The Hitchcock mosaics in the Leytonstone tube station are pretty cool.

The years, essexjan, course through our veins, one heartbeat at a time. And then, they don't.

I find these days I'm constantly overwhelmed at the passing of so many years seemingly so quickly. I feel very middle-aged and it seems like it was just the other day I was only turning 30 and had only then felt like I was truly a adult. But the twelve years since then have whooshed by.

Hell, what's probably tragic and is no small part of why I'm so depressed these days is that the last six years have passed in an eyeblink. In these six years I've not worked, my health has declined very badly to the point where today I have days where I can hardly even walk from one room to the other, I've not been in any real relationships and have only dated and had sex just a very few times. I've done almost nothing these six years. And that's a lot of time to have done nothing. I've become middle-aged. I plan to work again after I've had some joints replaced and am more able-bodied. I'd like to think I'll meet someone and marry again, but my dear wish to have children seems to be out of the question now.

So without much change in my life in six years, it seems like the world has changed rapidly around me and I've aged greatly overnight.

It's been two years since I've moved back to Albuquerque, the town I was born in and lived in a couple of different times for a total of a few years in my early adulthood. But I'm still a bit overwhelmed by how much the city has changed in the nearly twenty years since I lived here. (I lived here for about a year and a half right after I married in 1990, though.) There's so much that is so familiar to me, and yet there's so much that is very different. The whole part of the city on the west side of the river is mostly newly settled and it's like a completely new city to me. The city has grown impossibly far up the slopes of the Sandias, far higher than I had thought was possible. Living over here on the west side, now, the city lights climbing up the mountain are both beautiful and startling. The top of the mountain is improbably forested by dozens of soaring broadcast towers. (My uncle, a TV broadcast engineer who spends much of his time at his station's towers throughout the state told me that the EM field strength among the towers at the top of Sandia Peak is so strong that it blows the fuse of his handheld meter.)

My high school friends mostly have kids that themselves are in high school or are already graduated. None (that I'm close to) are grandparents yet, but it's shortly a matter of time.

The early nineties alternative and grunge music that I loved and which still seem "new" to me is at least fifteen years old. Of course, the pace of change in rock music has strangely slowed down dramatically since then. From the birth of rock to about the mid-90s, six years was just about long enough to have seen a major new transformation, a new wave of something or other. But no more, it seems.

Twenty years doesn't seem like a long time to me anymore, and therefore I can easily see myself twenty years older. An old man. And then not long after that, death.

Yeah, time flies.

Looks like I'm about the same age as you kmellis and yea it goes fast. My son is graduating from High School in a couple of months, it doesn't seem that long ago that I was that age. I sort of vacillate back and forth between feeling really old and not feeling any different than I was twenty years ago.

I was going to post a new thread about this, but I think it fits here.

I found out today, almost randomly, except that theatre folk know theatre folk everywhere - that a wonderful person I went to grad school with died in 2001 or 02. A previous stranger with mutual connections delivered this news.

I made it through my professional obligations today, but came home and had a spell of crying and grief. This guy was a good guy. I played Beatrice to his Benedict. No we were never involved. There are some actors who are oh so talented but difficult, and then sometimes, you get to know someone who is talented, but really, just a stellar, shining person, and that's what keeps them going, and he fell into that category.

Brain tumor. At least he had made it to Broadway in '98-'99.

So that tells you it's been at least twelve years since I've seen the guy, but because I didn't know, the grief hit me fresh and true.

Then, looking at old pictures of us, I see how much younger I looked, we all looked, and it's just overwhelming.

So many important people pass through your life (again, the old photo albums), and then people split ways. It's the way of the world, it's natural, but it doesn't mean you don't grieve them. . .even though all I have to miss is the thought of Jimmy out there in the world bringing sunshine to whoever he happened to be bringing it to.

Good for you for re-connecting jan.

and then sometimes, you get to know someone who is talented, but really, just a stellar, shining person, and that's what keeps them going, and he fell into that category.

(I'm sorry that you lost a dear friend, rainbaby.)

I have a different perspective on this issue.

I'm hearing a wistful tone to the question "Where did the years go?" a nostalgia that I respect and actually envy. But I don't feel that way myself.

That's because my early life really SUCKED. I didn't grow up poor. I didn't have abusive parents. But I did not have a happy childhood. Or adolescence. My question would be "Christ, those years CAME BACK? I thought I had gotten rid of those bastids." Back around Thanksgiving, my Dad sold my childhood home. I spent an afternoon saying goodbye to the house where I had spent two decades of my life. I wasn't terribly sentimental about it. I took a break from the house and walked down the main drag of my hometown. I felt nothing. I could have been walking down the main drag of any reasonably sized town anywhere in America. I thought to myself "This fucking place was never my home." And then I wondered "What is my home now?" An image of the New York Public Library on 42nd Street flashed through my mind and I knew then that that was my new home.

Forward ever. Backward never.

I'm looking forward to some really good years.

God, this is so not a good thread for me to be reading right about now.

The last twenty or so years since I left college (I never graduated) have gone by in the blink of an eye for me. I have things I'd like to do, places I'd like to go, and so on, but they seem to be constantly just beyond my reach. They aren't, of course; they only seem that way because I don't really try to grab them. I have a problem: It seems I have an almost terminal lack of ambition. I admire people who can reach out and grab that which they desire, but I never find the strength or drive to follow their leads. And so here I am, single, with a small, stable (read: stagnant) group of friends, a job that is going nowhere and might dry up any day now, my not-inconsiderable abilities and talents doing nothing for me or for anyone else. I am reminded of Jesus' parable of the three servants, whose master goes away and gives them each an amount of money. The first invests his money in the derivatives market and doubles his cash. The second buys a chicken farm and also doubles his. The third puts his under his mattress to keep it safe from disappearing, but of course generates no profit from it. I am the third servant, keeping the cash God/nature/luck have given me safely locked away, only taking it out to gaze at it at night to assure myself it's still there. And here's the scary part: I've been doing this for so long now I have no idea how to invest that cash without letting it slip through my fingers with nothing to show for it.

I guess that last sentence is my self-pity talking. I do know what I should do, or at least what I could do, but lack the nerve to do it. Twenty years is a long time in some ways, but damn.

I have no idea how to end this so I'll just quit typing here.

Hugs and hope, deadcowdan.

There was a derivatives market in Jesus' time?