I write to express myself, to know, and to share... it all started when I first found a crayon and learned it made marks on things and then I learned words and reading and writing and the world was never the same... after a while, my scattered pages became my written gardens and my first website was a way to say hello to the world and give the written gardens a publicly published form...

this is my domain, also know as the back door... and here is the closest thing to a site map as I've got for now... maybe I should start at the beginning (that might take forever, pick another place... ok) or some place before here and now...

start again...

in the beginning there was a void and into this void I babbled... ummm, ok, I'll try to keep this from becoming as long as the bible, after all, I'm not god... well, not your god, at least...

start again, again...

this is the main gate, the oldest portal I created that is still online... prior sites were deleted by the various free servers that offered them because they discontinued the free webspace... I ranted about them ages ago and if you really want to read the rants you can find links to them on the front page, which is a replica of the original site or home page I created back in the nineties... at first, like I said, I babbled... kinda like what I do here...

it started when I wandered online and explored the net looking for things to do back in the nineties... using a laptop that had an AOL connection, I found chat rooms and it took me back to the time I would write letters every day... once upon a time I had pen friends, hundreds of pen friends, and we shared life and creativity through written words sent through the mail... I published a newsletter called The Writer's Exchange, which focused on presenting poetry and shorts stories by those of us who love written words, and a small magazine called Paper Fantasies, which provided a way to network and make pen friends through aliases and fantasy persona... that was great fun...

anyway, I spent most of the first few years online in chat rooms and since ric (my name) was already used as a user name and so was candor (my other name... there, now you can look up my phone number and address and call and come visit... or you could just ask, but for this journal, call me candoor), I had to think up another... after I settled into the Yahoo chat rooms it was in the very early days of Yahoo and they allowed many more aliases than than allow now, so I created quite a few... the ones that stuck developed personalities all their own... I spent more time in a chat room called TheAsylum^TM thank anywhere else and there I was known as anonanonanon... it was anonanonanon who originally started a webpage and wrote the front page, where we shall begin (even though this is the middle of this entry)... so start again one more time...

hello, who are you?

it was much fun creating the persona of anonanonanon, a 4 year old toon (cartoon character) without specific gender or species who was a long lost sib of Yacko, Wacko, and Dot and also related to Bugs and Roger and several other toons... it was a time of reaching back into my memories and paying respects to people who came before... and then I spent a few years in public newsgroups (before google apparently took them over) where I was known as newsbee, who developed a website of selected newsgroup posts and letters to strangers (and even got political, however briefly, under a psudonym... and gradually the rest of my writings spread out on to the web and to tie it all to a main portal I created the main gate (ah, we've come full circle in this loopy entry, have we?... well, where shall we go from here?)...

it occurred to me that someone out there might actually want to know me, the person behind the various odd names and babbles and letters and messages and persona, and I very much wanted to find local friends and true love and family, since I found myself once again at a very lonely places in this life... I created local email groups (eventually they were swallowed up by Yahoo) and put up web pages introducing myself to the world and influenced by concepts like the magic mirror from Romper Room and the Beatles song She Came in Through The Bathroom Window and partly by fantasies of an adorable girl climbing through my window (who did not necessarily have to look like Katie Holmes or Mila Kunis or Meg Ryan or... oh, 'scuse me, I'm off on a tangent again, aren't I?)... I called the portal to my personal pages the window (though it is a couple of years since it was updated so it has some old news and tones and probably a fair share of soot on the sill... house cleaning is part of starting over, so any day now, especially if someone else wants to move it... you?)...

the personal pages grew a journal and then more journals and more letters and all sorts of branches kind of like the tree that you'd climb to get to the window and I decided that the personal stuff needed a portal a bit less close to the bedroom than the window so I created the back door and my home on the web was taking a real home-like form... when I finally decided to get a domain last year (I stalled because my name, candor, was taken in it's .com, .net, and .org forms and I was not interested in creating it in any other form), I used it for the back door cuz the back door was on the server where I registered my domain...

so I rambled on in my private journals for years, though daily, it was kind of timeless and today could have been any day or night... it was (and is, cuz one of these days I will catch it up as it does follow the time life of life, even if it does it obscurely and in it's own time)... and then I found public journal sites and created one, but forgot about it for a couple of years... meanwhile, I followed a link from a blog I had been reading since the last millenium into the Diaryland world and decided, after reading a while, that I would start my own diary... so candora was born as a way to express myself to the DLand community and whomever might find that site on the internet... candora did not quite replace my original journals, but it kind of became a combination of a few and ultimately became a home to childinside, one of my first and closest to home persona as it grows... it is a place for my fantasy of a perfect world where innocence and trust and love are the primary governing ideals and ways and reasons to be... go ahead, make fun... I do...

on the flip side, there is the land of the mostly dead where I take my stupid thoughts, my depressive feelings, my laments and self-pity and apathy and procrastination and powerlessness and hopelessness and helplessness and all the not-so-nice-ness stuff that I find... I kinda hope if I keep it all in one place, it might be managed and not grow into a monster that permeates everything and takes me down into the bottomless pits of despair where mostly dead and the nearly dead and even merely dead become really clearly most completely dead, all clever lyrical plays on words aside... expressing the darkness gives me comfort and some sense of control and all along I've called it the method to my madness, so it must be ok since it has a cool name, right?...

being insatiable for sharing, I found that being a creative writer was not enough and though I love the praise and sense of having fans, I much prefer knowing people as real people and being known as a real person, so right on time I stumbled on the journal I meant to start two years earlier (but was distracted by the curse of Cruella) and that is where I've been sharing daily life, mostly, for a while now... meanwhile, what with my heart and spirit (high and low) having outlets, the intellectual (and philosophical) me was thinking all these deep thoughts (like Jack Handy) and wanted a place to put them so funda was born...

on a side note, regularly interrupted to continue downloading updates and software on to the other computer... so far all the Windows updates have been downloaded (something like 80MB and then I moved over to Tucows to get some protection software and basic stuff life Adobe Acrobat... so the other computer has been downloading all night and it's going on 10AM and I'm a bit groggy and Close Encounters of a Third Kind (I don't think it's the director's cut... it's on TNT after all and they're somehow squeezing it into 3 hours with tons of commercial interruptions) has been on the past almost three hours or so and huh?... Contact just started, how appropriate... where were we?...

other journals have popped up (and the original site journals are still open and will be caught up, eventually) and if you go here you will find a list of most of my journal type writing spaces... and you could always start at the back door or window or site map or you could just call 407-325-1482 and say hello and ask whatever you'd like to know...

I need a nap (feel free to wake me)...

. o O ( NOTES ARE THE NEW HAPPY PILL ) O o .
(just let me know you were here)