I’m just a 24-year-old guy if I’m being honest. Wherever I go I’m there, somewhere. Just like Confucius said, I think. As I’m writing this I am in Savannah, Georgia – a town not known for harness racing (because there is none here) but is known for its willow-like trees, that in fact are just Oaks with dangling Spanish moss, and a university where kids learn things like drawing cartoons and vaping. For the weekend I stayed at an inn which also happens to be one of the oldest standing buildings in the city of Savannah. Opening the door to my room felt like entering an exhibit. The bedframe and dresser, weathered to faded colors and with slight chips in the wood, remained otherwise well preserved on top of the cherry brown pine flooring. I was told that the room contained the original furnishing from hundreds of years ago, but I couldn’t get an answer on how the HD television got here. The desk clerk at the inn, when showing me to my room, said that a sailor resided in this room hundreds of years ago when he docked in Savannah. The sailor never had money to cover the lodging, but he did hold a passion for painting. So he offered to paint murals in the building’s rooms in exchange for a place to stay. Inside my room of mint green walls, the sailor painted a nautical-blue trim with a pattern of a ribbon wrapping around a torch. The ceiling then has an intricate botanical border of winding roses and ivy inside an ornate gold-brick outline, which surrounds an atmospheric blue-green watercolor. The sky-like body of the ceiling was empty except for a pair of barn swallows, which were flying in opposite directions on opposite sides of the chandelier mount. All of this fine detail was painted by this sailor, who also had numerous affairs with the women of the inn and one day never returned to Savannah. One of these women was so devastated by his disappearance that she ended her life and now supposedly haunts the building to this day. However, all through my stay, I slept fine. Before heading to Georgia, I spent a week at the Farm Show Complex for the Standardbred Horse Sale in Harrisburg, surrounded by titans of the harness racing business and thousands of horses whose dander alone could destroy my airways. The sale is always a nice time of year because it’s a hub for me to say hello to people I may only see a few times a year or just once in a year, in Harrisburg of all places. My little town of Harrisburg has a history, one I admittedly don’t know a lot about, but it’s not a place where anything major happens. At one point it had a chance to be major to the whole world, but thankfully a pesky little nuclear power plant did not melt down and end modern life as we know it. That would’ve been a real blow to this whole harness racing thing we do, I think. A place like the yearling sale is another strange place to me. Once stepping foot inside that Farm Show Complex, the whole world shrinks. Everything that we know and care about is now locked inside this poorly ventilated megalith. If anything happened at that nuclear power plant down the river, who knows if or when the bidding would stop. Maybe it would. I’m just a 24-year-old guy who has managed to scrape the living of a minimum wage job. Every year I am awestruck to the sums of money paid for these horses – but not because that many are not worth the investment, but more so because some of these horses cost the same as 10 years of my salary, and that’s if I don’t pay for things like bread or shelter. But some of the people who come into this complex are at a much different point than me in their lives. They’ve given themselves to whatever endeavor or industry for likely decades and entered a position where they can make these passionate purchases. Because sure, they are investments, but there’s no way we can rationalize hope into anything justifiably profitable. The people who buy these horses are married to luck being on their side. And racing horses is much more fun than day trading the S&P 500. Harness racing is its own bubble, and I think that is part of its appeal. Like many recreations, harness racing has ever-increasing depths for people involved to understand but also is happening always and forever. To follow this sport devoutly is almost a 48-hour, 10-day a week pursuit, with tracks racing every day of the week at every hour of the day. Even the NBA has dark days. Harness racing has two. And forget it if you train horses. Horses are high-care creatures to begin with, but when you include the training regiments and the hours upon hours spent shipping from track to track, harness racing understandably is the world for many of our trainers, grooms, drivers and owners. It is their passion because they love this sport, but damn if it’s not easy work. So inside of this sale is its own little world, one that even though I am a part of as a writer and observer still feels estranged. The only reverberations of the outside felt are swings in federal interest rates and not much else. Nobody really talks of geopolitical conflicts or movies or other things. People instead talk endlessly about harness racing and more harness racing. They watch with a delicate gaze at a yearling’s walk and catch the subtlest imperfection in motion. They chirp to these animals, gloss their hands along the bridge of their nose and look to them as their own. So it’s not necessarily that these people here do not care about the world outside, but that this world inside is their escape, their refuge. Eying and buying these yearlings helps manifest for these people long-buried dreams looking to bloom. Whatever the cost is not important for these people because this is their world and they want to give as much of themselves to it as possible. It is their passion. And certainly, harness racing is a passion for me, but life is understandably different when we can go in and out of the bubble. I ended my trip in Savannah with a visit to a cat café. They house cats looking for adoption and let people pay to lounge, bond and play with the many cats fresh into this big world. I met a 6-month-old cat named Lucky, likely given that name for the sewed scar on his left eye. A 3-year-old cat named Pecan followed me around the whole time because she always was jonesing for food, but hissed whenever touched. Tommy – a 7-month-old – was the first to greet me through the doors and quickly made a jungle gym of my luggage stowed into a corner. Each of these cats sit in this building like myself, stuck in transit and looking for a bubble to call home. Thankfully, I’m able to leave Savannah with a good feeling. Many of these cats I had the privilege to meet will make their way soon enough into their adopted homes. And I will get to return to the place I call my home, which itself is just another small place buried inside this large and strange world we share. Then one day, whenever it is, I will no longer be a 24-year-old guy. I will turn 25. Somewhere. Wherever I will be then, I will be there.