Pain. We forget pain. Agony. We ignore Agony. Torture. We deny torture. Flash--of a girl cutting into her arm to pass the time. Flash--of a man bounding a woman whose body will float on the river the next day. Flash--of a woman videotaping herself being raped by the household pet. Flashes. Flashes--of the dark desires in the hearts of us all. We forget, willingly choose to look away from, the dark desires which surface up from the ocean of humanity. Because it seems that if the wonder of mankind is unconceivable so are the depths of mankind's perversion chosen to be uncharted. You choose to look away and the shadow only looms longer over you.

     What brings me to such dark subject matter? The things described above aren't just conceits of my imagination. Those things have happened. Before you turn away, consider that--those things have happened. This week police took custody of a mild-looking man who acted his master-and-slave fantasies with partners met in the Internet, a man suspected of murdering over 8 people. Who could've thought? The dark desires of this man...spreading their deadly wings and ending the lives of these women.

     The Internet continues to get the worst rap. It seems that nothing good comes out of this technological monstrosity these days. Slavemaster, as authorities refer to the man mentioned above, hooked up with women on the internet to play out sadomasochistic fantasies. And when one of these "play" sessions turned into a brutal attack, it literally opened the drums where this man hid his victims. The usual shock gets televised and the Internet gets vilified again--people seem to forget that depraved serial killers existed before the Internet. Where have thou gone Jack The Ripper? Still, the usual montage of Internet horror stories will get played for the next several weeks. Years ago there was a story in the news about a Maryland woman who met a partner in the Net. She made her way to him somewhere in North Carolina where the partner killed her--after all it was her fantasy. In Montel Williams, just today, a man told how his step-daughter was stalked and executed by an Internet wacko--

     Yes, it happens.

     Yes, it will happen.

     Yes, it will be horrible.

     But the Internet doesn't breed monsters. As Goya said, the sleep of reason breeds monsters. Still, the Internet can facilitate the dark wishes of people whose reason has unhinged.

     From personal experience, my years of cyber-surfing and misguided curiosity has uncovered some of the most disturbing images in the Internet, from "tasteless" photo newsgroups to a hidden corner of the net where a man put up a page soliciting gay sex with a partner and a willing dog. In the past, people with such dark desires peddled their fantasies on the underground sex scene now this Internet thing, which brings us all together, which has revolutionized how we relate to each other, brings together the poor souls who live their days dreaming of rape, torture and murder. It's an unfortunate side effect. Yet I believe that wherever man goes, evil will follow.

     We still commit the sin of acting as if these things could never happen. The most infuriating thing I found about the controversy regarding Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho and its recent film adaptation wasn't that the book was unreadable violent trash--it wasn't--but it was that Ellis' novel is a well-written story of a man's decent into hatred, horror, soullessness and madness. Strikes me that dark subject matter is repudiated to such an extent. As difficult as such works are to read or see...life is expressed in their folds. The subtleties of life hide as well in horror stories as they do in romantic comedies or highly-regarded dramas. That most of the American Psycho's critics and moviegoers missed this point proves to me once again that we will continue to ignore the lessons of real-life serial killers. People such as Slavemaster will continue to surface amongst humanity to our beffudlement. Our beffudlement caused by our inability to deal with the pathology of such individuals and their dark fantasies.