My Delorean

But for today I'm gonna drive
Content I'm still alive
And let it go in the wind

-Timecop1983 & Primo the Alien

As of April 16th, my year-long membership at the Bartlett Rec Center is now over. I never did go back after that day captured by May 26, 2023's post Dust in the Bin.

Was it worth plopping a few hundred bucks on the counter?

It never was what I expected. There was no community, just an ever-present solitude. Banners hung that spoke of a time in photo albums, but are a stranger of the present. Bartlett looks nothing like the Bartlett I knew. This frog's leaps to Midtown, Arizona, east Memphis, Jackson, Alaska missed the slow-to-boil pot.

In all my walks across the city, I realized the extent of how it is but a shell of its former self. Roving police patrols, wandering homeless—even the parade route has shifted away from Stage Rd, as urban decay exudes from its sewers. Shadows remain of the place I once loved.

I was among those who signed up in BRC's first year upon opening...

...and I was among those who signed up in its last as it is now Memphis (YMCA).

Perhaps I was the only one.

Incidentally, I have the same construct with the tenure of a former president of the University of Memphis, as I was in the graduation class at the start and again at its end.

As it has been sung, "I changed by not changing at all."

Change

But, all of that is not me. While it exists in its own harrowing, alternate dimension of the Upside Down, some mutant thing that stands in for a reality that was, I don't come from there.

I am alive.

And unlike the weight of that post from May 26, THIS year, I'm going to weighin on that day and beat out all of 2023. I'll look down at my driver's license. That headshot was taken in November 2014, nearly 10 years ago. It would get better, bud...eventually.