Looking Back

Looking back is seldom a good thing.  Thanks to Google, you can type in an address & viola  there you are.  I've used this application on Google to look at places from my childhood & for the most part it was a rather disappointing trip down memory lane.

I looked at places I'd lived, there were a lot of them, my family moved a lot.  I looked at childhood haunts & old schools. All but a few held unwanted visages I for some reason went looking for via cyberspace.  Most of the places just looked small, so very small & unimportant.  How could these be the places that loomed so large in my memory?  Many were dingy & in need of some serious maintenance or a bulldozer.  That same bulldozer seemed to have found many of the places I went looking for on my venture.

I never cared much for the town I grew up in, but I could always same it was clean & rather attractive. That is no longer the case.  Now it's run down, neglected & nothing like what it had been.  Since I was a child many things had changed.  Walmart came to town & destroyed the downtown businesses.  McDonalds came & soon all the local drive-ins & little cafes fell to the wayside.  The old folks held onto a lot the older businesses, but as they passed so did those businesses.  Good bye to Woolsworth, Montgomery Wards, Belks, Ramsey's, BF Goodrich & all those local shops that made my hometown what it was.  So long to all kids hangouts like the places to park while out doing the drag on Friday night, the skating rink & others too vague to recall.

Now when I use Google to look at my hometown, it's just a cliche of a broken down little town that used to have some character.  Now it's just a statistic.  All that was grand in my memory remains only that, a memory. I may not have liked my hometown & I certainly would never have gone back to it, but it deserved better than this fate.  I'm sure that's what a lot of people think when they finally get around to looking back to that town they'd left in their rear view mirror years ago.  We may have wanted out, we have even cussed the place, but we never really expected it to be so devastated by time.

For those of you that haven't been to your hometown in a long time & have been considering going back or using Google to look at it, STOP.  That's right stop.  Once you go back or look on the net for images of your old town, you will have information you may not really have wanted.  You could wind up wishing you had just been content with the memories you had of your old places.  Instead you may end up stuck with nasty images that belong in some Faulkner novel.

There's no sense in looking back anyway.  Even if it looks exactly the same & the very same people are still there, it isn't the same.  You can't go back to what it was, because that place doesn't exist anymore.  Those people, those relationships, those dreams don't exist anymore.  Time may not be linear, but the way we live our lives is.  We live in a line progressing forward, downstream or however else you want to look at it.  Going backwards isn't an option.  Time to take a cue from a Beatles' song & let it be.

Off On Out Of Focus Tangents...

I don't always talk about being +, but I'll try to get back to it, at least a little while before I veer off into something else again.  There are many things I hate about being + & the one I'll try to zoom in on today is my lack of focus. I used to love to read & watch movies.  These are things that are difficult for me now, especially the reading.  It was nothing for me to read a couple of novels a week on top of all the stuff I had to cover for my classes while I was in college.  That is no longer the case.  I haven't read a novel in years.  I HATE THAT.  I can barely hold it together long enough to get through the ten to twenty pages of Naruto that gets released weekly.

I just can't focus.  I start reading & think I'm doing well.   I look down & I've read twenty some odd pages.  Then it hits me, I can't remember half of what I read because my mind was focused on how much my arm was cramping in that position or wondering what that sound was that I just heard.  I made all the way through college to a Ph.D. without ever really seriously studying for anything.  I could read it in a flash & have it in my memory long enough to take any test.  Those days are long gone.

If my mind wandering off isn't bad enough, my body wants to as well.  Sometimes, even when I feel like crap, I can barely sit still.  I get anxious, my legs cramp or I just find myself walking off for no reason to another room.  It makes watching a movie almost impossible.  Movies I do get through are on a little portable DVD player next to my computer.  That way I can "watch" the movie & continue typing or playing a game.  I watch some TV episodes on my computer & most of the time I use the fast forward to zip through because the show bored me.  If I go to the theater, I have to fight the urge just to give into the darkness & comfy reclining chair & not fall asleep.

These days my mind is about as clear as some fuzzy impressionistic painting.  I know there's a couple of boats on some water & it's either dawn or dusk, but nothing else.  Since I've been + I've been twitchy, fuzzy & jumpy.  My mind wanders down some precarious little path of a thousand plus twists & turns.  I get bored.   I get frustrated.  I just get completely disinterested.  My body wants to keep moving even though I usually don't have the stamina to keep going all that long.

Of all the things I've lost due to HIV, I think the one that pisses me off the most or at least always hits high on the top ten is the fact it robbed me.   I don't like the physical changes in appearance but I can deal with them.  But this little virus robbed me of my drive to read, to learn, to explore.  It took away my ability to just sit & listen to a cd or watch a movie in its entirety without getting up or fast-forwarding.

I'm not sure there's anything I can do about it, but I keep plodding along.  Maybe I'll come across a book that will hold my attention enough to read it through.  Sometimes I do still find a movie that I can watch, like Red or Despicable Me.  I guess I'll just have to wait & see.