Tearing my hair out to the pleas of the Asian style love ballads on MTV, I remain in a world that lives heartbroken beside itself.

As much as I've tried to disagree with the idea that everywhere places and people are the same, and that by moving you run away from yourself, I can say that the pain of losing your love doesn't really stay behind when you board a plane.

On the contrary, you may even welcome the devil on board with you as a comforting guest to help you over the divide from past to future. A denial of the present, OK, well that's the trick isn't it. To remain feral and animalistic is what our ancestors wasted 1000s of years attemptinag to wean us of, trick us out of. Romance and significance, well that's all subjective in the end when you're dead, no?

The fact is no one will ever know if you were well 'loved' except for you, and when you pass, I suspect, it's the one place you won't be able to place it in the overhead compartment.

On arrival with your invisible friend, a real product of millions of shards of commercial sentimental preservatives eating the better parts of your waking life, others seem like distant planets in your delusion, but should nonetheless be embraced with all of your humor and social skills way before the jet lag takes hold. If she don't fit in the suitcase leave her behind, better start with fellow passengers and stewardesses.

If you don't you will wake up with this mass of displaced emotions, fresh and rested, so much so that checking your email like a zombie will seem like a perfectly natural way of supplanting what was otherwise a glorious sunrise outside. So you wait for your love to write, even though you already forgot that you have already brought them with you.

That's the first dissonance. Love can't expect can it, yet it can experience the unexpected. This asymmetry should be abolished, and could once you realize, like the poignancy of the characterization of love, in last years' Oscar nominated Adaptation, where the Nic Cage played misfit states that "You are what you love, not what loves you." It is in essence the key to keeping passionate about life in general against the malevolence of knowing you are just a commodity. Yes, the products speak back to you now.

The signs are usually within you, the premonitions about not ever seeing someone again are actually not to be discarded. They warn you, they are your friends who you've been telling deluded stories to about the groovy feelings that you have been deluding yourself with.

They know, they know you better than you do and are trying to stand clear hoping the repeating patterns of suicidal thrills would stop and you would find peace, as in solitude; Unless they despise you, lovingly, for still hanging on, like some sad b*stard.

The emotional analogue to the car crash for thrill entertainment of the great JG Ballard novel. To have a heart so hardened is to betray the message of the ballads. The question is only whether or not you have a good heart or not. Did I ever learn the lessons I could have, typical of the past oriented thought process inquiry.

The laboratory experiment continues, narcotic bliss only makes the frailty more acute the next day, the delusion more concrete. How easy it is to gaze deeply into the blackness of the devils' eyes and not see that the heart is not true. Easier if you are the clown, the amusement. The surest way to the bed is not the surest to the heart.

Here in the islands the temporary naturally governed copulation separation is in full effect, and yet hearts get intertwined littering the axons and dendrons of cyberspace with sorrow and time consuming confusion. How many Internet cafes are by this beach, filled with the sturm and drang of hopeless loves who hope and deceive in equal measure. I've wanted to transcend this, and I've wanted to save other victims of unrequited fantasies, and I've seen the fossilized hearts of the damaged, and the 21st century pre-emptive freeze dried variety too. Mobile phone doesn't help either, why? Just because.

Actually they diminish commitments to a minutes choice and change of mind. Nosferatu might just be able to use these. I can't think of any relationship I've seen enhanced by one, especially when things start to go a bit pear-shaped.

So these alien ballads that collude with and against me, testify to little else than the power of music in itself. In any language, the fabric of understanding how much to give, take or hold back is a function of how much of your heart you have to gamble. The young are rich and foolish, the older poorer and desperate, and pay for new blood with bitterness. And it all must move fast, for the tension, the building of bigger structures to abandon only makes forgetting them more difficult.

Nabokov would hate what I said, but he failed to sell his heart early in life, and his future never existed, except in his head. A friend once told me that great artists may not be worthwhile people. Today is cloudy, and the blood is thick and would rather starve than eat.

The young must sell their meat so as to have the means to purchase it back later down the line of course, and those who don't are condemned to memories and the authenticity of loneliness. Today as I look for takers on this preserved Heartifact living inside me, I pay homage to those who hang on in this market, remerchandising souls they couldn't sell or no one found vulnerable enough to take or steal, with an authentic Asian love ballad.

What's left now only belongs to me, and the bids on ebay are sky high. Sold. The last is gone now, and I'm now materially provided for, a new vampire on the loose to cash in on your freshness. It took awhile for me to come around of course, since I'd already thought I had the past beat. I tried to look at the future bright eyed and with evolutionary optimism, but in fact my nostrils did flair at he unreflected loves that passed by like any other poet/idiot/zealot.

Hail to the thief!

Hell, It even happened to Ozzy Osbourne ('No more tears', for crying out loud), its time to look forward and break out of that illusion that we are any more or less special than the others. If intolerance to difference is the only thing I learned from Communism, it wouldn't be as important as the need to disavow the last 2000 years of romantic love, hood ornament for false arrogance, and veil of unspeakable violence. Fly away now, and pack my heart in your suitcase...if you dare, darling.

If you can find it, you probably won't recognize it. It looks like a little like Saddam Hussein.