I begin this entry while listening to Top 40: July 11, 1991. I had just stepped into my teens, 8th grade was but weeks away.

It's funny how I was just a kid in those days with my cassette singles and a newspaper collage on the wall, but this core remains to this day, just one that's far more identified. And life has given me a deck's worth of trivia along the way! I no longer have that section of this diary available, words typed up on that old 486. I miss his voice, but what did I ever know then? (what do I know now?)

I'm looking for a reason
Roaming through the night to find
My place in this world

Michael W. Smith, Place in This World (1991)

It is difficult to look back at those times. I see all the people, places, and things that are gone. We live in a ridiculous world these days—a ship of fools. Can I disembark from this Barge of the Dead headed to Gre'thor? Yes, in those days at 13, my nose was always buried deep in some Star Trek novel or something in the respective novels of Orson Scott Card and Dean Koontz. Yes, I can reference the Klingon hellish afterlife for the dishonorable because that 8th grade me is still me.

I suppose I'm an old, nostalgic fool myself, wondering why things had to ever change. I haven't, but they have—time is moving so head-spinningly fast. I want to hold close to those things that are so meaningful to me, but I know they will slip away into the sands of time just as the precious substantives did before them.

And as I ended that sentence, this song came on:

Don't be afraid, oh my love
I'll be watching you from above
And I'd give all the world tonight,
To be with you
Because I'm on your side,
And I still care
I may have died, But I've gone nowhere

The Escape Club, I'll Be There (1991)

Perhaps I ought to just sit here with a tub of popcorn with Another One Rides the Bus on repeat?

Or, perhaps I don't concede; I react like these lyrics:

So I'm gonna sit right here
On the edge of this pier
Watch the sunset disappear
And drink a beer

Luke Bryan, Drink a Beer (2013)

There's a spiritual component to this world that's often dismissed by the contemporary world, powers that I've tapped into even as an NT rational. And among the rationals, I find that their box is too small. Does this spirit not animate this flesh? Why must I believe that the spirit follows the flesh's playbook?