ghosts

I'm housesitting again, time for a retreat, looking forward to two weeks of many walks around the neighborhood, nights at the kitchen table with a sketchbook, journals, and colored pencils, and hopefully some time for introversion and contemplation on the back balcony.

I've had a lot of blasts from the past recently, people I haven't seen in years, some I've lost touch with, some just seemed to disappear, are now showing up again. I'm hanging out with Derek tomorrow for the first time since the weekend that James Brown died when we wandered the empty streets of Akron. I got a random phone call from someone from my days when I was hanging out in Tremont, and then another friend who I haven't seen because of geography and time and untold other things...

There's been a lot of trouble going on all around me... seems like everyone's dealing with loss and bad situations and the lame things that people do to each other and I just hope I'm doing something that isn't contributing to the problems that I see.



It seems so often like it's so much easier to tear down and destroy, to let things disintegrate, rather than building them up.



And either people change so much you hardly know them anymore, or they're stuck in the same rut wishing for the good old days, and then there's some who are growing up along with you, and there's still some kind of spark there, where you catch up and it's like you haven't missed a beat...

And I wonder what the next five years will look like, where I'll be, where everything else will be. I don't worry too much anymore, but everything has shifted so much and my perceptions have altered so drastically that it is so evident when I brush against worlds that I've left behind.