Expensive neighbourhoods are all the same, but every cheap neighbourhood is cheap in its own way. The rise of the cool rooftop is a reminder of how wealth has changed. When the goal was bright lights, tall buildings, gold, diamonds and marble, everything came together nicely. Opulence and success, hand in glove. However, modern opulence isn't based on the scarcity of goods but experiences. Hanging out with artists, going to dive bars before they get popular, claiming the cachet of a less wealthy life. Of course, you can still buy these things, and many do. Thus the cheap part of town becomes the expensive part of town, and the experiential wealth slips further away, gripped too tightly by the invisible hand.
There's something hellish about the subway. It's dark, hot, and the smell is violent. Inside the tin cars, the people glorp together into an undifferentiated sweaty mass, like pasta that's been left out for too long. None of us want to get on the subway, it's just something that we endure to get where we're going. Finally, we crawl from the grimy dark up into the light and space of the city, and it's hard to believe how different it is. Like two worlds, one built on top of the other.
It's one thing to see the skyscrapers from a distance, quite another to be nestled in between them. Just the sheer tonnage, all that concrete and steel, that raw power. It's breathtaking. You feel like an ant, or an explorer picking their way through the relics of some ancient and unimaginably powerful civilisation. Who made these enormous affronts to gravity? These mighty digits pointed up at the cold universe that birthed us if to say "your move, punk".
I am writing this failure from the future – spooky! I was away on holiday for the month following this post. My original plan was to keep writing while I was away, but a few things conspired to make that difficult: I was still getting myself sorted out from my previous failure, and my preparation for leaving took up time that I would normally use for fixing it. The ultimate outcome was that I was still behind when I got on the plane, and I couldn't really get around to sorting everything out until I got home.
I did keep writing, just not publishing, and so I have a backlog of a month's worth of travel posts to put up. Rather than drop them all at once, I'll be releasing them in blocks of 5 each day starting tomorrow so that they're not impossible to follow for anyone who'd care to. At that rate, I should be back to real-time by next week.
Clearly, my concerns about this oscillating pattern of failing and catching up are starting to look pretty well founded. I have a plan to fix it that will probably take a couple months to sort out, but more on that later.
I've been thinking about travelling recently. It can be kind of a hassle with the waiting around at the airport, security checks, baggage and so on. The main thing is just how much it takes away from your day. Even a trip of a few hours can basically eat up all your time once you take all the incidental stuff into account.
One thing that's always made me feel like I'm cheating the system is overnight travel. Many international train services in Europe, for example, offer an overnight sleeper option. If you play your cards right, all the wasted travel time happens while you'd be asleep anyway, so you basically get it for free. Of course, you still have to be awake for all the incidental stuff, which makes this system much more compelling for rail than air travel because of the lesser security requirements.
I'm wondering if you could go even further with this idea and have a kind of door-to-door human cargo service. You order a little pod, like one of those Japanese capsule hotels, to act as kind of personal shipping container. You load your stuff into it, get in and go to bed. During the night, the pod is loaded onto a vehicle which takes it to an airport or train station where it is carried on to its destination. From your perspective, you go to sleep in one place, wake up in another, and all the logistics are taken care of for you.
There are some pretty large open questions, particularly around security and what happens if you need to leave your pod. The nice thing about each passenger being isolated is that you wouldn't need to do carry-on security checks, and checked baggage could be in a special compartment so it can be screened while you're alseep without disturbing you. Maybe you could have some isolation system so that if there's a common area like a bathroom then only one passenger is allowed out at a time to use it.
There'd also be a pretty hard limit around journey length. Obviously if the total time is more than 8 hours, this system becomes a lot less attractive. Still, the idea of getting your travel time for free seems so compelling that it'd be worth investigating. For many situations you might even be able to replace long-haul flights with a series of short-term pod jumps.