The Open Matt Project

Love Life

My heart has been broken three times this year. I think that's a record. I'd like to say that I've become wiser or more matured, and perhaps that's true without my saying so, but I can't. Looking back on it, I don't think I would do anything differently. At each point where I made a critical decision, I was fully aware of it and made the best and most decisive moves possible. No one forced me or tricked me, I was not influenced by drugs or hurried by a busy schedule, and there was little information unavailable to me. The choices I made were all the best choices I could have made - and would make again, given the chance.

But these best possible choices I made, and would make again, lead directly to the best possible broken heart I have. Three times, no less. That's a difficult pill to swallow, even for a bigmouth like myself. So what else is there to do but scrutinize, analyze, and pick apart the minutia with the hope of gleaning some idea of how to avoid this recurring tragedy? Not much, it seems, since most of the world is on holiday and I've estranged the rest.

Far from the costliest free time I've had, this time is something of a bargain in comparison with my previous vacations through the abyss. Heartbreak is in some ways old hat, a warm rhubarb pie that screams of time past by you and past you by but is mouth-watering and nose-pleasing in spite of it. If your heart hasn't been broken, you've never loved enough. If it's been broken three times in as many months, perhaps you love too much.

I began writing this with the intention of telling the stories behind the three heartbreaks; there is healing in a eulogy, and I have tired of marveling at my wounds. Writing "love too much" was a parting of the clouds, or so, as I saw that my scrutiny, analysis, and minutia picking were all functions of logic - and the source of my pain is no failing of my mind, but rather my heart.

Failing in love can only follow falling in love, neither of which I would trade for the other any more than I would forget that the strength of ones love is married to the vulnerability of ones heart. And therein is the salve that will put my mind as ease, to know that there was neither a failing of thought, nor foresight, nor feeling, but rather a success of life.

Comments vs Comments

I've re-opened the comments. I've cleared out thousands and thousands of spam-comments and made the filters utterly draconian. Oddly enough, I cannot make the filter block anything with HTTP in it, which would cut down on the spam by probably 90%.

You are now FORCED to preview your comment before you can submit it. I'm going to try to put something in the comment window to tell you that, so if you see it I was successful but otherwise... deal.

I swear I have never wanted to wrap my hands around a living, breathing human neck more than I do now. I would love to squeeze the life out of the rat-fuck bastard who is taking an e-shit on my site. I would choke him for exactly as long as I've spent on trying to clean and fix the mess he made of my site, and I wouldn't mind that he'd be well past rigor before I let go.

Tsunami Help Now

As the number of victims climbs past one hundred twenty-four thousand - 124,000 - people, I decided to remove my more recent posts and leave this at the top of my page. That is more people than the entire population of Berkeley, gone. I watched the initial shakey-cam videos from the various areas hit and I've never seen anything like it. I watched a bulldozer pushing piles of corpses into an enormous muddy pit. I saw pictures of people half buried in the sand, limbs sticking out in all directions, I watched people passing out from the sheer smell of death. I'm sure very little of this will make it to any mainstream news source because frankly, they are stomach-turning and truly, truly disturbing.

I have not been this stunned since 9/11.

CNN has a decent page set up for relief aid links

Tsunamihelp is a blog that has been set up to cover the swiftly multiplying sources of information (mostly relief info) available for this. Please help however you can. I contributed at Amazon.com - I urge anyone reading this to do and give what you can. When I originally posted this it was at 400,000 dollars, and in one day it has gone up by a factor of 10 to over 4 million dollars. The Amazon page is about as easy as it gets to send money - do it.

(pictures borrowed from yahoo news pictures)

Hole in Day Cheer

My heart is broken. I'd like to claim that it's the first time, or that it becomes easier with each assault, but unfortunately I can't. In some ways, I can't help but think about how amusing it is that I'm here again. Didn't I learn anything?

No. Not really. I continue to extend my tanned emotions into the unknown like a fly-fisherman of love, pointedly disregarding past experiences. I'll continue to do so as well, so long as love proves to be as mysterious and elusive as it has always been.

Man, I'm sad though.

Holiday Char

I got my Christmas present early this year. It's one of those mystical, magical dark clouds that comes unannounced to hover over my head and batter me to the ground with meh-meh-meh misery. It's departure time will be exactly as predictable as it's arrival was, which is to say I'll only notice it's gone after a thrashing of sufficient severity leaves me utterly unable to appreciate its absence.

My flimsy explanation to those who ask is that I've come off a series of terribly unhappy love affairs and I'm feeling rather wretched. Frequent visitors might have noticed this from my previous, certainly inebreated, posts of the past month.

As for the comments, I cleaned out about 2000 spam-comments from the past month and realized that the quantity and quality of the comments I get isn't in fact worth the work it takes to allow them. I'm working on making the comment field registration-only, but (of course) that is not working properly and so the whole endeavor has so far proved to be an entirely putrid waste of time.

Don't bother. Two words that seem to summarize the situation nicely.

Snip

There is no limit to the punishment awaiting virtuous action. Toss the awards into the null where it comes from.

Blood Land

Reporting from where we don't like to occupy. Welcome to your other. My all-season pass to our shared tap of empty resonance. Our hopes come here to spend their final days. It's a landfill of inspiration and lively dreams where one cannot avoid but seeing the few children of Icarus lying still. Too still.

The voices of depression and despair reverberate here like the pulse of a thunderstrike, reverberating over the land without shame or judjement. This very land is the grit and granule of misgiving. We take a simple wrong turn in our paths and reluctantly feel the vibration of lost hope through our feet.

It is the tide against which our hearts resist. It is the wasteland upon which we find an ultimate resolution, unshirkable, unavoidable in its truth. Here is the terrain that proves our undoing or our validation, without which we are merely motes, blown and buffeted from desires and reasons alike.

What could be more lonely than finding passage amongst this deadland? Would there be anything more tangible and heartfelt than the winds of this absolution? Each soul knows its range and path here, and not one leaves who cannot feel the bonds that are its cost. Such is the price of intimate knowledge.