The lone howl of the nocturnal train mesmerizes my spirit. My mind returns to those night drives cutting through the fog while Patterns played on.

The night sets softly
With the hush of falling leaves
Casting shivering shadows
On the houses through the trees

-Simon & Garfunkel

I look at these years falling off the wall...are things all that different from when I was 23 in 2001? Yeah, a few pages have been added to the history books. For me, I picked up a bag of stories and got a few knocks on my noggin' for my trouble along the way. Fundamentally, my heart is the same as it ever was.

The benefit of running a blog online for so long is that I can return to both what I wrote and how I wrote it. Poetry aside, while I only have a single post from when I was 23, I posted Fantasy of Personality later that year in September 2002. And yes, it amuses me that I randomly picked out a post that actually has a perspective on today's topic.

I'm still me.

That post was 21 years ago in a September. What of that September some 21 years from now? You can bet your bottom dollar I'll be the same in 2044. At 66, I will still piddle around with tech and complain of its evolution for the worse. The world was a better place back when we had to boot our operating system off a 5.25" floppy.

I'm giving the "AI" DJ of Spotify a shot. I seriously doubt the ChatGPT engine is involved; it is likely just a repackaging of the same algorithm from a decade ago stitched together with audio generation for the DJ.

Spotify specifically references that it will "push (my) boundaries." Was that a feature I was asking for? I'm just here to have a good time! Generally, pushing boundaries is a BAD thing, right? ...unless you are a global superpower and then it's that "Get busy living, or get busy dying" historical debate. I seriously have my doubts as to whether Spotify will introduce music that I've missed for awhile like Paul Young's Everytime You Go Away or entire genres like Southern Gothic.

So far, it's playing it safe...

• Bon Jovi - I'll Be There For You
• Journey - Faithfully

I had no interest in its Warrant selection, so it picked out...

But all of this glitter is getting dark
There's concrete growin' in the city park
I don't know who my neighbors are
There's bars on the corners and bars on my heart

Well played, Spotify. Well played.

The enigmatic label of this post borrows from the title of a Mitch Murder song, one that caught my attention this morning. Based on my selection of Tangerine Dream - Love on a Real Train, Traces to Nowhere is on repeat.

Nostalgia. How it aches my heart. People...places...things...ideas...all of these were once common in my life...a shared experience...they were the air I breathed...they were there...so common...have become lines on the yellowing pages of history...

As I experience the '20s, I am a ghost on the campus of UofM; I haunt the streets of Bartlett. I am of a time that once was. A foot in the past and a knee in the present, I fear the future.

For all the vibrancy of life and drama, The World I Know is relegated to unnoticed roadside placards as folks throttle down the road to create their multi-volume tomes to be summarized later on metal lost in overgrowth.

Are these hints of what is to come; is this what it feels to be old? Is life More than a Memory?

I return to the thematic elements of 2016: the adventure of the future. In that year, I listened to a stack of Audiomachine, Future World Music, Epic Score, etc. In the backdrop of these tales, there is a narrative that was among the top songs of that year for me, a selection from 2002 by Audioslave:

I Am the Highway.

Leaves are falling all around
It's time I was on my way
Thanks to you I'm much obliged
For such a pleasant stay
But now it's time for me to go
The autumn moon lights my way
For now, I smell the rain
And with it pain
And it's headed my way

-Led Zeppelin, Ramble On

Yesterday, I returned to TurnKey for a WP solution. Long gone are the days for a dev environment where I set up XAMPP on Windows or piece together something on Linux. Still further back around 2008, I hosted my website on an old Dell laptop. "Stand in line, people. One visitor at a time."

Of course, you won't find a blog post from that era. Or from the two domains I owned out in Arizona—oh, ForeignForest and Endotriad! No, long gone is that content...from all of those years.

You try. You lug around Wordpress exports from one removable media to the next. Why do I even entertain a return to Wordpress when I've lost so much in my moves? Not that the platform is bad beyond being a rattling behemoth.

No, not having the posts free—off their database table—is the problem...and my penchant for relying on unreliable media. I guess my sidestepping for change is most suspect. In some ways, it is very much like that scene from Office Space making moves in bumper-to-bumper traffic to improve position, only to fall back. And in these moves, just like the ones that involve a moving truck, things just get dented or broke when we move.

There's always change, regardless if I change. I've had INTJBill.com since April 2017. Now into my seventh year, I've hosted it on NearlyFreeSpeech and GitHub. This site actually started by manually coding HTML tags as I wrote. Trends come and go. Styles and popularity have a limited shelf life with all the longevity of a one-hit wonder band. But <p> tags have been a constant in my life since '95 whether lovingly crafted by hand or coldly generated.

Folks will snicker of the old ways, "The Cool Kids use MeTiki!" One journal of expression will rise and another will fall. This is the way of things. And folks will clamor to fit in that too small of a circle. And some folks will never belong because they never could belong.

...And I'd argue that is a good thing—don't follow the crowd for the open road with tunes is a better drive! But, be wary: this freedom is why I've lost so many posts

...and why I skipped honors English classes to shoot pool in college...

...and why twice, I left an IT position for a university and immediately walked in my work casual attire through the mist and shower of a towering water fountain...

...and why my truck got stuck.

I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I’d like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can’t be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away.

Shawshank Redemption