I don't know which is lonelier: writing Yet Another Post or tossing content Facebook's way to garner a couple of Likes to be given back your pulsating cursor. As a Meg Ryan character might say, "I don't really want an answer. I just want to send this cosmic question out into the void."

And you run, and you run
To catch up with the sun, but it's sinking
And racing around
To come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way
But you're older
Shorter of breath
And one day closer to death

-Pink Floyd, Time (1974)

Until a couple of years ago, I spent all of my adult life volleying email correspondence. Some 26 years. There was a beauty about this asynchronous connection, a simplicity. It was small talk over a cup of coffee at Cracker Barrel.

Those years were not today's terseness of texts, a Fall '97 semester VH1 Pop-Up video of Lisa Loeb info bits to just flail in the rapids of the notification torrent.

No, emails were just shared banter across a blue-checkered tablecloth at the Blue Plate Cafe:

...mostly it was "with a little help from my friends..."

...a time or two it was "how can we be lovers if we can't be friends..."

...then there were the "same old lang syne."

Email just plugged into the puzzle of the greater landscape.

That was then. Perhaps The Shawshank Redemption says it best, "The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry."

If that's what the world is all about now...

Yeah, if that's what you're all about
Good luck movin' up, 'cause I'm movin' out

-Billy Joel

I want to know, what is real?

Life is simpler now that I de-Googled. I don't pay half attention to my phone these days. The modern age has lost its luster; it no longer has a hold over me. The frizzled and frazzled world throws its tantrums and I just do not care. Roughly once a week, my pocket computer comes in handy to play a little music with my ear plugs in as I cut the grass, compliments of my conduction headphones. However, there will come a day when I'll scale that back.

Do you believe
In what you see?
Motionless wheel
Nothing is real
Wasting my time
In the waiting line

-Zero 7, In the Waiting Line

Since the walking dead overtook me back in winter, I have been waiting. I have not engaged in those 3 AM lifting sessions or 4 AM walks. I have lost around 30 lbs since then, but those are not a function of that anyway. I do miss my soundtrack from that time. It is not Atlanta Rhythm Section and Journey echoing in my head, but Shape of You and One in a Million pulling me like a magnet to those pre-dawn hours.

Weightloss itself is a waiting around game. With what I do now, I don't plateau. There is no non-existential threat to it; there are no nachos or Taco Bell cravings. Mostly, I find eating a chore, just a macro checkbox to mark off. I know if I wait long enough, I'll reach my goal.

No, the waiting I am experiencing is more than that. It is more than waiting for that mid-February, vitality-draining Dementor to temper down. In fact, I am waiting for more, beyond fitness.

And I gotta think that this phase of my life is a time of preparation...to add wrenches into this ol' toolbox handed down the generations. Pursue it with passion and purpose.

I know I am coming up upon a threshold. As sung in my #1 song a few years back, "I can feel it, coming in the air tonight."

It is a TimeCop1983 Cruise kind of night.

I love the legibility of this worn journal. The main course is a system font stack with a healthy serving of font size, just a hint of spacing between letters, and a sprinkling of spacing between each word, all plated on a light canvas with black text. Don't forget that generous portion of line spacing!

Still, I want more. My heart wants more. It is 1992's Constant Craving; I want the night; I want shades of text on shadows, a synthwave symphony! But, pupil dilation hammers cacophony on the sweet song of text. The portal opens to that which entices us and the dark. The shimmering lights of strings weave discord in the synapses.

And thus, I return to this B/W theme. Some things are just better that way. Would I want It's a Wonderful Life in color? When The Andy Griffith Show became Oz, the magic was lost.

However...

I know they'd never match my sweet imagination
Everything looks worse in black and white
Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day

-Paul Simon

This Player One considers the retrowave sunset against the purple nightsky:

One ring to rule them all,
One ring to find them,
One ring to bring them all
And in the darkness bind them.

-J.R.R. Tolkien

Who knew web design was about more than web design?