E. Buzz Miller/OperaPunk

Man, the weirdness brings them all out of the woodwork...

So, over on the Dissolve facebook group, someone emailed one of Buzz's old emails and got a response. You can take with as much grains of salt as you want:

"i'm very mentally ill with schizophrenia, sick and lonely. The internet is all I have for social interaction, but I'm now going to quit it for everyone else's benefit. I truly didn't mean to offend or hurt anyone, things got out of hand. Not that it will probably make any difference, but i wish to apologize and just move on from all those hurt's lives."

The guy who posted the response followed it up with a really nice summation, I felt:

"Assuming this statement to be true (and that's a matter of debate, of course) I think the E. Buzz Miller part before he came out as Dom was no different than being Gary X, Cookie Monster, or any other AVC commenter. But as Libby Hill noted, most of us are good, kind people and I think it makes sense it's going to draw in sick and lonely people who want to belong and share their joy in movies and pop culture. I'm not entirely sure, and I'd like the input of AVCers here, but I don't have any recollection of him being "Dom" before the advent of fetish swap club. If that recollection is correct it fleshes out a definite sad narrative."

"OK", he said to himself as he peered down the rabbit hole into the ever deepening pit of swirling madness below, "WTF is Fetish Swap Club?", although he supposed the first rule of Fetish Swap Club would be that you don't talk about Fetish Swap Club, and that he would hear only the screaming silence of the abyss.

Now we're going to get into a discussion about how much bad behaviour a legitimate claim of mental illness excuses, that's always fun and civil.

Am I the only one getting a Fatman vibe off that?

I regret to confirm that they are a thing, I've been to one, and I needed a reservation.

I'm not a psychiatrist, and I know that schizophrenia is a broad and highly varied condition, but my educated instinct is to say that claimed diagnosis is B.S.

This is a protracted and complex (and effective) deception. That is not characteristic of schizophrenic behavior. From the reading I've been doing online (especially forums for people with schizophrenia), when schizophrenics lie frequently, it's usually a device to try to conceal their illness. And schizophrenia comes with cognitive issues that make upholding a complex lie consistently difficult. Furthermore, in this case, the fact that evidence was being manufactured to support the fictitious partner pretty strongly signals that this is not dissociative or delusional, so that component of schizophrenia is ruled out.

So it seems to me what you probably have is a liar (pathological or otherwise) who is fully prepared to lie about being schizophrenic in order to continue to garner sympathy (or perhaps just to deflect guilt).

(And I know I offered the "performance art" angle earlier, but screw that.)

And I agree that the similarities to the Fatman M.O. are striking, but I think that's probably because there is a shared underlying condition for both, not because it's all the same person. Certainly, there is a strong set of common traits for people who are more usually brought to the public eye as online stalkers (of which Fatman is more clearly an example), what with a general need to provoke responses and get attention from the people they're fixated on, using tactics that run the gamut from positive to negative emotions, from fawning praise and declarations of love and friendship to suicide threats and threats of violence against others.

If there's an interesting feature of the E. Buzz Miller story, it's that he didn't immediately start the cycle over (as Fatman usually does), as far as we know. It looks like he self-destructed the persona and then retired for at least a couple of years before getting the itch to come back. But maybe that's how this kind of "addiction" works, and he's on a path to Fatmanhood of winning trust and then melting down again and again and again with new identities to keep getting that same emotional high.

My chief curiosity with the Fatman angle was how Fatman was able to get close, personal info about a number of our members. Obviously one could just be a master doxxer, but my mind was speculating that they possibly used Miller/OperaPunk as a way to ingratiate themselves and then use the personal outlets as needed. Of course, it's all highly speculative, and we may never really know the truth about Miller/Punk and Fatman (and a number of people probably don't want to know either, just for our own mental health), but my mind did flit to that thought more than a few times.

I hope he's proud that he's got us to fill 6 pages in 24 hours. That's good going.

Holy shit. This is one of those cases where reading the most recent comments in the thread left me completely bewildered. Gonna go back to page one, though I have a sinking feeling in my stomach already.

When you referred to "Miller" I thought you meant Miller, the also longtime poster with a simpsons headline for an av, and just about had a heart attack, like he was found out to be part of this deception as well. Then I realized you meant E Buzz Miller (we also can't just call him Buzz, since that's the name Lobsters is currently using).

On AVC?  Lobsters was always kinda trollish, too, iirc.

I started to think that myself. The level of obsessiveness and the amount of time this would take, I know there are plenty of catfishers out there, but it seems so off the charts that I wondered....

This kind of confuses me. I wasn't a big follower of this guy, though I read a bunch of his comments never the suicide one. I thought he died of heart failure? Or was that just the obit being sensitive?