It's been a while since I've been here

And now I'm back. Quick little update: Movie was amazing and I have the photos of my costume up on my facebook. Feel free to check them out. As for the film itself? It's as if they were a spy inside of my head, looking at all the amazing things I wanted to be accurately translated to film and at the least adequately performed by the cast. Each and every expectation I had was surpassed, and not by just a little. If you haven't seen it yet, go do so immediately. If you don't the community will cast you out, like a leper! Just go see it already. stop reading this, get in your car, and drive to the theater.



Onto more personal matters. This is a blog, after all, and I shall use it to rant and complain as that is the main purpose of such devices.

I've dropped down to my all time lowest weight today of 183.2 lbs. This is fantastic for me, but I'm going to have to keep most of my family out of the loop or they'll force an intervention on me. 2 pounds higher my mother said I looked "gaunt" and I'm sure she'll throw emaciated at me soon as well. But if enduring this is the price of health than so be it. My father weighed 167 after he got out of basic training. there's no reason I shouldn't be able to hit 170 and remain healthy. If he was in acceptable condition to go to battle at that weight than I should be more than up to performing my mundane everyday tasks.

I guess I'm optimistic about more weight loss, but I seem to have lost sight of my goal. At the beginning I just wanted to be a little healthier, maybe look a little more attractive, and I guess I've done that. But I don't know what I'm doing it for anymore. When I hit 200 I said I was happy and stopped. That was also when I was with Sarah. I think I was happy. Then that ended. I dropped to 190, said "I'm comfortable at this weight," and that happened to coincide with quasi-girl (lets make this easier. From here on out let's just call her Camilla. Good pseudonym.). I was happy with Camilla. But then it ended. She was scared, and would not risk it. I haven't really been happy since then. I'm almost down to 180 now, and I don't see much of an end in sight.

A concerned party today told me to make sure I don't "whither away," but I think that's what I want to do. Work out so much and eat so little that I'm just skin and bones. My sweat and soul poured out into the sky, evaporating away to the heavens. I'm tired of this body, tired of this life. I could turn to my knives, any of my many beautiful knives, to make myself feel better. But it would just be another quick rush, a momentary lapse from it all.

When you create a scar, the way I do, time seems to stop. You slice, living between two heartbeats, two ticks of a clock. Everything is silenced but for the blood dripping down your body, captured by the pull of gravity, and the rush of happiness, slave to the pull of chemicals released in your brain.

I don't know if I do it for the rush or for the scars or for self-loathing. I don't know why I stopped. I don't know if I'll start again. For now, I'll run.

Ah, quasi-girlfriend thing

It was fun while it lasted. My anger and frustration was misplaced, but ended up finding the right spot eventually. Thank the maker for xanax and other mind altering medications that keep my blades off my flesh and my soul from being crushed by the illusion of loveliness. Now I am once again 100% alone.

So you're not even talking to me on facebook now?

Exactly far how do I have to back off before you're comfortable. Forget that we were lovers, how about having the common decency to acknowledge that we are (were?) friends? I am really loving this arctic shoulder you're giving me. Suits your emotional state really well, apathy. You little living lie (I'm probably over-reacting and you probably have a shitty signal, or didn't notice the message).

On to more general matters. My medication situation has been updated. I've had my cymbalta dosage upped from 60mg to 90mg and my continual xanax Rx has finally moved from my General practitioner to a legitimate Psychiatric clinician. And limited, sadly. But I'll be weaned off it with my brand new anti-psych drug Seroquel . Check it out if you'd like. I certainly am feeling a little better today. The urge to slice at my flesh is significantly lessened. But on that note: My new throwing knives have arrived.



Aren't they beautiful?

I'm glad you came along

Do you have any idea what this isolation does to me? The lack of communication is screaming out at me, drowning out the dead silence I'm suffocating in. I know you worried because you don't want to hurt me, and that you explained how you can be a sadist. But ignoring me like you've been to someone with my condition is 10x worse than removing yourself completely.

I long for the feel of my blades as they are all I can find to replace your teeth on my flesh. That rough jaggedness that envelops me in comfort like a vintage blanket. I scar a little bit more each day you are gone and when I don't hear from you I tear up old wounds. My knee is covered in lines and my new set of knives are due to arrive. I'm not far gone enough to attempt to end it like I have been in the past, but you must appreciate that in order for me to be the ongoing drip upon your defensive wall you cannot dam the river. And this communication breakdown has stopped the flow completely. Are you so afraid that you would suffer a drought rather than risk tasting the water?



Listen: with nearly anyone else, at least anyone else I've met in my life thus far, I wouldn't even be willing to try like I am here. I would do what I've always only done in this situation, cling to your bosom with any label you'll accept like barnacles on a ship's bow; using you purely as transportation to take me to my next illogical clingy attachment. But today I know what I'm doing. Today I acknowledge my own inabilities and try to overcome them. But without any participation from you whatsoever, I'm merely talking to myself.

Who am I kidding? That's what I'm doing right now. It's therapeutic and even cathartic to let all of this loose onto paper, or even into text on a glaring screen like I do now at 4:30 in the morning. I couldn't sleep. I ran out of xanax and now all I can do is lie there running into the corners of my mind searching for figures hiding in the shadows. Women who haunt me long after they're gone. And you, that constant drumbeat of concern, now burdened with my rage and blood-lust, piggybacking on your image as they are want to do. I am never able to understand much about myself until it is too late. This is probably another one of those situations. But I'm trying real hard to climb on up into that so called mind of mine and take a look around. I know this much: Whatever ends are to come of this chaos, for a time we cared for each other. I still care for you. I've no way of knowing if the opposite is true. But, I was able to for so long, not only silence the violence but satisfy it too.

Around you, sharing our problems the way we did, it shied away in good company. It is only now that we lack your presence that that side of me returns. I do not delude myself into thinking I'm really in control, in control the way I want to be. The way I hope to be eventually through therapy, meditation, and medication. But when I was with you I didn't feel split. And I didn't constantly feel like a liar. I didn't even feel what has been throughout my life a steady stream of self-loathing.

This isn't me screaming at you, this isn't me telling you I've given up. This is me at my most sane, early in the morning revealing to myself what my scars should be shouting out at me.

You say you once spoke of sex as a drug. That's all your ex was, right? 3 years of constant abuse. And you took it because you believed the ends justified the means. Just like all addicts. But you're not addicted to me. You never were. You legitimately liked me and when we were alone we connected on such a level that it scared the warrior image you convey right out of you and left you curled up like an Armadillo inside of excuses. Hiding underneath your shield lest some arrow piece your breast.

You think it not as difficult for me? That even reaching this level of sanity for you has not been a momentous undertaking?

We are not the sadist and the masochist enveloped again in our little dance, my dear. We are two people who happened to be good friends, sharing the most disturbed and depraved of images with and within each other. Then, on a whim, as a mere happenstance of sex, we became more. So I don't fit into your little plan. Alter the plan. Take some of your own advice and live in the dream, praying not to wake up.

Dreams fade fast once you're awake anyway.

All I want to do is go back to sleep.

And here, we...go!

Cosplay update. I know, i know, I need makeup. This is what I got for clothes though. Just use the power of your imagination to put me in makeup and turn my hair green.

Justifying the Joker

Jokes can be noble. Laughs are exactly as honorable as tears. Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion, to the futility of thinking and striving anymore. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward — and since I can start thinking and striving again that much sooner.

-Kurt Vonnegut

I live every day of my life teetering on the edge, as I have previously said. And I've explained how and why I identify with the Joker as a character, laugh at his jokes, and defend him to the bitter end. Let me throw one more Vonnegut quote on the subject into the mix and then I'll get down to it.

"...laughter is not pleasant, if it goes on too long. I think it's a desperate sort of convulsion in desperate circumstances, which helps a little."

I can't help but quote from one of my idols. It may seem a bit heartless to say so, but I miss him more than family members who have passed on.

In "Arkham Asylum: A serious house on serious Earth," the Joker's actual diagnosis is unclear. However the expert clinical therapist on call says that he isn't even really crazy. He suffers from a sort of super-sanity and is only able to function in the world and interpret what he sees around him by creating himself anew each day.


Here i'm providing you with the relevant pages.


There are two different paths a person can walk down when they look around them and finally recognize what was merely a void, or empty space, as actual emptiness. Real, metaphysical, all that jazz. We are tiny little blips on the radar. As kids it doesn't bother us so much because we have some sort of faith. Mine may have been in my parents. But for those of us who have nothing to turn to the emptiness stares back. Anne Frank is recorded as writing that

It's difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart. I simply can't build my hopes on a foundation of confusion, misery, and death...and yet...I think...this cruelty will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.

But has it? Couldn't these same words have been written in any language, by any man woman or child at nearly any point in history? The statistics of those believed to be mentally sound but participating in positive self-delusion are staggering. The perceived order of the world is only a few steps away, or one bad day, or a slip of a finger onto a button, a lone gunman, a first shot, away from falling in upon itself. The implosion of starship earth. In such an insane world the only sane thing to do is struggle onwards towards whatever you believe is best to do.

For the Joker this is to be an agent of chaos and destruction. The human embodiment of all the random tragedy that is existence. Sometimes this means he steals report cards from school children or ties up a family and eats their food and plays with their stuff on Christmas Eve. Or it could mean shooting a girl through the spine, beating a teenager to death, or even shooting a baby. On occasion the Joker is truly hilarious, making the reader or watcher belly laugh with his antics. But this same character could make this observer vomit with some of the sick, twisted, and depraved things he's done. His obsession with Batman borders on the religious. Batman is order. Joker is chaos. Batman has one rule and represents order and lawful good. Joker has no rules, no order, no modus operandi even. Two examples to perfectly offset each other.



To be continued hopefully soon, coupled with the latest photos of my Joker costume I'll be donning for the midnight release of The Dark Knight.

I said I'd be covering the subject of scars, right?

It's amazing how little time it took to do this amazing artwork. I love MS paint.

Let us count them together shall we? 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9

There are 9 scars on my body clearly visible to the naked eye. Most of those red spots indicate multiple scars on one location, but for the sake of efficiency I'll just go with 9. For each single mark I can tell you why and I can tell you how. On more than half I can even tell you who. The ones on my left knee and right calf (diagonal) are most recent. The one diagonally cut into my right calf being only a few days old, and still forming an absolutely gorgeous scab. In the field of psychology this act is referred to rather pleasantly as Self-mutilation. Lovely term, isn't it?

Colloquially it is known as cutting. This is the term more people are familiar with. I beg of you though, please do not compare me to an "emo" person. Like most I am mildly annoyed by this subset of goth culture, but I find them manageable and easily avoidable. My own scars are not evidence of some deep hidden pain I keep locked away, or a crushing ennui and weltshmerz that many seem to wear on their sleeve. It is one's actions that define them, not the statement they make about them. If you're sad all the time, go on some blasted antidepressants. I've been stuffed full of the things for years. But I was never really made happy by pills. Even now I'm not fulfilled by the reaction these things have on me. Xanax is supposed to be a treatment for anxiety. However, I find it is as true to call it an apathy inducer.

My multiple scars are proof that I have lived through some especially difficult part of my existence so far. I am young, and am sure that I've yet to gain a full appreciation for the word "difficult," but for where I am now: coasting along plan A in my life, some parts have been harder than others.

It is a "happy accident" that when my most recent girlfriend hastily ended it she had only weeks earlier borrowed my good knife and neglected to return it to me. The knife she borrowed was my first I used on myself and the only one with which I shared enough of a report to have attempted suicide. In a rage I dumped my box of weaponry upon a loved one's desk. I haven't asked for them back yet. I'm not ready to have such easy access again. But eventually I'll have to in order to prove to myself that the life I'm living without her is worth it.

By lacking in memory to return my favorite blade Sarah saved my life. The scars I've left using cheap multi-tools and razorblades are proof to me that I lived through her.

My own appearance has forced me to create a position on scarring and body alteration through physical means and after much contemplation I have come to one: Each mark or scar or blemish upon your skin is yet another proof that life was lived in it. Many try to keep themselves perfect and serene like a white plaster sculpture. But so few know that the Greeks and the Romans brightly painted those and it is only time that has stripped the color from their cheeks. I have many scars of the physical and mental variety. As was so wisely observed in a recent short film I watched when asked if the pain of hot coals would scar.

"...What pain doesn't?"

The more scars or marks upon a person's hide, the more they have lived. Sarah had a scar from a cesarean section she needed performed on her. I made a special point when I found my hands brushing against it as I explored her body in the dark that my lips came to rest upon the scar in acknowledgment.

Every painful moment we have endured has brought us here, and for now we are left with the moment. More pain and scars are to come. And they, too, must be endured.

I'll take the battered and broken beauty of the Venus de Milo over the pristinely preserved and complete Aphrodite of Cnidus any day of the week.

My cousin the journalist having one of these has jealously led me towards the creation of my very own blog.

You know, my mother always said I was the more talented of the two of us. Then again, I bet his mother told him the very same thing. So here I am on some sort of website writing up my opinion(s) whether valid or invalid up for all of the internet in its quivering filthy huddled mass to view and judge. As for the explanation of my title, I shall refer you to a comic published by DC back in the 80's and written by none other than the old wizard himself: Alan Moore. From "The Killing Joke"

"I've demonstrated that there's no difference between me and anyone else! All it takes is one bad day to reduce the sanest man alive to lunacy. That's how far away the world is from where I am. Just one bad day."

Thus, my title. Because I feel like I walk on the edge day in and day out. The event horizon is visible, but never passed. At least not yet. I've had moments where I felt the overwhelming sensation of some superior sanity begin to overtake me; but I have not yet succumbed. With any luck, I never will.

Not many (if any) will be reading this as I update, perhaps day to day if the situation calls for it. But I feel it necessary if even for my own honesty to start off on the right foot. I've a history of violence and mental illness. Take your pick, I've probably been told I'm it at one point in my life. It took this long for the formal diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder to be applied to me. However, I am not my condition. I am not defined by my mental disorder, by my social interaction (or lack thereof) , or even any of my scars (to be covered in a later post). I am defined by my writing. The written word being the only place I feel I can accurately convey in any type of translatable way the manner in which I perceive and interpret the world around me.

My name is Benjamin. Welcome to my blog.