I said it and I mean it.

Sometimes shit just comes out of left field.

A phone call interrupts your otherwise pleasant and productive afternoon and suddenly there's a crisis -- an actual crisis, not a made up work crisis -- to deal with, involving state and local institutions with which you're connected. Someone may come over for an inspection. Maybe today, even. Maybe next week. We just don't know, Mr. Brown.

I'm being intentionally oblique about this, because it's my beeswax, but it's also worth noting that an event occurred today, an event I'm not particularly happy about, that could have long-reaching repercussions.

I just want it noted in the record is all.

I got a taste of what my new job is going to be like yesterday. I fielded numerous assignments -- none terribly difficult, but all with extremely tight deadlines and one that came in at 5 p.m. That one was due an hour before and was the most difficult. More than anything else, I think this new gig is going to be a time management nightmare.

"I'd like to start laying down the ground rules with an email to [department] managers/VPs:

Keith will now be:

Anything else for now?"

My youngest reminded me not long ago that I don't write for myself anymore, that I only write for other people . Or for money. Or both. But not just for me.

Fair point. A little blunt, but fair.

Then, Elon Musk took over Twitter and fired half the people. I quit my account. I didn't use it much anyway, so it's not like my closed account amounted to much, for them or for me. And I've been on the fence about Facebook for some time. I'm tired of social media. I've come to the conclusion -- quite late, I'll admit -- that it has done terrible harm. There was an internet I once was excited about it. An internet I helped build. An internet full of limitless possibilities.

On this internet, I wrote blogs before they were called blogs. They were just called personal sites back then. That's when Yahoo was still the biggest game in town, and that only consisted of links categorized and curated by regular human people. Wikipedia was years away. Google was still just a huge number nerds used.

There was a community of people who operated personal sites. You learned about people from far-flung places and their lives. I virtually "met" a bunch of people, a handful of whom I'm still friends with. And I've still never met them in person, some 25 years later.

That internet no longer exists. It has been replaced by a giant shopping mall, where algorithms monetize the personal and worst of humanity rises to the top. From this, I'm dropping out. I'm going to try to keep it 1994 up in here.

So that's why the name. Zero Comments is what I expect to see here, since my audience will exist of only those who, somehow, accidentally ended up here, likely never to return. Just like it was in the old days.

There's supposed to be a book with the same name, discussing what the internet was like before social media took over. I'm not sure. I'd probably never read it, anyway. If it does exist, dude, I ripped you off. Sorry.

Now that my son is a full-fledged adult, with his own car, job and college schedule, I worry that we're never going to be as close as we were when he was young. I feel a little distant sometimes, he's so busy.

But then, out of the blue, he'll text me with a minor emergency that popped up during his day, for which he is seeking my advice. These are good days. He still needs me. Maybe not as often, but he still values my opinion.

I wish he'd call instead of texting, but, frankly, he could send carrier pigeons and I'd be happy.

The furriest among us, living their best, furry, lives.

I may end up with one of these. I'm going to try a less expensive folder first, maybe a Zizzo Urbano -- about $300 used -- before leaping into the Bike Friday, which runs near $2k, all said.

That's what these blogs used to be, before the billionaires took over and made everything so awful. I'd like to go back to personal websites for the simplicity, the dearth of advertising and the slower pace. But let's be honest, Zuckerberg has taken all my friends, some of whom are scattered all over the world, hostage. How will I ever permanently detach from Facespace and never really be able to eavesdrop on my friends' lives again? I mean, damn, that seems lonely. But I hate Facespace. It's so full of garbage and ads and things that I really don't need nor want.

But he's got all my friends, whether I haven't talked to them in years or not -- or, frankly, even if I really like all of them or not -- it's nice to feel at least a tinge of connection when I see them post about something that I may or may not relate to.

I suppose I did it before Facespace and I could do it again. But once you know you have something, how do you just walk away from it?

It was easy to cut off Twitter, as I did the day I found out Elon Musk fired half the company. I never used that all that much. There's only one friend I know who uses it extensively, and as much as I hate to admit it, I haven't talked to him in 25 years.

So I keep trying out these free, or nearly free, blog building websites, trying to find one that works for me. This is my latest. I don't expect it to catch on and become a habit like it was in the Before Times, but it's worth a shot.