I wrote these words last evening:

Awash with melancholy, I gaze upward, my search gazing deep into the night sky. My attention falls downward toward the glow of Memphis, the horizon a backdrop to my fence flipbook of Yale Road. The passing destinations with headlights weave narratives I will never know.

"You can't go home again."

I then promptly sat down and ate a bowl of tangerines.

On my run through country music nostalgia the other day, I ran across these yellowed-by-time lyrics. While at the time this blockquote was a square peg, it fits into today's post:

What good is a man who hasn't got a dream
'Bout as good as a car with no gasoline

-Neal McCoy, No Doubt About

This isn't the first time I've felt this...I feel the passion that leads me to and resonates in retrowave. Each day I wake up and it feels like there is no purpose, there is no target for which to invest effort to achieve. I aimlessly meet the day. I suppose some folks do well with that. Just plop a captain's hat atop my head, crank out some yacht rock and head out to the sunset. But, even that, has a target! The 13th Expedition: Of Yachts & Speedboats has a playlist that encapsulated it.

And thus, I have a challenge before me. What an opportunity! I've got one helluva rucksack with me. While I cannot do that which my heart longs for, that is, to feel those European cobblestones on my feet or soak into my skin the amber of a Caribbean sunset, I can set a series of intermediate targets that will better aid me with a future date.

I-269 is an interstate bypass that as its initial path was being cleared, I planted my high school truck in the mud. With country tunes running shotgun and before a weekend shift at Piggly Wiggly, I was where I shouldn't have been with all the bravado a 17-year-old guy exudes. And my rig was bumper deep in a viscous vat of mud. Since cell phones were atypical for a 1995-1996 teen to have, I had to walk a mile down the road for help. I tried to flag down somebody on a dirt bike. But paralleling life, they hightailed it in the other direction. Folks do that.

Today, I 269: it is where my mark on the scale lands. Like that dirt road, summer's 213 lbs is in the rearview mirror.

So, I'm back in the game; I'm carnivore. I watched the beautiful Kelly Hogan's These tips will start working for you TODAY. While I have largely applied this in the past, their reminder is what I need now:

1. Embrace your desperation
2. Hope abounds
3. Ditch sweet tastes
4. Eat enough, overall
5. The junk must GO
6. Anticipatory dopamine
7. Three meals
8. Move it, baby
9. Redefine "comfort" and "treats"
10. Salt, water, electrolytes?
11. Variety
12. Stress management
13. Full package of the food
14. Destroy your enemy
15. Replace your happy brain-hormones
16. Get educated
17. True hunger
18. This, too, shall pass
19. Stick to YOUR parameters
20. Get support

The money quotation for me is at 29:52. Just like the mental space of my own workouts, Kelly recognizes the value to "focus on the pain."

I now recall why I was adamant to have a Software Standards for my New Year's Resolutions: I have been undisciplined in my tech application. To LM to Win10. "Snip-snap, snip-snap, snip-snap!"

And it's not like it's a hands-off thing: I rip fonts out of LM and slap Edge out of the room. Rinse and repeat all over again.

Night after night after night after night
Down in dry county
They're swimming in the sand

-Bon Jovi, Dry County

If I may misapply further...

This ain't no thinkin' thing, right brain, left brain
It goes a little deeper than that
It's a chemical, physical, emotional devotion

-Trace Adkins, (This Ain't) No Thinkin' Thing

I just might have to resurrect the Software Standards out from my digital graveyard.

I don't mind running my domain email, especially as I updated all of my accounts with the new address. Still, it feels funny to pay more for my email for the domain than for this site. I even had this address picked out: the90s@INTJBill.com.

Wordpress. Bleh.

And while I will likely return to Gmail as my starter, I just may stick with Spotify. It had slipped my mind on it having the one thing that YouTube Music does not: user data, or specifically user data that can train up its algorithms to provide more effective results to the users. I am loving this Spotify "radio" from an old Radney Foster song that was randomly playing in my head this morning, Nobody Wins.

...which led me to listen to a song that hit hard in high school: Doug Supernaw's Reno. Looking back through my life, who knew this Kenny Roger's Gambler would play out the way it has? Another memory from '93, Gibson/Miller Band: "...high rolling, holding the winning hand."

Naw, I ain't got no use for today's "country." But in the Before Times? Yeeeeeeeehaw! I could can give an ol' rebel yell!

Ahh, enough with country. This was my Spring 2001 jam in the 12-disc CD player, an album short enough to listen to its entirety as I drove around town in that ol' white, 1993 Chevy Silverado extended cab with the stepsides:

Logging into my Gmail this morning, I received this ominous warning from the client:

You could lose access to your 7 years of Gmail history.

"Wow there, Bucko, I only have emails as old as March. I guess YOU still have everything else."

And isn't it peculiar to add an email address to my email address?

I am moving away from Google Music. But, I am not the only that is flippant with tech. A painful website I like to visit from time to time is Killed By Google.

So many memories...heartaches...remember that time we could have our own custom home page with iGoogle? A few Google products deserved their death knell, like Google Buzz and Google+...

...but Google Reader did not! I still ache for it; the #1 feed reader—just gone!

The only thing I see sticking around with Google is its search and YouTube, two things that drive ads. Again, Google is an advertising company. That's it.

And sure, other companies can and do shutter their doors. In grad school, I listened to a LOT of rdio.com (Entertainment Weekly bit). Juggernauts like Myspace fall to the wayside. But, Google has and absolutely will pull the rug out from beneath its users. You can bet your bottom dollar they will.

Ultimately, Google's behavior reinforces my idea to depend far less on its ecosystem. Here today, shuttered tomorrow. Will these services I lean on be there a year from now? Here are the services in order of need for me:

1. Drive / One - Cloud backups that are accessible by strange admins.
2. Gmail - Read my email, please!
3. Docs/Sheets/Slides - (See above)
4. Android phone - I'm ready for a dumb phone. Bottom of the barrel, licking lead paint kind of dumb.
5. YouTube - Giving this up would be "super easy, barely an inconvenience."
6. Chromecast - Running an HDMI cord from a laptop is...tacky?
7. YouTube Music - Would be ranked higher, if I cared to stream my collection of...GARTH BROOKS' CDs!
8. Calendar - This is really important to me until I forget it exists.
9. bookmarks sync - How else am I gonna cart around that video of The Nine Most Terrifying Words in the English Lanaguage?
10. Chrome - I liked the jump I made from Navigator to IE; I LOVED the hop from IE to Firefox; I swooned over the leap from Firefox to Chrome; and today?
11. Contacts - "And the price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings"
12. Find My Device - I'm forever misplacing my phone.
13. Photos - This thing just happened to me.
14. Forms - "...while your computer's crashin', mine's multitaskin'"
15. Fonts - Dreaming in ITC Benguiat. Living in Papyrus.
16. Maps - Half of my life's stories don't happen WITH this.

Clearly, like the hegemony of foreign oil, gotta remove my dependence on Google...