Well, here we all are, over five years from the last activity on World Class Flaneur. I'm positive that all of us have changed in significant ways. Perhaps that was largely instigated by the hellscape we currently find ourselves in that began in 2016 with the death of David Bowie followed by the death of Prince, a one-two shock wave backed by Newtonian physics that, I'm convinced, sent our current dimension careening off its intended path into uncharted space. Perhaps we are all now dizzy, bewildered, and disoriented saying to ourselves, "How did I get here?" in a very David Byrne-esque manner as madmen finger the big red Armageddon button and emboldened hurricanes rip our infrastructure apart and people continue to die needlessly. What a time to be alive, eh?
Or, perhaps it was just life happening. If you had asked me five years ago what 2017 would look like and what I'd be doing at that time, I probably would have just chugged a beer and told you I would be dead by then. Instead of dying, I chose to look back on some of those old blog posts from five, six, and seven years ago and cringed harder than I thought possible. Wow, I was some kind of guy, wasn't I? Not malevolent by any means, just young and unabashedly so. I find that my writing style (and lifestyle) was a bit abrasive, a bit crude, and sometimes annoying. I probably wouldn't want to hang out with myself from 2012 for a very long time, but I was young after all.
On the other hand, it's nice to have this definite record. I can point to a tangible document and confidently say that I have grown in significant ways since then. It's nice, also, to sift through the garbage and dust off some of the memories that I'd like to hold on to, maybe keep them polished and shiny in a mental glass case to look on from time to time.
This presents a problem for me, though. This blog is a time capsule instead of a slow metamorphosis of a human life. There exists this space in that mental glass case, a five year period, where the memories are exposed, unable to be polished or kept from decay simply because they were not documented in a substantial way.
And so much happened since that last post in April 2012. I moved to Australia, moved back to Korea, got married, got divorced, gained and lost weight, went to a considerable number of new places, held several different jobs, met a ton of people, and cultivated or neglected existing relationships to the point where the people I am surrounded by now both physically and digitally are largely different than they were five years ago. People I know have died and new ones I know were born. What a roller coaster if I look back on it as one, but of course it all happened so slowly. I'm thirty three now, and the Earth has had the time to travel fully around the sun five times. That in itself is insane to me.
I suppose the reason I'm here right now is because my life is currently in upheaval. I am largely alone in my daily proceedings, left to my own thoughts and inclinations in the calm before the storm of a huge life transition taking place early next year. I find myself regretting aspects of the past, longing for the future, and mostly not living in the present. To use another quote from a greater person than I, Thich Nhat Hahn said, "We fall back into the past, we jump ahead into the future, and in this we lose our entire lives."
I don't want to lose my entire life. So, in an attempt to rectify a few lost memories and create new lasting ones, I am trying to revive blogging in whatever capacity that pans out as. My thinking is that it will help realign me to live more in the moment. It will be largely for myself, obviously, but if you stumble upon it, you're free to read and follow along at your leisure. This has been a public service announcement from the center of the nuclear cross-hairs.
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| For the record, I am alive. |
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