The Old Lone Ranger

Immigration Comes Home

By Rich Marin | April 25, 2026 by Rich Marin

When we bought this hilltop in early 2012, Mexican immigration was at a historically low point. 2011 represented the trough of a decade-long decline in Mexican migration driven by the 2008–09 financial crisis, a strengthening Mexican economy, and dramatically increased US border enforcement. After the Great Recession in 2007–2008, migration from Mexico declined sharply, falling from 1,089,092 apprehensions in fiscal year 2006 to 340,252 apprehensions in fiscal year 2011. Around the same time, the number…

Flying Solo

By Rich Marin | April 24, 2026 by Rich Marin

As I mentioned before, my favorite painting is one that hangs in our living room directly over the etagere that I bought in Toronto 36 years ago. That etagere is home to all the most interesting and emblematic curios and artifacts that I and we have collected over the last seventy years. To be fair, some of them were really collected by my mother during her travels across Latin America as well, but they have…

Business Advice Memoir Retirement

Groove v Rut

By Rich Marin | April 23, 2026 by Rich Marin

I just had a silly epiphany today. I’m scheduled to take a Cinco de Mayo motorcycle ride for five days up to Utah and back. Four of us will ride up to Lake Las Vegas, across the San Jacintos and across the Mojave, join two others coming up fro Phoenix, and then head up through the Pinto Valley Wilderness north of Lake Mead, through the Virgin Valley Gorge to Zion, to the Lodge at Red…

Memoir Retirement

Hands Down

By Rich Marin | April 22, 2026 by Rich Marin

Occupational Therapy and what it actually does has become a topic for me lately. The name is genuinely misleading. Despite “occupational” suggesting job-related work (big shudder from the retirement community…especially Gary), the term uses occupation in its broader sense… any meaningful activity that occupies your time and gives your life structure and purpose. That includes self-care, work, leisure, social participation, and everything in between. The core purpose of occupational therapy (OT) is to help people…

Memoir

Dinner Out

By Rich Marin | April 21, 2026 by Rich Marin

There are certain expressions that always immediately remind me of great movie lines, and one of those is from the Robert Redford and Brad Pitt movie Spy Games. The line is about a little code that that Redford and Pitt establish between themselves that starts with a hip flask gift that Pitt gets for Redford. They are hanging out in Beirut and Pitt gets his CIA support team to order the flask for Redford under…

Memoir

Who Am I Kidding?

By Rich Marin | April 20, 2026 by Rich Marin

Body image is a person’s perception, thoughts, feelings, and attitudes toward their own physical appearance. How you see yourself when you look in the mirror, how you imagine you look to others, and how you feel about your body’s size, shape, and features. Psychologists generally break body image into four dimensions: perceptual (how accurately you see your own body), affective (how you feel about your appearance), cognitive (the thoughts and beliefs you hold about your…

Business Advice Love Retirement

Growing Pains

By Rich Marin | April 19, 2026 by Rich Marin

People grow continuously throughout life. While that is a true statement, the picture is more nuanced than simple linear growth. What clearly continues throughout life are the obvious things like wisdom and judgment, which tend to improve well into old age. In terms of emotional regulation, most people genuinely get better at managing feelings over the decades, that that is not a universal truth by any means. Vocabulary and crystallized knowledge (accumulated facts, expertise) certainly…

Politics

AI Means “Authoritarian Imperative”

By Rich Marin | April 18, 2026 by Rich Marin

At the China Development Forum on March, the Director of the Chinese National Data Administration, disclosed that China’s daily AI token consumption had surpassed 140 trillion tokens in March 2026, up from just 100 billion tokens per day at the beginning of 2024. That is a more than a 1,000-fold increase in two years. China’s weekly large-model usage has now surpassed. that of the United States. China is on an AI juggernaut. The Chinese administration…

Love Memoir Retirement

Stiff Arming Time

By Rich Marin | April 17, 2026 by Rich Marin

We all have activities that define us. They say, “you are what you eat”. That’s a phrase with a surprisingly deep history for something that sounds like a modern wellness slogan. The saying traces back to the French gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who wrote in his 1825 masterwork Physiologie du Goût (The Physiology of Taste): “Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es” — “Tell me what you eat and I…

Memoir Politics

European Goulash

By Rich Marin | April 16, 2026 by Rich Marin

The big news this week so far is the defeat of Victor Orbán, who has ruled Hungary and been a spiritual leader for the worldwide Christian Nationalism movement that has been so embraced by the American Right Wing and MAGA movements. Orbán was defeated in the Hungarian elections on Sunday April 12, two days ago. Péter Magyar’s Tisza party won a landslide two-thirds majority, securing 138 seats in the 199-seat parliament on 53.6% of the…

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