Back and Forth, #TGIF #FTSF

I often feel like these last twenty-two years have all been a dream, that I’ll still suddenly wake up and be back in the fourth grade, that ten-year-old little girl who has no idea what lies in store for her: both good and bad.

But that’s a story for another time.

IF I could travel in time, it’s the 80s I would return to.

Not only is it my favourite decade, for the music alone, it is the one me and all three of my siblings were born in. It was when we were young and we didn’t have to worry about filing taxes, basement flooding, and the future quite so much.

Save a Prayer – Duran Duran, 1982

Both Duran Duran and Back to the Future mark the 80s, in both music and film, better than almost anything else, in my opinion.

Marty McFly and Doc Brown’s DeLorean are giving me a ride and we’re traveling to the date…well, I don’t know because it all depends on my mood, sometimes from moment to moment: 1982, 1992.

I really liked Back to the Future, but only the first and third, as I thought the second one jumped around too much. It couldn’t make up its mind, thinking the future would be so much better, re-writing things too much, but I guess I am not recalling it very well.

I liked BTTF because the star of the film, Michael J. Fox, he’s Canadian and I always thought he was cute, sweet, different than all the other actors in Hollywood, starting from the eighties onward.

Well, music changed, Duran Duran, once it hit the 90s

changed quite a lot in its sound,

But it’s still the same band. They are still performing, all these years later,, for outrageous ticket prices if you ask me. It really costs a lot to travel back in time from the year 2016 apparently.

😉

Past, present, future. It really shows that things don’t change that much, and yet they change more than we know when time feels like it travels so slowly in the moment.

A time machine could bring me back or forward to any date I might wish, but what would I have to sacrifice for either one?

Duran Duran, in 1992 said:

“But I won’t cry for yesterday.”

I guess I shouldn’t look back, a concept I am exploring a lot lately, though it’s hard not to look back at all.

I don’t have the time traveling vehicle featured in Back to the Future, (although I did ride in one like it at Disney World once, with my family in the 90s), but I do have music. It

makes me happy

and it is my time machine, taking me wherever I wish to go, any time I might need a little reminiscing.

And that is a precious thing, one that doesn’t exist only in the movies, or in a science experiment, or at a Disney theme park of my childhood memories.

This was a Finish the Sentence Friday post, thanks to:

Michelle Grewe of Crumpets and Bollocks

&

Kristi of Finding Ninee.

Phasmophobia

Welcome to October.

Now that we are in the month leading up to Halloween (historically not always my favourite holiday) I have decided I would take my past issues with it and try and loosen up a little.

Every Fiction Friday leading up to the 31st I plan to write a creepy, spooky, or scary tale.

I have been thinking about this for a while, but this week a blog post from one of, what has quickly become, one of my most looked-forward-to bloggers, landed in my in-box:

5 fears and what they say about us.

This insightful young, twenty-something blogger has given me the five Halloween-themed short story prompts I have been looking for.

***

1. Ghosts. We breathe easy knowing we’re in the safety of our own home. Confined within walls, behind a deadbolt,, with 9-1-1 on speed dial. Ghosts take that security and leave us helpless. to be in the in the presence of a ghost is the all too familiar feeling of being trapped within ourselves, with nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. The mere idea of being powerless is enough to break us down.

***

As you enter the house you close the heavy side door behind you with a thud. From somewhere within the house you hear a shattering noise, as if a picture has just fallen off the wall in some room on the other side.

This makes no sense. How could closing this door, barely slamming it at all, how could this cause that?

The room is silent and still, the darkness closing in and that can’t all be coincidence. Something lingers in the room, even as you leave it. It might follow or patiently await your return.

As the television seems to flicker on and off a time or two, your apprehension is growing. All these creeks and alike used to be disguised, perhaps by the simple fact that you were not alone so much. Did the distractions that have ceased only served to remind you that sanity is loosely maintained? After you are alone with only your thoughts to keep you occupied, you start to second guess your grip on your present and the reality or lack there of.

It’s silly to believe in any supernatural beings. What evidence have you really seen of such foolishness? None, that’s what. others’ abnormal little anecdotes aren’t nearly enough to convince you that your usual rational reasoning is faulty in any way.

Suddenly you think of that famous Shakespeare line:

Me thinks thou doth protest too much.

The air feels stifling in the room as you awake suddenly and with a start, a strange shiver running down your spine. That ghostly sound that you sometimes hear when you close the basement stairs behind you, going down to check the laundry and the dryer, is perhaps the thing that has disturbed your sleep tonight. Your ears seem to recognize the faint ghastliness of that reverberation.

You suddenly sense a presence close to you in the dark and a soft coolness seems to slide through your fingers, as if you hold the hand of an invisible bedmate you did not recall lying down with.

The next sign that you aren’t alone is a gentle sweep, as if a finger has reached out, without being spotted, a trick of the mind like when your brother used to tap you on the shoulder on one side, slyly while he sat on the other. Gotcha!

You jerk your hand away at first because there is no explanation that seems to satisfy you. you swipe your own cheek with the back of your own hand. Such a gentle gesture of human contact, but maybe just a dream, seeping through your seconds old consciousness.

If you could bolt from this room at this hour you would, but there is nothing else outside your window, other than more darkness. You could start, heading for somewhere where these things would lose their oddity, but you fear then you might never stop or find your way home again, doomed to wander somewhere out there, forevermore.

If there is a disturbance in the space around you you don’t know how to classify what it is, but your soul seems to freeze in mid sensation. All the synapses are firing and something makes you pull the covers up tight to your chin, as if pulling your limbs to your sides under the blankets will protect you from these unrelenting forces. Why they nag at you more and ore you can’t say.

What is this presence existing side by side with you in the house that you have all to yourself, or you used to think so anyway. Now you can’t get rid of it, whatever you want to call it. You are never alone, but doomed to always be alone all at once.

***

Thank you

Young and Twenty,

for your thought-provoking blog and I will be back next Friday, to tackle those creepy crawly critters that make so many of us jump back in fear.

What about you? Do you believe in ghosts? Have you experienced strange and unexplained incidences at any point?

To Any Loyal Readers: Goodbye Summer

I can’t say I saw that there would be a time when I would not post on a weekly or more than a weekly basis here.

Okay, maybe I could and did worry I would eventually run out of things to say and therefore would stop posting. A few months down the line or maybe years. Well, I made it past the six month mark and I am proud to say I have not yet run out of things to write about. On the contrary actually. If anything, I have too much to say and find it overwhelming at times. It isn’t always so easy to get all the ideas constantly swirling around inside my head down on this blog.

It is the end of summer, unofficially, with the long weekend and Labour Day just ahead. I can’t say I am sorry to see this particular summer go, but may find I am left to eat my words when another lengthy frigid winter like last years) settles in.

I am posting just once this week, smack-dab in the middle and only to let you all know I am still here and that I truly appreciate the more than eighty followers to this blog I have accumulated. I am taking a vacation, a week’s break. I wanted to take a few days to ponder the question of moving forward and adding to the wonderful thing I’ve got going here already.

I am trying to decide if it is always important to take a chance and make what you want your reality or if sometimes the point is to decide when to make a move and when it is the right time for a change and when to just wait. I am not always the most patient of people.

In this case, I have been blogging for months now and I needed this time to hone in on what I really wanted to write about, what I was most passionate about. I do enjoy writing about all sorts of things, from fiction and memoir to reviews and interviews, but I have a dream of having my own travel blog.

I came up with the name The Insightful Wanderer (thanks to a helpful suggestion from a friend), only after my first thought which was The Sightless Wanderer. I agree my friend’s suggestion is better. I just wanted to come up with something that could subtly hint at my particular viewpoint and from what angle I would approach travel writing from, but without being super obvious about it.

Step One: come up with a name. Check.

Step Two: Start a site and claim the name. (This is the one I am stuck on.

Should I rush into this when I haven’t even figured out the third and final step in my three-step process?

Step Three: Travel so I actually have something to put on my site.

Now, I have traveled enough in the past that I think I have plenty of past stories in me, enough to post for a good while. I would write about travel, whether it was local (in Ontario) or far off. I have been reaching out to several travel writers/bloggers in recent weeks and am determined to learn about what other people’s experiences have been with exploring this planet. I want to know how they do it and what they have seen of the world. Travel changes many people’s lives and perspectives.

I simply did not want to start posting a lot of these particular interviews on my current blog, even with my Travel Tuesday feature. I thought maybe now was the time to move forward and perhaps I could make it happen.

In the world of online and on the Internet it is hard to make a name for yourself and to find your voice. I want to make my mark in this world by seeing it up-close. I don’t want to just hear about it and read about it. Pictures do me no good and I feel like travel may be my only way to make the most of life while I can.

I do realize that if I do not include a photographic element to my travel blog that I will be behind almost everyone else, and I am still working that out.

Also, I admire the women who travel solo and I wish I could be one of them, because at the moment I don’t exactly have a lot of options. However, being a woman who just happens to be visually impaired also makes it all the more tricky to see my dream come to fruition. These are the sorts of things I haven’t yet worked out and of which make me nervous to jump off the cliff, so-to-speak.

On the other hand, how do you know when things like these aren’t just excuses not to make what you want happen?

I don’t want to take on more than I can handle and I am glad I have you all and this blog. The idea of having to build back up an audience and an online presence is daunting to me, seeing as this one I’ve got here wasn’t a walk in the park and super easy for me. I had help and I go on habit and routine. I do not have a master web designer on hand and at my beckon call. Money is not plentiful and this makes paying for help on a site and for the actual cost of travel rather tricky, but I will scrip and save where I can and save up if I know I will travel again one of these days.

I just want to be able to print off some business cards with the name Insightful Wanderer on them and to make a real and honest go at this dream of mine.

🙂

Only time will tell and probably not in one week will I find my answers to all these questions.

One step at a time. Follow my new travel blog (on Facebook only, for now)

Here,

and I am open to any or all suggestions or feedback on this matter.

What advice do you have on making your dreams a reality or on travel? Where have you travelled and what might you write about if you had a reason to, such as a travel blog?

Thanks for listening and stay tuned for more excellent posts here in the weeks to come.

Note: I’ve got some wonderful interviews with interesting people ahead, a couple reviews of some movies and shows to share, and a new weekly feature, every Monday for the foreseeable future, which will start on September 1st.

Hope everyone enjoys the last long weekend of the summer and thanks for reading.