monkey see, monkey do serves as a personal blog and creative outlet for
george sodini’s blog
mr. sodini allegedly marched into his gym and started shooting people. whenever i hear some news item like that, i can’t imagine why someone would do that, and assume it must be some kind of mental illness at work; a complete emotional breakdown, or something.
but i’m finding over the last few years some of these crazy people have had online blogs or myspace profiles and when they die their public, online diary is free for all to read. in this case, mr. sodini in his blog went so far as to release the copyright of all of his writing so he says others could study it and learn from it.
i’m not sure how long his blog will stay active, but folks like abc news have republished it in full as he requested.
i find it so puzzling to read. he does sound obsessed and depressed, and hints at some of his complaints in life, but he also sounds like he did not have any overt external pressures causing mental illness or his suicidal urge. it must have just been internal or maybe even something he was born with? he had a decent job as a .Net programmer, managed to survive layoffs and get promoted in a tough economy, had sufficient funds to avoid stress even if he had been laid off with a protracted period of unemployment. sure he couldn’t get a date, but is that really that important? from reading his post, i don’t see the kind of things that drive most people to ruin.
can you tell i’m grasping for some explanation that makes sense?
i’ve had some friends over the years with unusual medical conditions, from rare blood disorders to hidden cancers to brain aneurisms. all kinds of things. is it possible that the brain also has truly rare and unusual conditions which can generally go undetected? like an undetectable aneurism, someone’s mind can just suddenly and without warning become deeply ill?
but i probably need not fear that. the news has a way of making a one-in-a-billion event sound like it is an everyday occurrence. i’m sure it’s still 100 times more likely to die in a car accident then to encounter a mentally ill murderer at the gym. but it’s an odd world we live in when i can read the online diary of a person accused of that, and see that he had planned the murder over a protracted period of time and maintained what appeared to be a functional life concurrently. scary.
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