jeff never thought his life could be helpful to anyone, but he really has helped me a ton. he’s helped me think more deeply about people, about psychology, about the different ways in which the system fails us all, and about the complex nature of morality and human nature in general.
jeff is a teacher and subject both, perhaps inadvertently so. he didn’t recognize his own power. but i’m always going to be grateful to him for that. his actions were horrific, but his existence has somehow still helped us all here in this community. those who’ve wished to study him deeply have uncovered a lot of profound truths along the way.
like a retrograde planet, jeff’s existence bungled things up quite a bit, but it also taught us a lot in the process. and there are always going to be retrogrades. on a grand scale, we need them.
and i hate even saying that because it seems like an insult to his victims. they certainly didn’t deserve to die or be violated in all those horrible disgusting ways. it’s sort of making me squirm to even have this thought at all right now. but i guess death gets us all at some point; it’s just a matter of how it happens and what — or who — brings it. and sometimes society as a whole needs a shock to it in order to recognize that the current setup is absolutely fucked and needs to change. it’s just how the huge complex rube-goldberg contraption called “the world” is set up.
unfortunately, someone has to play the bad guy. like how judas had to betray jesus in order to get the ball rolling for his death and resurrection. without judas, the whole thing would never have happened. he hated himself for what he did, too, and he hung himself because of it.
i see jeff very similarly. he’s a catalyst for change.
and now somehow i’m linking this with the trolley problem. a few casualties for the good of the whole later on down the line? it’s cruel. it’s brutal. it’s a horrible reality. but the only way we can improve things as they are, i guess, is by fighting fire with fire at some point.
i don’t know. this might all be bullshit and i might regret saying it in about 5 minutes. i feel like i’m being insulting to jeff’s victims by saying it. but i’m also not married to these thoughts, either — they’re just swimming through my head, and i might read over them again in an hour and hate them. but maybe there’s a similarity there in that i’m thinking brutal thoughts and am self-aware at the same time, just as jeff was self-aware and yet couldn’t stop causing destruction.
i think his fame was necessary. he had to slam into our collective consciousness like a meteor and leave a huge crater so we can later fill it with new lessons and knowledge.
it makes sense that he came to light during the early 90s, with all that harsh outer-planet shit that was going on right then. capricorn and scorpio, saturn and pluto dominance. saturn is the grim reaper swinging his scythe; pluto destroys and rebuilds. jeff was absolutely a harbinger of all this outer-planet energy.
maybe in his next life, jeff will go on to be an even greater force for helping people than he was for harming them. maybe he’s already doing that right now. he just needed to go through a really nasty incarnation first.
maybe he needed to experience firsthand what horrors one human is capable of before he could help change this in the next life. i do wonder how many of us have at least one past life where we were a murderer or a rapist or some other awful person, and that’s what’s made us wiser in the end and we just aren’t aware of it.
the difference with jeff is that he seemed to retain some awareness that this was wrong. he’s bridged the gap so we can peer into the other side. he’s relatable because we need to be able to recognize these traits in ourselves.
only then can we take the first step toward righting our wrongs.
[ • dahmers-ashes • ]
Jeffrey Dahmer Memorial 