This quarter I attempt to tackle the last hurdle in the acquisition of my Associates of Art degree, English 205: research paper writing. I have chosen, or have had chosen for me, it's hard to say at this point honestly, a class on Jack the Ripper. The reading load has been staggering but I'm recovering and catching up quickly. Even had time for a little light reading on the side. (I finished a 373 page book in, oh 3 days or so) Here's something I wrote in class today, just sort of a free write, so if it gets poorly written forgive me. Also try to bear the mispellings and soforth as I really didn't take the time to check myself.

What is a serial killer? Some one who kills people. But mure than that. Think of the term, "serial" killer, or a series of killings a sequence of killings, one who commits a sequence of killings. We have killers, who are outside what we consider the norm in our society. But even so they often commit murder for reasons that are understood, passion, anger, drunken fury, jealousy, greed. But serial killers are different, and perhaps that is why we view them with such captivation. One who kills, and presumably will continue to kill, motivated by internal reasonings that seem absurd, abstract, or down right alien to the "normal" person. They suggest another abborent style of thought, one that diverges from what is so impressed upon us, the individual, when we [active form of resign, cosign?] to security and purpose granted to us by Society and resign ourselves to normality. One thing we all hold to be true within society is the right of people to live, we are fascinated by violence and the concept of killing portayed to us in the media and our make believe tv shows. When an actual person who has no regard for human life, actually crops up we are shocked by it. It's a slap in the face, "people like that aren't real, they can't be. No one thinks like that."  But there is, and they are, and to the people who are actually in the area that the murders are happening, it is even more real, there becomes the sense that this could happen to me. When a murder happens, most people don't really care unless you were someone who knew that person. Certainly most peole who hear about it are shocked, aghast, but they reassure themselves, this person will be caught. More murders follow, and they seem related. This lights a fuse, why hasn't he been caught yet, will he kill again, why is he killing. Will he kill me, even after he is caught, or more importantly if he is not caught, these thoughts linger. So why do they so fascinate us so? Ultimately it all heralds back to fear, the primal fear of our own death. Maybe part of the mob mentality and the group psychology of hate they express towards a murderer is motivated by this. You made us consider our own end, you took the life of another, I don't want to think about who I must die one day. How does this tie in with the racial hatred? This us and them concept, where we blame all the woes on someone whose not us. Maybe this kind of panic and violence came from the feeling of helplessness and the need to do something. Possibly tied into the inevitability of one's own death. It seems as though we try to ascribe the deviant thoughts and actions of a serial killer to another "race" to diverge the association with one's own self. It's strange to think that today, most serial killers are normal, so normal in fact as to belie the word normal itself. They are your neighbor, your dog walker, the man you buy your bread from. True they tend to be socially stunted, but they are by all apearences normal. We say they, they must have done it. Not us, good Englishmen. We call them monsters, or beasts, Inhuman. But what really scares us is the throught that they are just like us. That secretly we want the same things, to deny our own mortality, to deny that we are going to die, to show the world is false, that only WE are the real people that NONE of it really matters. Or so I wonder.

And that's where I stopped. I suppose it is a bit incomprehensible but, hell, why are you reading my blog anyway.
*meow* =^.^= *meow*