Truck cap has been installed
At 4 PM, I will ride downtown and catch the Bus Plus to New Karner Station. I paid before having it installed, as I didn’t want to hold the check all day, and honestly, if Andy Ruth has my $60,000 truck, I doubt he’s going to steal a $5,000 check. Plus he’s been good in the past with last truck cap I bought for him in 2012. He said he would be there until 5:30 PM but I am hoping to be there sooner then that, as I also need to get that Group 27 battery box to mount the second battery, maybe some more butt connectors and two-sided sticky tape at Wally World Albany Edition next to the Rapp Road Garbage Dump (I don’t feel bad for all that plastic crap I’ve burnt over the years), and maybe see if I can break some bike spokes riding around Blueberry Hill on my Mountain Bike. I mean, why not? And then off to the Guilderland Town Board to thank them for preserving 16 acres just over the town-city line along Blueberry Hill parcel.
The Mid-Life as a Non-Renewable Resource
The technical ghost of that phrase—“irreversible commitment”—haunts the middle-aged mind because it highlights the one thing no one likes to admit: life is a zero-sum game. At forty-five, the math is no longer theoretical. Every dollar tucked away for a distant, quiet retirement is a mountain I won’t climb this year; the money spent on Ford SuperDuty and my camping rig is money I can’t spend on my off-grid homestead when I retire.
Nothing is free. To live deeply now is to tax the person I will become; to save obsessively for later is to starve the person I am today.
We are told we can “have it all,” but the middle years teach us that we can only have trade-offs. I am the architect of a bridge between two versions of myself: the one who is single, free to spend weekends camping in wood, riding trail, having fires and smoking weed, floating down rivers, and the one who eventually wants the off-grid homestead, with livestock and freedom of wilderness. If I overbuild for the latter, not by the truck, spend my even more of my money investing for a person I haven’t met yet, while the current version of me feels stuck and unable to enjoy life today.
The compromise is where the poetry lives. It’s in the “intentional dent” I put in my savings to buy a memory that will outlast the currency it cost. It’s the realization that while I am “wasting” a resource that won’t be available tomorrow on the truck, I am preventing a far more tragic waste: the expiration of an opportunity. There is no compound interest on a sunset seen through 43-year-old eyes.
This isn’t an argument for recklessness; it’s an argument for conscious sacrifice. It’s about looking at my bank account and my calendar and saying: “I will trade this piece of my future safety for this piece of present soul.” It is a somber, hopeful contract. I am willing to let my future be a little leaner so that my history can be a little fatter.
The “cost” is real. The resources are truly irretrievable. Money spent on the big truck won’t be in my investment or savings account. But the hope lies in the balance—in finding that sweet, narrow ridge where I save enough to be safe, but spend enough to be certain I actually lived. I want to arrive at retirement not just with a full ledger, but with a heart so heavily “committed” to the world that the money wouldn’t have known what to do with itself anyway.
Maybe filing that ticket fixed my blog after all 💻
Last Friday, my blog went down. I’ve been having a lot of performance issues with my blog, despite trying to fix whatever I could find to reduce slow queries, bad code, and enabling caching wherever possible. I didn’t think I caused the problem, but I had hoped it was something I could fix. I couldn’t, so I reached out to my web host’s tech support, and while they never gave me an answer – they said the issue went away on it’s own and could not be reproduced – since whatever they did behind scenes, the blog has been loading faster and with no reported downtime in recent days. And blog revenue is back up again.