“Today is August 15, 2013. Today is my 60th birthday. Today is the last day of my life. Today, I committed suicide. Today, is the first day this site is active, but it will be here for years to come.” — Martin Manley
Yesterday, on the morning of his sixtieth birthday, Martin Manley committed suicide just moments after launching a website that chronicles his entire life. The site is split into individual sections, with content ranging from photographs, art, philosophy, social commentary, and even GPS coordinates.
Two marriages, no kids, a poker fetish, an out-of-control fedora collection, a lifelong battle with insomnia, a love of symmetry, an obsession with numbers, a fondness for sand-to-stars analogies, a 23-year-old wallet, and even some written fiction, among other things. Guess I ain’t the only one. Well, maybe now I am.
I found his page on Synesthesia especially fascinating. I totally do that, along with other quirky association thingies. For instance, just the other day I was telling M that beef stroganoff tastes like The Dick Van Dyke Show.
Regardless of how you feel about the complicated topic of suicide, you’ll find Mr. Manley’s honesty and logic difficult to shrug off. I only wish he’d had a chance to read Under Angels before he turned sixty. As a guy who proposed to his second wife with a crossword puzzle, he’d certainly have appreciated Pete’s own dark journey.
RIP at last, kind sir.
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UPDATE 8/18/2013: On Friday night, Yahoo took Martin’s site down, declaring it violated terms of service. His sister has asked them to put the site back up, and for good reason.
I figured such a thing could happen, so I nabbed the files early Friday and have them archived. Fortunately others on the web had the same foresight. So regardless of what Yahoo decides to do with Martin’s site files, his site will live on forever on other domains. Anonymous has set up the mirror site here a http://martinmanley.org/
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