Night of Dread.

So tonight, myself, the New Model Circus Army, and other variegated and lovely people fought Ultimate Evil, with fire of course. (photos pending, I hope) It was a remarkable feat. 

After that, the Night of Dread parade moved on, and after a short break for whisky and weehoos, we rejoined to watch people burn paper-box effigies of their fears.  Amongst my favourites were "mediocrity", "Sarah Palin", and "loneliness".  And bobbing up and down near the back of the crowd though was a paper-box with "a broken heart" written on it. 

This got me thinking, of course. We throw around the term "broken heart" so flippantly sometimes. It translates so easily to getting dumped, getting cheated on, time's up, a bad date, any number of mundane disappointments, etc etc. But here's my question.

What happens if you heart actually DOES get broken. I'm not talking about the aforementioned. I'm talking about the cirumstance where, for whatever reason, your heart ceases to work. This is not even necessarily related to a romantic relationship. What if, somehow, human relations (of all and any sort) involve so much misleading, so much taunting, so much selfishness on the part of others, so much negligence in self-caring (and therefore not SEEING the selfishness of others), so much egotism, so much lack of communication, that one day a person's heart just shuts down, 'coz it just no longer knows what to do or what it's looking for. Everything it knows is wrong. Everything it wanted has ended up being wrong. It just doesn't work anymore. 

The term "broken heart" should not be used for people who have been dumped, or whose relationships have reached the sell-by date, or who play at one relationship while they've got three other fuck-buddies or "other relationships" on the back burner. It should be used for people who are genuinely incapable of using an organ that must, at some point, have known how to work.

I know.

But what's a Night of Dread without a good old-fashioned serving of cynicism.