Lums Pond is Delaware’s largest freshwater pond. The pond was built in the 1700s, and then was used in the 19th century for the C&D (Chesapeake Bay and Delaware River) Canal. If you want more information, the park has a Wikipedia page, as well as a page dedicated to it by Delaware State Parks.

That reminds me of how, growing up in high school and as undergraduates, teachers and professors told us (the students) that we could not use Wikipedia. It was considered cheating and not reliable. However, how many of us in the professional world stalk celebrities and their interests through Wikipedia? But now AI, such as ChatGPT (I call it Chatty), Gemini (Google’s AI that once told me 6 was greater than 7), and others are going to be the end of civilization as we know it. Well, I do believe that, but only because we are going to depend on AI too much.

While AI is a powerful tool, people should remember it is a tool. I think it is no better or worse than my film camera (currently the Voigtlander Bessa R2) or my iPhone 14 Plus (for making calls). I think of it as a more accurate Google. Instead of Googling something and spending the time to find the answer, Chatty is able to give me a more reliable answer. However, I use it to help springboard my ideas, format my reports, and solve issues that get in the way of my ideas.

However, what I expect is that companies will go all in with AI. Soon, your doctor will be a robot, and you will have to hope that the black box that is running it doesn’t make some wrong calculation. The scary part is that you will not know the calculation. Or the basis of their idea. And while it was only a few months ago that Google’s AI was sure that six sugar cubes were greater than seven sugar cubes, too many companies rely on this AI to replace real human beings.

But we shouldn’t go off on a tangent tonight. I have not posted in the past two weeks, mostly because I was quite busy. I walked across the stage this past week at UD (after graduating with my MPA this past December), and am getting ready for another move in just a few weeks. However, I am always glad to look back at my videos and remember simpler times.

In general, everything in the past was simpler. That is because in the present, or in the future, you will know more than you did in the past, making life more complex. Also, looking back on life with 20/20 vision will make things seem more clear-cut. But in truth, life is always complex. We just forget what we have gone through.

So this past fall (2024), my wife and I ventured to Lums Pond State Park. Lums Pond is not too far from where we live (Newark, Delaware), and is far enough away that it is quite empty when it’s not summer. I remember when we first arrived and we saw a crane standing still in the water, waiting for fish to swim by so it could grab an early meal. The beauty of the crane, the calmness of the water, and the color of the trees made it seem like it was from some Zen den to meditate.

As you can see in the video, we walk down the trails (the trails go around the entire lake, something we have not fully walked yet) before coming back and watching the water move with the wind. Because it was fall, the area was deserted except for those who were training for a marathon or people fishing from the docks. We have been to Lums Pond a few times, usually in summer or fall. Because of the number of trees that circle the lake, every angle of the shore will guarantee a wonderful fall picture.

So here it is, my Lums Pond State Park video, including a rant about companies using AI, while trying to think about how wonderful this day was. If I were to leave Delaware, this pond would be one of the things I would miss seeing as I drive by the C&D Canal (it is next to Summit Bridge, on the north side). But that is also okay, because we can never stop looking forward in life. I always say, my future self will be the best version of myself, because I truly believe it. That is always something that brings me hope for the future. My future self. My hope.

This video is a poem, written with the help of my wife, to Bethany Beach. Bethany Beach is one of our favorite beaches on the Delaware coast. Personally, I prefer it over Rehoboth Beach.

Being on the beach is enjoyable. We bring an umbrella, chairs, and our kindles, and spend the day reading and relaxing. This particular day was the first warm day of Spring in Delaware. The beach was packed for this time of year. While the weather was sunny, the wind did make it nippy, requiring a small jacket to keep warm when the sun hid behind the rolling clouds.

Not seen on the video was our shopping on the boardwalk. Bethany Beach has a small town center (seen in the video), where souvenirs, books, and food can be found. We purchased new books at the local bookstore, grabbed some handmade goods, and enjoyed seafood and ice cream while enjoying our time at the beach. We then went and enjoyed hours of sunbathing and listening to the waves as we read in our beach chairs.

Another thing we could not capture was the school of dolphins that swam close to the beach. While dolphins are not rare when it comes to the Delaware coastlines, it is still a treat to see them fly through the sky as they travel. Towards the end of the day, before we left to have fish and chips at one of our favorite eateries in Lewes, we got to see a large school of them travel south, not far off the shoreline. I watched the school pass instead of trying to take a video that would not do it justice.

While summer is coming soon, which will bring tourists and high prices to these locations, we do hope to find more time relaxing next to the waves.

Lastly, I would recommend anyone traveling in the area to visit Bethany Beach. While it may not be the biggest or have the whitest sands, it is one of Delaware’s best beaches.

Thank you, and take care, y’all.

In that time, I got to experience a little bit of everything. There was the Texas heat. There were the frigid North Dakota winters. And when it wasn’t snowing in North Dakota, there were approximately seventeen billion mosquitoes waiting outside the door each morning, eager to remind you that nature always finds a way.

Then there was rural Nebraska. I remember being in Las Vegas once when someone asked where I was from. When I said Nebraska, they paused and asked, “Oh, do you guys have electricity?” Mind you, this was sometime in the 2000s, not 1920. I replied, “We sure don’t. We wake up at five every morning to pump water before heading off to school. We also carry a gun because you never know what trouble you’ll find on the way there.” The person nodded thoughtfully, as if I might be telling the truth.

Years later, while I worked for the State of Nebraska, the tourism department launched a new slogan: “Nebraska. Honestly, it’s not for everyone.” I loved it immediately.

The following summer, during a road trip from Washington, D.C., to Buffalo, I found myself repeating the slogan every time someone asked where I was from. I probably did more volunteer marketing for Nebraska than the state ever got from its advertising budget.

The truth is that there are things about the Midwest that people who didn’t grow up here will never quite understand.

One of them is distance. On the coasts, a thirty-minute drive can still leave you in the same city. In much of the Midwest, thirty minutes means you’re heading somewhere else entirely. Towns are spread apart, connected by long stretches of highway that roll across farmland and prairie. Depending on the season, there is always something different to see. In summer, endless fields stretch toward the horizon. In winter, snow transforms the landscape into something almost minimalist. At night, the stars put on a show that city dwellers pay good money to see in a planetarium.

Then there are the towns themselves. In a small Midwestern town, everybody knows everybody, or at least knows somebody who knows everybody. If you decided to cut off all your hair and dye it purple, the entire town would hear about it before the dye had finished setting. That kind of familiarity can occasionally be annoying. It can also be comforting. In an era when many Americans barely know their neighbors, there is something reassuring about living in a place where people still recognize one another.

There are also the creeks. Almost every Midwesterner knows of at least one hidden spot where they can spend an entire afternoon sitting by the water with a cooler, a lawn chair, and nowhere else to be. These locations are guarded with remarkable secrecy. The coordinates are rarely shared and are generally passed down through families with all the caution of a state secret.

And then there is the prairie. People who have never spent time in prairie country sometimes struggle to understand its appeal. They look out and see emptiness. I look out and see space. There is a quiet beauty in a landscape that has not been crowded by billboards, developments, and endless construction projects. The prairie has a way of making you feel small, but in a comforting way. It reminds you that the world existed long before you arrived and will hopefully continue long after you’re gone.

That beauty is one reason I worry about the future of places like these. Not because change is inherently bad. Every generation leaves its mark on the landscape. But increasingly, many places in America are starting to look the same. The same chain restaurants. The same stores. The same highway exits. The same developments.

Part of what makes the Midwest special is that it still feels distinct. You can still drive for miles and see open land. You can still find small towns with their own character. You can still stumble upon stretches of prairie that look much the same as they did decades ago. I hope we don’t lose that.

Every time I drive across the Midwest, I’m reminded of how fortunate I was to grow up here. The region may not have mountains, oceans, or world-famous landmarks. It may not even have electricity, depending on who you ask. But it has something increasingly rare: room to breathe.

And I hope future generations get the chance to experience that same feeling as they drive down a long Midwestern highway, watching the sun set over a landscape that still feels wild, open, and uniquely its own.

Of course, it wasn’t long before better flash drives showed up everywhere, with more space and lower prices. That is how storage technology always seemed to work. You bought something that felt futuristic, and six months later it looked like you had overpaid for a keychain. In my lifetime, I have seen a strange number of ways to hold digital information. There were the giant floppy disks, which were, as advertised, actually floppy. I remember it being a treat when my grade school class got to go into the computer lab and play The Oregon Trail after inserting one. Nothing said childhood like dying of dysentery in 20 minutes and calling it education.

At home, though, my memories were mostly stored on CDs and the smaller, harder floppy disks. I played NBA Live 95 and Madden 95 for hours on our PC from CDs. I would play as the Chicago Bulls after creating Michael Jordan myself because he was not included in the game. Even as a child, I understood that a Bulls roster without MJ was less a basketball simulation and more a clerical error. My room was full of Michael Jordan and Brett Favre posters. More MJ than Favre. Basketball was my first love, football my second. The files were small, the graphics were crude, and the memories somehow took up more space than anything I have saved since.

By the time I got to high school, floppy disks were becoming rare, though we still had stacks of them in the house. I used them to transport papers between home and school. In fact, the only time I failed a course in high school was because the entire grade depended on a final paper, and my floppy disk seemed to corrupt itself somewhere between my parents’ basement and debate class. I was devastated. I had made the honor roll several times. To be let down by electric currents felt cruel. It was also an important lesson, technology does not have to hate you to ruin your day. It only has to malfunction at the correct moment.

During my senior year, I got my first laptop, a Toshiba. It was winter break, my favorite time of year, and by then I had started using recordable CDs and DVDs to move files around. Kids today will never fully understand the pain of using a DVD player for a class presentation. Or, worse, a VHS tape. PowerPoint existed, but the classrooms I grew up in could not connect to a computer. So we would record our presentations onto a DVD or VHS tape and then perform along with the timing of the video. This required a surprising amount of coordination, like synchronized swimming for teenagers who owned khakis.

Then came college and the USB drive. After that, portable hard drives became common. Then solid-state drives. Then network-attached storage systems. Now, as I write this, I have a 2-bay NAS, an external hard drive, two solid-state drives, and cloud storage for my most important files. That does not include the files I have forgotten about, the files I have duplicated by accident, or the folders named “New Folder,” “New Folder 2,” and “Actually Sort This Later,” which is the digital equivalent of stuffing papers into a drawer and calling it a system.

It is astonishing how much the world has changed in 20 years. For most of that time, the pattern was predictable. New storage was expensive at first, then it became cheaper, larger, and more ordinary. Hard drives followed this path. Solid-state drives did too. What once cost a small fortune eventually became something you could buy without having to financially consult your ancestors. For regular people, that was the deal. Every year, we could store more of our lives for less money. That deal may be changing.

The rise of AI has created enormous demand for data centers, and data centers need storage. They need hard drives. They need solid-state drives. They need memory chips. They need an absurd amount of infrastructure so a chatbot can tell someone to put glue on pizza with the confidence of a middle manager. The result is that storage, after years of getting cheaper, has started to feel expensive again. Western Digital reportedly sold out its 2026 hard drive production capacity early. SSD prices have climbed. Drives that were affordable not long ago now cost several times what they did. Contractors who build NAS systems are raising prices because the drives inside them are no longer cheap.

This may sound like a niche concern, the kind of thing only people with too many hard drives and not enough dinner party invitations care about. But it matters. First, it may make computers and smartphones more expensive. Companies may absorb some of the cost for a while, but eventually, price increases tend to find their way to us. They always do. The consumer is less a customer than the final resting place for every supply-chain problem.

Second, it means people with lots of photos, videos, and personal files will pay more to keep them. That matters because our lives are increasingly digital. Baby photos, family videos, scanned documents, old writing, tax files, wedding footage, and years of ordinary memories now live on drives and servers.

Third, it may push more people toward cloud storage. And that is where the story becomes less about money and more about privacy. Cloud storage is convenient. I use it. Most of us do. It solves a real problem, especially when a hard drive fails or a laptop decides to become decorative. But cloud storage is not magic. It is just someone else’s computer, sitting somewhere else, under someone else’s rules. That does not mean every company is secretly plotting against you. But it does mean we should be careful about any bargain that sounds too generous. When a company offers to store your photos, videos, files, and memories, it is worth asking what the long-term arrangement really is.

We used to pay for storage with money. Increasingly, we may be paying for it with access. That is the part that bothers me. AI is not inherently evil. It is a tool. A chatbot does what it is programmed, trained, and incentivized to do. The problem is not the tool itself. The problem is the business model around it. The companies building these systems have every incentive to turn private life into training data, marketing data, or behavioral prediction. Photos are not just photos anymore. They can reveal where we go, who we know, what we buy, what we value, what our homes look like, what our children look like, and what parts of our lives we thought were too boring for anyone to monetize.

But nothing is too boring to monetize. That may be the unofficial motto of the 21st century. The old internet bargain was already uncomfortable. Free services in exchange for data. AI makes that bargain feel larger and stranger. It is not just that companies want to sell us things. It is that they may be building systems that know enough about us to anticipate the things we have not yet admitted to ourselves. That sounds dramatic, but so did the idea that everyone would one day carry a location-tracking device in their pocket and voluntarily charge it every night.

Unfortunately, the future of storage prices does not look especially comforting. As long as demand for data centers outpaces supply, prices will likely remain under pressure. Maybe new manufacturing capacity will come online. Maybe supply will catch up. Maybe the market will correct itself, as markets sometimes do after making everyone miserable first. But I do not see data centers disappearing anytime soon. If anything, more are being built. More companies want more AI tools, more storage, more training data, and more infrastructure. The machine is hungry, and it has excellent financing.

So maybe the old ways will make a partial comeback. I have already found myself using paper more often. I write outlines by hand. I take notes on paper. I study away from screens when I can. I like the quiet privacy of a notebook. No software update. No cloud sync. No terms of service. No cheerful notification asking whether I want to improve my experience. A handwritten letter now feels almost radical. So does printing a photograph. So does keeping a journal in a drawer. Not because technology is bad, but because some parts of life should not be optimized, scanned, trained on, or turned into a recommendation.

Maybe that is where we are headed. Not a rejection of digital life, but a more careful relationship with it. We will still use hard drives and cloud storage and AI tools. I certainly will. But maybe we will also remember that not every memory needs to live on a server. Some memories should be held in your hand. And some, apparently, should be backed up in three places, because I still remember that floppy disk.

Behind me sat two men on their way to Estes Park for a wedding. I was not exactly eavesdropping. They were speaking loudly enough that I felt less like a stranger listening in and more like a reluctant member of their advisory board. One of the men was a developer. He told his friend he was being promoted at work because of his use of AI. Specifically, he had built multiple agents in Claude, an AI tool I know about but have not personally tried. These agents had apparently put him on the fast track at his company.

There was, however, a small problem. Because there is always a small problem. His senior leadership had not funded his AI expenses. They had concerns. Some of these concerns were reasonable, including the possibility of becoming dependent on AI tools that may become much more expensive once everyone is locked in. So the developer was paying for Claude himself. According to him, he was spending around 30% of his own salary on it. He was proud of what he had built, but also worried. If he kept building agents, buying tokens, and waiting for the company to catch up, he might end up putting most of his salary into Claude just to stay ahead.

There are worse career strategies, I suppose. Though not many that sound so much like a tech-themed treadmill where the incline keeps increasing, and the treadmill sends you an invoice. By that point, the plane was fully boarded. To my relief, both men eventually decided to take a nap. I was grateful. I like my transportation quiet. I do not need every flight to become a podcast.

But the conversation stayed with me. It made me think about AI, work, money, skill, creativity, and the general direction of things, which, admittedly, is a lot to put on two men trying to get to a wedding in Colorado. Still, I think the conversation revealed something important.

AI is going to widen the gap between people who know what they are doing and people who do not. That sounds harsh, but I think it is true. AI will help people with existing skills. It will make productive people more productive. It will make knowledgeable people faster. It will help people who understand the fundamentals build, edit, automate, analyze, and create more efficiently. But it will not magically give people judgment.

I was talking this past week to a director at one of the big accounting firms. He has been using AI for about as long as I have, roughly four years. He started at the bottom of the company and worked his way up, so he has done the basic work by hand. He knows how the machinery works because he once had to turn the gears himself. He told me that their AI now handles much of the work he did when he first started. For example, many associates are expected to use AI to help with reconciliation reports. But when the reports are wrong, the associates often do not catch the mistake. He does. Because he has done the work manually, he can look at an output and immediately know when something is off. That is the part people keep missing. Skill is still required.

The developer behind me could use Claude effectively because he knew what he was trying to build. The accounting director could catch AI’s mistakes because he understood reconciliation before AI entered the room. When I use AI to build automated reports, I still need to know what the report is supposed to do. Otherwise, I am just politely asking a machine to produce nonsense in a more efficient font.

AI is like the new Google. When Google first entered classrooms, it changed how people found information. I remember that shift. Suddenly, answers were faster. But Google did not make everyone smarter. It helped people who knew what to search for, how to evaluate sources, and what to do with the information once they found it. AI is doing the same thing, only faster and with more confidence. Those who are efficient, skilled, and grounded in the fundamentals will gain the most from AI. Those who are not will get fluent-looking mistakes, automated shortcuts, and perhaps a very polished road to nowhere.

This is why I worry about students in high school and college. I do not think students should use AI to replace the act of learning. Teachers should also, as much as possible, try to prevent students from relying on AI before they understand the work themselves. I know that sounds old-fashioned. I am aware that every generation eventually becomes the people warning that the new tool will ruin the youth. Somewhere, someone once looked at a calculator and thought, “Well, civilization had a good run.”

But there is a real danger here. If students use AI before they develop their own skills, they will not become the people who benefit most from AI. They will become dependent on it. They will have the tool, but not the judgment. And in a capitalist world, that is not a great position to be in. Capitalism is not famous for gently protecting people who lack bargaining power. Before you outsource the thing, you need to learn the thing.

There is another problem, too, and it is harder to measure. AI can flatten the human soul. That sounds dramatic, but I mean it plainly. Human beings need purpose. We need to make things. We need to write words, draw pictures, cook meals, take photographs, tell stories, arrange furniture badly, rearrange it, and then pretend the second version was the plan all along.

Everyone is creative, even people who insist they are not. Some people are creative with words. Some with numbers. Some with recipes. Some with spreadsheets. Some with gardens. Some with jokes. Some with the exact placement of a throw pillow, which I do not personally understand, but am willing to respect. The point is that creativity is not only for artists. It is part of being human. And right now, people already spend so much of their lives consuming other people’s creativity through algorithms. We watch, scroll, react, compare, and absorb. AI may make this worse. There are already people asking AI to come up with the idea, write the essay, draw the picture, compose the song, generate the caption, and then tell them when to post it.

That should not be the goal. Use AI as an editor. Use it as an assistant. Use it as a curator, organizer, or second set of eyes. Use it to challenge your thinking, clean up your structure, or help you see what you missed. But do not let it become your ghostwriter, ghost painter, ghost thinker, or ghost soul.

Do not let a machine do all the making for you. Write the words. Take the picture. Draw the thing badly. Make the playlist. Cook the meal. Put something of yourself into the world, even if it is imperfect. Especially if it is imperfect.

AI can be a good tool. It has made editing available to more people, including people who could never afford the kind of support that famous authors have always had. That part is genuinely useful. But relying on it completely will make us smaller.

And then there is the money. If we become overly reliant on AI, someone will find a way to extract money from that reliance. The tools will become subscriptions. The subscriptions will become tiers. The tiers will become necessities. And the people who own the platforms will discover, with great sadness and a prepared statement from investor relations, that prices simply must go up.

When I say “poor people,” I mean almost all of us. I mean the 99%. If you do not own a private jet and a mansion, you are probably not on the winning side of this arrangement. You may own a house. You may own land. You may have a retirement account and a nice sectional. That can create the illusion of safety. But the people building these systems do not think of most of us as citizens, neighbors, or fully formed human beings. They think of us as users, consumers, data points, labor costs, risks, and claims to be denied.

AI will not only write emails and summarize meetings. It will increasingly help decide who gets approved, who gets denied, who gets hired, who gets flagged, who gets monitored, who gets care, and who gets told to call another number. And of course, this will all be sold to us as efficiency. That is the word we should probably fear most. Efficiency sounds so reasonable. Who could be against efficiency? Only a fool would oppose efficiency. But efficiency for whom? Efficiency at whose expense? Efficiency measured by what?

A system can be very efficient at denying people help. A company can be very efficient at reducing labor costs. A platform can be very efficient at keeping you addicted. A government can be very efficient at deciding that you are not worth the expense.

Picture some future version of Medicaid or Medicare relying heavily on AI systems to evaluate claims. The companies selling the systems will say they are saving taxpayer money. They will say they are protecting the program for people who truly deserve it. They will say the model is objective, as if objectivity is something you can purchase in a software package.

And then, one day, someone will discover that they can be born here, live in the Midwest, wear the flag proudly, vote correctly according to whoever is currently defining “correctly,” and still not be considered deserving enough when the algorithm says no. That is the thing about systems built to exclude. Eventually, they come for people who thought they were safely inside.

The information environment will get worse, too. A small number of powerful people and companies already control much of what we watch, read, and scroll through. The AI systems we use are also owned by powerful companies with their own incentives. Americans often imagine censorship as something that happens somewhere else, in countries we have been taught to pity or fear. But we have been living inside softer forms of control for a long time.

Your social media feed shows you things designed to keep you from leaving the app. News channels package reality in ways that keep you watching. Platforms do not need you to understand the world. They need you to stay engaged long enough to be monetized.

AI will make that easier. It is not that doctored images, propaganda, or manipulated narratives are new. Dictators have been altering reality for a very long time. Stalin did not need Photoshop to remove people from photographs. Hitler did not need a generative model to flood a country with lies. AI is not inventing manipulation. It is industrializing it. The wealthy and powerful will not need as many people to produce propaganda, distortion, or distraction. They will be able to automate it. At scale. With better grammar.

And then there is the environmental cost. AI is often presented as weightless. Digital. Clean. Floating somewhere in “the cloud,” which sounds peaceful until you remember that the cloud is mostly buildings, servers, electricity, heat, water, land, and shareholders. Data centers require enormous amounts of power and water. They need infrastructure, cooling systems, and energy. The companies building them will describe this as the cost of progress. They will say AI is good for humanity. They will say it will free up resources, improve productivity, and solve problems that previous technology helped create.

Maybe some of that will be true. But I worry that the public costs will be carried by the public, while the private profits remain very private. We have already seen what happens when wealthy industries are allowed to pollute air, water, and land in the name of growth. The damage does not fall evenly. It never does. The people with the fewest resources are usually the first to breathe the bad air, drink the bad water, and live near the consequences. All of this, so we can generate more content. More emails. More images. More summaries. More posts. More slop. More little bits of language and light to keep the machine full.

So as the man behind me talked about spending a large portion of his salary on Claude to move up in his company, I saw more than one ambitious developer trying to get ahead. I saw a small preview of the future.

A future where the skilled become more efficient, the unskilled become more dependent, creativity becomes outsourced, information becomes more manipulated, jobs become more precarious, public goods become more strained, and the wealthy discover yet another way to turn human anxiety into recurring revenue.

I wish I had a more cheerful conclusion. I would prefer to end with something balanced and hopeful, perhaps involving a sunset over the Rockies or the men behind me waking up with a renewed commitment to labor organizing. But I do not feel especially cheerful about AI.

I do not think the danger is that AI will kill us like in Terminator. That would at least be direct. Dramatic, yes, but efficient. No subscription tier required. The more likely future is slower and more humiliating. More claims denied. More jobs squeezed. More creativity outsourced. More water used. More heat generated. More money extracted. More people told that all of this is innovation.

Hopefully, I am wrong. I would like to be wrong. But sitting on that plane, listening to a man describe spending his own salary to keep up with the machine, I could not shake the feeling that the future had already boarded. And, of course, it had priority.

The reason I was in Denver was simple. Living in Chadron, Denver is the best airport option, even though Rapid City is technically closer. Rapid City mostly sends you to Denver or Chicago. Denver, meanwhile, can get me to Philadelphia without requiring a small expedition across the continental United States.

While I currently live in Nebraska, I still work in Delaware. Up until a year ago, my wife and I lived there. I could probably write an entire series about Delaware, but then again, I could probably do that for every place I’ve lived. Places are like colors. No color is objectively better than another. Everyone simply has their favorite. Delaware may not be everyone’s favorite color, but it remains one of mine.

After getting past the ID check, I noticed something unusual. If I had to estimate, nearly 70 percent of the bags going through the scanners were being flagged for additional inspection. I had never seen anything like it. Someone nearby mentioned that TSA was using AI, which made me wonder whether I was witnessing the future of airport security or simply the consequences of hundreds of people forgetting that water bottles are still not allowed through security.

Given my experiences with AI, I wasn’t entirely sure which explanation was more comforting. Some AI companies are certainly better than others. Microsoft’s Copilot, in my experience, is about as useful as sticking a fork into a light socket. The only difference is that the light socket occasionally accomplishes something.

Fortunately, I had brought film with me and requested a hand inspection. Because I made the request before the TSA agents began pulling aside what felt like every bag in Colorado, my film canisters ended up first in line. Behind me stood a growing collection of travelers desperately watching the clock as their luggage sat in inspection purgatory. Then the TSA agent slowly reached for a pair of gloves. Very slowly. Each finger appeared to receive its own individual onboarding process. Instantly, I was reminded of the sloth working at the DMV in Zootopia. The people waiting for their bags watched in silent horror as my film inspection became the highest-priority project in the terminal.

To be fair, I don’t blame TSA agents. I’ve had film hand-checked in Philadelphia, Lincoln, New Orleans, and Rapid City recently. Most inspections are quick and professional. This one was professional too. Just... deliberate. TSA agents receive more criticism than appreciation. The reality is that most of what frustrates travelers today exists because of what happened on September 11.

I was sitting in a classroom in Hastings, Nebraska when those attacks occurred. I was nowhere near New York, Washington, or Pennsylvania, but like most Americans who were alive at the time, I remember exactly where I was. Flying changed after that. People became nervous. Security became stricter. Some people unfortunately became suspicious of anyone who looked different from them. None of that was particularly admirable, but much of it was real. Whenever someone complains about TSA, I sometimes wonder if they remember how people felt during those first few years after 9/11. Given the choice between longer security lines and repeating that experience, I’ll take the longer security line every time.

Eventually, I escaped Denver and headed toward Saint Louis. I don’t believe I’ve ever been through Saint Louis’s airport before. My first impression was that whoever designed the seating areas must have assumed flights would only operate at half capacity. Every seat was occupied. Every gate was crowded. Even the gates without flights seemed to be hosting conventions. Finding an empty chair became more competitive than finding a parking spot at Costco on a Saturday afternoon.

I also noticed what appeared to be a large number of international travelers. Then I remembered that the United States is preparing to host the World Cup. Years ago, that would have excited me. I used to love the World Cup. I would rearrange my schedule around it. These days, however, my enthusiasm for FIFA has faded considerably. Corruption has a remarkable ability to drain the joy from almost anything. So, for the first time in my life, I’ll be skipping the tournament. I wish Team USA well, but my television and I will be pursuing separate interests.

Eventually, I boarded my flight to Philadelphia. That was when my next observation occurred. Airlines really need to decide what they want to do about overhead bin space. Either reserve a specific amount of space for each passenger or charge for it directly. Right now, overhead bins operate like a highly competitive free-market experiment where the reward is storing a backpack. Airlines spent years unbundling ticket prices because customers wanted cheaper fares. Then customers became upset when they discovered that all the things previously included with tickets now cost extra. In fairness, both sides have a point.

The larger issue, however, was sitting directly beside me. The passenger in the middle seat occupied considerably more than one seat’s worth of space. For more than three hours, the dividing line between our seats became less of a border and more of a diplomatic suggestion. I don’t blame the passenger. I blame the seats. Airlines have spent decades shrinking them. At some point, the average American and the average airline seat began moving in opposite directions. Unfortunately, I had plenty of time to contemplate this issue because our flight remained parked at the gate for nearly ninety minutes.

During the safety inspection, a mechanic discovered unusual wear on one of the tires. This announcement is never encouraging. In my experience, airline maintenance updates usually means the start of looking for a hotel. The mechanic first consulted the manual. Then headquarters. Then measured the tire. Then apparently consulted headquarters again. Then there was a Zoom call. At that point, I became convinced that we were witnessing the world’s most bureaucratic tire evaluation. Normally, when a tire discussion reaches the Zoom stage, the outcome is not promising.

Since it was already after 10:30 p.m. on a Sunday, I began mentally preparing for the announcement that we would all be spending the night in Saint Louis. Miraculously, however, the tire survived the meeting. The flight was approved. We departed. I still wonder whether replacing the tire would have taken less time than debating it.

In the end, despite the long security lines, crowded airports, delayed flights, shrinking seats, and tire conferences, I still prefer flying. It remains the fastest and safest way to cross this country. Would I love a high-speed rail system? Absolutely. Do I expect one anytime soon? Not particularly. So for now, I’ll continue making the journey from Chadron to Newark the old-fashioned way. By spending an entire day in airports while accumulating enough observations to annoy readers with another Substack post.

The timing was fitting. Earlier that day, Chadron had been hit by a large hailstorm and flash flooding. Chadron sits in a dry part of the country, but in about an hour, it received more rain than it had seen since the snow melted. There was so much hail on the ground that, despite temperatures in the high seventies, it looked as if someone had emptied sacks of snow across town and then fled the scene.

Most of the hail was pea-sized, which meant it mostly ruined people’s gardens while leaving windows, roofs, and cars mercifully intact. A very Nebraska compromise, your home survives, but the tomatoes are sacrificed.

It is not that I have never lived through hailstorms. On the East Coast, I barely experienced them, but in the Midwest, they are practically civic events. The worst one I remember was in Hastings in 2005. That summer, out-of-state contractors poured into town to take advantage of the sudden demand for new shingles and gutters. I even worked under the table for a few weeks, doing eight-hour days. I was only sixteen.

The man I worked for remains vivid in my mind, mostly because he appeared physically incapable of going more than thirty seconds without a cigarette in his mouth. I had seen chain smokers before, but this man treated cigarettes like oxygen with branding. He claimed he was going back to Tennessee to get more supplies after two weeks of roofing houses. We never saw him again. Perhaps he is still on the road somewhere, driving through America in a truck full of shingles and Marlboros.

Another thing I remember about that storm is how oddly selective it was. In Hastings, the railroad divides the north and south sides of town. The storm seemed to understand municipal geography. It damaged the south side and spared much of the north, as if the clouds had been consulting a zoning map.

Yesterday, after the storm passed, Diya and I swung by the Mari Sandoz High Plains Heritage Center on Chadron State College’s campus to open the doors for the concert. Then we went home, changed out of our rain-and-hail clothes, and returned.

The concert itself was lovely. Nelda Swiggett played piano, while her husband, Clif, played drums and trombone. The music flowed with the subject matter, soft, uneasy, beautiful, and occasionally ominous, which is probably the correct soundtrack for discussing the planet at this point.

They spoke about birds and climate change, and the point that stayed with me was simple: humans can adapt, at least somewhat. Animals often cannot. Birds depend on timing. They migrate according to ancient clocks, but the clocks are now being tampered with by a species that also invented the leaf blower.

Spring can arrive weeks early. Sometimes there are false springs. Birds arrive expecting insects, nesting material, food, and the usual seasonal welcome basket, only to find that the timing is off. If they arrive late, the resources they need may already be gone. If they arrive during a false spring, the next cold snap can freeze the insects they depend on, and sometimes the birds themselves.

They also talked about fires. Birds are especially vulnerable to smoke. There is a reason miners once carried canaries into mines. Birds are more sensitive to toxins, which makes them useful warning systems and, rather unfortunately, victims of our habit of turning landscapes into chimneys.

And it is not as if Nebraska is immune. This year alone, the state has experienced major wildfires. The Great Plains are not some distant postcard where climate consequences happen politely off-screen. They are right here, burning, flooding, drying out, and then occasionally covering themselves in hail for theatrical effect.

Of course, some people still insist this is all natural. Nothing to see here. Just regular weather. Just a normal century. Just the earth coughing politely while the room fills with smoke.

The concert also touched on polar vortices, which always bring out a familiar chorus, “If climate change is real, why is it cold?” This argument usually arrives with the confidence of a man who has confused weather with climate and thinks the distinction is elitist. Yes, it can snow in Texas. No, that does not disprove climate change. That is like saying hunger is fake because you once ate lunch.

Trying to explain this to certain people is like trying to explain supply chains to a cat. The cat does not care how the food arrived. The cat cares that the food is in the bowl. If it is not in the bowl, the cat assumes you have personally failed civilization.

At the end of the concert, they gave us a pop quiz and a list of ways people can make environmentally friendly choices. I do believe small choices matter. I really do. But I also think we have become far too comfortable pretending that the fate of the planet hinges on whether I rinse out a yogurt container correctly while billion-dollar companies treat rivers like open sewers.

America has a talent for this. We are very good at making ordinary people feel responsible while letting the powerful write the terms of destruction. We tell people to recycle while allowing industries to pollute the air, water, and land at scales no household could ever dream of achieving. We scold individuals for plastic straws while entire systems are built around fossil fuels, overconsumption, sprawl, and the sacred American right to sit alone in traffic in a vehicle the size of a studio apartment.

We should still do our part. But our part should not become a moral smokescreen that lets corporations and policymakers stroll away whistling.

The rich and powerful have done a remarkable job convincing everyone else that the problem is either too complicated to understand or too inconvenient to fix. They have made education expensive, expertise suspicious, public goods unfashionable, and television loud enough to drown out thought. They have built a world where being informed is treated as pretentious and being confidently wrong is treated as authenticity.

This is not an accident. An educated public is harder to rob. A distracted public is easier to manage.

Then there is transportation. America has spent decades making reliable public transportation feel impossible, or worse, vaguely un-American. High-speed rail is treated like a fantasy, even though much of the developed world has already figured out that trains are not witchcraft. But if people can travel efficiently without buying cars, gasoline, insurance, and endless repairs, someone very wealthy becomes slightly less wealthy. Naturally, this cannot be allowed.

So we sit in traffic. We burn fuel. We build more lanes. Then we act surprised when the air gets worse, the weather gets stranger, and the birds begin to disappear.

Industry, too, has been allowed to pollute public goods while keeping private profits. The public gets the sludge, the smoke, the asthma, the poisoned water, the flooded towns, and the burned habitats. The executives get bonuses, retreats, and perhaps a tasteful beach house somewhere far from the consequences.

It is a beautiful system, if you are a ghoul.

So what do we do?

For one, we stop pretending this is only about individual virtue. Yes, recycle. Yes, consume less. Yes, think about what you eat, drive, buy, and waste. Those things matter. But they are not enough. We need regulation with teeth. We need public transportation that is actually public and actually transportation. We need to make pollution expensive for the people who profit from it, not merely inconvenient for the people who suffer from it.

We also need to read more and be lied to less. Turn off some of the noise. Pick up a book. Learn how systems work. Ask who benefits when you are angry at the wrong person. Do your own research, not the kind that involves watching a man yell in a studio, but the kind that requires patience, evidence, and the occasional admission that you may have been wrong.

America was not supposed to be a land where the richest people could strip public goods for parts while everyone else argues over the scraps. At least, that is not the version we like to tell ourselves. We talk endlessly about freedom, but freedom means very little if the air is poisoned, the water is unsafe, the land is burning, and the birds no longer know when to come home.

The concert was called For the Birds. It was small, gentle, and earnest. Outside, the town was still drying out from a storm that had briefly made May look like winter. Inside, two musicians reminded us that birds are not simply background decoration for our lives. They are witnesses. They are warnings. They are living clocks.

And lately, the clocks seem confused.

Which should worry us. Because when the birds are in trouble, it usually means we are not far behind.

When I think of her, I already see the next eighteen years playing out in front of me. I know life will not go exactly as I picture it. Hell, maybe none of what I picture will happen. But that does not make me any less excited for those future moments. I cannot wait to show her my favorite shows, teach her how to drive, take her to sporting events, and read to her while she is still small enough to think my voice is the most interesting sound in the room.

Still, setting up the crib made me wonder what kind of world she is about to enter. Extremist politics, climate change, artificial intelligence, a tidy little welcome basket from the twenty-first century. How do we parent and teach a child in a world that seems determined to be both advanced and deeply ridiculous?

It is funny to think that millennials may be the best generation at using computers. The generation before us did not have computers until adulthood. Younger generations have grown up with technology their whole lives, but software has become so user-friendly that many people cannot handle it when something goes wrong. Millennials, meanwhile, had to learn to use computers when they were still useful but still openly hostile. We had to troubleshoot. We had to install things. We had to watch the family computer make noises that suggested it was either connecting to the internet or contacting the dead.

Maybe our daughter will benefit from that experience. I do love going into long explanations about the history of everything, which may delight her or make her flee the room. Time will tell. Maybe that is why I love digitizing memories. Maybe that is why I should have been a history professor. I have always believed that you cannot explain the present without explaining how we got here.

That applies not only to the world, but also to the operating procedures I write at work. People forget why we do things. They see a rule or a process and think it appeared out of nowhere, conjured by some joyless committee with a fondness for forms. But usually, a rule exists because something went wrong. There was an error here, a problem there, and now we have a procedure to prevent it from happening again.

The same is true of regulations, which people love to complain about until the alternative arrives and ruins everyone’s afternoon. Some people act as if regulations were invented purely to annoy business owners. But many of them were created because, at some point, someone made a mess large enough that society had to say, “Right, perhaps we should not do that again.” People forget struggles quickly. The years around the 2008 financial crisis were dark, but for those who spend their days drifting between sports, television, and selective memory, it is as if that period never happened. That forgetfulness worries me.

In politics, I keep hoping people will grow tired of extremism. So far, this has not been a winning prediction. Trump was an extremist from 2017 to 2021. Biden was a moderate from 2021 to 2025. Yet people forgot how turbulent those Trump years were and voted the clown back into office. Trump helped create extremists on both sides. The more extreme one side becomes, the more the other side sharpens its knives. So, in 2028, I would not be surprised if the Democrats respond with their own extremist. That is how pendulums work when no one bothers to install brakes.

Is there hope for a return to moderation? I want to believe there is, but I doubt it will happen easily. The way people interact now makes moderation harder. I can keep my daughter off social media until she is older, but I cannot keep her away from everyone else who is already using it. Social media has some good uses, but I think something broke when endless scrolling became normal. The algorithms are not designed to make people wiser, kinder, or more thoughtful. They are designed to keep people staring. In fairness, they are very good at their jobs, which is more than can be said for many humans.

In the past, people met in bars, churches, potlucks, and other shared spaces. Extreme ideas could still exist, of course, but they were more likely to be challenged by ordinary people standing nearby with potato salad and common sense. Now, people can disappear into online corners where their worst thoughts are not corrected but applauded. Extremism no longer has to survive in public. It can grow comfortably in private, fed by strangers who mistake outrage for insight.

I have seen this in my own family. I cannot count how many times I have watched someone post a picture of a person of color and claim they committed some horrible crime, only for the story to be false. And the person sharing it would not take fifteen seconds to check. I saw parents, aunts, cousins, and other relatives post racist, sexist, and completely false things. I lost respect for many of them. I do not say that lightly.

For me, I always wanted to know more before I shared something. I wanted to verify it. I wanted the details. I wanted the nitty-gritty. But many people wanted something else, to be accepted by people they were never going to meet. Somehow, the “cool crowd” from high school became an online mob of strangers, only now some of them are white nationalists in Idaho building bunkers for race wars that exist mostly in their own fever dreams. A normal and healthy development, obviously.

Protecting my daughter from that world will be one of my goals. Maybe people will grow tired of the internet and crave real human connection again. We are social animals, and the fake connections we get online cannot sustain us forever. They mimic community without providing much of what community actually gives: accountability, patience, humor, forgiveness, and the ability to tell someone, gently or not, that they are being an idiot.

Maybe people will also begin to see that blind loyalty to political parties keeps us divided. Loyalty is often a trait the rich want to instill in everyone else. Keep buying the cheap product, keep working under bad conditions, keep defending the system that benefits someone above you. It is strange how people can be more loyal to a car company, a political party, or a brand than to the people who actually matter, their spouse, their children, and their immediate family.

And if extremism is not enough to worry about, there is climate change. Any reasonable person can see that climate change is happening. The data is there. Even our grandparents and parents talk about how winters used to be colder and snowier. And they are right. I may add data to this later, but I have done my own research and run the numbers. One of the biggest changes is that low temperatures are rising faster than high temperatures. Anyone can pull weather data for their own area and see it, especially in America, where we have nearly a century of local data available in many places. If you are skeptical, then I invite you to do your own research. It would probably be good to take a break from scrolling to put together a pivot table.

I fear that the time to save the planet may already be passing. But maybe I am wrong. Humans have always found new solutions, often after exhausting every worst option first. Perhaps we will find ways to make the planet better. I hope so. But Americans may have to rely on other countries, because our current administration seems intent on making climate research disappear with a snap of its pudgy fingers. I hope universities in India, France, and elsewhere help lead the way. America is no longer acting like the world's leader. At the moment, it is auditioning for the role of cautionary tale. England, if it is not careful, may join us in the sequel.

Then there is AI. How do I protect my daughter from AI? Or will she need protection from it at all? If AI became smart enough, could it hack into the world’s nuclear missiles and end civilization, as portrayed in the Mission Impossible movies? Possibly. Though given my experience with technology, it would probably first ask us to verify we are not robots.

I have been using AI for the past four years, and my view is that AI is only as useful as the person using it. In my profession, AI is widening the gap between those who know what they are doing and those who do not. You still need to understand the concepts. If you do not know what you need, AI will not magically get you there. It can suggest things, yes, but there is no substitute for knowing what you are looking for.

For people with experience and knowledge, AI can speed up work. I had already been working with VBA and queries before AI became widely available. Now that my colleagues are also using AI, they can automate more than before, but the gap remains. AI can help, but it is not always right. Just the other day, Google’s Gemini told me that six was greater than seven, which was bold. Incorrect, but bold.

That is why I want to teach my daughter how to think and create without depending on AI. If she learns the underlying skills first, then when she does use AI, it can make her faster. But if she relies on it before she has built those skills, it may make her weaker.

My deeper concern is not that AI will destroy humanity in one dramatic nuclear event. My concern is quieter, that people will outsource their creativity to it. Those who use AI to create all their images, stories, ideas, and art risk losing something essential. There is a dullness in merely breathing without anything original going on in your head. People need to create, write, draw, take pictures, build things, garden, and learn. These are not hobbies in some trivial sense. They are part of what makes us human.

I have nothing against AI. I use it. I think it can be valuable. But I believe people often use it incorrectly. AI should be something you delegate work to. You are the boss, AI is the worker bee. It can help organize, edit, summarize, or speed things along. But when you ask it to become the source of your ideas, you begin draining your own skills. You outsource not just the task, but the muscle.

So protecting my daughter’s creativity will matter. I want her to play with Lincoln Logs and building blocks. I want her to paint, garden, read, imagine, and make things badly before she makes them well. I want her to know the pleasure of creating something that did not exist before, even if that something is just a lopsided drawing, a muddy garden bed, or a story about a dragon who inexplicably works in accounting.

As I sit here writing this, the crib is now in the corner. I already have the next eighteen years mapped out in my head, which is both beautiful and completely unreasonable. I will show her Doctor Who when she is young, read Agatha Christie novels to her when she is older, and try to help her think outside the box, or at least notice when someone is trying to sell her the box at a markup.

I do not want her raised by social media or parked endlessly in front of a television. I want her outside, in nature, with books, with art, with dirt under her fingernails and questions in her head. I know it will not go exactly according to plan. Children, I am told, have their own opinions about these things. But I am patient, and I can be flexible.

I cannot wait for her to come into this world. I cannot wait for the years ahead when I get to guide her, teach her, learn from her, and watch her become whoever she is meant to be.

The crib is ready.

Now we wait.

Most of these memories play back in my mind like a VCR tape would in the day. Which brings me to this incredible week, when I received the first shipment of digitized tapes.

Digitizing has been one of my main goals since 2016. I started with the photo albums, using an Epson V600 to scan hundreds of photographs. While I didn’t always have time to scan, it took roughly four years to complete that process. Then came the 35mm negatives, which I started in 2024. It wasn’t until the end of spring this year that I was able to properly archive all of those. And both of those processes brought back many amazing memories. But photographs can only tell so much of the story.

Recently, I received some of the VCR tapes my grandparents had after my grandmother passed away. I had other VCR tapes sitting around that I needed to digitize as well, but I decided to start with the ones I had received from my grandmother. After about a six-week wait from the time I placed the order, I received the digital copies of the 12 tapes.

Unfortunately, two of the tapes were completely VCR recordings of movies and news from those time periods. Three more were half memories, half recordings of things on the telly. Which feels right for the VCR era. One minute you are watching a treasured family moment, and the next you are watching a weather report from 1992 as if it were part of the family archive.

Each tape also had many memories that needed to be split out, including some that will never be shown. Apparently, parents in the late 80s and early 90s loved to videotape their children being bathed, from the day they were born through the day they could start showering on their own. This was apparently normal. We survived, but only just.

As of today, I have four of the videotapes broken out and posted the videos on YouTube to share. Of course, I will not release them all at once, and I have decided that using my Substack would be an appropriate place to share these memories. While I know the audience is small, maybe these posts will be appreciated one day. Or, at the very least, they will confuse a future archivist.

The first memory I would like to share is from October 11, 1991. It is a short clip, only around three and a half minutes. It features both my brother Mark and me as we put on our Halloween costumes. It is mentioned that it is actually the first time I have dressed up for Halloween, as I find people wearing masks scary.

There are a lot of emotions that come when watching these old videos. If you do not get emotional watching the small person you used to be, then there should be questions. It isn’t that I want to be that person again, but it is interesting to see the person I was. Because all throughout our lives, we are different people. I am not the same person I was when I was three, nor the same person I was at 10 or 26, or even today. I have always believed that a person should never stop learning, never stop evolving in life. If I were the same person I was when I came out of high school, I would very much want to question myself. Preferably in writing.

But another part of these memories was seeing family life. It is interesting how families functioned before your crazy parents and uncles decided that a man who wears more makeup than a regional theatre production of Cats was more believable than their own children. It is that same family member who says politics shouldn’t come between family, but then continues to support someone who wants to tear their family apart. It is hard to reconcile.

Truthfully, as I am about to become a parent, I know this much: I would never support a clown over my own child. Not even a very convincing clown. Not even one with a flag behind him and a poorly fitted suit.

It is crazy to think how much one man can divide families. And let’s not forget, this is a man who is a convicted felon, has bankrupted multiple businesses, and tells so many lies that if I had a nickel for each one, I would probably be a trillionaire at this point. He has also said things about his own daughter that should make any decent person quietly leave the room and not come back.

It is sad watching these videos, realizing that those family moments will never happen again. And I am not sorry for it. I cannot love someone who supports someone who wants to tear my family apart. If they want to say they didn’t know how crazy he was, they shouldn’t support someone without doing their research. He was telling everyone exactly who he was for years. Subtlety was never his burden.

But this is part of a broader subject. Political parties are toxic. They allow people to be ignorant and support people without having to do the work. People are so brainwashed in America that they do not seem to care if it means cutting their children out of their lives to support a clown.

I mean, I was three, in that clown outfit, and I had more intelligence than the current President. That is not a sentence I expected to write in a reflection on childhood memories, but history has been very inconsiderate lately. And while some are reading this as if I’m only against Republicans, I’m not. Democrats are not innocent in this either.

George Washington, in his farewell speech, spoke out against political parties. And I am a firm believer that these parties are America’s downfall. Both of these parties are run by huge donors, who will keep us separate as they steal all the public goods. And for those who do not know what a public good is, it is a good for all of America to enjoy, not for the rich to own, poison, package, and sell back to us with a subscription fee. Just the other day, the current administration rolled back water safety standards, just to ensure that us 99% could have a higher risk of cancer. So yay, that was a win for America. Nothing says greatness quite like a glass of tap water with a warning label.

What a joke.

So I will look back at myself dressing as a clown, not knowing I was really dressing as the future President, all those years ago. And you know what? I am still a person afraid of masks, because I do not know what the clown with a mask full of orange makeup will do next.

Today, most cars available to the average consumer can easily outperform the 14 to 17 miles per gallon advertised by the 1941 Cadillac, which is comforting, I suppose, in the same way it is comforting to learn that modern medicine has advanced beyond leeches. Fuel efficiency is now treated as a major selling point in much of the world. In America, however, its importance tends to rise and fall with the price displayed on the gas station sign. When gas is cheap, we rediscover our love of size, horsepower, and vehicles large enough to suggest we are preparing to tow a house.

Having lived in several regions of the United States, I have come to believe that Americans care about fuel efficiency in the same way they care about flossing: sincerely, briefly, and usually after something has gone wrong. Gas prices rise, and suddenly everyone becomes an amateur energy economist. Gas prices fall, and we return to our regularly scheduled programming: large vehicles, vague lifestyle justifications, and the quiet belief that the laws of physics are negotiable if the monthly payment is low enough.

The last few major gas-price panics: the 2008 depression, the COVID-era disruption, and Trump’s attempt at creating WWIII, all produced the same temporary revelation: maybe driving a vehicle that drinks fuel like it has unresolved emotional needs is expensive. But the revelation never lasts. Once the price at the pump becomes tolerable again, fuel economy goes back to being something people claim to value while shopping for the automotive equivalent of a studio apartment.

Across blue states and red states alike, Americans have found ways to make poor fuel economy feel like a personality trait. In the Midwest, this often takes the form of the oversized pickup truck. A vehicle theoretically designed for hauling lumber, livestock, and equipment, but frequently used to transport one laptop bag and a sack of groceries from Walmart. High school and college parking lots are full of trucks large enough to suggest their owners are operating a small ranch, though the nearest many of them get to livestock is ordering a burger after class.

Could many of these drivers get by with a Toyota or Honda that gets three or four times the fuel economy? Of course. But then the vehicle would merely function as transportation, which is apparently not the assignment. The truck is doing other work. It signals toughness, independence, masculinity, and a general willingness to reverse into parking spaces with unnecessary confidence.

The coastal version is not that different. There, the truck is often replaced by the Jeep. A vehicle purchased, at least in theory, for off-roading and communion with the wilderness. In practice, many Jeeps seem to spend their lives driving to state parks, parking beside Corollas, and proving that a person can love nature while burning through gas with impressive commitment. A Prius may get you to the same trailhead, but it does not say, “I have a complicated relationship with REI.”

If gas prices stay high, I imagine we will see another brief national shift toward fuel efficiency. The same country that once shed Hummers in the late aughts may rediscover the compact car with the solemnity of a people uncovering fire. There will be earnest conversations about hybrids. Someone’s neighbor will sell a Jeep and call it “a financial decision,” as though the vehicle had not spent the previous five years making the same argument from the driveway.

But eventually, if prices fall, the lesson will probably evaporate. It usually does. Americans will once again remember that what they truly wanted was not the economy, exactly, but presence. Height, weight, chrome, clearance, the ability to look prepared for weather that is not happening. The 1941 Cadillac promised 14 to 17 miles per gallon as evidence of restraint. Nearly a century later, plenty of us are still getting the same mileage. Only now we call it a lifestyle.

One of the biggest issues I have with American food culture is how much we have allowed ourselves to be ruled by chains. From McDonald’s and Burger King to more regional chains like Runza and Grotto Pizza, they have taken over a lot of the restaurant landscape. I get why chains are popular. They are predictable, fast, and unlikely to startle anyone. But predictability is not the same thing as flavor, and convenience is not the same thing as an experience. The best restaurants I have found in cities have usually been created by people with a real passion for food: the child who grew up in the city and wanted to build something of their own, or the immigrant showcasing the food of their home in a new country. They are not only feeding the hungry; they are giving people an experience of flavor. That is why I was surprised, in the best way, to come across The Silk Road Experience in Hot Springs, South Dakota.

In the Black Hills region, it is rare to find a restaurant operating out of an alleyway, though that is a common enough sight in cities around the world. Around here, “alleyway restaurant” is not usually the phrase that comes to mind when making dinner plans. All the seating is outdoors, split between shaded tables and open-air tables. There was even a clear snow-globe-like enclosure that my wife and I enjoyed as an unexpected shower moved through the region while we ate. The shaded seating area has tapestries adorning the walls, giving the space a character that matches the food. At first glance, it may look like it was put together randomly, but that is part of what makes it special. It does not try to be something it is not, which is a trap many restaurants in America have fallen into. The atmosphere feels more like something you would stumble upon in a bigger city, such as New York or D.C., than something you would expect to find tucked away in Hot Springs, South Dakota.

I have found that lamb is one of the hardest meats for restaurants to get right. Even for me, someone who grew up cooking lamb often, getting it tender and full of flavor was difficult. Many times, when I order lamb in America, whether in cities or small towns, the words I would usually use to describe it are: tough, uneventful, bland, and desperately waiting for a sauce to rescue it. But to my wonderful surprise, The Silk Road Experience defied all of those words with their smoked lamb masala. Every bite was rich and layered, with the smoke coming through without overpowering the masala. The lamb was tender, the sauce had depth, and the dish felt like something someone had actually cared about making. Served with basmati rice and garlic naan, it was easily the kind of meal that gives me an excuse to drive an hour back to Hot Springs.

Another outstanding part of the meal was the garlic naan. I was a little surprised to find that it was not as fluffy as the naan I had had at many other restaurants. If I had to describe it, I would say it reminded me more of pita bread than traditional naan. But that did not take away from how enjoyable it was. It was crisp, but not hard, and it balanced beautifully with the rice and lamb. While it is normal to break the naan apart and use it to scoop up the entrée, I have always been someone who enjoys naan by itself, because apparently, I believe bread deserves its own spotlight. This naan could stand on its own, and honestly, it might be reason enough for me to come back.

The Silk Road Experience in Hot Springs brings real flavor to this region. It defies what too many small towns in America have become: places where the same chains appear from coast to coast, offering familiarity, fries, and very few surprises. That is why I would recommend it to anyone in the Black Hills region. For those who grew up on the typical American diet, the food is flavorful without being overly spicy. It is a great introduction to a cuisine that originated outside our borders, and it is a reminder that small towns do not have to settle for the same predictable options.

We had just gotten our cat, Lucky, and my brother and I had spent the night camped out in our basement with our new cat. My maternal grandmother had called that night, like many other nights in the past month, to talk to my mother. I declined to talk to her. The next morning, we were awakened by my paternal grandparents, who explained that my other grandmother had been in a plane accident, and she had passed away.

It has been over 25 years since I lost my maternal grandmother, and this past month, I lost my paternal grandmother to natural causes.

I cannot remember the exact first memory of my paternal grandmother, though my memory may be influenced by the pictures I have recently scanned from when I was a baby.

Growing up as an Air Force brat meant living away from much of your family when you were younger. Grandparents, cousins, aunts, and uncles were occasional visits, not trips across town. I remember visits growing up, meeting them on summer vacations, trips to the Black Hills in South Dakota, and the visits we made while living in North Dakota. There were also times when my mom and dad would drop my brother and me off at their house during school breaks.

Those summers will probably live with me forever. I remember sleeping in their basement, which had the wood paneling of the 70s and a matching blue-and-green shag carpet. They kept their older tube television in the basement. When we were not running back and forth to the old Oswego Pool in Hastings, we would hook up our N64 or Super Nintendo and play games during those summer visits. The best part of our stay was on the weekends, when they would get us these delicious, gooey, monstrous cinnamon rolls from the OK Cafe.

After my father retired from the Air Force, we moved to his childhood home of Hastings, where my grandparents had lived since getting married in their teens. That opened up a new realm of visits with them. The memories that come to mind first are Nebraska football games.

If you lived in Nebraska between the 60s and early 00s, you knew those games were close to a religious experience. Bars showing the games would be packed, pizzerias would be overfilled with orders, and there would hardly be a soul not sitting in front of the television watching the game. Even the week leading up to the game was an experience in itself. School teachers would give candy to kids wearing Nebraska shirts on Friday, and extra credit to the student who picked the closest score. Local businesses would put their score predictions on the board, always in favor of the Big Red.

For us, it meant game days in my grandparents’ basement. Even though their kids and grandkids had nicer television sets, we all came to watch those games with them.

Each game day followed the same program. During the first half, there was soda and candy to snack on. At halftime, Papa Ray’s Pizza hamburger pizza was brought in. Then came popcorn made on the stove and served in brown grocery bags for the second half. After the game, there were card games, and a chance to discuss the game we had just watched.

Those memories will stay with me forever: the few special weekends throughout fall and winter when all college football games still seemed to happen on Saturdays. I will miss watching the games with my grandmother, who would pray for turnovers and touchdowns. I will miss when she would ask if there was a fumble because the television was so blurry we could not tell if the ball had popped loose. I will miss the popcorn in those brown paper bags, which ruined microwave popcorn for me for life. I will miss the card games, whether they happened after the game or during other visits unrelated to Nebraska games.

After leaving Hastings for college, I would call my grandparents almost every weekend, normally on Sundays. Because my grandfather is deaf, I spent most of that time talking to my grandmother. We would talk about everything: the weather, politics, family news, and, of course, Nebraska football.

She would end almost every call by saying that she enjoyed talking to us because she learned something new. Most of the time, that meant something I was learning during my college days, from my undergraduate studies to my master’s degree. She would also bring up anytime she had seen the place where we were living in the news, whether that was Lincoln, Delaware, or Chadron. She would say something like, “I saw there was a storm heading toward Philadelphia. Did that include you guys?” Or, “The Eagles game was getting a lot of snow. Did you also get a lot of snow?”

Now that she has passed away, her phone number will live forever in my memory. I will miss those calls. They were a Sunday tradition, as much as going to church in the morning.

It has not been a full month since she passed away. We visited her a week before she died, during Easter break. When we visited her for the last time, she had been at Mary Lanning Hospital for the past three months. She kept talking about when she would be released, because she was tired of all the hospital food. During that visit, it felt strange: it was the first time I had visited Hastings and had not gone to their house to see them.

But she was still in good spirits when we saw her over Easter weekend. And for the first time since arriving at the hospital, she finally got what she was craving: spaghetti.

As I write this now, and as all the memories come back, there is so much more I could say. I could write about the summers I spent there as a child, how they would drop us off at the pool, or the chest of toys we would play with, filled with treasures from the 60s to the 90s. There were times they would take us to the movies downtown, or get us McDonald’s so we could get the toy in the Happy Meal. There were May Day baskets we would make, mud pies, Easter eggs filled with dollar bills, and Wendy’s Frostys they would store in their freezer. There was the cookie drawer, filled with wafers and frosted oatmeal cookies. There were the years we would call “Elvis and Granny” for giggles.

But it will be the conversations I feel most, the phone calls, the card games, the weather reports, the family updates, the football talk, and the small questions that made distance feel smaller.

Her phone number is still in my memory. I imagine it always will be.