I had a compulsion to do it

I like serial killers almost as much as I like birthdays. So today is a two-for-one!

Ed Gein, possibly the most infamous serial killer who didn't really kill all that many people (he only actual claimed to have killed two women), was born today, 1906.

I swear he could've been my brother:

Except he was a supposed necrophiliac cannibal who liked to rob graves (including that of his mother), make pretty/fancy things like bowls, jewelery, masks, lampshades, chairs, bedposts, etc. out of body parts, murder women who looked like his mother, and dress up in a full bodysuit made of human skin. Ol' Eddy sure was obsessed with women! Especially dead ones. He also read anatomy texts & literature on the Nazi's, kept preserved vulvas in a box (just in case?!), & even babysat on occasion.

Thankfully, he and my brother have very little in common. 

Whether Ed actually did EVERYTHING he is purported to have done--he never admitted to necrophilia or cannibalism--or whether some of it is journalistic embellishment doesn't really matter. He was dedicated to his art.

Reminds me of someone else who was dedicated to his art:



...

In a Dark Time
Theodore Roethke

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

...