Today, being the first day of classes for me, I decided was a perfect day to do some drawing. What better place than in a studio class? I cracked open my notebook, coaxed some graphite from my pencil, and started sketching, an idea already forming in my mind. What I meant to draw was my darker side, the calculating madman I call Black.

What I got was a self portrait.

It's interesting, though, if not faintly disturbing. I realized that I had drawn Black after all. When I first came up with him, I was toying with the idea of characters based on exaggerated fragments of my personality for a story I had been working on (and still am). The result was sort of a Jeckle and Hyde: Mirth, the Twisted Jester, and Black. Whereas Mirth was, quite literally, a clown with a somewhat deranged sense of humor, Black was much colder, a monster of a man who would do whatever he could to break someone if he deemed it necessary. While I refuse to be that monster, and in the past have even gone so far as to bury that part of myself deep within me, that drawing today made me realize that it is still very much a part of me. I still feel violent urges sometimes, still want to say the few words that could completely shatter a man... it's frightening to think what would happen if I ever gave that part of myself control.