoon of a kitten being fed through a mincing machine as if this were a perfectly normal and funny joke.<\/p>\n\n On myspace.com,<\/a> a giant dating site, a huge and hideous comment thread has grown over his entry: “your so God damn gay! fucking molesting a 10 year old little girl!” writes “uhh.i.hate.myself”<\/span><\/p>\n\n A cornfed blonde calling herself Kimberlycious writes: “You are one sick mo-fo. Obviously your medication isn’t working you friggin gay mo-fo.” <\/span><\/p>\n\n And these people, however shocked and angry, seem no more real than he is. Looking through all the trails that Kevin Underwood left online, an awful fact becomes clear. Almost everything he did there to express himself was simply a record of the things he liked to buy or watch. Even his depression was understood in terms of the pills that he did or didn’t take. It is only in the light of his abominable crime that we can see how strange an inhuman is our assumption that our personalities are expressed by what we consume, for we look at the cannibal blogger’s life and he seems like a perfectly ordinary consumer.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I just filed this to the gdn, and I am afraid that they will think the end, which is the whole point, is too strong. So I post it here anyway, below the fold, for tidyness, and also so my … Continue reading
\nKevin Underwood,<\/a> aged 26, had dead end jobs in the dead end town of Purcell, Oklahoma. You could read all about his empty life in the two blogs he kept up for several years but hardly anyone cared to until last week when he killed Jamie Rose Bolin, his neighbours’ ten-year-old daughter. According to the local police chief , he planned to later rape her corpse, then eat some of it and dismember what was left. Police found the body in his bathtub, and barbeque skewers and meat tenderiser all prepared.<\/p>\n\n