What Keeps You Up At Night?

I have returned from a week of site work in Gunnison, a town in Colorado known for recording some of the coldest temperatures in the state. It was a tough week. We got lucky, in a way; the winter has been very mild so far this year and it wasn’t as brutal as it could have been. Even so, it was exhausting, and I returned to the office to find more fires burning that had to be put out. This weekend is the first chance I’ve had in months to relax.

There are days when it hits all at once.

Not with drama, not with some cinematic lightning bolt—just a quiet, ugly little realization while I’m doing something stupidly ordinary. Pulling a car cover over a truck that now lives outside. Watching rust creep in just a little farther. Noticing how the edges of everything I care about are a bit more frayed than they were last year.

Nothing catastrophic. Nothing headline-worthy. Just that low-level hum:

• This is all going away.
• You’re going away.
• And maybe none of it will matter.

That’s what keeps me up at night.

Fear vs. Loss (The Two Four-Letter Words)

When I tried to boil down my motives for writing this blog into a single four-letter word, the first one that came to mind was fear. A good friend who has suffered through years of my decisions, rants, and obsessions—came back with a different 4-letter word: loss. Seems to me that they’re the same thing from two angles.

Loss is what’s already happened: the people, places, and times that are gone. Fear is what happens when you project that forward and realize it’s only going to keep happening, over and over, until it’s your turn.

I’m not especially afraid of dying in the abstract. Everyone gets that ticket punched sooner or later. What really gets its fingers around my throat is the idea of being forgotten; the idea that the things that mattered to me will be smoothed over and paved into “content;” the idea that my entire life becomes, at best, a vague memory, a misfiled box, a “oh yeah, that guy was really into… cars? music? something?”

It’s the fear of erasure: Full stop.That’s the thing pacing through the halls at 3:17 a.m. while I stare at the ceiling.

A Hungry Ghost With a Label Maker

So what do you do when you’re afraid of being erased?

In my case, you document like hell.

• You build an HO-scale raceway with named turns, storylines, hospital admissions, and a fully functioning miniature mythos.
• You write long blog posts about malls that don’t exist anymore, a garage that vanished in a puff of bureaucracy, the way “investment culture” has turned childhood toys into speculative chips.
• You track vinyl pressings by matrix numbers and obscure label variations.

From the outside, it probably looks like nostalgia fueled by OCD. From the inside, it feels like triage.

In the aftermath of the events of this fall, everything around me suddenly feels “temporary:” the garage and workshop I had for years? Gone. The albums that once felt essential now reduced to thumbnails on a streaming app—if they’re there at all. The places I learned to be myself turned into “redeveloped mixed-use experiences” with nowhere to just sit and be.

So I label. I archive. I write. I build.

Call it obsessive if you want. For me, it’s a way of standing in front of the bulldozer and at least scribbling the names of things on a clipboard before they get flattened.

Hungry ghosts calling “remember me,” yes—but also “remember this. Remember that it was real.”

Time: The Slow, Patient Vandal

Rust is one of my native languages.

I’ve watched metal go from “patina” to “terminal” enough times to know the difference. The line where something stops being “fixable with effort” and starts being “fixable only in theory, if you had infinite money and the laws of physics on your side.”

That line exists everywhere:

• in machines
• in bodies
• in relationships
• in neighborhoods
• in scenes and subcultures
• in nations and empires

There’s a moment when you can feel it: the point where you’re no longer maintaining something, you’re managing its decline.

And yeah, that’s melodramatic. But sit with it long enough and you’ll start to notice all the small deaths:

• the way your knees sound when you stand up
• the favorite shirt that finally loses its structural integrity
• the friend you “mean to catch up with” who eventually becomes a profile you scroll past

Time is patient. It doesn’t need to rush. It just keeps tapping, tapping, tapping. A slow vandal with all the hours in the world.

That’s another thing that keeps me up at night: knowing that no matter how hard I fight, entropy still gets the last word.

Drag City vs. the Clock

And yet—I keep fighting. That’s what Drag City really is: not just a hobby, but a counter-spell.

At Drag City:

• The track gets rebuilt, not condemned.
• The cars crash spectacularly and then return for another race.
• The hospital is always busy, but the people inside never suffer.
• The paddock dirt remembers every footprint.
• It’s a place where I can cheat time.

I can take the Inland Empire of the 80s, forgotten SoCal drag strips, half-remembered mall parking lots at dusk, and graft them into a single, persistent world that I refuse to abandon.

You can bulldoze a real-world raceway.

You can repossess a garage.

You can price weirdos like me out of our own cities.

But Drag City exists on my table, in my notes, in the photos I take, in the lore I keep piling up. It’s rust-proof in a way nothing physical ever is.

That doesn’t cancel the fear. It doesn’t stop the clock. But it does give me a place where time has to negotiate with me instead of just steamrolling everything.

What Keeps You Up At Night?

The funny thing is, none of this is unique to me.

Everyone, at some point, feels that late-night static: “Will any of this matter? Am I building anything that survives me, even a little?”

For some people it shows up as ambitions and bucket lists. For others, it’s art, or houses, or businesses. And for many, it shows up as their children.

For me, it’s:

• a wall of die-cast cars and slot cars
• an electric track that represents a fictional raceway in a fictional town in California
• cabinets of CDs, tapes, and records
• reams of paper

…and a stubborn refusal to let memory be outsourced to algorithms and timelines that don’t care

That’s what keeps me up at night.

Not the fear of dying, but the fear of disappearing—of being smoothed out into “user data,” my life boiled down to spending habits and half-remembered anecdotes.

So I write.

I build.

I document.

And I’ll keep doing it as long as I can, even knowing the vandal is still out there with all the time in the world.

Because as long as I can still feel the panic and answer with a story, a photo, a lap around Drag City—

—I’m not erased yet.