So many things on my mind this morning, but nothing suitable for bloggery. I’ve been awake for hours. I’ve written nothing of any consequence. I’ve had thoughts this morning that matter just as much as my writing. Perhaps I’m a bit out of sorts because I realize that I have been an orphan for about 40 years…longer than I had parents. The older I get, the greater the imbalance grows between childhood and adulthood. The natural order is undergoing serious disruption. But maybe what’s being disrupted is the unnatural order, instead. Perhaps my life, from birth to this very moment, has amounted to an unintentional detour from normalcy…and maybe the future and what it holds are the perfect representations of “normal.” We met a woman on a train in Canada, many years ago. She and her husband were vacationing, as were my late wife and I. I am sure I’ve mentioned before that we gave that woman a nickname…one she earned through her strange behavior…Abnorma. There must be some meaning to having that recollection at this moment. Or maybe not. “Meaning” is too often associated with woo-woo. Though I can accept a little woo-woo, a little goes a VERY long way.
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Everything around our house remains white. The snow does not seem to have melted at all…not in the least. Most of the main streets in the Village may be passable, but we shall stay in until the ice hidden beneath the snow is gone. I pity people who MUST go out onto the streets; those who go out…without any compelling reason…have my contempt.
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The sky is clear. Bright blue. Sunny. But, still, cold. 19°F. Inside, it’s much warmer. I would be even more comfortable, though, if we had a big wood-burning fireplace, an unlimited supply of firewood, and a volunteer to keep the hearth clean and safe and providing heat and ambiance.
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Detectives looking into my online search history might find plenty of evidence I have been planning an elaborate serial killing spree. The planning and execution (pun intended) of the string of murders would—I hope—impress the investigators. The manner in which targets are identified, selected, and dispatched would appear deliberately labyrinthine to criminal investigators, suggesting that the perpetrator’s purposes including extending and stymying the efforts of the police. But, until they figure out the complex logic behind the criminal’s processes, the killings would appear random; unrelated to one another. Except for just one commonality. The process—from the birth of the idea to the death of each victim—is inherently time-intensive and expensive. It is so rambling and circuitous that finding connections between each murder would require an absolutely exhaustive exploration of the activities of each victim over a lengthy period of time. Even then, the perpetrator’s tactics may be so intricate that searchers might miss critical correlations. All the evidence, by the way, would be circumstantial…at best. And, thanks to the depth of planning involved in the scheme, a substantial amount of intentional circumstantial evidence would be readily available to send investigators off, chasing false leads. This lengthy paragraph could be condensed and summarized as follows: writers who search the internet to gather material leave a trail—every possible means of diverting investigators from that trail must be used to protect the writer from becoming a “person of interest” or worse.
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