Taking a break from the series, because strange things have happened.
First to all of the folks still having a nervous breakdown because their Twitter went away and then so did their Facebook, I had nothing to do with that. Honest! Just because I was blogging about irresponsible use of SMS, does not mean that I sent a Zombie Bot Net to launch a distributed denial-of-service attack on social-networking sites.
I still think it's kind of funny, though.
What I do not think is funny at all is the rampage of one George Sodini, who evidently was so hard up for a date that he went ballistic at the Collier Township, PA, "LA Fitness" center, killing three women and himself, and wounding nine other women.
To make things more worrisome, so far as anyone could tell, this was a man who was otherwise well-educated, hard-working, generally responsible, affable and sociable.
Evidently over the last year, he began to withdraw into himself, according to neighbors, letting the appearance of his home and yard go downhill. Well, evidently he was too busy online. If only someone had been reading his blog.
The video, above, shows a modestly successful man's modest but sufficient home.
Evidently he made good money. Evidently people thought he was more or less an okay guy. Even he mostly thought he was an okay guy. So why go on a murder/suicide spree?
Reading his blog, it's clear that even he didn't think that it was either a good idea, or morally acceptable, to do such a thing. Yet somehow he was able to psych himself into the act, although it took him the better part of a year. Why?
Personally, I think this is most likely a sort of dual-diagnosis sort of thing, a combination of slowly building depression -- some of the phrasing is extremely indicative, especially when he starts talking about how taking it one day at a time will eventually turn into taking it one year or a decade at a time, to paraphrase -- and some of the traits of high-function autism spectrum disorder.
What I'm seeing here, more than any other thing in terms of the pathology and how it came to end as it did, is a lot of lack of insight into self and into emerging (or longstanding) disorder.
A lot of men have remarked on the fact that if you are single and looking, a lot of women avoid you. These same men generally first notice this the first time they have a steady girlfriend for a while. As long as they have a girlfriend, the other women tend to be quite friendly, often seeming a bit too much so.
A lot of the men who make this realization realize as well that it is therefor essential to have a girlfriend at all times, even if they don't mean a lot to you, just so that other women -- one of whom might turn out to mean a lot more to you -- won't be scared off by the idea that you've been single a long time. Or at least, this is how I understand the rationale.
There are, no doubt, a lot of women who don't want to take the time or trouble to deal with guys who are not, so to speak, "housebroken" as to how relationships go. And it's not as if they dislike the men, it's not as if they think they're bad, or criminal, or any other thing... it's just that they aren't likely to prefer someone who is going to be more work, more "needy" or "high maintenance" or whatever.
And as time goes on, the men get more isolated, less at ease, and something inside -- in some of such men -- starts to go bad, gets twisted up, maybe even goes rotten.
Institutions exist to deal with this, ranging from prostitution to organized religion. Indeed, at various times and places in history, religion was what organized the prostitution. See also "the Roman Republic" and the Scriptural Molochites.
In the modern day, though, I hear that any single man that walks into almost any church around here is likely to find themselves pretty much surrounded by a pretty varied array of marriagable females. They might be rather religious marriagable females, and not interested in premarital sex, but there's a high likelihood that any man who has a job or job prospects, and isn't actually hideous, will be getting at least a few dates, and "genteel companionship".
Mr Sodini went on at some length about the failings of his church and his preacher. Yet even Mr Sodini doesn't seem to quite understand that the main failing of this church (for him) was that it couldn't seem to get him and any of the ladies together in a way that helped him become something that the ladies saw as comfortable to be around.
Folks, I am definitely no expert on romance, love, relationships, or women, or men for that matter. Love might be a rare spark that you can't expect to see flash between anyone or everyone who goes on a date or to a church social.
As an old song by The Doors says, "women seem wicked, when you're unwanted" (People Are Strange). And no doubt there are men and women out there who know that, who aren't in too much of a hurry or who are too unwilling to be bothered to take the extra trouble with the high-maintenance types. Yet where do they go to find the hard-to-love? That how you find them, the hard-to-love, you have to go where such people gather.
Yet Mr Sodini wasn't in any such places. He wasn't at the homeless shelter, he wasn't at the day-care center for intellectually-challenged adults, he wasn't sitting in the waiting room at the psychiatrist's office, either. He was living the life, as in that poem Richard Cory (Edwin Arlington Robins), if not quite so large.
Nobody could save him from his fall, because apparently nobody knew. Perhaps new information will come to shed some more light on the psychology that led to this tragedy, but for now I think it's just another case of the sad story in The Beatle's song "Eleanor Rigby", but just taken to violent extremes.
George Sodini was, as best he could tell, doing all of the things he could, everything that one has to do to be a success, and as far as he knew, he should have had flocks of materialistic young women falling all over him. He seems to have thought that he'd have been willing to deal with "gold diggers" so long as he had someone. Yet the harder he tried, it seems, the more elusive was the quarry.
Perhaps he was trying too hard. Or, it could have been a failure to communicate, as in Stevie Smith's classic poem:
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
George Sodini, unfortunately, took others down with him as he drowned, three at least. And -- to possibly over-extend my metaphor -- how could any of those women have known that they were swimming with a man whose drowning was quiet and mostly self-restrained and evidently standoffishly polite? Until the last moments, at any rate.
I can't make any suggestions about how to prevent this sort of thing from happening again. In any case, this is probably one very rare extreme case, with perhaps only one in a thousand such socially isolated single men ever snapping into any sort of violence, much less spending a year plotting a mass-murder and suicide.
I used to occasionally get annoyed at the way various social scenes always tended to try to get single people hooked up into couples, and I never could quite figure out why people did this. Maybe it's just a cultural practice to forestall this particular reason for someone to go violently mad.
When I was maybe all of 19 or 20, I used to joke with some friends about whether or not there was some vast network of Yentas out there, taking names and comparing notes, so that no unmarried male could go anywhere without there quickly appearing a young lady looking to get married, or at least go out on a couple of dates. But if the real reason that George Sodini went mad was that he couldn't get a date for 20 years, maybe a vast network of Yentas might be a good idea.
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