I am not a doctor. This is more of a “path of logical”, slightly artistic exploration of loneliness. It’s winter.

I was born exactly twenty years to the day after Ted Bundy was born. Not that it is relevant in any way other than it creeps me out quite a bit, and has caused a morbid curiosity to surface about him.

As a result of my studies of Bundy, I have come to the conclusion that he was brought to life with a black cube in his head where his empathy should have been stored. This black cube expanded when he drank, demanding to be filled with snapshots that made up a body of work that was his idea of art. Obsession fueled the desire to kill the way Bundy did it. His diabolical sense of purpose sought out the perfect conditions where means and opportunity could meet his motive in a triumvirate that resulted in a giant hole left in someone else’s family. This hole, started in the cube, engulfed his own sense of loss growing up in a family that was less than stable.

My curiosity has pushed me to the moment where some a-hole like Bundy decides the time has come to end a person’s life. After putting the girl through a litany of impulsive tortures, he arrives at the time where she must be sent to the other side. Not so that he won’t leave any witnesses, though this is a fringe benefit, but because he wants to be the last person to see her alive. He wants to look into her eyes and watch her leave herself. He becomes the witnesses to the one instance where, like a doctor or a priest, both sides of the line of death can be seen simultaneously and for a split second, the mystery is solved.

Is this behavior triggered by a massive fear of death, a need to continually confront death in order not to be afraid of it? An overwhelming need for control blooms backwards in Bundy’s box. No longer is God or fate choosing when his victim will die, but he chooses it. Little does he realize that his victim was put across his path by forces other than his will, so the choice really wasn’t his at all. Technical details. It still feels good for him to don the power cloak and steal someone’s ability to breathe, as it this will stall the Grim Reaper by occupying him with other clients.

Which brings me to the reasons behind why someone as smart as Bundy thought he was would allow his heinous predilections to take over. The pathological loneliness kicks in, belittling the power that women have in a normal relationship…the power to leave. Take out that factor and you have automatic and absolute commitment. He reveals every dark and dirty secret, and still they stay. The drug of choice is the seduction of supreme acceptance.

Are there serial killers who figure out the fly in the Vaseline, that a greater need is created with each kill and that it must be filled with more and more darkness? The control is lost to the black box and it takes up more and more of the mind. Do people stop, uncaught, and live out their lives in normalcy, having survived their “phase” like Miles Davis kicking heroin, leaving a clothesline of dangling bodies hanging from deep ends of their subconscious never to see the light of day? I think not. Clothes don’t dry that way. If you are out there, you have a price to pay.