Massive vintage boy

Ramón 17

World Naked Bike Ride 6

Here is a whole series of links WNBR

Ramón 16

Fits & Starts: a retrospective on ten years with a 'secret' obsession

A decade seems an insignificant thing, especially when finished, it slips into history as a period in photographs and headlines passed except for the reverberations that creep into the present - of reactions to it and fit regret for it.

If I could but watch a clock and see the pendulum swing backward (a mere second it would take, only that) then maybe I could commune with ghosts and make my peace with them, and, laying them to rest, myself.

And I realize I do not want to be younger by setting this clock back (the paean of so many), my aim to reach into the past is not to be fresh again, or desired by others for what would be my regained youthfulness.

Ten years ago I included a quote by Thomas Mann, from Death in Venice, in my first post. My feelings regarding it haven't changed.

Is it all down to pride then?  For what, in aging, does one have left but that? It is still competence to age, and it can only be so.  We must let things pass and be happy only for the memories of them, evanescent and slim as they may be.

Like a man fighting for oxygen in a new world, I had a hard time accepting that.  For a very long time it wasn't enough for me, and I thought it unfair that life leaves us with so little.

But then something happened.  As if sitting alone in a darkened room can compare, completely still and airless, a smile crept upon my face, from nothing.  It was the smile of a hard-fought contentment - and a realization that the comfort I thought time was robbing me of flows back to one in a current all its own.  It's not the same water, it can't be of course.  And it took some time, it wasn't an epiphany.  And like choosing a product (i.e., yourself really), we are sometimes not content with its performance or aesthetics after we purchase it, but we must live with it, foibles, breaks, sorrows, and all.

Secret to whom then?  Indeed.  Of you to my beloved and of my beloved to you.  Never the twain, as they say.  So then in this sliver of virtual space I can be who I want to be.  Isn't that what a diary is for, after all?