Leaves are falling all around
It's time I was on my way
Thanks to you I'm much obliged
For such a pleasant stay
But now it's time for me to go
The autumn moon lights my way
For now, I smell the rain
And with it pain
And it's headed my way

-Led Zeppelin, Ramble On

Yesterday, I returned to TurnKey for a WP solution. Long gone are the days for a dev environment where I set up XAMPP on Windows or piece together something on Linux. Still further back around 2008, I hosted my website on an old Dell laptop. "Stand in line, people. One visitor at a time."

Of course, you won't find a blog post from that era. Or from the two domains I owned out in Arizona—oh, ForeignForest and Endotriad! No, long gone is that content...from all of those years.

You try. You lug around Wordpress exports from one removable media to the next. Why do I even entertain a return to Wordpress when I've lost so much in my moves? Not that the platform is bad beyond being a rattling behemoth.

No, not having the posts free—off their database table—is the problem...and my penchant for relying on unreliable media. I guess my sidestepping for change is most suspect. In some ways, it is very much like that scene from Office Space making moves in bumper-to-bumper traffic to improve position, only to fall back. And in these moves, just like the ones that involve a moving truck, things just get dented or broke when we move.

There's always change, regardless if I change. I've had INTJBill.com since April 2017. Now into my seventh year, I've hosted it on NearlyFreeSpeech and GitHub. This site actually started by manually coding HTML tags as I wrote. Trends come and go. Styles and popularity have a limited shelf life with all the longevity of a one-hit wonder band. But <p> tags have been a constant in my life since '95 whether lovingly crafted by hand or coldly generated.

Folks will snicker of the old ways, "The Cool Kids use MeTiki!" One journal of expression will rise and another will fall. This is the way of things. And folks will clamor to fit in that too small of a circle. And some folks will never belong because they never could belong.

...And I'd argue that is a good thing—don't follow the crowd for the open road with tunes is a better drive! But, be wary: this freedom is why I've lost so many posts

...and why I skipped honors English classes to shoot pool in college...

...and why twice, I left an IT position for a university and immediately walked in my work casual attire through the mist and shower of a towering water fountain...

...and why my truck got stuck.

I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I’d like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can’t be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away.

Shawshank Redemption