poliphilo | Dorian Gray And Friend

I was trawling the lj universe haphazardly and came across the journal of a guy I last spoke to ten years ago. It was kinda scary. If his icon's to be believed he doesn't look a day older. He's still in the same job. And he's still banging on about medieval Hungary in the same pompous, mock-Edwardian prose.

No surprises. I wonder if he would feel the same if he found my journal. Huh, Tony Grist- same old same-old.

I hope not.

From Chris's journal it was a short hop to Dave's. Dave's user-name is ****-the-twat. He's still as self-hating as he ever was, but now the anger is finding an outlet in paki-bashing nationalism. And he's still chasing teenage goth girls- which was iffy when he was twenty eight and is now downright inappropriate.

I was fond of him. He was a mess the way a puppy of one of the larger breeds of dog is a mess. He had a good heart. It's a shame to see him sink. Life is a tricky business. Some people develop effective strategies for getting through it without sustaining too much damage and others don't.

My first instinct was to give these blokes a cheery wave, but they live too close to home- and I don't want either of them back in my life.

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Yeah, I usually have chosen to break with people I used to tolerate in the past and cease to be interneighbourly to them and simply don't speak with them if I find them online. This is part of the reason that no one I know from high school knows the name for this journal or my AIM. As odd as it may seem for my age, the few times I tried talking to them, they simply wanted to reminisce and imagine what they could have or should have done. For my part, I don't care to be drawn ceaselessly back into my own past.

Hah. A paraphrase of the last bit of one of my favorite novels, imagine that.

Dave has a post about how he misses the 80s- complete with pictures of his favourite rock stars. These, he says, were the glory days. I, being a good bit older, remember the 80s as the decade of Reagan and Thatcher and all-round naffness.

If you catch me talking about any past decade as "the glory days" please mock me unpityingly.

Hah. I suspect that I'll be reminiscing about the 90s or something like that. In fact, I seem permanently stuck in "90s-mode" where I still believe that we can create a better world of mutual understanding and responsible business if we're simply willing to reach across the weird political divisions.

they live too close to home- and I don't want either of them back in my life. Wise choice.

I had no glory days, just some times that were quite nice when they were happening and which I can look back on and say, "My god, I'm glad I survived without too many scars and yeah, that was pretty cool", but I sure as hell wouldn't want to go back and do THAT again, so yes, if you ever wax nostalgic to that extreme, I'll make a special trip to the UK, hunt you down and whack you royally.

People who get stuck in a particular decade are like ghosts who can't tear themselves away from the place where they died.

Oh, if that isn't the most bizarre thing to experience? I have always imagined the world of LJ to be separate from the world in which I live. Of the people I meet here, I may cross the physical boundary, but never the other way around. There is an understanding with people on LiveJournal that doesn't seem to exist with people who live in the world above.

I like LiveJournalers better, I can trust them more, even if I cannot see them. They grant me the key to their lives, whereas when I meet a stranger at a bar, I never really know. I like the freedom of this world. It would be so troubling to stumble on the truths of someone I knew before.

It would be downright frightening if they were perverse in some way I did not previously know, or were hateful without apparent reason.

This is the first time this has happened to me. It probably won't be the last.

Chris has given himself a user-name he was employing as a pseudonym a decade ago- so it leapt off the (virtual) page at me. Dave, too, has only slightly adapted a nick-name that was current in the unlamented days of yore.

People run in such grooves.

It probably won't be the last, you are absolutely right. That is a little disturbing.

Being a woman of many names and eternal metamorphosis, I find it hard to imagine that they would still be using the same names! How bizarre for you to follow a hunch and find it was just as you suspected!

It was as I'd popped out of the room for five minutes and come back in to find Chris pursuing the same sub-Wildean monologue. He doesn't seem to have changed a bit.

We are like electrons, moving in whichever direction we want. Some of us go forward sometimes, so backward, some sideways, it's strange to collide.

I probably would not have said a thing, either.

Actually now that I think about it, this sort of happened to me. My ex found my LiveJournal a few months ago and left me a message asking me to ring him. I freaked out as soon as I saw the area code and deleted it.

Hi there... I saw you on glitzfrau's journal and thought I would come and say hello.

Something like this happened to me for the first time a couple of weeks ago... my face and email address are on my work's website, and someone who disapprared out of my life 5 years ago emailed me to say hello. It's very odd, the idea that a life plays out over decades, and people can just still be around like that.

Hello,

Nice to meet you.

I guess the internet makes these chance re-encounters much more likely. If we're at all active in cyberspace we leave a shining trail behind us.

Quote: Life is a tricky business. Some people develop effective strategies for getting through it without sustaining too much damage and others don't.

Never a truer word spoken. Well said.

HePo

There are times when I've been teetering along on the edge of the sidewalk and come that close to toppling over into the gutter.

Dorian Gray And Friend

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