THE SUBURBS

I keep hearing this term "managed decline" lately but I don't see much managing from where I'm standing. Just the decline.

It only seems like yesterday it was the 90's and the Western world seemed like one giant safe space. Or at least America did. Easy for you to say, I can hear some of you call out from your glasshouses - you were just a white American surburban kid - muh privilege.

Yeah, well, the wheels have come off the star spangled bus now and I ain't blind to what's going on around me, even though I sometimes wish I was. The crazy thing about it is I now find as I'm getting older, America is getting increasingly broken as if my ageing is in some kind of symbiosis with the degrading of the place I grew up in. We all kind of anticipated it; I just didn't personally expect it to break apart so quickly the way it has. 9/11 was a definitive turning point in the recent history of the country where shit started to change for the worse. My mother (God bless her) took me to the WTC ten years before they got blown up and we stood on top of the South Tower watching the cargo ships moving up the Hudson River and I remember thinking how peaceful it all seemed up there on the "Top Of The World" 107th floor.

Now all I can think about is how that view is gone forever, blasted into non-existence and yet I'm still standing.

When I was teenager, riding my bike on summer nights in a BMX flotilla with my friends, I never imagined there would come a time where I would believe there was a synergy between the well-being of my own life and the well-being of the country, but now I get it. Your environment defines you in the end. None of us wanted to end up living in an American dystopia but here we are. I guess all that junk food and trash TV finally caught up with us. Good job my old man showed me all those post-apocalypse movies such as The Omega Man, Soylent Green and Mad Max, otherwise I would never have believed such an outcome was possible for this nation of ours. I didn't appreciate at the time they were 'how to' survival guides for us all back then when we watched them on the old man's VCR in his garage turned man cave.

The saddest part about it is me and my friends had such hopes for our future and then slowly like a withering party balloon we had our dreams deflated. I gave it my best push for a decade or two but now I can't see anyway out of the hellscape. No amount of personal development books or Ted Talks can save us now, I'm afraid. Better that we hand over the reins to the oncoming robot revolution.

They keep talking about this fusion between human and robots but in humanity's current state I'm not even sure what any robot would gain from us, to be honest about it.

I seriously doubt any T-1000 would have much use for what I got to offer them.

Except my soul. But they're not getting that. No matter how down trodden I get from here on in, no matter how demoralised, I'll still have my soul.

Late last night I was clearing out my late dad's garage and found my old 1987 Summit Freestyle in there. I can't explain why it made me cry seeing it again after all these years but it did.

I oiled the rusty chain with some gear oil and got it moving. Reminded me for some reason of when Dorothy oils the the Tin Man's rusted joints in The Wizard Of Oz movie. I half expected the old free flight to start talking to me. Another sign I'm getting more sentimental as I get older.

Tonight I took it out for my first ride in twenty years or more. As I pedalled like a demon round all my old neighbourhood haunts I felt as if my long cherished BMX was a time machine and I was re-living something I thought I'd lost for good.

Who knows, maybe I'm managing my own decline but it occurred to me while I cycled through the empty parks of my youth that just like the wind, memories are unbreakable.

Turns out, some things can't be destroyed after all.