It is trashcan pickup day where I am, which means walking around outside in circles is less pleasant. Sometimes I have to step off the sidewalk or otherwise navigate around an obstructing trashcan. Sometimes I have to move to dodge some stink. On top of that, there are leaf blowers filling the morning peace with noise, a person or two standing in the shadows possibly doing drugs...
Infrastructure exists; my city is still going. Otherwise, there would be no trashcans out to be picked up. This much is nice.
I reach a bridge overlooking a freeway. The road doesn't look great (trash and stuff around, some areas in need of repair), but its scale is impressive—it vanishes into the horizon. If someone told you that you had to run across the freeway, you might feel tired just thinking about it. Cars move quickly because traffic is significantly reduced during these COVID-19 times.
Near the freeway bridge is a train station. I don't really know who uses this train 1, but it is there and it is operational. Heaven knows that there are people in other cities all over the place petitioning for funds to be allocated to build a train. I like to pace around on the train platform sometimes because there are no cars to hit me there.
A rack for fancy bikes to rent stands empty 2. The past year or so I rode these a few times; it was really fun to ride an electric-assisted bike, especially when visiting Davis (about half an hour or so from Sacramento; where I did grad school and still have some contacts) so I wouldn't have to disassemble and bring my own bicycle. Are these gone temporarily? Or will they be gone for good, with skeletons of charging stations past littering these semi-corporate streets?
The city is less strained under COVID-19 because overall there is less movement. Like an exercise in fasting, the city itself is probably "thankful" for the reduction in traffic. There is time to chill out, to heal. City road work and stuff resumes (I've heard and seen it) with less interrupting traffic. Some experimental things (like the JUMP bikes) may or may not return; is this like trying alcohol during college and then quitting afterwards?
I'm wearing a hat fit for a relaxed boomer barbecue paired with some dark sunglasses (아저씨 패션); it is the season where looking shady is the way to not get bothered. For this morning, I enjoy LARPing as an industrialist surveying their city from the ground level rather from a fancy VIP suite. The sober stillness of underused infrastructure is my pacing ground, the gasoline motors of gardening power tools provide my industrial soundtrack...