The Hiatus Est Terminé

Except for a couple contentless posts following Halloween Story Moving On there have been none. 

The reason has been that all my writing time and effort has been taken up with additional sections to what I am now considering a novel – bad though it is, nonetheless a novel – in process.

But I have felt unsettled not making real blog posts as my time here in Paris winds down.

To address that unsettled feeling I have been constantly noting on my four folded, lined 8.5 x 11 sheets of paper torn from their tablet, ideas for posts: ideas that would become posts once the time to write them appeared.

That set of scribbled observations has evolved into what will be my “The State Of Paris” post.

The basis for my thinking I have the depth of viewpoint to write anything analytical about a place as sophisticated and complex as Paris has at least some small degree of heft.

In the last twelve years I have come to Paris quite a few times.  I don’t really know how many times I have been here, but it must be somewhere near twenty.  At least two years I came here three times.  And except for the in and outs of being on the way or coming back from some other expedition: a month in Brittany or a self directed bike tour in Entre Deux Mers or Languedoc, I have lived in Apartments.  Those stays have been as brief as two weeks – one time – were usually a month, and one time the stay was six weeks.  And this time it has been four months.  And this time I have lodged in three different apartments in two distinctly different locations: three months in Saint-Germain des Pres and a month on Isle de Cité.

So I think I have basis for saying that I have lived among them (“a’hve lived amongst ‘em”) for a reasonably significant amount of time.

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Things change.

I have no surprise in that.

One of the first posts in this blog was about my – lack of surprise notwithstanding – continuing sadness about things that I had valued, loved, maybe, even, having changed or departed.  But those were all physical things that everywhere come and go.  My documenting of their passing was only a mark of the inevitable affection that one has for those physical things whether in Portland or Paris and the frequently felt sadness that accompanies their passing.

The basis for the post-to-be that I am previewing here in this post is change that isn’t tangible.  Obviously some of the changes I will mention will have physically tangible manifestations, but the changes themselves are intangible and their physically observable manifestations are merely clues to their existence. 

Some of the changes don’t have even physical clues.  They are just “vibrations in the air”.

The things that I have noticed, or felt, can be categorized with the following tangible words:

Beggars

Africans and Asians

General Hostility

The Beautiful and Self Absorbed