I'm going to start out with an introduction.

My name is Top Hat. I'm a 14 year old boy, I'm gay, I'm a hopeless romantic. I suffer from chronic insomnia, bipolar disorder, and schizotypal tendencies. I'm afraid of sunlight because my eyes are extremely sensitive to all forms of light. I love to swim, it's such a wonderful pastime. Swimming is topped only by singing. I am a baritone/bass-alto. I can reach tenor with falsetto, but let us face the facts- I'm in the lower register when I sing. They say my laugh sounds like an evil laugh- I prefer to think of it as coming from deep inside of me, that's why it's so reverberating. I'm a writer, I write fiction, poetry, and the occasional nonfiction essay. These essays are often philosophical bull sessions.

I hate war, but I will always support the soldiers. We cannot blame the fighters for the war. I believe that war-crimes are all-too-common: war itself, in my eyes, is a crime. To quote La Vie Boheme: The opposite of war isn't peace, it's creation!

I have a strange imagination, dark, twisted landscapes and tragic characters litter the worlds in my head.

I have recently come to terms with the fact that I was raped a year ago by a man who I was deeply in love with. He was a monster. I don't know what else to say about that.

I am deep in my convictions, but I try to keep an open mind about all things. We are not capable of knowing anything for sure, much less everything.

One way or another, I'm probably going to die young. I'm not afraid to die, it is a doorway that has always stood open to me, waiting for me to walk through it. But I've got too much to do to die quite yet, and I do hope that no sickness, be it the slow-but-sure physical deterioration that plagues me or the even more insidious crawl of insanity, should take me before I can finish at least one more project: love, actual love. Not my obsessive control, not my terrible submission, but love.

I would like to finish my novels. I have so many stories to tell. But we will all die one day- no exceptions. But we were not born to fear death. We can't fear death. If we do, we simply lay limply about until we finally do die. No, there are two constants in our lives (not counting taxes): Death, and creation. We were born to create until we die.

Shape the world to be beautiful.

And in the end

ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee