I've heard, over the years, that part of the appeal of authors such as Stephen King is that they evoke a sense of bad things lurking in a normal, everyday setting. That you could just go about your everyday life in suburbia and the next thing you know dead animals are going to come back to terrorise you. It's a little thrill in an otherwise dull existence. You're supposed to feel scared and safe, because, you know, these things don't really happen.

I write horror because these things do indeed happen, with the exception of the dead coming back to life, unless there was yet another particularly inept set of emergency rescuers. And no, I don't particularly believ in monsters either. What I do belive in is the idea that someone can just kill you for no damn reason at all. I've heard that one out of every four Americans has some sort of mental illness. That's a staggering amount of people. But the other 3/4 isn't so stable, either.

There was a woman in the news a few months ago that decided she needed to run over a couple of kids because the ball they were playing with accidentally hit her van. She was *proud* of it. This was a mentally unbalanced person.
But especially this week it seems like people are killing other people at the drop of an inconvenience. A missing woman was found dead because her boyfriend killed her. Motive? An argument over the tv. The thing that just completely turned my stomach was the man who punched his three year old daughter to death. Motive? She wouldn't eat a sandwich. These people weren't outside of their killer's 'monkeysphere'.

Which isn't to say that the 'monkeysphere' concept is invalid. From the guy spouting hatred and threatening violence because I wouldn't follow him to some undisclosed location to 'distribute food to children' to the woman at Lowe's food who had to tell me off because she didn't feel like selling me some stamps, I know that to 99.9% of everyone I'm around on a daily basis I am not a person. I'm an inconvenience. And inconveniences should be removed because they bother people. But you're also more likely to be killed by someone who knows you, to whom you are inside their 'sphere'. Or are you? Is the number of people who are real to someone 150? Or is it 1?

Parnoid entry ends.