Yes, yes, I know. It’s a cliche to discuss the search strings that show up in your user stats as people search for random things online. But everything’s a cliche these day. Calling things a cliche is sort of a cliche. So here we are.
“graveyard dirt sat on a roast while menstruating”
Two people this month thus far have landed on this site with this search string. Is it really that odd, that a woman sat naked on a roast? Maybe it is. I mean, I haven’t done it and feel no urge but I think this would be odder if she had sat on a dog while naked and menstruating, or on your grandpa, or a stranger’s fully loaded Toyota Camry. But alas, while I have discussed Ms Graveyarddirt over here, I cannot help you get to the pictures of her most notorious act.
“8 yod girls want sex”
So… Anyone have any idea what this is about? Is this motherfucker asking if 8 year old girls want sex? What the hell? Fuck you, no they don’t. Thanks for coming to me so we could clear that up together.
“adderall addiction paranoid boyfriend. heating”
I sort of sense that period followed by an H is a mistype and the searcher likely meant “beating.” Oh this world…
“better word for collection of short stories”
Anthology. Glad I could help.
“do they have book about cannibals”
Indeed, they do. They have lots of them.
“half shirts fucking movies”
No idea what this could mean. None whatsoever.
“if you spend every day chopping up meat on a slab and selling it”
You will likely be called a butcher? I don’t know. I am mostly appalled that I immediately knew which entry I wrote caused this lost soul to come to IROB – Leopold Stein’s frightening treatise on the female patients who terrified him because women with mental illness are ABSOLUTE EXAMPLES OF HUMAN EVIL, Loathsome Women.
“ireadoddbooks adam parfrey”
“ireadoddbooks jim goad”
“ireadoddbooks parfrey”
“ireadoddbooks tethers”
Holy crap, this means people specifically searched for books on this site. Like there was a pre-existing awareness that IROB is here. Like maybe they read my discussions and felt the need to search for them again. Oh my ego!
“is it legal to read fiction bestiality”
God, I hope so or we’re all gonna do time.
“list of zoophilia fiction”
“sexy write-ups on bestiality(horse)”
James Steele, are you reading this? Your touching novella of a horse dildo is why search strings like this happen. You man. It’s all you. And yet I still somehow feel it’s all my fault.
“science fiction book where the main character gets an anal probe”
You’re gonna have to narrow it down.
“what was the bird-serpent war in history”
I don’t know but I do know it happened around the time the poles shifted. If you find out, come back and tell me.
“the evil gringo blogger”
Evil Gringo, what the fuck have you been doing? You have a blog? Why did I not know of this?
“what happens if you shoplift from american apparel”
You end up with a book deal and slavering fans who continue to this day to dog the hell out of people who found your prose lacking. That’s what happens if you shoplift from American Apparel. Also your dick falls off.
“lesley ann downey photos”
“lesley ann downey ian brady photos”
“lesley ann downey ian brady audiotape”
These particular strings come up a lot. Guys, you’re not gonna find her autopsy photos, or any of the photos and audio recordings Myra and Ian took of this child here on the public Internet. If they are out there you are gonna have to search the deep web and you may want to think about it before you take that step to find images of a tortured, murdered child and the sounds she made when begging for her mother. Not moralizing here. I’ve searched for terrible things. But I’ve also found some stuff online that, once I found it, left a stain my soul that can never wash away. Just throwing it out there that maybe you don’t want to see or hear these things if you know it may haunt you forever.
“rubbed a pregnant belly (horror fiction)”
From your keyboard comes much truth, anonymous web surfer.
These are the highlights from May and June. For all those who landed here hoping to find horse porn and tapes of murdered children, sorry to have misled you. Alas, I feel this is my curse for refusing to take SEO seriously.
Regarding your penultimate paragraph: why would one not want to ”see things if you know it may haunt you forever?” In an era of bland correctness, in an age of when the establishment media diligently and determinedly strives not to “offend” – would it not be refreshing to come across something that actually produces some sort of emotional reaction – even if that response might be somewhat distressing.
First, found your blog, thanks for linking to me and I will return the favor this weekend when I finally have a chance to work in peace for a while.
Second, I have difficulty answering your question because it makes some assumptions that are pretty far away from what I consider reality.
I have no idea what media you are referring to that tries not to offend – between entertainment and news media the average person is besieged with a continual barrage of offensive material. But let’s assume your premise is correct that we have an establishment media that strives not to offend.
“In an era of bland correctness,” as you put it, it is hard to see how listening to a murdered child beg for her mother is spice for life to avoid blandness. It’s difficult to see how pictures of that same child during her exploitation will achieve the same ends. Because our lives are not bland, assuming they are bland, because we don’t have enough access to records of child murder and rape. Lesley Ann’s pitiful voice and image really are not the solution to feeling emotionally numb unless one has something pretty fucking terminal going on.
But let’s say the world is indeed so bland and devoid of emotional reaction that we need to submerge ourselves in the worst the deep web has to offer in order to find recordings of murdered children so we can have an emotional reaction, even then we should be cautious. Though the world is often a toilet the fact remains that the mass bulk of people on this planet have empathy, have a moral center and would do anything in their power to prevent harm coming to a child. Using media like that to have an emotional response of any kind is like setting yourself on fire to see if you enjoy heat. I can think of a million better ways to fight the bland banality of a politically correct media than listening to child murder.
What good comes from haunting yourself forever if you can avoid it while achieving catharsis in another way? What possible end is there to knowing exactly how a child suffered, her intonation as she cried for help? How can seeing the pictures of her bound cause a “refreshing” reaction? How is consuming such images a blow to the media forces that strive not to offend if your can never again look at a little girl, a kitten, or a homeless person and not think of the one you specifically searched for online so you could listen or watch as their lives ended in the most repellent and evil ways possible?
And to be very specific, there are enough discussions, non-fiction accounts, articles and similar about Lesley that our bland correctness really hasn’t prevented people from knowing enough about her situation that they are deprived catharsis or reaction. The need to parse her misery down to the cellular level and consume it with both fists is not borne from a need to experience something, anything, in order to feel in a numb world. It stems from morbid curiosity or extreme deviance and it is those with morbid curiosity who I am speaking to here because once you find Lesley exposed to a subatomic level, you will find more children like her and worse and it will hurt your psyche in a way unnecessary to have an emotional reaction in a bland world.
Of course there are terminal cases for whom achieving catharsis (as well an erection, it seems) is an act that can only involve images of exploited and murdered children. I feel infinite pity for people who have their sexuality wired this way but unless you really are a person for whom basic urges have become so skewed that consuming such media is the only hope for an emotional reaction, best to give images of exploited children a miss.
It all boils down to whether or not you really think watching child pornography and still images from a snuff film (in the most literal definition) are really things you need to fight against a bland media culture.
As a point of order, The Evil Gringo does NOT blog under the name “The Evil Gringo.” His psychopathic jabbering and jibbering might well appear under a different name. Whomever you might have found blogging under the name “The Evil Gringo” is NOT the real Gringo – and undoubtedly NOT evil enough for me.
Well, I will hold off linking then and perhaps one day you will share with me the location of your psychopathic jabbering and jibbering.
Jabbering, eh? I find that unlikely.
I haven’t listened to the Lesley Anne Downey tape that you reference (and perhaps I am missing something), so I am put in a rather odd position of defending something that I haven’t heard. I am not saying that seeking out such material is a good thing – but it is a necessary thing. I am not suggesting that anyone should enjoy hearing a child being tortured (and I personally would not want to be around degenerates who find some arousal in child murder) – but such horror that exposes the modern world as it really is. Only when we truly experience the disgusting world in which such suffering exists can we truly understand what it means to be human.
Compassions & empathy are just a cowardly refusal to see the evil that surrounds us. We need to grab the barf bags and watch such revolting filth to understand exactly what is in our neighbor’s soul. We need such monsters – like Ian Brady and Luka Magnotta – to show us what humanity truly is.
This is the society in which we find ourselves – and we need to have it rubbed in our faces.
There are elements of truth to your position, though you are absolutely wrong that compassion and empathy are cowardly attempts to avoid the horror of the real world. Real horror has no truth to it – read Gates of Janus and get back to me on the truth horror can convey. Feeling the pain of others and wanting to help them makes people face horror, not avoid it. I just question the validity of wallowing in the decades old murder of a specific child and risking having that imprinted on your psyche for the rest of your life.
Do you think it would change anything if everyone on the planet was forced to listen to a child begging for her mother before she is raped and killed, to see the pictures? What would be the result if they did? Would a fucking thing change or would we just now have to contend with the emotional toll that comes from knowing a child was tortured and killed and there is nothing we can do about it even as one of the fuckers who did it still writes books crowing about his emotional superiority to the rest of us who do not kill. Be careful when asserting that compassion and empathy are cowardice – it does make you sound like Ian Brady, who insists we are all killers inside and that we would do as he did if only we weren’t constrained by common decency and basic morality. To dismiss the thing that keeps us human as being cowardice that shields us from monsters is to insist that the monsters have something to show us. They don’t. They are showing us themselves and hoping we dig them, too.
The Lesley Ann Downey tapes have nothing to show me about myself or the world around me. I already know I am better than Ian Brady, his ridiculous assertions aside. And I know there is so much misery I cannot effect. And I suspect I am not alone because this world is hardly as wicked as you seem to think.
Perhaps my reaction is one of disgust and not anything morally enlightening, but I do wonder what good it does to force people who already have empathy to watch Luke Magnotta killing kittens and eating a dead man. I can say my emotional Waterloo was watching the dreadful Chinese kitten crush video because it filled me with impotent rage, revulsion, misery and a desire to kill. I see kittens and I remember that drugged kitten and it never stops assaulting my psyche.
I already knew the world was a terrible place before I saw that video. I had spent years in animal rescue and I already knew people set animals on fire, stomped on their skulls, fucked them, beat them, harmed them. Did I really need that image to drive home what I already knew? I say no, I and I suspect most people with cultural awareness and empathy would say they don’t need it.
I suspect the the same is true of the people who just want to find the Lesley tapes and photos out of morbid curiosity. And there is nothing we as a culture can do to prevent people who find such material titillating to their sexual drive from searching for such things. We don’t as a culture want to deal honestly with people who are wired that way and those people will never stop searching for the damage, and part of me hopes they sublimate their urges by making Lesley their sacrificial lamb over and over.
And we do have it rubbed in our faces. I don’t know what media you consume that you find this world bland but I can think of dozens of public web sites that show the horror over and over. We know the society we live in because Bad Breeders, I Wish I Didn’t Know and similar make it very easy to read the stories of modern Lesleys.
And that brings me to a place of inconsistency because if we can read every detail of a Baby P in the UK or all the forsaken, starved, raped, beaten and neglected children in the USA, what difference does it make if we have the video and audio to accompany it?
I don’t know. Perhaps it is the idea that I wish I could protect Lesley from further victimization, which is spurious in a way because she is dead and gone and consuming her image from curiosity or sexual proclivity means little to the girl anymore. Perhaps because seeking out their trophies ensures that subhumans like Ian Brady and Luke Magnotta get to spread their disease and experience the thrill of the kill vicariously over and over.
I guess all I can say from personal experience is that the world is both a horrible place and a wonderful place and that if you consume too much of the horrible, you won’t be viscerally experiencing the real world or any real society – you’ll just be experiencing what degenerate fucks bring to the table and despite the horrors I have seen in my own live, degenerate fucks are not nearly as thick on the ground as your words portray.
But mileage varies. Maybe you aren’t wrong. Perhaps people do need to hear Lesley to understand the brutality of men like Brady. All I know is that I don’t and through my own personal experience convey that idea.
Someone recommended that I check out Alfred Armstrong’s index of Odd Books. When I typed “odd books” into the magical Google machine, I noticed your site listed directly below his, so I thought I’d take a look at it. I’m glad I did, since your reviews got me intrigued enough to read some fascinating books I’d considered outside of my areas of interest, and sometimes my comfort zone.
Oh wow, Ed, thanks for telling me that. If you read something I recommended and have the time, be sure to come back and tell me what you thought of it.
Alfred Armstrong is The Man. I really like his site. One day I really need to branch out into the older esoterica he discusses.