“You’ve never lived by yourself?”

This question, posed to me after I had moved in with my then-girlfriend, many years ago.

“No, I just… went from home to living with roommates to this,” I had told her.

“Everyone should live by themselves at some point,” she had replied.

In early 2023,  she would give me that opportunity.

“There was no love in that house,” she would say, and she was right.

So finally on my own for the first time, I set about making a space of my own – not just in what took up physical space, but with things that gave me mental comfort.

I soon found myself looking back to an old Friday tradition.

When I was a kid, if I was at a house that had cable on a Friday night, chances are I would be watching the TGIF line-up. “My era” was firmly set around Family Matters, Step by Step, Boy Meets World, Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper, Sister Sister, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. Many episodes of those shows are burned into my brain from old VHS tapes I had recorded onto – nice shows to help pass the time.

On my own, I found myself looking to recreate that experience every now and then. I started grabbing a few series from the line on DVD and set about searching for others on Streaming. Every now and then, I’d build my own franken-line up and watch four different episodes of four different shows.

These days, I don’t always do the full block, but on most Fridays, I’ll pop one of the shows on for an episode or two, just as a weird way of bringing my head back to simpler times.

When I decided that I’d try and write 100 words of something every day, I thought “won’t it be nice to share that experience with folks every Friday until I inevitably stop whatever this is…”

And so here we are.

Starting next week, join me for a slice of TGIF in one form or another. For now, enjoy that opening song, complete with the lipstick kiss I can still see in my head whenever I remember this nights as a kid.