"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.

I will be turning 46 this summer.

That number tends to lean toward 50, a construct that is entirely foreign to me. I have this idea in my head of what 50 is, and I just don't seem to be conforming to it!

Perhaps because I am not aging. I am grabbing all the good things with age and thus far, my armor dings off the bad.

My beard has its color change (and I'd argue that's a good thing). That said, I have been dying it each month in 2024—oh!—my vanity extends further: with a daily shower for under a week with a Clairol product, I found that I could dye my chest hair! "Hi there, buddy! Haven't seen you like this in a good long while!"

This will likely change in the future as I would like to step away from purposeless vanity. In the meantime, I have a stash of various clearance-out beard dyes.

I feel natural and vibrant. Perhaps the key these days is to choose minimally-processed intake. Avoid those nicely wrapped presents from Mondelez, General Mills, Kraft Heinz et al.

1. You won't find Christmas nostalgia on aisle 9.

2. Pull Coca-Cola off your counter. You ain't ordering chocolate ice cream in a dish from George Bailey at the soda fountain.

3. Be that 3-4-year-old kid asking "why" to medications. Embrace boolean: run a while loop.

I consider my life: I am attracted to the idea of harvesting my own meat, fish, and eggs. I am also drawn to the idea of milking cows to separate butter from milk, and roasting imported coffee beans.

The whole world's gone caught up with civilization. Cities are cesspools of the dregs of society. We are not true to our identity. If I may paraphrase from The Lion King: we are more than what we have become.

We miss the simplicity of existence, what it is to be alive. Distractions and flailing attempts at falling coins—life is more than this! Look at our lives: can we do anything? We push papers around; we maintain standards and bureaucracy.

In my years of IT and Engish, can I say I did anything, from updating BIOS firmware for the impending Y2K apocalypse to my last interaction with a student whose momma saved him from retaking a class that he failed, what can I say I did that mattered?

Pushed paper, talked paper.

Like I did with my high school diploma, those things are as good as wadded up and thrown into the trash. This cardstock with a master's degree printed on the front is starting to look like good kindling...

Maybe this summer is a good time to review everything leading up to now. Or, it is a good time to concentrate on value. To breathe. To enjoy creating something with these two hands. To share a smile.

I once was networked into the system. While I first fell in love with it in 1994 in the back of a 70s Oldsmobile Cutlass headed toward a store-closing K-Mart in Germantown, Queensrÿche's 1990 Anybody Listening? cursed my thoughts:

Is there anybody listening?
Is there anyone that sees what’s going on?
Read between the lines,
criticize the words they’re selling.
Think for yourself and feel the walls
become sand beneath your feet

Social media has no appeal because it is not social.

These days, I check my email once every few days. There are no notifications in my life.

I'm not drawn to world events anymore. I don't want no geopolitical gobblygook! Don't get me wrong—I LOVE history. But current events are just mass manipulation. A bunch of "I'm right, he's wrong, now pass me the whole pizza."

We get all bent out of shape on things outside of our scope.

"I just wanna fly"

I continue...

My first winter morning walk toward Starbucks at 4:15 AM seems so very long ago! I was somewhere in my 250s as I looked toward 2024 with hopes of what it might entail. Now at the halfway point of The 38th Expedition, I am on the verge of diving below that 200 lb marker despite my training being stripped from me back in February. I want to get back to my workouts—I do—and I know I cannot even attempt hitting that golden ratio without lifting. I do not know if my killing time for that green light of 179 lbs in August (projected) is the cause.

There has been a philosophical shift—or maybe a highlighting of late. Truthfully, it has always been in me, but buried under a layer of numbing consumerism. I could grab from a stack of posts, but how I feel is how I felt in 2003. Just replace television with telecommunicatons / today's Internet and I nailed it.

There is value in disconnecting from what the world esteems, or pretends to esteem, for in reality, the news cycles shout into echo chambers to drive you to Buy Buy Buy, a less enigmatic version of the NSYNC hit to be sure. The owners have bought into the lie that gaining wealth in lieu of truth is a weightier outcome. Is that not the pursuit of the politician as well? Like a folk song:

Where have all the wise men gone, long time passing?
Where have all the wise men gone, long time ago?
Where have all the wise men gone?
Gone to deserts, every one!
When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?

While I still feel people generally are dull sheep than agile tigers with sharp eyes, all of this media consumption makes me want to want to append to my analysis: we're parrots. And this Polly doesn't want a cracker.