Introductions
My name is Ben. I was born, raised, and still currently reside in Roanoke, Virginia nestled into a valley in the Blue Ridge Mountains but because my father and step-mother are there I live up to 6 weeks or so out of the year spread out in Eastern North Carolina whose incredible number of thrift malls is the most efficient fuel for my obsession with collecting cheap, used DVDs and BluRays.
I have a number of obsessions and pick up new hobbies every few months to make the days pass by easier, I don't get lonely very often but I certainly do get bored living an often solitary lifestyle. The oldest and chief among these is auto racing. NASCAR, Indycar, Formula 1, sports cars, dirt racing, drag racing, I live for any form of 4 wheels going fast. So much of the year my weekends are totally occupied by how many races across the world are on my schedule, and if you read this blog you will almost certainly see a lot of historical motorsports posts as that's what is running through my mind so much of the day.
Almost equal on the obsession scale is film. I'm a total film nerd and movie geek, with a broad range of tastes from classics to art film to trashy Z-grade shlock, but I love David Lynch, “cult” films, horror/giallo films, film noir, sci-fi, kaiju and the like. My most frequently revisited television shows these days as I've grown out of bingewatching most of the time tend to be genre anthology shows from the 50s-00s which I'm starting to amass a sizable collection of, with collection of film and television box sets being one of my most prominent hobbies. My chief comfort when I'm feeling bad is Columbo.
Some of my collections include VHS tapes, audio cassette tapes, laserdiscs, classic motorsports diecast cars and memorabilia, horror paperback books, and Sega Dreamcast games. Among my other major interests that might get touched on from time to time are retro video games (early 00s or earlier), writing poetry, mental health advocacy, true crime, political history, and meditation.
As for my personal information, I'm in my early 30s. I have been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, BPD, and PTSD and I care quite a bit about the sorry state of the American mental health industry, especially with having a mother we lost to suicide. I am genderqueer, using he/they pronouns but generally not referring to myself as a male any longer by choice. I've dated both men and women in the past, but over time my interest in romantic or physical pursuits has waned almost entirely to the point that I place myself somewhere on the ace scale. I am not religious at all, but I do appreciate a good deal of Eastern philosophy as taught to me through Alan Watts lectures. I am very solitary and shy in my real life, but when you become my friend you just become an integral part of my daily life, even more when you become my family.