The Times They Are A Changin'

Well, I was right: one of the things that would get me back on my ass and posting on this blog would be packing up and going somewhere else away from the distractions of home for a couple of days.  The destination of this excursion: Bend, the rather large central Oregon town that invokes a feeling of deja vu within me, a person who has spent the last three months essentially living on central Oregon.

I haven't been here in more than a decade, and it shows in the fact that I recognize absolutely nothing.  The areas around the High Desert Museum, Sunriver, and Mount Bachelor are totally different now, packed with resorts, supermarkets, and strip malls, the folly of a rapidly-expanding tourist stopover.  I've noticed this in many places I've been; even Albany, a town seemingly frozen in time, has changed in a few significant ways over the years.  Change is the law of the modern land, but we are a species that thrives on the comfort of the familiar.

Change can upset and enrage some groups of folks, and lives can be shattered when things simply don't go according to plan.  There's a lot of tension going on between the old and the young of this nation today.  Understandable, really, since the old folks can't retire and keep on working, and the millions of young folks looking for work are left out because of it.  The average age of the workforce is shifting permanently up, and the young and old are having a tough time adjusting, getting aggressive and defensive towards one another.  They will eventually adapt, but it will take time.

In increasingly uncertain times, people will hold on to what is familiar, to what they percieve as normal.  I believe firmly to this day that I was hardwired to have a paranoid personality.  I am never off my guard, I pathologically think negatively of every situation I come to in life, and I have always viewed the unknown as something that will be the death of me one day.  The transition into adulthood has wrecked havoc on the deepest layers of my psyche, but it never showed past the quirky-yet-friendly facade I put up on a day-to-day basis.  The weight of the world is crashing down hard, and I can only hope to brace myself.

Perhaps I might view change more positively if I wasn't instinctively paranoid.  I might be able to view it as exciting, as a myriad of trackless paths with a million opportunities just waiting to be explored.  Alas, as I see it, all the paths lead into packs of wolves, endless wastelands, lava pools, and other rather unpleasant things.  Maybe the truth is that it's a little bit of both, and that our choices and outlook dictate whether we'll end up down a pleasant road or down the alpha wolf's digestive system.  Like the whole "being crazy and loving it" spiel last time, it's a matter of life being what you make of it.

Now, if only I could apply those lessons to my own life

Damn, this was another deep trip down Downer Central, I better liven things up next time.