jollycandymanOG 2001

A kid named Pat who got held back twice and loved snowboarding gave him the word "jolly." A late-night viewing of Willy Wonka supplied "candy man." And a Tech class in Roseto, Pennsylvania, somewhere around 2001, fused them together into a username that perfectly captured the spirit behind it: Matt Opanowicz was earnest, a little goofy, and incapable of telling a story without turning it into a full production. His very first comment on eZabel was "one time someone said happy birthday to me and i ran away crying" — nine words that somehow tell you everything about the next seven years. He joined as an original in November 2001, peaked with a furious 459 comments in 2003, attended a staggering 25 eZabel events, and left behind a body of work that reads like the world's most charming collection of rambling anecdotes, all told by someone who never quite figured out when to stop — and was better for it.

Matt's signature move was the story that started small and ended in chaos. A childhood memory about bees at his grandma's house didn't just involve throwing rocks at a hive — it required his brother Tristan ratting him out mid-sentence, a brand new white towel commandeered for battle, and grandma going ballistic while Tristan casually resumed throwing rocks. A scaffolding accident at his dad's job site included "3 flips, a triple axle and a reverse grap" before he hit his head on a rock for thirty stitches. Even his dreams got the treatment: he once journaled about singing "Take on Me" with The Who at his Kingdom Hall, "the one guy was playing the guitar with a whistle for some reason," while all the older sisters jumped on stage and danced in unison. His mom, aperson, would surface in comment threads to corroborate the family chaos — confirming that his dad once took an ax to a beehive, got stung five times, and ran away screaming, only for her to try the same thing and get stung six times. The Opanowicz household was apparently a place where bad ideas were not just tolerated but inherited.

He was homeschooled — a fact he discussed with surprising honesty, admitting "i do feel a little dumber since i started homeschooling" while also acknowledging the freedom it gave him. That freedom meant waking up, hanging around in his underwear eating Cheetos until 4 PM, and working at a catering place for an Italian guy who looked uncannily like Mario. He saved up for trips to South Dakota and England, maintained an ongoing correspondence with his school friend chucktheclone (Luke) that reads like two kids desperately trying to stay connected across different worlds, and stayed plugged into the eZabel social scene with a commitment that put most members to shame. He was at the LAN parties, the manhunt games, the bonfires, the go-carting days, and Mike's Post-Marital Engagement Party — basically anything with a sign-up sheet and a prayer. His bond with skaorsk8 (Dan) extended to inviting his cousin to the eZabel party, borrowing Xboxes for Halo sessions, and exchanging his actual phone number. With thatdarngirl he traded favors and roasts, and tinser was his most frequent sparring partner — the two riffing off each other with the easy rhythm of people who've been cracking each other up for years.

His cultural taste was genuinely excellent and delivered with zero pretension. He championed Coldplay's first album while admitting "Clocks" was getting annoying from overplay, insisted Weezer's Pinkerton was "much, much better" than Blue but would diplomatically recommend Blue to anyone easily stumbled, and built a top-ten concert wish list that included three dead artists "cause he's dead" followed by everyone coming out to sing "We Are the World." His movie list — Gattaca, Moonstruck, Groundhog Day, The Count of Monte Cristo, You've Got Mail — drew an incredulous "You've Got Mail? WHAT!" from ilikebirds, who threatened to revoke torch-passing privileges. He quoted Monty Python's Holy Hand Grenade speech in full, mixed Radiohead lyrics with Christina Aguilera's "Genie in a Bottle" as a gag, and created polls with the quiet confidence of a man who knew the world needed to vote on Best Form of Potato and Favorite Toe.

eZabel Personality Type: ENFP — "The Storyteller Next Door." Matt was the guy at the gathering who'd start telling you about the time he landed on a pin cushion and somehow end up on a tangent about a poor man's piñata made of poop hanging from a tree branch — and you'd listen to every word because the delivery was so guileless you couldn't look away. He wrote about his faith with the same unguarded honesty he brought to everything else, describing how an Unassigned Territory trip at thirteen turned him from a reluctant kid who hated meetings into someone who realized "spiritual stuff could be fun." He shared threads with 105 different members, started 13 forum threads, created 8 polls, and read 833 pictures — a voracious consumer of everything the community produced. His activity faded after 2004, surfacing for scattered comments in 2006, 2007, and a final appearance in late 2008, but during his peak years he was the beating heart of eZabel's Pennsylvania contingent: a tall kid from Roseto who worked with his hands, told stories that spiraled beautifully out of control, and never once pretended to be cooler than he was.