Return of the Candyman

I've been gone a long time. It's true.

My first inclination is to explain myself, try to catch you up, but that's awful, tedious, and completely unnecessary right now, because a) it'll take up much more time than it's worth, and b) no one is reading this, so there's really no one who needs to be "caught up" and I'd really just be going over it for myself, which has merit of its own, but fuck it, the important parts will trickle out on their own as I go along.

What's important is that I am here.

I'm not sure why I disappeared for so long. Part of it was that I haven't really been in an office, and so haven't really been forced to sit in front of a computer and subsequently write here (is this actually a "place," though?) as a necessary diversion. But then, that's not the only reason I was writing--I mean, I liked it, too. I'd like to be able to look you in your non-existent invisible eye and tell you that I was too busy living my life to be writing about it--a notion that always gives me a snug warm feeling to entertain. But I don't think that's true either. I've been doing stuff, yes, I wrote and made a movie, I've been spending time with a girl, sure, but when something's important enough to you, you make time, you see to it that opportunities are presented, and so forth. So I guess that means, in the end, that I don't need to write this blog. I like it, but don't need it, it's not an indespensible part of my life like it was for Boswell and Pepys. And that's what you want, isn't it, when you're reading a journal? You don't want something that the writer could take or leave, at his whim, but something that drives him, that keeps him going, so you know that you're getting an essential part of the writer himself.

This, it seems, I can not offer you, or me, as much as I would like to. There are moments that drive me here, but on the whole, do I need it? No. So I guess, then, we'll both have to settle for something else. A kind of elective, voluntary relationship. And instead, I can look back at this someday as a record of the moments in my life that drove me to write, and you can look back at the moments that drove you to read, and eventually it'll create some kind of picture. Not a perfect one, like a constant documentation would provide, but a fainter, hazier one, just an outline even. But sometimes, that's better anyway.

For whatever reason, now is one of the times that I find myself here.

Well, okay, I can probably offer a reason or two.

First one is, I do in fact have to be here. Life has seen fit to make me a receptionist once again, this time at the office of none other than my father, Allen Hyman, a lawyer. Certainly, things are better here than they were last time you saw me in this position, sitting at a desk up front and answering phones. By many accounts I was a shell of a human being then; and, though I still may not be whole, my shell certianly has a gravity that it has previously lacked. But there's something else behind this. What really amazes me is that I started this blog almost two years ago. It's startling for me to read the early entries and trace my thought process back, and to know that that point, that moment, was closer in time to my college graduation then it is to this moment now. As a matter of fact, I had a dream about college last night--as I do from time to time--and, over the last couple years, the college world that I experience in my dreams has become less and less like what it was actually like. Certainly my memory of school is fading, but there's more to it than that: the feeling of that time in my life, of what it was to be who I was, and where I was, is disappearing too. I try to place myself in the mindset I know I was once in, to give myself a sense of the perspective I once had, and it's getting harder and harder to do. I remember the events, the details even...but it's so difficult to know what I thought like.

I'd like to think that some kind of "growing up" has accompanied the passing of these two years. Sure, being a receptionist now isn't nearly as bad as it was then, because now I have a better sense of what's going on, of what I need to do, so forth. Now, of course, it's an issue of doing what one does as an adult. What I want, or am comfortable with, has nothing to do with it. As it happens, I understood all this two years ago; really, there's nothing that I knew at that time about my situation that I don't know now. But just because you understand something, doesn't mean you can really feel it for yourself. But now I think I am starting to feel those things for myself, that not so long ago just seemed to be principles and maxims--valid and relevant, but still foreign and strange. That's part of what "growing up" is, I suppose, an ability to feel the impact of the knowledge you've spent your young life accumulating.

I don't want to opine too much here, or postulate, or go on and on about the dreary inner-workings of my thoughts and feelings. But I wanted to touch upon it for a second, since I think that's one of the things that led to my ceasing to write: that as my entries grew increasingly away from me toward external topics, it became harder and harder for ideas I had to qualify as "worth writing about." And if I did come across a worthy topic, the task of developing it adequately for my own standards (which increased drastically without my even realizing it) wasn't worth the trouble. So I wanted to get back, for a moment, to the way I started this thing, before I can veer off into any new directions that might strike me. And of course, these ideas aren't revelatory; on the contrary, they're probably very common, and very simple. But that makes them most important to me, right now. And maybe after I get them out I can move on to my usual astounding insights.

A year and a half since I quit my architecture firm. Unbelievable. What's really been incredible the last few years has been the redefinition in my mind, and my senses, or what exactly a "year" is. My god, a "year" was once an almost interminable time period. The sound of the word alone made my vision turn blurry, as if I were staring off into a distant horizon, searching for a fuzzy outline of things past and future. Years were structured, consistent, and full of ideas, experiences, and people. They were regulated by school and family. The last years, however, have been shapeless blobs, defined by no seasons or distinct patters, with no unifying cycles or determinative events. Each one now takes on its own qualities, its own structures, and its own speed. And before you know it they just disappear...

It is now July 2006--the second half of a decade that always seemed distant to me. The '90s, once the only decade I had really known, are now a distant and forlorn decade, associated with extinction--everything extinct, extinct styles, extinct notions, exctinct ways of thinking, extinct ways of life. Extinct ways of viewing the world. The '90s have a distance now that I had never known anything beyond the '80s to have. The '90s are far enough away where people can talk about "the '90s." Funny how that works, isn't it?

And it all just reminds me of something that's not exactly true, but not exactly false, either: that as much as I'd like to think of myself as one person, living from the beginning of my life to the end--a person that changes, of course, but still remains whole--that just might not be how it works. I'd like to think of the versions of myself that once existed as just that, earlier versions of me; but it feels more and more that these were other people, so foreign and incomprehensible, and that I have no connection to how they think, how they act, what they want, how they live. People whose lives I try to remember and recreate some connection to but I just can't. People whose knowledge and understanding, that existed at the very core of their being, that allowed them to live, are just things I've forgotten, and can't get back. And of course, the person who's sitting here, writing this, will be soon be one of those people too; and I'll be someone else.