So the other day Hot Andrea and I were watching something like Forensic Files or The Investigators or Body of Evidence or one of those ten thousand other true-crime shows exactly like Forensic Files that Court TV offers in their epically diverse prime time lineup.  Well anyone who's caught ten seconds of any one of the eight bajillion true crime shows out there knows that nine out of every ten times the plot is about some chick who gets mysteriously murdered and then the police collect some evidence and find out that the husband/boyfriend did it and the husband/boyfriend gets sentenced to eight thousand years hard labor in Federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison where they get shackled to one of those bowling balls and assigned to a cell with a white power 800lb gorilla skinhead who has "L-O-V-E" tattooed on his knuckles and swastikas on his eyelids.  This episode was of course no exception.  We both know what's going to happen and we are constantly drawn to it regardless.  The fact that we were laying in bed for a quiet evening of hearing stories about murder, dismemberment and sexual assault isn't the weird part here.

The weird part is that after the show ended I was like, "Do you think that the husband's always the killer because the cops have the easiest time pinning it on him, or because a guy's first reaction when things start going wrong is just to flip out caveman-style and just start killing stuff?".  Andrea, somewhat to my surprise, responded by saying, "I don't know.  If you ever get sick of me though, let's talk about it or get a divorce.  Just don't kill me, OK?".

This was slightly troublesome;  However, things only got worse when I asked for clarification.

"Do you seriously think that I would kill you?"

"I don't know... I guess not..."

"You guess not?  Seriously?  You're not absolutely certain that I'm not a violent lunatic?"

"I don't know... you just have this creepy quality to you sometimes..."

Obviously this was a little disturbing to me.  If we're going to have a successful marriage and be able to coexist like normal people, we'll have to be able to trust that we're not going to chop each other up into tiny pieces at any given moment and with little to no provocation.  To that end, I have made it my mission this week to convince Hot Andrea and the rest of the world that I'm not the kind of crazy maniac that would do something insane like poison his girlfriend's ice cream or run around the streets of downtown Boston attacking bums with a weed whacker or something.  To do this, I'll first provide evidence of people thinking that I'm a potential loose cannon.  Then I will identify the numerous things I may have working against me before making a case that will prove that I'm not going to magically morph into some crazy serial killer-esque freakshow and fly into the sun.

• Example One

  In my high school yearbook some of the chicks in my class put together a list of predictions as to where the various members of our senior class would be when the ten year reunion rolled around, and the general consensus was that I was going to be at the head of a violent, bloody Communist revolution in some remote third-world country.  While I know this doesn't pigeonhole me into being a murderer per se, it's certainly a far cry from, "Future President" or "Most Likely to Succeed".  Sure, I wore combat boots to school every day and had Nine Inch Nails and Rage Against the Machine patches on my backpack, but that's your typical Catholic school protest shit and no reason to assume that I'm a naturally violent person, right?

• Example Two

  My first steady girlfriend used to kick me out of her home after we would watch a scary movie together because she said that I was akin to those slasher horror-flick boyfriends who acted all nice and shit and said sort-of comforting stuff like, "Don't worry, I'll never let anything happen to you..." in a really suggestive creepy voice right before whipping out a knife and revealing themselves to be the killer.  It's so weird.  What kind of chick doesn't want a big strong man like me around after watching a scary film?  Whatever.  I just chalked it up to her being a quasi-unstable catastrophist who was probably just a bad judge of character.  I'm far more awesome and complex than a cheap late-nineties low-budget crap film plot device.

• Example Three

  I was telling the above story to a different girlfriend a couple years later, and when she heard it she just sort of stared at me and giggled nervously for a second before tapping her finger on her chin and going, "Yeah... I guess I could see that..."

• Example Four

  Hot Andrea, as mentioned before, has said that there is a certain "quality" about me that is "creepy".  Now of course creeping a girl out isn't anything that's particularly new to me, but if someone has known me for eight years and still thinks that I have mid-to-high level murderer potential then maybe there's something about myself that I need to fix.  Since I don't see that happening any time soon, I'll give you a list of serial killer qualities that I have, and then tell you why said qualities do not make me a serial killer.  That way I can continue to be a dick without making people worry about my mental stability and whether or not I have access to samurai swords.

• I'm a Little "Too Quiet"

  This is probably the most common thing I hear when asking people why they think I'm an axe-wielding psycho.  They tell me I'm a little "too quiet", or a little "too patient" or something like that, and then mention how they expect me to completely flip out ninja-style one day and start going all Falling Down on everyone.  I don't really see things shaking down like that.  I think that I'm actually just a relatively quiet, patient guy who has learned healthy ways to deal with frustration (though you would probably never guess that from reading some of my rants on this site) and not a "keep it all in until the only way to vent your frustration is by jamming a steak knife into your neighbor's heart" kind of guy.

• I Have a Near Encyclopedic Knowledge of Guns, War and Nazis

  I have always been interested in weapons and feel comfortable around them.  This may be because I fired my first round from a Beretta 92F at age 12 and have grown up around guns my entire life because my dad was a card-carrying NRA commie-hating survivalist in the 1980s who lived in the wilderness building a nuclear fallout shelter and re-chambering his M-16s to use "captured Soviet ammo"... I don't know.  However, over the years I've fired many different types of weapons and have done a lot of reading on various guns and wars, mostly just so that I can make myself the ultimate Real-Time Strategy Video Game Expert and also so I could finally beat Bill in those Avalon Hill D-Day board games we both love so much.  I applied to West Point, considered ROTC and for a good part of my life wanted to be a tank commander for the US Army because holy crap how much ass would that kick.  Eventually though, I realized that maybe I didn't want to make a career out of having douchebags shoot rocket launchers at me, so I decided just to stick with the field of military history, which unfortunately is also (coincidentally) the sort of thing that a few serial killer-types seem to have some sort of interest in as well.  My senior thesis was on World War II German armored tactics, specifically the 1st SS Panzer Division in Normandy and the Ardennes, and there's no way that can help my cause either.  It's prime content for a Court TV exclusive.  I can almost hear the narrator now... "When investigators searched Mr. Thompson's bedroom they came across several books related to the SS and Nazi Germany.  At this point, detectives knew they had found their killer."

  That's the problem with being a history major who's interested in WWII.  People have a tendency to glance right over all the classical Greek literature and West Coast Offense playbooks and see that I have an old tome with some obscure World War II German officer giving the Seig Heil to a fucking rock on the cover and think, "yeah this guy's an A-1 platinum-grade nutcase."  It totally doesn't help my situation with Andrea that I'm always watching the Military Channel or violent movies and making weird comments like, "This movie is bullshit.  That guy's carrying a bandolier of .223 caliber ammo but the M-60 he's carrying takes 7.62mm rounds.  You'd think they'd do a little bit of research about that, you know?"

  All this leads me to my next point...

  
  
• I Say Some Messed-Up Stuff Sometimes

  I say some stupid shit sometimes that can lead people to believe that I'm a really violent angry person or a criminal mastermind or whatever.  I'm sure that you have some idea what I'm talking about from reading this site, but just for argument's sake here are some examples of the ill-advised advice and poorly-chosen phrases that I'm prone to volunteering to anyone who will listen to me for like ten seconds, the unfortunate by-product of not thinking before I speak:

  • "You know what we should try to see if we could buy?  Cyanide capsules.  Even if we took out the Cyanide and replaced it with mouthwash, how cool would that be?  It's like you would have mouthwash any time you needed it!"
    
    
  • "Man, your boss sucks.  You should just bake him some poisoned cookies and be done with it."
    
    
  • "Will you give me ten bucks if I run up to that guy in the banana suit and give him a flying side kick?"
    
    
  • "If you could assassinate any celebrity and get away with it, who would it be and why?"
    
    
  • "Those drunk college kids outside are really pissing me off.  We should buy an air rifle so we can take potshots at them from our bedroom window."
    
    
  • "I don't know about you, but if I was going to kill someone I'd drive them out to a remote location, put a bullet in their head and bury them deep enough that they wouldn't re-surface.  To avoid being caught, I'd burn my clothes, break the gun down into its most basic components and then throw the pieces in various dumpsters and bodies of water throughout the state."
    
    

  It's saying things like this that make people start to have doubts about your sanity and start worrying about you being a potential sociopath.

  
  
• I'm Pretty Much the Ultimate Killing Machine

  Yeah, by now this one should really go without saying.  When you're as jacked as I am and spend your time thinking about how awesome you are and how you could destroy anything you wanted to with your bare hands, people often times assume that you're willing to kill another human being for no reason at all.  While that may be true, I'm certainly not the kind of guy that is going to go off and do that just to prove how badass I am, because pretty much everybody knows that already.  However, much like everyone in the bar keeps an eye on the seven foot tall skinhead handlebar-mustached biker with a "Guns Dont Kill People... I Kill People" neck tattoo just in case his PCP starts acting up and he decides to start crushing peoples' skulls, I suppose people look at me the same way and wonder when I'm going to let my Cannons loose and start pummeling jerks to death for winking at Andrea.

  
  
  
  
  
  
• I'm Allegedly "Addicted to Porn"

  One of the first things that these true-crime shows mention when they talk about police raids on serial killers' homes is their extensive collection of pornographic material.  And oh no!  I have a porn collection as well!  Well guess what?  Porn doesn't make me a serial killer... it makes me a TYPICAL MALE WITH INTERNET ACCESS.  The only problem here is that chicks don't really realize that every guy on the planet downloads porn because we are all trying to appear "sensitive" and "not perverted" and never speak of it to members of the opposite sex.  So now my girl-on-girl porn red-flags me as a potential sadistic sociopath murderer.  Great.

• I'm Prone to Occasional Outbursts

  You may not know it if you've never met me in real life, but I'm actually a pretty quiet, reserved guy.  So when people first come to my website, they're often a little surprised that I can be prone to occasional outbursts and sporadically extensive profanity.  This of course often leads people to believe that I'm a font of misplaced rage hiding behind a seemingly innocuous facade.  Well, this isn't really the case.  It's more like I'm a quiet guy who makes an attempt at pretending his life is actually the slightest bit interesting so that his website isn't the boring e/n self-depriating tripe that permeates the internet like an infestation of ecologically-unfriendly toads in the Australian Outback.  But people don't see it that way though and when they see that I have a fucking sick sense of humor and a wealth of pissed-offedness deep down that they didn't expect to be there, their first thought is "yeah, this guys a serial murderer waiting to happen".

  Well Andrea sees that my frustration is usually directed at the thing that most deserves it - my goddamned Xbox.  Man that thing pisses me off.  Of course, it's probably a little unnerving that I can seemingly be sitting on the couch with her one minute having a pleasant mild-mannered conversation and then suddenly flip out, throw my controller and scream the phrase "cockmunching asswanger" at the TV.  To her this translates into me being the kind of guy who flies off the handle at the stupidest shit, making me potentially psychologically unstable.  What she doesn't understand is that my super Rage-Meter isn't just flashing for no good reason.  Nine times out of ten she's just not paying attention to the game and how when I tell Bill the Ninja to jump from one platform to another and attack with his sword it doesn't mean that I want him to fucking fall off the edge of a cliff like a Xanax-addicted dipshit with no motor skills and have his goddamned eyes pecked out by vultures on the way down while the stupid son-of-a-whore evil ninjas laugh at him and make out with his girlfriend.  If the game didn't fucking cheat so hard then maybe I wouldn't have to get so pissed off that my hands start sweating.

  See?  There's a perfectly logical explanation as to why I get pissed sometimes.  Yeah, logical...

  
  
• I Have a Strangely Compulsive Personality

  The compulsive personality is another staple of a true serial murderer.  I guess I have a few compulsions, but they're all stupid crap like trying to get 100% completion on the challenges in TimeSplitters 2 or making sure that all song titles in my MP3 collection are formatted in the same way.  It's hardly anything that can be considered dangerous, even if it's wicked upsetting to me when stupid fucking Windows Media Player changes my files to the stupid "track name - song title" format after I've spent two hours renaming and reorganizing them.  Man I hate that fucking program.  Windows Media Player is such a bastard.  But compulsion doesn't mean anything.  Look at Marc Summers... that guy's an icon of our generation and he's as OCD as it gets!  So seriously, in the grand scheme of things my compulsions are certainly a far cry from arranging polaroids of dead cacti in order by size and bark color or something equally as insane.

  Well, the point of this section was to prove to you the subtle differences between the standard serial killer profile and my own personal quirkiness, but now that I've finished it, it's becoming apparent that this section isn't really helping my cause any.  So let's move on to something a little more productive, like this:

• I Like Animals and No, I Don't Mean Killing Animals

  It seems to me that a good portion of serial killers out there got their start by being cruel to animals for no good reason.  Well I like animals.  The only time I ever hurt an animal was when I accidentally stepped on my cat one morning when I was stumbling to the bathroom half-asleep at three o'clock in the morning, but he got over it pretty quickly because he's a total attention whore.  I pretty much like all animals too, even the gross ones.  Plus, what's the point of hurting an animal?  Unless it's like a charging rhino and you've got to decide between killing it and saving yourself then you're really just wasting your time and being a total dick by injuring a living creature for no good reason.

  Don't think this means that I don't eat animals though, because I do.  That's different though because I'm not the one who goes out and whacks them over the head or anything, so I feel like I'm exempted there.  But seriously, I like animals.  People, not so much.

  
  
• Possibly Confusing "Homicidal Lunatic" with "Hardass Vigilante"

  This is the explanation I come up with the most when people think that I'm possibly a murderer of some sort.  I mean, if you didn't know a whole lot about the Punisher, you'd probably think he was some sort of gun-toting psychopath with a crazy set of tights, but he's actually a grim vigilante who dishes out his own ruthless brand of justice to evildoers and criminals who slip through the cracks.  Now if someone compared me to the Punisher, that would be awesome.  I pretty much try to convince myself that's what people are thinking of when they say that there's something slightly disturbing about me, like I really should be some sort of Max Payne-style film noir badass loose cannon detective who should be out there getting into fistfights with thugs and hooligans, cleaning up the streets or otherwise doing something awesome for the good of humanity.  I think it's pretty easy to confuse murderers and above-the-law detectives because they share so many of the same qualities, except that the heroes only kill bad guys.  Ultimately, I think that people make this mistake with me as well, confusing me with a murderer when I'm really just a super badass, because trust me when I say that I'm far more interested in beating up a machine gun-toting bank robber terrorist than I am at hiding in the park at night dressed in black and frightening joggers.

  
  
  
  
  
  
• I Can't Afford Rent on My Own

  Rent in Boston is way wicked expensive.  The total rent for our apartment is like 67% of my monthly take-home paycheck, and if I had to pay the whole thing myself there's no way I would have enough money left over for anything else like gasoline, car payments and PS2 games.  So in addition to the fact that I'm a stand-up guy who would never do anything to harm her, and that she's the love of my life and I would be a miserable empty shell of a man without her, Andrea should also rest easy knowing that I'd never kill her because there is no way I could survive without her half of the rent.

  
  
• I'm Too Practical

  I tend to aire on the side of practicality when it comes to things like deciding whether or not to become a homicidal madman lunatic who chops people up with chainsaws and puts their parts into Jiffy Bags.  I mean, there's got to be a better way to solve your problems right?  Like if at some point down the road Andrea and I grow apart and decide we can't make our marriage work, I'd much rather split apart in an amiable divorce than do something drastic.  Like what would killing her solve that a divorce wouldn't?  Plus, how much sense would that make?  Not only is it fucking crazy, but the first person the cops investigate is the husband, so I'd pretty much doing exactly what they would expect me to and they'd figure it out pretty fucking quickly and then it's off to ass-pounding jail for me.  And NOTHING is worth that.

  This doesn't just apply to Andrea either.  Like if someone's pissing me off, it's probably a little more reasonable to try and work our differences out than to just start hacking away with a hatchet.  On top of all this, I'm pretty much a passive-aggressive douchebag so if I couldn't work things out with the guy I'm far more likely to break into his apartment and urinate in his shampoo than I am to crush his skull with a hammer.  People like Andrea should know that by now!

  
  
• I'm Kind of Retarded

  A lot of stuff can go wrong in an attempted homicide, and I'm just the kind of bungler who would find a way to fuck it up somehow.  I bet if I tried to kill someone I'd probably fucking end up accidentally hacking my own leg off and giving them my wallet or something.  I mean, pretty much everything I try to do gets fucked up somehow, so why attempt something so complicated and with such far-reaching implications as homicide?  It's pretty much pointless, because I'd botch it somehow and then I'd come off looking like a real asshole.  And nobody wants that.

I don't know why people throughout my life hint at me possibly being a serial killer, but I'm sick of it.  Now hopefully I've given you enough reasons (above and beyond the obvious) why I'm not going to go off on a homicidal rampage so we can put this to rest.  Thank you for your time.