Every morning was a cool, grey reprise from the dark night of ghosts and demons that would torture him. The mornings were times when he would look out over the frontier of his future and see wide open spaces. He had grown up in a world and believed in a world of plans and goals. Now he had neither.

He was older and surrounded by a dystopian world. Computers generated music and automatic “authors” pumped out whole books in minutes. The fantasy of those who couldn’t was hurriedly becoming the nightmare of those who could.

Cellphones were a sickness and e-bikes were exercise. But he wrote anyway and pedaled his bike up hills happily. Although it was inevitable that the world would change, people were…well, they were what they were and anyway, he thought, he wouldn’t let the laziness and inanity of human ‘progress’ hold him back.

He wouldn’t be subsumed into a black hole of buying rather than learning. He would not fall for cheap trinkets and sell his soul so easily. He would earn every sentence and every inch with thought and sweat. He still needed to work for what he accomplished, not because he was a good man but because he didn’t want to live in the dark world of the demons and ghosts of his nights.