As I sit down to journal, these lyrics arise in me:

As I burn another page,
As I look the other way
I still try to find my place
In the diary of Jane

Breaking Benjamin, The Diary of Jane (2006)

Before I put these words down onto paper, they already feel days old, another page shelved deep down the hallway of my library labyrinth. What substance is this? I want to say that I was ALIVE once...that I had a voice...that I never could be easily shoved into a categorical box...that I was a lot like you.

Look around the Internet, what do we see? A lot of echo chambers on repeat about the heroic Us vs. the villainous Them. What else? Subscribe! Patreon! Pull out the O'Jay's "Money, money, money...money!"

Is that the totality of life? We know it's not.

1. So we say yet another thing...
2. Try hard to pay no attention to everyone else's focus...
3. Line up our sight picture...
4. And leave a mark in the diary...

I listen to Focus '80s Hits, this time around Human League's Human (1986). My Psychology teacher in high school was WRONG in '95: '80s music is stellar!

But the problem I have with it now...*sigh*...is that I am nostalgic for the past. When I listen to new wave—I'm not that way; synthesizers are the wave of the future! And its rock really is just something of the spirit I had in college. But, as for its pop? I yearn for another time: a time of Pronto Pups I suppose.

I need to shake that off. 'Cause I can't change things...and now the anthem of If I Could Turn Back Time (1989) plays on the stream.

Good! Another Climbing-Out-of-a-Trans-Am song is playing: Def Lepard's Armageddon It out of '89.

I suppose if I'm honest with myself, today isn't my world. I nestle away in the pages of history books; I reminisce of a time when the world was a better place; I lament lost connections. These days, it is more enticing to get lost in woodworking ideas, model building dreams, radiating sunsets, and becoming carried away on a breeze toward the call to adventure.