A lot can happen when transiting Mercury conjuncts one's Mars - the brief influence or reflection, as it may be, can indicate ill temper, belligerence, defensiveness - "cruising for bruising" one source calls it. This doesn't sound unlike where I can go any day of the week, though. But it interests me that during this conjunction, yesterday and today, I have news of the murder of a local woman allegedly at the hand of a gentleman I have been acquainted with, who 16 years back visited in our home on the farm we had then, a person with whom I met several times to discuss editing a book he was writing. One panicky afternoon back then, before I resided in this town, before I had a cellphone, I knocked at the door of his house and was let in to use his telephone because I couldn't find a functioning pay phone and had an emergency.

Clearly he was an isolated fellow, somewhat younger than I was. When I opened my bookshop he visited once and we conversed. I made a cynical remark about something I've forgotten now, and he took me literally, although I meant the opposite, and he became enraged and fled, and he would not acknowledge me thereafter if we passed on the street. A woman who was a close friend to me for several years dated him briefly, and then suddenly broke it off and virtually went into hiding with no explanation. This man attended a Friends of the Library meeting I was at and left in a rage when it did not begin precisely at the expected time. That was the last time I saw him, actually, and by then I had some study of high-functioning autism under my belt and had quietly diagnosed him as such, with OCD as his comorbidity. He had the typical "melt-downs" and social cluelessness and obsessive interests - the subject of his book, for example, which he spent most of his time researching.

Now the papers tell us he has been wanted for assault in a nearby county since 2006, where a woman had accused him of strangling her into unconsciousness. This would have been the time of his bookshop visit. He was into bodybuilding then, and had bulked up alarmingly since his visit to our farm years before. And now, because the accusation of a woman was insufficient to motivate the Oregon cops to follow up and extradite him, even at the request of our local police, a different woman has been found murdered in his house, and he found unconscious in a closet having consumed suicidal amounts of drugs and alcohol, when the fire department arrived to extinguish the fire he'd set to destroy all evidence, apparently, and himself.

I have been shaken - all night, all day. He was a scary person, attractive but socially inept, utterly offputting. But I feel his isolation acutely. I feel his rage, his desperation. I can see the darkened rooms, feel his panic and remorse. I have had no one to discuss this with. I work at other things, keep busy, but experience such sorrow for his aloneness. No one will visit him in jail. He'll have no one to talk to. He won't understand himself and his motives and compulsions. Ach. What is wrong with me? Why do I align so easily with the out-of-register? I am continually self-endangered by this tendency. I am glad I know enough about the Asperger's female to understand now that we put ourselves in harm's way. I will have to work hard to callous over this deep empathetic nerve that feels what (I imagine) he feels. What terror these women must have experienced. I can feel that too.