TBT #63: Where Is The Madness That You Promised Me

Wearing dark slacks and a red tie, Neelesh Phadnis repeatedly perched the reading glasses he’d borrowed from the judge on his forehead and looked at the men and women inside the jury box.

“You guys,” he said during closing arguments, “I mean, I hope you guys are sharp. I mean, I want to have children. I mean, I want to fall in love with a female. I want to have a happy life. I mean, my life is on the line here. I hope you understand that.”

I’ve had this page open in my browser for a week. I don’t really know what to do with it, but I feel like it would be a mistake to just let it pass me by. It’s not, however, something you forward to all your friends with an “LOL” subject line and a “Truth IS stranger than fiction :)” message body. I don’t think many people would find it amusing alongside a video of a girl farting and yet another link to some flash movie thing that’s supposed to scare you with a really loud noise. But to be entirely truthful, it DID make me laugh out loud and it IS an example of truth that is stranger than most of the fiction I’ve ever read. It’s very rare that I actually laugh from reading something online, but this did it. I laughed for a good minute!

Phadnis, 24, is accused of fatally shooting his father and mother, Ravindra, 53, and Surekha Phadnis, 49, on Aug. 24, 2002, in the family’s Avon Court home in Kent.

And then I felt bad about it. Because the story is about murder. Grizzly, pre-meditated, intra-family murder! And here I am laughing, because it’s just so god damn funny.

C’mon, he borrowed the judge’s glasses. That’s hilarious! If this kid wasn’t looking at spending the rest of his life in prison, I would swear this is some kind of twisted, brilliant performance art. In addition to that astounding closing statement, Phandis also

• Claimed “he was kidnapped and tortured for three days by a gang of 400-pound Samoans who eventually killed his parents in front of him.”
• “[P]ut his finger in his mouth, like a gag, to show jurors how he was supposedly silenced by the Samoan gang. He then proceeded to talk while his voice was muffled”
• Continually altered his testimony. “One day, the gang was comprised of a handful of Samoans and their girlfriends. Later that same day, there were also two whites, a couple of blacks, one Native American and, perhaps, even one transgendered individual in the gang. By the end of the trial, Phadnis was saying there were more than 30 armed Samoans involved.”
• “Under cross-examination by Deputy Prosecutor Don Raz, Phadnis explained his calm demeanor after the slayings because he had “been trained all the way through junior high to stay calm when you deal with fire, crime, drugs and earthquakes.” He then launched into a long discourse on how he learned to “stop, drop and roll.”"
• “[S]aid though he had seen someone fire a gun at his parents, he didn’t realize they’d been hurt.”

It’s a cavalcade of weirdness, to be sure, but the weirdest part is this: “Phadnis has had several mental-health evaluations that determined he was competent to make legal decisions for himself.” Seriously. The kid claims a gang seemingly made up of Former WWF Champion Yokozuna and “perhaps” a transgendered individual kidnapped him for three days and also tried to use fire safety tips to prove his innocence and he’s apparently SANE? How hard is it to get labeled crazy in the world these days? The next time some college-age person tells me how CRAZY they are because they, like, totally love Homestar Runner and talk to themselves in the shower I am going to ask them, point blank, if they have ever addressed a jury with their hand in their mouth. Because apparently the true test of insanity is to go just a little bit further than THAT.

The psychotic among us

I’ve always had some fascination with cases like this. Not so much with the actual murderings and killings because that just makes me sad, but rather with the social reactions surrounding the incidences. It was that sort of fascination that caused me to work Japan’s “Celebrity Cannibal” Issei Sagawa into a story this past summer, and it’s that sort of fascination that will hopefully lead to my much-balleyhooed return to journalism with a feature-length article on the “Livejournal Murders.” It’s been one of the overlooked aspects of this new era of communication and blogs where everyone’s innermost and thoughts and feelings are broadcast to the world on a semi-daily basis that bad people are going to end up involving themselves in this web. The number of people who have both maintained blogs and committed a capital crime is still rather small, but, still, those who have done so remain a fascinating study. There’s a kind of twisted normalcy to the writing, with a million signals pointing towards the writer’s instability but very few that you actually would have noted had that crime not taken place.

The blogosphere

I hate the word ‘blogosphere’ because in no way do those of us who update and maintain blogs form any kind of sphere. If it’s any shape — and I still think seeing it as any kind of ’shape’ is stupid — it’s sort of depressed oval, like a distended belly: a few muscles holding up the whole thing while a bunch of fat frantically seeks the floor. But, still, the newsmedia loves to talk about the ‘blogosphere’ in broad terms as this great new entity that seeks to reveal truth and bring people together under a new banner of interconnectedness and whatever else. And, you know, I guess this is true if you ignore the vast number of blogs that eschew truth in favour of poetry about tears dripping over a black heart and also shout-outs to all the girls and boys. You also have to ignore the huge number of blogs that think, while truth is great, what they really want people to read about is their otherkin existence as a dragon or their Morrisey fan fiction.

It’s not truth. Even I, who likes to think of my own blog of something a little more sophisticated than a pro-anorexia community, wouldn’t say this blog is TRUTH. I don’t think I’ve ever really expressed myself as I am in “real life” on these pages. I don’t think people do, for the most part. They express aspects of themselves, some embellished, some hidden, all in order to make yourself look good. (There is a step down from that, where people use their blogs exclusively as a place to whine and get e-hugs that look like {{{{{{this}}}}}} but they’re not really worth talking about.)

Who would have thought that Kevin Smith’s blog would be primarily made-up of rather graphic retellings of he and his wife having sex, or that Rosie O’Donnell would blog entirely in lowercase pseudo-poetry, posting couplets like “I am in la / doing press / 4 the movie / that airs this sunday / do me a favor / tivo desperate housewives”? It’s just baffling in a lot of ways, but at the same time impossible not to read, because it represents an entirely new facet of someone that no one had any idea existed. That’s the best that can be said about this whole blog thing — it may not be about truth, but it’s about people. People and their edges and their insides and the weird part of their brain that says “Yes, sometimes I think about having sex with Anthony Edwards, but only if I could call him Goose.”

Stay Tuned

This was supposed to be a random thoughts update but somehow it turned into some sort of pseudo-intellectual treatise on blogs and humanity and stuff. But that’s okay because I had very few random thoughts to begin with. This week will also see another round of King’s pictures and also preliminary instructions for November’s INTERNATIONAL PHOTOJOURNAL DAY which is something you will be participating in if you have a digital camera! If you do not have a digital camera, get one before November so you can take part in this awesome event.

Speaking of November, it also marks the return of National Novel Writing Month an event I utterly failed at last year, so thus must attempt again. I am joined this year by Pearle, who will also be attempting to write a novel. If anyone else wants to participate, please feel free, as others doing it will ignite my innate sense of competition and cause me to actually write this year if only to take all you jerks to SCHOOL.

So visit this site! Excitement is afoot! Invite your friends! End EVERY sentence with an exclamation mark if you choose to leave a comment! Excitement! Fun!

Matt!