blather_oddity take care of yourselves i never read any of ashmanzhou's words at the time they were written, because i was in the middle of a self-imposed blather exile at the time. so i missed her apparent suicide over on ask_ashmanzhou. i read it for the first time the other day, while going through her blathes, mesmerized by her unique way of writing. after reading about the sixteen painkillers she took and then seeing that there was only silence that followed, i sent her an email. i wanted to tell her that she was beautiful, and that our faces and our bodies---skin, bone, organs, tangled sinew...that isn't really us at all. the email came back undeliverable, with a "mailbox unavailable" message, which generally means the email account no longer exists. it looked like she really had succeeded in offing herself back in 2003. this was more than a little depressing. then i found something that made no sense. i was reading through all of ashmanzhou's blathes, trying in vain to find any sign that suggested life beyond that final blathe. several things that she said pointed toward eventually dying or killing herself, so there didn't seem to be much of any hope. then i saw that there were two blathes on her "who" page credited to blah-ze, but with her hotmail address attached instead of blah-ze's. that seemed odd. i've seen a lot of things on blather over the years, including impersonations, but never with the email address of the person who was doing the impersonating attached. that tends to defeat the whole purpose, doesn't it? i clicked on these blathes, and though the email address was ashmanzhou's, the writing style seemed to be blah-ze's. strange. then i took a look at blah-ze's "who" page, and at the bottom found two blathes with ashmanzhou's name, but his email address. in these blathes the style looks more like ashmanzhou's, but the posts are so brief it's hard to say with any degree of certainty. then i read ruining_dreams_for_emma, and here blah-ze responds directly to ashmanzhou and has something of a dialogue with her...using _her_ email address in the process. he only does this in his first response, and then reverts to using his own email address for the rest of the exchange. this can only mean one of two things. 1/ ashmanzhou and blah-ze each posted using the other's name but with their own personal email addresses attached, for whatever absurd reason---and each of them only did so exactly twice. i've been trying to slice this in such a way that it makes sense, and it just doesn't work. why would you ever type your own email address when using someone else's name and writing in their style, with all of the punctuation and grammatical changes that entailed? as a rule, when you're imitating someone, you don't want to make your identity that obvious. 2/ blah-ze and ashmanzhou are the same person, and ashmanzhou's story was a creative lie that was eventually killed off, with everyone (including me) buying it hook, line and sinker. i don't want to believe that this is the truth, but it seems more probable than the first possibility. creating several different email addresses and changing your writing style isn't necessarily that difficult to do...i've done it myself, though i haven't bothered to attach email addresses to most of the pseudonyms i've employed, because i wasn't saying anything worth paying attention to. still, #2 seems very unlikely, because the writing styles are so completely different, blah-ze is a guy, and why would he say it was interesting that his birthday was close to falling on the same day as ashmanzhou's on ask_ashmanzhou if he was making the whole thing/persona/story up? but #1 doesn't come close to making any amount of sense either. consider: i post using your name. for two blathes only. i try to imitate your writing style as well as i possibly can. and then i attach my own email address at the end, rendering the entire exercise completely pointless. in response, or perhaps on your own with no influence from me, you decide to post using my name...for two blathes only. you imitate my writing style as well as you can, and then you attach your email address, again negating whatever you might have hoped to accomplish. does this make sense to you? the only other possibility is that i accidentally type your email address instead of my own when posting as myself, and you do the exact same thing, and we each do this exactly twice. i guess this is remotely possible...if we were emailing one another, and if i accidentally copied and pasted your email address into the appropriate field on blather without realizing it. but the exchanges between ashmanzhou and blah-ze don't point to the two of them talking outside of blather. quite the opposite, really. then there's the fact that ashmanzhou would spell words like "color" and "humor" as "colour" and "humour"---as would blah-ze, being australian. why would you post using someone else's email address but your own name when responding to something they had said, unless both of you were the same person? i've attached the same email address to different names, only i wasn't even remotely trying to pass myself off as different people while doing it; i was being young and stupid, and using blather to amuse myself when i had just discovered the place, tacking my email address onto every name i used so it would be clear that i was the one writing all of the words. i can't even begin to untangle everything i think and feel about this. if ashmanzhou was real (and she felt very real to me, even if i wasn't around when she was a part of blather), and she really did succeed in killing herself, then we would have a genuine blather_suicide, and i hate that i wasn't around then to at least try to reach out to her and tell her that, while i could never pretend to have gone through anything approaching what she has, i've been in that place where the pain you feel is so great death seems like the only solution. but even though it feels like there's no other way out, it really isn't worth it. things do get better. there are people who care. and just because you have scars, it doesn't mean you're not beautiful. not by a long shot. but if ashmanzhou was just a figment of blah-ze's imagination, created as a blather experiment, and then killed off when he no longer found the process amusing...there aren't words to express the sense of anger and betrayal i would feel. you just don't do that shit. i suppose we'll never know what the truth is here. ashmanzhou's email address no longer exists, and blah-ze has been gone for something like two years now...i wouldn't be surprised if his email address doesn't exist anymore either. maybe he had his fun and then decided it was time to go on to other things. maybe there's some bizarre explanation for all of this that i'm missing. until/unless i find out otherwise, i will continue to believe that ashmanzhou was a real person, and i will grieve for her in my own belated, inferior way. i realize that blathing this serves no real purpose, and doing it in a faceless way is perhaps a cowardly thing to do, but i don't feel comfortable attaching my name to this. i don't feel like getting into a flame war if someone decides to attack me for even considering any of these things, so i won't be returning. i know i don't belong here anymore, and i haven't for a long time (which is why i haven't been around)...i just felt the need to purge myself of this whole thing. be well, blather. . 080408 ... meta meta 080408 ... Lemon_Soda Please Stay. Please. 080408 ... They call me Truth Please stay don't go there is so much beauty still left here Be here with us 080408 ... minnesota_chris actually, my psychiatrist told me that I've been typing as ashmanzhou in my sleep, only after I eat a lot of chili rellenos. Sorry for the confustion. 080408 ... . i think the poster may actually be wanting to know what really happened here. 080408 ... u24 She changed her name, but left some traces. I looked and found her. She was last seen on 060203. I won't divulge her newer moniker, she deserves her privacy, should she ever return. 080409 ... u24 wow. you can really tell I didn't read the original post, eh? um.. forget all that "she needs her privacy" stuff. 080502 ... u24 I had always assumed that ash and blah-ze were the same person, but that was based purely on the email address connection. I hadn't looked deep enough to find the writing style anomalies. I remember, but cannot now find, a post by blah-ze containing the phrase "as dead as ash", which I took to be a sign that the 'suicide' was in fact a metaphorical killing off of the 'ash' handle and/or persona by blah-ze. It could also simply be further evidence of communication between ash and blah-ze and thus support the theory that they are different people. 080502 ... u24 there is another email oddity in relation to ash's handle: go to who;email=oddlyrigidfish%40hotmail.com and we see the "ashrakundreamer" identity, who uses "killallthechildren@hotmail.com" (no longer an active address). Last blathe: 030711 No Mutual blathes between dreamer and ash. Dreamer and blah-ze share bonzai_kitty. Which shows that blah-ze can write japanese. I wonder if ash ever writes in japanese? ------------------ ash and blah-ze both appear on 15 blathes: ask_ashmanzhou maybe_we_should_all_just_burn pd_needs_help calling_in_a_blather_favour cowardly_words 10_blatherskites_i_would_love_to_meet deliberate_disassociation cure_for_loneliness believe_in ruining_dreams_for_emma say_something_please ztupid_questions how_to_lose_friends_and_alienate_people five_words_that_describe_you that_which_does_not_kill_us 080502 ... u24 blah-ze's email address is "theonlyotherlostsoul@hotmail.com" ash leaves that as her email address on these pages: there_are_people_who_truly_care maybe_we_should_all_just_burn 080502 ... u24 found the dead as ash reference: unbroken_rebroken 080502 ... u24 these are the blathes where blah-ze mentions the word "ash" 10_blatherskites_i_would_love_to_meet ask_ashmanzhou believe_in blather_family calling_in_a_blather_favour deliberate_disassociation misstree's_rambling_roof pd_needs_help ruining_dreams_for_emma unbroken_rebroken what_music_are_you_listening_to 080502 ... u24 (aren't y'all glad I'm not a stalker, eh?) 080502 ... u24 unbroken_rebroken was written a year and ten days after ash's suicide. 080502 ... u24 correction. "these are the blathes where blah-ze mentions the word "ash"" should read "these are the blathes where the word "ash" is mentioned, that blah-ze has also written on". (and thus that list isn't useful until someone trims out the noise) 080502 ... u24 I (and evidently others) would be interested in analysis of the data above. I'm just trawling through and collecting it. I'll leave the conclusions to you. Given the amount of data, I do get the feeling that we can reach a consensus about what happened. But I'm leaning away from the ash=blah-ze theory... 080502 ... u24 dead end: checked all years XX1104 (anniversary of suicide) against blah-ze's blathes. nothing there. 080502 ... u24 ok I think the data collection stage is over. analysis please. 080502 ... florescent light in ash's blathe on: 10_blatherskites_i_would_love_to_meet she comments on the origins of her screen name- "ash: my name (short for ashley) manzhou: classical chinese character" so ash does have a knowledge of asian language, as you mentioned blah_ze does...and there writing styles on this page are very simular, both using words such as 'doth' 'dost' and 'thou' 080502 ... more more more regarding the asian language: from ask_ashmanzhou: "i was born in northern china not sure what day before 18th april 1986 and adopted in july 1990 " 080502 ... u24 interesting insight, thankyou. 080504 ... LEMON SODA RESPONDING CHECK 081110 what's it to you? who go blather from