Spent all last week updating my business websites so I could finish the last stage of my retirement and put them all on auto-pilot.

Some weren’t mobile compatible, some had menus that just went to raw feeds in various categories rather than to curated master pages listing top posts in that category with a link to the feed and to the search function.

I finished that job just before noon yesterday (Friday) and now on Saturday night I take stock of what I want to do next.

Teresa is playing cover music by a number of amazing modern bands – folks who have it nailed and play it with the same passion as the originals, ranging from Asian bands, Australian Bands, even Russian Bands – all just as good (if not better) than the originals.

She said to me the other day, you know, if you’re going to retire, you really ought to ask yourself. If you were starting out right now from scratch, what would you do, what would you build, how would you spend your time?

Tough question. The answer, of course, lies in being able to rip off the filter of preconception and to stare into the wild wind of truth. To do this, I’ve been inundating myself in hours and hours of new modern streaming movies and series, mostly epic sci-fi as I enjoyed as a kid.

Teresa said I need to get back to who I was – to what I used to love. Problem was, I don’t know that I ever really embraced those things back in the day when I was a child. I was always looking for the impact what I built and created and did might have, and that was more important to me than the thing itself. So though the projects I pursued did spring from my interests, they all became work efforts where the focus was not on what I was getting out of it but what I might accomplish.

And so, I can’t get back to what I never had.

But I can have it now, for the first time.

And that is what my next steps are all about: to look at what I have already built, mostly disorganized and unpolished (a raw fount of creativity), look deep into where I truly find meaning in life, and then bring that all together into a wave of renovation, reorganization, and re-creation.

Hence, I am here. Back to the personal web site I created as a storefront for everything I have ever made or conceived. I guess I was in love with what I’d spewed forth into the world – so in love I couldn’t stand the thought of it being lost to the world once I am gone, and at 68 that is often on my mind.

Perhaps at one time long ago I cared about fame and fortune, but that time is long passed. And here I find I want nothing more than to express the thoughts and visions I have and have had – to share them, whether they survive me or not, or perhaps even whether or not they are seen.

At least I said them. At least I was here. At least I lived before I died.