Opaque Lucidity

borne back ceaselessly into the past

in three hours and eighteen minutes from this moment, it will be may 31st on the east coast of the united states. that will mark the seventh anniversary of this blog. it ran for a little over a year as the dattblog, which is still accessible if you follow one of the links on the lower left-hand side of this page. in september, 2003, opaque lucidity opened its wide mouth and i have been here yelling ever since.

until now. the world, my world, has changed a lot since those first heady nights i threw my thoughts out into the ether. very few people read this blog at first, because i only told close friends and a few less-judgmental family members. but through hugh hewitt's discovery of the blogosphere in 2004, my readership grew until maybe 200 people a day were passing by here. those are tiny numbers, but they always meant a great deal to me.

may, 2005 saw the beginning of my foray into podcasting, which continues to this day. much to my surprise, people like my audio ramblings about history exponentially more than my ramblings about my personal life and politics. at one point in 2007, matt's today in history had over 12,000 subscribers. that number is lower now, but it is once again on the rise due to my re-commitment to creating something people can not only enjoy but maybe learn something from. but working on the podcast means that this, as it did before, must suffer. researching and writing for a ten minute audio show is surprisingly hard work and after working at least forty hours a week on top of that, there is simply not enough for a blog.

two other things have changed as well since may, 2002. facebook and twitter have come into many of our lives and i find i touch many more people through those two social networks than i ever did here. there are only about 30 of you who read this blog with any regularity; most of you are on facebook and/or twitter. if you are not, you need to consider it. facebook especially is now attracting people of all ages and interests. jump in the pool---you can always leave if you don't like it.

the other thing that has changed dramatically in past seven years is the political climate in our country. by 2002, the far-left loonies were already calling president bush a fascist and it was fun to point and laugh at them. now, it's not fun anymore because those who used to be on the fringes of liberalism now have positions of real power and we can already see how dangerous they are. they will disassemble this country if given enough time, and the general public seems willing to give them all the time they need. i find that discouraging beyond words.

thanks to those of you who have been reading my ramblings for so long. this blog will stay here as long as my faithful friends who host this site feel the need to leave it up. then everything here will be gone as if it never existed. but i'm still around and hopefully will be for a good long while.

i leave you with the last few paragraphs of 'winter dreams', a short story by f. scott fitzgerald about a young man and a love he lost. i don't know if it's fitting in any way, but it seems like a good way to end things here. thank you.

The dream was gone. Something had been taken from him. In a sort of panic he pushed the palms of his hands into his eyes and tried to bring up a picture of the waters lapping on Sherry Island and the moonlit veranda, and gingham on the golf-links and the dry sun and the gold color of her neck's soft down. And her mouth damp to his kisses and her eyes plaintive with melancholy and her freshness like new fine linen in the morning. Why, these things were no longer in the world! They had existed and they existed no longer.

"Long ago," he said, "long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more."