"Loneliness has followed me my whole life, everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man." -- Travis Bickle, "Taxi Driver"

"I guess some of us were simply meant to walk a lonely path. I have slept alone for over 20 years. Last time I slept all night with a girlfriend was 1982. Proof I am a total malfunction. Girls and women don't even give me a second look ANYWHERE. There is something BLATANTLY wrong with me that NO goddam person will tell me what it is." -- George Sodini

The only thing missing from the online text of Pittsburgh's latest mass murderer is a plea to God to send a hard rain to wash the trash from the streets. Otherwise, George Sodini's banal observations chronicling his exercise routines and his murderous thoughts read like a rejected first draft of Martin Scorsese's 1976 film "Taxi Driver."

Like the alienated New York cabbie Travis Bickle, played brilliantly by a brooding Robert De Niro 33 years ago, George Sodini had a big, existential chip on his shoulder. He harbored a palpable anger and rage at the monotony of his life. He didn't just whine about his loneliness -- he deeply resented it enough to resort to violence as some sort of purgation. He murdered three women and wounded nine others Tuesday night at the Collier gym he belonged to.

Unlike George Sodini, De Niro's Travis Bickle wasn't a murderous misogynist. He had no desire to kill Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a Senate campaign worker, after she rejected his advances. In fact, the socially adrift cabbie put Iris (Jodie Foster), a 14-year-old prostitute, on a pedestal. He desperately wanted to save her from a life on the urban streets he despised. He directed his homicidal resentment at her pimp and his associates.

"The days go on and on ... they don't end," Travis Bickle's voice over says at one point. "All my life needed was a sense of someplace to go. I don't believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention. I believe that one should become a person like other people."

Travis Bickle's rampage at the end of "Taxi Driver" was more about self-redemption and saving Iris than an immersion in violence for its own sake. That's where he and George Sodini part company. Despite a well-paying job and a comfortable home, Mr. Sodini was a whiny nihilist who couldn't be bothered with defining a purpose for his life, even if horribly misguided. If his online diary is to be believed, he wallowed in self-pity because it was the path of least resistance:

"I like to write and talk. Ironic because I haven't met anybody recently ... who I want to be close friends with OR who want to be close friends with me. I was always open to suggestions to what I am doing wrong, no brother or father ... or close friend to nudge me. ... A personal coach or someone who knows what he is doing would be perfect. Money is highly secondary for a solution."

So why didn't George Sodini hire a life coach? Why didn't he try computer dating to improve his odds with the hundreds of millions of women he estimated rejected him? Why was he so passive in his misery? These questions come to mind because we all know people like George Sodini. If we're brutally honest about it, we can probably account for two or three people in our lives that we suspect could come close to fitting his profile. Deeply alienated people with superficially pleasant facades are far more common than the fictional character Robert De Niro played in "Taxi Driver."

Many of us have even joked about social misfits who we say wouldn't surprise us if they came into work, school or church one day and shot the place up. Obviously, it isn't always the person who mutters in the corner or picks fights who generates newspaper headlines. Sometimes the unassuming systems analyst who just got a raise at a major Downtown law firm will be the culprit.

There's no point in blaming George Sodini's colleagues, neighbors or relatives for not seeing signs of the killer's murderous desperation. If the next George Sodini stands next to us in a crowd and isn't carrying a gun, we're likely to be blind to it, too. It's the gun that always concentrates our attention, not the bad attitude.

George Sodini was able to hide his hatred for women behind a bland mask of stultifying dullness. His ordinariness, not his oddness, was his greatest weapon.