Mandatory Meandering

Moving, shifting, ever changing through this journey of life, acquiring scar tissue and bruises and happiness and sadness, all sides of the dodecahedron looking shape we call life, twelve faces for each month of each year that we exist.

What motivates us? What pushes us out of our comfort zones and into places we feared to ever enter? What cradles us in moments of mental agony, when we feel that continuing to breathe cannot be possible? Why is it that most of us push on to an eventual demise, sometimes forgetting that it exists, that life will cease to be at any given time? Ernest Hemingway, my literary lover, said that "it is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end". We all are journeying to our ends, but are we taking the journey itself for granted?

It is difficult during moments of any sort of pain to see any light. The window to one's soul during these moments have their blinds shut tight, so tight that not even the tiniest of sun rays can enter to brighten up their days. In this instance one can fail to see the beauty in the world, one fails to remember their part in the world and the reason for the continuation of their journey. One eventually pulls through, but most of the time one does not. One might then get caught in a vicious cycle of self-hatred, of self-mutilation both in the physical and mental sense, and they may fall short of ever being able to reach the blind's drawstrings.

But we are mandatory. Each one of us. We each teach one another though most of us loathe the idea of school and teachers. We each teach each others lessons though most of us set bad examples. Jeffrey Dahmer taught me not to drug men and bring them back home to my apartment and eat them. Alan Grant taught me never to tour a park populated by live dinosaurs. Carl Denham taught me never to set sail towards Skull Island and on the off chance that I do, to never capture King Kong and bring him back to my hometown. Pinocchio taught me never to want to become a politician in the event of having an extended nose with larger nostrils during the flu season. Every day I am taught something on Tumblr, whether it is to love my body, to hate those who exploit and abuse animals, and to feed bees that appear to be dying sweet water to rejuvenate them. Tumblr also teaches me not to use it around others in the event that a pornographic gif pops up and dances on my phone screen beyond my control, but that is beside the point.

The point is that just like atoms, just like the molecules that make us up, we make up one another. We are crucial to the existence of others, which is why most of us require relationships to thrive, not romantic relationships necessarily. But everyone has someone, even that homeless man down the road who feeds pigeons his scraps even though he needs them to survive himself. The ocean will never feel fulfilled unless it touches daily the sand and fondles its many shells and bathes with its human visitors. The air cannot itself breathe unless it blows through the trees and tickles its many leaves, and it laughs with them and blows off through the branches of many other trees.

We are all interconnected, and though  people discriminate against the internet for taking away our lives, we should rejoice it for allowing us to meander mandatorily in a free manner, and to a larger audience.

Miranda Barbour

“I feel it is time to get all of this out… 

it is time for me to be honest and I feel the need to be honest.”

Emerging from Pennsylvania, soft-spoken and short, Miranda Barbour lurked the streets of Alaska, Texas, California and North Carolina, hunting those “who deserved it”, burying them under soil, claiming to pinpoint exactly where each body is on a map.

Miranda considers herself the real life Dexter Morgan, offering a response to the disbelief of her actions due to her small nature “looks can be deceiving”, and that her victims “did bad things and didn’t deserve to be here anymore”. Her first victim was chosen by the Satanic Cult in Alaska that she joined when she was just thirteen years old, whose leader prompted her to kill the man who owed them money – she “hate[s] guns”, yet she still shot him after the leader “took his hands and put them on top of [hers] and [they] pulled the trigger”, and she just “continued to kill”, and apparently when she “hit 22 [victims, she] stopped counting”. She would “lure these people in” and “stud[y] them.” She “learned them and even became their friend”.

Miranda and her husband, Elytte Barbour, had found their recent victim on Craigslist, Troy LaFerrara, lured in by a promise to rid him of the loneliness he felt. No longer was he empty on the inside, because soon after Elytte had popped up in the backseat of the car Miranda and Troy were in, strangling Troy, Miranda had decided to fill Troy’s emptiness with a knife, twenty times. Had it not been for the success of Craigslist sexual encounters, the world would not have known about the murderous capabilities of this nineteen year old mother, who just wants to “start over and forget what [she] did”.

The interesting thing about this murder is that Miranda did not intend on killing Troy. She had placed him in a test, unbeknownst to him. She lied to him when they were in her car, her husband hiding under the blanket in the backseat, ready for her cue, telling Troy that she “just turned 16”. He replied “that it was OK”. She told the interviewers that “if he had said no, that he wasn’t going to go through with the arrangement, I would have let him go”.  Her reasoning for his murder is that “he said the wrong things”.  

When she was just four years old, Miranda was sexually molested by an uncle at her sister’s house. He was sentenced to fourteen years of jail time, charged with the sexual abuse of a minor, who would later grow to be a major figure in the news. She had joined the Satanic Cult nine years later, possibly due to the fragility of her soul during childhood. She claims that she “wasn’t always there [mentally”, and that she “knew there was something bad inside [her] and the satanic beliefs [had] brought it out”. By becoming a member of the cult, she “embraced it”.

Miranda now claims that she has killed over twenty-two people. Infamous serial killer Jeffry Dahmer had killed seventeen, Richard Ramirez killed fourteen, and now Miranda has claimed to kill over twenty-two, probably a umber under Andrei Chikatilo’s fifty-three – perhaps Miranda’s amount of killings might surpass Andrei’s. An honest soul, she claims that “if [she] were to be released, [she] would do this again”.

Things brings to the foreground the question: who really is the criminal? The people subject to wanting to perform sexual acts with minors or the people who, using violent ways, are trying to put an end to it? Perhaps Miranda and Elytte’s approach to killing Troy was wrong, however their reasoning is indeed quite reasonable. Troy could have gone off to have sexual relations with other minors, and what is to say that he had not had sex with a minor before his murder?

Perhaps Miranda and Elytte are the modern-day Bonnie and Clyde with a Dexter Morgan twist – modern-day superheroes, who, at the verge of performing more atrocities for a supposed good cause, were caught. Or perhaps Miranda has had feelings of vengeance lurking within her ever since her sexual molestation, and has had her vengefulness grow along with her over the course of nine years, leading her to hate and want to kill those who have had sex with minors. Only time will tell, and only truth will tell, depending on how much of it will come from Miranda during her trial. She claims that she does not want to “glorify [the killings] or get attention”, rather she feels that she should be honest.

Either way, I certainly am anticipating to hear the rest of this story, as it unfolds.

                                                                                                                                                                                         

References:

The Daily Item's interview and report:
http://www.dailyitem.com/x1708329322/BODY-COUNT-AT-22

CNHI's News Service article:
http://www.cnhinews.com/cnhins_news/x1783673805/Teen-mom-says-shes-a-mass-murderer

Hollywood Life's article:
http://hollywoodlife.com/2014/02/16/miranda-barbour-craigslist-killer-who-is-she/

The Stereotypical Amorality of Tattooed People

For years, tattoos have stereotypically been associated with bikers, gangs and criminals. Those imprisoned would receive tattoos and tattoo other prisoners to convey gang membership, and those who killed would tattoo tear-drops underneath their eyes - one tear-drop for each victim. Other forms of tattoos are tribal tattoos, and identification tattoos which Jewish people were forcibly given to permanently remind them that they were a part of the Holocaust. The stereotype, though, has since died down, as tattoos have become more common with youth. It is now recognised as a legitimate art form, and accepted in varied cultures.

Tattooing started out in Asia and Europe, and was adopted by Samoans as 'Tatau'. Female Samoans would receive a 'Malu', a tattoo to signify their progression into puberty, and males would receive a 'Pe'a' so signify male-hood, and respect for their courage. It was not until Captain Cook's Botanist, Sir Joseph Banks, in the 1700s, had returned to England with a tattoo, thus sailing, so to speak, the concept of tattooing across the globe. Sailors soon adopted this, and by 1870 it was popular amongst upper-class individuals, including royalty, due to the pricing. When the 1970s came along, tattooing became a fashionable thing in the Western side of the world, and has been redefined as an art form, and has pulled away from being merely a statement of individuality and rebellion, although most teenagers wait until they are seventeen to get their first tattoo because it is deemed utterly awesome to have ink in one's skin before the age of legality.

In this day and age, it would be difficult to understand why someone would not stray from the stereotypes associated with drugs and tattoos, unless of course they belong to the older generations of humans. A certain someone, though, has recently caught my attention as I was reading their article which attempted to describe Ian Watkins' appearance before diving into the gnarly details of his pedophilic state of being. I did not believe what I was reading - no, I did believe the pedophile part, because it has been blown out of proportions by the media and for once, for the right reasons, however I did not believe the portrayal of Watkins which was provided. I had mistaken the description for a Mexican Drug Ring leader or something of the sort. Here is a screen shot of the basis of my disbelief, located in the article:

I read it again to make sure that my mind has read it the way it was written. I thought that, perhaps my mind was playing some sort of trick on me, to agitate me and cause alarm for no apparent reason. But no, my mind was correct. What I read was right. The journalist was attempting to shun Watkins as a stereotypical rapist because of his "heavily tattooed" appearance, and associate this appearance with the use of drugs, in an attempt to justify his actions. I searched for a photograph of Watkins to make sure that my image of him had not changed since I had a poster of his face on my bedroom wall ten years ago, and I found his mugshot:

I observed this photograph for a mere twenty seconds and burst into laughter. From the description above, one would imagine Watkins to look something like this:

Honestly, whoever this 'AFP' character is that wrote this article is, needs a serious visit to Specsavers. They are seeing the world in the eyes of my hardened ancestors who attacked homosexuals or tattooed people on sight back in Lebanon. Listen to me, AFP: the insertion of lead-free ink into one's skin does not turn them into pedophiles. I have a tattoo close to my skull, and I do not seem to have been influenced to inappropriately touch children, nor sexually abuse them. Whoever you are, you need to go back to University and learn better adjectives to assist you to help describe the criminal at hand to the public. The way you have written this description implies that tattooed people are amoral, and the fact that you have written this so-called descriptor in the same sentence as the word 'meth' and 'desire' disgusts me even more - so all those who "desire" methamphetamine are "heavily tattooed" and run a risk of sexually antagonising and raping premature children? How is this man, as such, in any way heavily tattooed?

And in the mug-shot, which is the predominant photograph of Watkins at this point in time, all I can see is a hint of a tattoo on the left side on his neck. That description is downright misleading. As well as misleading, it is also inappropriate. Tattooed people are people too, there are more pedophiles and sadistic criminals and rapists out there who are not tattooed. Take Jeffrey Dahmer. Charles Manson. Aileen Wournos. Gilles de Rais. Richard Trenton Chase. Albert Fish. Andrei Chickatilo. Joachim Kroll. Dennis Rader. John Haigh. Adolf Hitler. Javed Iqbal. Ted Bundy. None of these sadists were "heavily tattooed". It is not scientifically proven that tattooed individuals are secretly sadistic pedophiles. That claim is just as unbelievable as claiming that people with fingernails which fall short of three-centimetres long will, in their lifetimes, consume more beer than people who regularly attend pubs. Or people born with a monobrow will be more likely to fall off a verandah due to the excessive weight on their face than people born with two eyebrows. Ridiculous!

What AFP should have written, is something along the lines of this: The fetish-fueled sadistic rockstar with an addiction to drugs and the sexual domination of fans and their children due to his fame who happens to have a few tattoos scattered around his body which have absolutely nothing to do with the case at hand, spoke of his desire to intoxicate one of his victims by blowing crystal meth smoke into the child's face. Judging by AFP's claim, though, I suppose Mike Tyson probably is a pedophile too.



                                                                                                                                                                                         
References:
Wikipedia [en.wikipedia.org]
AFP's news article: [http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/lostprophets-lead-singer-ian-watkins-pleads-guilty-to-attempted-baby-rape/story-e6frg6so-1226769281856]