Have you ever just kept a notebook to record your thoughts in? Well I started to do that. I have this nice black notebook that I write my poems in, my mad rantings in, my deranged imaginings in, and even a few sober thoughts. I began to realize as I wrote that I have many things in my life that I honestly stuffed down and put away because they were too painful for me to deal with then. Suddenly it is time and I have found a way to release these feelings. Plus I have a soundtrack to go with them.

The art of Marilyn Manson has been a recent discovery of mine, and frankly I'm thankful that I did. I began to find Manson in my first attempt at college, but it was because I was a sad, depressed stoner who was lost in his own head. Suddenly I am thrust into the real world, and trust me, it was a sobering experience. Now I'm back in college, I'm made some very good friends, friends I believe will become like family in a way I could not have imagined. Jake, Ainsley, and even Alex, have become two brothers and a sister and it is our art that brings us together. And so this personal journey of mine has begun. I realized that I am an artist. As an artist, it is my duty to hold a mirror up to the world, while at the same time being a mirage. So I began to look at myself and decided what I was about. After my 2 week relapse into the drugs again, Jake and I, in an act of ceremonious imagery, threw everything I had into the Spoon River, after smoking all the weed I had. We agreed to not do it again until Winter Break. Well that has not happened, because a few days after the incident at the bridge, I almost jumped off in a near-suicide attempt that startled me.

I've reconfigured what I've become and I've realized that I accepted the darkness that night. I realized that I am the Writer in Black, the Guild, and that the Double N means me. The world is right and I am right to prove it wrong. So I continue to right and I look at what I'm writing about and I make it mean something, to me at least. I am only a third of my art, for there is the canvas, the world, and me. There is a lot to do yet before I understand fully what I have to create, but what I do know is that, like Marilyn Manson, I must portray evil for the world to understand. They, the mechanical masses, are in one universe, while I am in my own and they are in their monotony. They are black and red, marking me black and them red, evil and evil, where 2 bads make a good score again. Darkness is the only constant in this universe and we all eventually fall into it. Why not sooner than later?

So much of what I have written now has been an attempt at taking my own mind apart. Manson has helped considerably, for the misery he portrays feeds my own and lets me study what I have built my wall of. I was like a mason who did not mix his own mortar. It's almost too strong now. But I can feel it slowly coming down. Strong, but still flaky and soon the bricks will tumble as I pull them down. What will emerge I do now know for sure, but I believe that I have found a comparison in how I appear now.

Up to now I have been slowly losing weight for some unknown reason. At first I thought I was sick, and of course I was sick in the mind, but I was worried about my body. That does not seem to be the case as I feel I have gained a bit of weight back. Next I blamed what pot did to my body. I did not eat regular and when I did it was only a small amount unless it was junk food, so I got little nutrition. Strangely I still lost weight when I was eating little, but healthy, but smoking lots and doing pot too, once I was out of college and on my own. The weight loss has now seemed to stop or even reverse to some extent, but I think I will lose more weight now. So I'm guessing it was the pot.

Next my insistence on the color black has increased. Like my junior year and my senior year combined, I now have black hair, black clothes, ripped up jeans with safety pins in them, and black thumbnails. I'm still deciding on my image, but I am thinking of ways to contrast Ainsley's and Jake's metal style while still being very metal myself, but in an artistic way. I'm very much thinking of a straight, white collar design gone terribly right with lots of black and tattoos and an evil look altogether. My first design was a black, short-sleeve, button-up shirt with a red tie over a t-shirt and my ripped up blue jeans and my skater shoes. Kinda emo actually. But that would be added to by metal boots and a leather trench coat. I would possibly even just wear black dress pants. Almost a uniform-like look. I'm not sure, I think it could come out too Manson, but my had is definitely off to him anyway. But nevertheless, whatever comes out of this new change, it will be a bane to this world.

"I don't need a reason to hate you the way I do...." -Marilyn Manson