I have spent the past several mornings taking 10+ mile bike trips on sections of the local bike trail. Some fragments.
One morning, I decided to do the part of the trail that would deposit me at the family homestead (part of which backs up to the trail). I knew my mother was out of town at a conference, having missed the memo that says you're allowed to stop working once you turn 70. I thought dad would be home, but I couldn't reach him after calling several times. So I did not stop at the house.
Twenty minutes down the trail, we do this text exchange:
dad: you called?
me: yeah, I am on the trail by you and was going to say hi. I am in [nearest town] now
dad: i am on the state land snarking some orchids. sorry i missed you.
me: sorry i missed the orchids
("Snarking" is my dad's word for "photographing and documenting." I don't know why. No, he does not care that the Internet defines "snarking" totally differently.)
So yeah. Mom Tov off at work despite being well into retirement age; Dad Tov misses his only daughter visiting on a multi-mile bike ride because he needs to document some of the state's rarest orchids AGAIN. Yep. That tracks. Lol.
I remember, at age 19, looking in the mirror in my dorm room and deciding: "I can just stay young like this forever. I just won't slow down." Just completely switching up cause and effect there. I, 19 and bulletproof, did not understand that people don't age because they slow down; they slow down as they age.
Or so I thought in my 30s. Now, in my mid 40s, I think 19 year old me was on to something. Yes, I've slowed down as I age. But staying active has caused me to age far more slowly than many of my cohort. I might be a little slower, but I enjoy life a lot more, too.
(It still blows my mind that Alex Jones and I are only a few years removed in age. Dude looks like he's been dragged through hell backwards. Pete Hegseth and I are nearly the same age. J.D. Vance is younger than I am. So is Graham Platner.)
I pass several manufactured homes on various parts of the bike trail. Some of them are decades old, and they show it.
I rented a manufactured home briefly in the early 2010s. My sister in law still lives in one. They are, frankly, depressing.
As I was passing them on the trail, thinking about what color to paint my kitchen, I remembered what it was like living in one, and I thought: There's something singularly depressing about doing home repairs in a house that feels like it's disintegrating around you.
My own house is about 55 years old. Gremlin's is 76 this year. Yet they're both solidly built brick houses. Neither of us minds putting in new floors or painting or replacing fixtures, because the house feels like it's going to be here for a good long time. It feels like it'll protect our investment in its interior.
Meanwhile, my sister in law hasn't replaced the thirty year old carpets and has no plans to. Her reason? "I'm not sure the house will stand another 30 years." I can't fault that. The one I rented was built ten years before I moved in, and it didn't feel like it would stand another 30 years either.
The US is the land of unforced errors. We sucked so much wealth out of our people to convince ten billionaires they are actual demigods. We picked a fight with Iran that has done nothing so far except drive up our debt and undermine the petrodollar. We're nothing without our reserve currency status, but that's not because the land and the people are nothing. It's because the land and the people HAVE nothing. Unforced errors. (Meanwhile, as Gremlin points out, China seems to have embraced the most Taoist of approaches: "do nothing. win.")
The bike trail is built on an old railroad bed, as part of the national Rails to Trails program. In some places, this is patently obvious. The east end of the trail cuts right through hills at one point and is built up over a sheer drop to the forest floor on others.
The railroad boom was another bubble that, when it burst, left ghost infrastructure and a lot of poor people. Yet the infrastructure eventually got used. We needed and used railroads; we just didn't need and use them all right when everyone was speculating on them. The dot-com bubble did something similar, but with fiber optic network cables.
The AI bubble is giving us a lot of data centers stocked with GPUs that can only do two things: generative AI and crypto mining. The buildings themselves are massive, but often poorly served (if at all) by mass transit lines. Not like plants that actually make things, which are often served directly by railroad lines or are within a short distance of a port (sea or air).
Railroads and fiber optic cable could eventually be put to purpose. Centuries after it was built, this railroad bed is still being used as a bike trail - a trail that in several places is the most direct connection between two towns, local roads having been built to divert around farms and infrastructure that didn't exist when the railroad was built. What can we use massive data center buildings for?
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