"Hit it..."

I get nostalgic.

Perhaps, it is because I meander across these streets that are drenched with memories of a time when it is hard to believe those things ever happened at all...

...I had parents once?

...a Chief 17 and offset printing ink were the sound and smell of my childhood through high school into college?

...the biggest thrill of my day was to simply catch a shared hallway smile at a locker?

I will hear a song like REM's Shiny Happy People or Richard Marx's Should've Known Better or Savage Garden's Truly Madly Deeply—a wistful wave rocks me. I want to reach over and flip on my CD/cassette player with its ever-pressed bass booster button and listen to 1991's Rick Dees Weekly Top 40 on FM100.

But, those are just dreams I had. I look out my window...

Nobody on the road
Nobody on the beach
I feel it in the air
The summer's out of reach
Empty lake, empty streets
The sun goes down alone
I'm driving by your house
Though I know you're not home

-Don Henley, The Boys of Summer (1984)

The door reopens as the draft of Simon and Garfunkel's Scarborough Fair / Canticle and Before Sunrise waft through my space.

Truly, "I wanna go back and do it all over, but I can't go back, I know." It is like watching those decades-old Computer Chronicles episodes with its current tech discussion in backdrop of promise of a brighter tomorrow. I now live in that future. It is far more Matrix than Star Trek: The Next Generation.

And I suppose I really ought to realign my thoughts: the future will not be special but will be the present. And the past is just a greatest hits album.

When we kicked off 2024, I thought I knew the way the year would unwrap itself for me personally. It made sense! How could it go any other way? Belt buckles, man, BELT BUCKLES! And somewhere along the way, it has become suspenders. Just black. Everything black: pants, shirts, shoes, etc. It's like I've got Eddie Vedder singing Black over here.

Maybe it's something like this?

Or a callback to my earlier Back in Black ages of 17-to-20-years-old?

It just feels right.