Before deactivating my Facebook account, I posted a photo of Rainer Werner Fassbinder as my profile picture. The New German Cinema was in vogue in Iowa City during the early 1980s. I saw more than 20 films by Fassbinder during a two-year period. He died on June 10, 1982, of a drug overdose/suicide. The joke was that as prolific as I was on social media, as Fassbinder was in film, I ended my own Facebook life by deactivating it, partly because I felt addicted to it. I suspect no one got the joke.
The changes in my social media use mentioned in yesterday’s post have had an immediate effect. Maybe not exactly cause-effect, but since I removed social media from mobile, I have been sleeping more soundly and more hours of it. I reduced mobile device screen time by half yesterday, to about three hours. I seem to be getting back to having seven or eight hours of sleep in a night. While that takes time from doing things I love, it is likely good for my health. Other positive changes seem to be happening.
It took a while this year, yet I am deep into revision of my current book. I had 63,000 words on January 1, yet the whole thing needs restructuring. I spent part of yesterday working on a new outline. It’s not finished. Having written the first book, I learned a lot about how to create a readable narrative. I plan to apply those skills as the major re-write begins. I will start with a solid outline and then, from the beginning, rewrite each chapter as if it were a stand-alone piece. The main epiphany is I need to focus on a smaller set of narratives. I’m thinking 25-30 stories. My whole life won’t fit, and there is no reason for it to do so. It’s not like I’m Robert Caro writing the biography of LBJ.
Yesterday one of my shoes wore out while I was walking on the state park trail. Water began to seep through the hole in the sole and by the time I finished 30 minutes of walking, my left foot was drenched. When I got home, I tossed the shoes in the trash and dried my feet. I made a note to buy a better pair of walking shoes soon.
There are a lot of moving pieces today. Having more rest and a new pair of walking shoes seems like a necessity. Also humor can help if people get the jokes.
Our home is a relatively quiet sanctuary for creative work and networking with family and friends. It is easy to enter a room and “do something,” whether it be cooking, cleaning, writing, reading, or working in the garage, garden or yard. We made it this way when we designed the house and its setting. We are constantly using computers.
I recently discovered a new widget on my mobile device called Digital Wellbeing and parental controls. It tracks screen time. The results were shocking: more than six hours per day. Since then, I’ve been using the tool to reduce screen time. Last week I averaged 4 hours 24 minutes per day, which is a still a lot. I am endeavoring to do better.
What did I do about it? First I sorted my social media accounts. During the last year I reduced my social media presence, deactivating Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. I left Threads on my desktop and had BlueSky on my mobile device. This morning I removed all social media from mobile. In doing so, I removed them from my bed room and living room.
Second, I turned my mobile device into the tool it was intended to be. Instead of garnering my attention on social media feeds the way a slot machine empties one’s pockets, I time my morning exercise, read ebooks, keep up with news and email, and monitor traffic on my blog. I don’t mind the screen time if I’m getting something other than distraction in return.
Since paring back social media my human interaction increased with more telephone time and emails. As the weather warms, I expect to have more interaction with neighbors outdoors. These are positive developments.
The main thing I learned through the widget is to think about how I spend my time and focus more of it on stuff that adds value. That doesn’t just happen by itself.
At the end of week two I continue to hunker down, waiting for the shrapnel and debris to settle from the new administration’s assault on the government. I’m not ready to come out of the bunker because destruction is just beginning. This is infantry tactics 101.
The bellwether for me will be the arrival of my Social Security check, which is scheduled for the fourth Wednesday of each month. February will be the first month in which the new group was in charge, so any variation in delivery will be a sign.
There have been few surprises since Jan. 20. The president is doing much of what he said he would, plus things outlined in the Project 2025 document written mostly by Russell Vought. Senate hearings were completed on Vought’s appointment as director of the Office of Management and Budget. We are waiting for Republicans to schedule a vote. I have been following Vought since 2015 and am well-familiar with his intentions for our government.
One surprising thing has been Elon Musk’s approach to the Treasury. He purportedly installed his team to review every expenditure as money moves from the government. On one hand, the owner or general manager of every small company I have known scrutinizes every invoice before payment. However, the scale of U.S. Government disbursal is about $6 trillion per year. That’s a lot of invoices to review — even with an experienced staff — without mucking things up. Time will tell if Musk survives the wrath of the president. The over/under of him surviving is Feb. 8 among my friends. We may be optimistic.
I view myself as part of the resistance. Anne Lamott wrote about the lack of visible action to resist in today’s Washington Post:
I think we need and are taking a good, long rest. Along with half of America, I have been feeling doomed, exhausted and quiet. A few of us, approximately 75 million people, see the future as a desert of harshness. The new land looks inhospitable. But if we stay alert, we’ll notice that the stark desert is dotted with growing things. In the pitiless heat and scarcity, we also see shrubs and conviction.
This is how I feel. I am ready to get active but not sure what I should get active doing. I write letters to the editors of newspapers, yet mostly am dealing with family issues and my own mental and physical health. As bad as these two weeks have been, I am confident there will be a reckoning for what the November election results have wrought. Robert Reich wrote today in his substack:
As bad as this “fu*king nightmare” gets, it will awaken Americans to the truth about what has happened to this country — and what we must do to get it back on the track toward social justice, democracy, and widespread prosperity.
On Friday, Jan. 31, 2025, State Representative Amy Nielsen and Solon Mayor Dan O’Neil hosted a town hall meeting attended by 17 local residents at the Solon Public Library. There was a lively discussion.
Overshadowing the town hall was the fact Republican lawmaker Martin Graber of Fort Madison died unexpectedly of a heart attack at age 72. The Gazette story quoted House Speaker House Pat Grassley, “Our caucus is devastated by the unexpected passing of our friend and colleague Martin Graber.” “Our caucus” and no one else? A Democrat at the town hall suggested the obvious: there will be a special election to fill his seat. Let’s give partisanship a rest until the human is buried or cremated before thinking about politics. May Graber rest in peace.
Mayor O’Neil went first. The biggest project the City of Solon is planning is a new wastewater treatment facility. In part, the current one, built in the 1960s, needs updating. The population has grown considerably since the original plant and the city needs expanded capacity. They are one year into a five-year project.
The mayor also suggested the city welcomes increased tax revenue from recent growth. It leaves a little breathing space in the budget, he said. He also discussed the non-partisan nature of city council and would like to keep it that way. We all know he is a Democrat, yet the work is more positive when politics is left outside. He also talked about getting more representation on the county board of supervisors. The legislature is talking about “rural representation” again this year.
State Senator Dawn Driscoll introduced Senate Study Bill 1018 in the Iowa Senate, related to county supervisors and “rural representation.” She explained in her newsletter:
At the forefront of my week was Senate Study Bill (SSB) 1018, which is a bill I filed and am particularly passionate about. This bill requires county supervisors be elected from single-member, equal-population districts in counties with populations of 125,000 or more (or are home to one of Iowa’s public universities). This bill also requires these same counties to fill vacancies on their board of supervisors by special election, while all other counties must fill the vacancy by appointment. SSB 1018 gives a voice to the people of Iowa, especially those in rural communities whose voices can be overpowered by massive amounts of student populations. Given that I live in rural Iowa myself, I recognize the importance of rural representation. Our votes and our voices matter, and I believe SSB 1018 captures exactly this sentiment. The bill advanced through Tuesday’s subcommittee and the Local Government Committee meeting
I pointed out at the town hall that a lot depends upon how the maps dividing our county into districts were drawn. County Auditor Julie Persons was present and said depending on how the legislation is written, and whether it passes, her office would draw a district map and forward it to the Secretary of State for approval. In an Iowa State University study conducted after the 2020 U.S. Census, researchers found 83.3 percent of Johnson County is urban and 16.7 percent is rural. It’s hard to see how a single rural-dominant district could be drawn without extreme gerrymandering.
I want the freedom to vote for the best candidates for all five supervisor seats as the current at-large elections enable. The only Republican elected to the board of supervisors since we moved here in 1993 was John Etheridge. Republicans won by getting out the vote in the entire county in a low turnout election. There’s another reason to favor the at-large system. It elected the first Republican supervisor in many years. It seems like the bill will move this year, even though in our county, it would lock in urban rule by Democrats by district.
Rep. Amy Nielsen speaking to residents at a Town Hall Meeting at the Solon Public Library on Jan. 31, 2025
Rep. Nielsen covered many topics, including private school vouchers, home schooling, changes in special education, school lunch programs, and the higher education committee. There were questions about water quality, discrimination against LGBTQIA individuals, cancer, and nicotine use and control.
I raised two issues I would like to gain more attention.
Public discussion of contracted administration of Medicaid has gone silent in the state. Is it still costing us too much money? Is the current administrator going to endure? Are we going to require grandma to get a job while enroute to the nursing home? It was a good discussion that ended with my suggestion Rep. Nielsen address it in her legislative newsletter.
I also asked what the legislature was doing to address the statewide shortage of physicians, especially in specialties such as vascular surgery. This topic has not gained traction among Republican lawmakers whose past tendency has been to lower standards rather than incentivize qualified surgeons to move to Iowa.
Rep. Nielsen wears a white hat and even though she doesn’t represent my district, she has been very supportive of everyone in the county. It was a good night in Solon.
Gillett Grove, Iowa has a post office and 30 people, according to the 2020 U.S. Census. In 2000, there were 55 people. The whole of Clay County, where the town is located, appears in decline. In some ways, Gillett Grove typifies rural Iowa.
How did this come up? The way many things come up in a household: we got talking.
Its history is brief. “First settlers appeared in Gillett Grove in 1856 and the town, named after the Gillett brothers, was incorporated on May 13, 1874,” according to the website Travel Iowa. “The town was originally located west of the (Little Sioux) river and one and half miles North until 1899 when it was moved to the east side of the river along with the arrival of the railroad.” I don’t see railroad tracks on Google Maps.
The high school for the South Clay Community School District was located in Gillett Grove. It also served Webb, Dickens, and surrounding rural settlements. In a relatively rare for Iowa occurrence, this consolidated district was dissolved in 2010 when it had 132 students.
The website Zillow lists the sale of a house at 506 3rd Street at auction for $25,300. Built in 1900, the outbuildings appear to be worth more than the dwelling. It’s a fixer-upper, definitely. Who might live in such a place in this rural city with limited visible economic activity? It’s an open question, yet the website suggests the property could garner $816 per month in rental income.
How many towns and hamlets like Gillett Grove exist in Iowa? More than a few. There is not time to write about them all. What we do is discuss our connections with some of them and wonder what life might be like living there. Then the conversation ends and I’m glad to live where we do.
Editor’s Note: As I prepare for my exit from Facebook, I came across this list of quotes from a long time ago. They remain some of my favorites.
“For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie– deliberate, contrived and dishonest– but the myth– persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” ~ John F. Kennedy
“No ideas but in things” ~ William Carlos Williams
“If each citizen did not learn, in proportion as he individually becomes more feeble and consequently more incapable of preserving his freedom single-handed, to combine with his fellow citizens for the purpose of defending it, it is clear that tyranny would unavoidably increase together with equality.” ~Alexis de Tocqueville
“Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans.” ~ Jacques Yves Cousteau
“Early apples begin to be ripe about the first of August; but I think that none of them are so good to eat as some to smell. One is worth more to scent your handkerchief with than any perfume they sell in the shops. The fragrance of some fruits is not to be forgotten, along with that of flowers. Some gnarly apple which I pick up in the road reminds me by its fragrance of all the wealth of Pomona, carrying me forward to those days when they will be collected in golden and ruddy heaps in the orchards and about the cider-mills.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
“Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell? Sleeping or waking? mad or well-advised? Known unto these, and to myself disguised! I’ll say as they say and persever so, And in this mist at all adventures go.” ~ William Shakespeare
“Radix malorum est Cupiditas” ~ from Chaucer, but older
“It’s always the old who lead us to the war. Always the young who fall. Now look at all we’ve won with the saber and the gun. Tell me is it worth it all?” ~Phil Ochs
“No. Try not. Do… or do not. There is no try.” ~Yoda
“Good navigators are always skeptical, not of the presences of things, but of what they see and understand. Good navigators are almost always lost.” ~Robert Finley
“Why, this is very midsummer madness.” ~ William Shakespeare
“You know? There’s the most extraordinary, unheard-of poetry buried in America, but none of the conventional means known to culture can even begin to extract it. But now this is true of the world as a whole. The agony is too deep, the disorder too big for art enterprises undertaken in the old way. Now I begin to understand what Tolstoi was getting at when he called on mankind to cease the false and unnecessary comedy of history and begin simply to live.” ~Saul Bellow
“We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist…The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” ~R. Buckminster Fuller
“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.” ~ John Donne
“We harbor no illusions about the difficulty of bringing about a world without nuclear weapons. We know there are plenty of cynics, and that there will be setbacks to prove their point. But there will also be days like today that push us forward – days that tell a different story.” ~ Barack Obama
“And our mouths shaped words, And our destiny was shaped. With words we made our sacred songs, We took possession of language, And our being was borne on words.” ~ N. Scott Momaday
“As we come marching, marching, we battle too for men, For they are women’s children, and we mother them again. Our lives shall not be sweated from birth until life closes; Hearts starve as well as bodies; give us bread, but give us roses!” ~ James Oppenheim
“Fill ‘er up with love please won’t you mister? Just the hi-test is what I used to say… But that was before I lost my baby, I’ll have a dollar’s worth of regular today.” ~ Phil Ochs
“An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.” ~ Martin Luther King Jr.
Just give me the warm power of the sun. Give me the steady flow of a waterfall. Give me the spirit of living things as they return to clay. Just give me the restless power of the wind. Give me the comforting glow of a wood fire. But please take all of your atomic poison power away. ~ John Hall
“But your flag decal won’t get you Into Heaven any more. They’re already overcrowded From your dirty little war. Now Jesus don’t like killin’ No matter what the reason’s for, And your flag decal won’t get you Into Heaven any more.” ~ John Prine
I won’t miss Joe Biden because he became the face of America during his presidency, leaving a positive, persisting imprint across our government.
Althea Cole (Jan. 19) and Mike Hayes (Jan. 26), have been saying in the Gazette they won’t miss President Biden. They ran him down with words and stomped him like he was a dust ball in their closet. You may not miss Joe Biden but you will miss his policies.
I’ll mention three.
The Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD), an Iowa program authorized by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021 is bringing broadband to rural parts of the state where it had not been before. People I speak with say it is life-changing. Thank you, Joe Biden.
More than $200 million in National Institutes of Health funding comes into Iowa, supporting more than 2,500 jobs. Clinical trials and research are a part of so many of our lives. They include research into the prevention and treatment of cancer, which the governor highlighted in her condition of the state address. Biden supported this funding.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is expected to send Iowa $3.9 billion in Federal highway formula funding for highways and bridges. We all use highways and bridges. Again, thank you, Joe Biden.
It’s a free country and people can say what they want. What I’ll say about Cole and Hayes is they are not being Iowa nice even though they should be.
~ Submitted as a letter to the editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette
January and February are the best months to hunker down and write. I get outside almost every day to take a brisk walk along the state park trail. Some mornings the landscape looks like this. Then it’s back indoors and to work.
Today we’ll experience ambient temperatures in the 40s. I decided to run the buckets of compost out to the garden composter. They started to stink in the garage, so it was time to go. On January 28, it should not be this warm, but it is.
NextEra Energy Resources filed a request with the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission to potentially restore the facility’s operating license as demand for electricity surges to power large data centers needed to handle the growth of artificial intelligence, the Cedar Rapids Gazette reported on Saturday. The plant was damaged during the 2020 derecho and has not been repaired. If the license were issued, management expects the nuclear power plant to be back on line sometime in 2028. My question about this is who pays? Except for those parts of the operation paid by the Department of Energy, all costs should be paid by the potential customers. We shouldn’t pretend bringing Duane Arnold back on line serves the public good.
The other question, and I believe it is the right one, relates to re-starting the Duane Arnold Nuclear Power plant because of the big electricity needs to power Artificial Intelligence. What people are not talking about is using new power plants to generate electricity for another energy hog, crypto-currency, to the detriment of our economy. Shouldn’t we be talking about that?
I’m losing confidence in our local media to cover this issue. For the most part, they seem to be writing stories based on industry generated information and not any specific facts.
Well, at least the compost is out in the bin ready to make a soil conditioner. That, I know I can put to good use.
Editor’s Note: This is a draft of the opening chapter of Part II of my memoir. Its purpose is to introduce some major themes in the narrative and stand alone as a story.It is also a work in progress. I removed the full names of people I know for this post.
After my post-master’s degree tour of racism in America, I stayed in Iowa City. The reasons were not complicated.
I had to decide whether to be in a relationship with someone, and Iowa City was a regional social hub offering a large pool of potential friends and mates. The rest of the state seemed a primitive agricultural landscape, desolate and barren of intellectual engagement. As a young Iowan possessing two degrees, and aspiration to do better than merely survive, of course I chose to live in Iowa City.
Iowa City seemed an excellent place for a writer. It offered a broad intellectual life, not to mention, was the home of multiple writers’ workshops and groups. I expected to find other writers of varied skills, along with what it took to support a writing community. Nowhere else in Iowa could I find that.
In the pre-internet days, relationships were in person or they were difficult. A long-distance relationship involved telephone calls, letters, and the occasional audio cassette. We made our life where we lived and it took a year for me to discover what was in Iowa City and what was possible. The year beginning in summer 1981, became my year of being a writer.
I knew how to live in Iowa City as a writer. Writers came and went at the shared house on Gilbert Court during my undergraduate studies. The pattern was simple. Find a place to live and write, find income and resources to pay bills, and then go on living with a view toward producing poetry or prose. It was no different when I finished graduate school.
When I moved out of JG’s basement, I found a small apartment with a kitchen in a divided single-family dwelling. My apartment search benefited from most students being out of town on summer break.
On a pre-rental tour, a tenant still lived there. I deduced she was a writer of some kind. “A writer’s workshop type,” I noted. She had photographs of writers on the walls, and many books by workshop alumni in a living room pier cabinet. My quick analysis of her book shelves was she displayed the kinds of books I avoided. My future landlady had had a run in with her and described her as “a little backward.” I didn’t care that much about the drama. I was ready to move in and get started with the next iteration of my life.
The second-floor apartment at 721 Market Street had six windows. It helped me feel more in touch with the world after living in a windowless basement. It literally gave me perspective on quotidian affairs on the street. I felt included with events going on around me in the vibrant county seat. I also felt power in the old part of the city. It took me two days to settle in.
If I had an idea about being an Iowa City writer, it was modeled on John Irving’s time there in the 1960s and ‘70s. He began his first book, Setting Free the Bears, as part of his Master of Fine Arts thesis at the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop. His second book, The Water-Method Man, was set in Iowa City and contained settings one can easily recognize. I carried this model of Irving with me throughout my life. Eventually, John Irving displaced Joan Didion as my favorite writer, although that will be much later in this story. I read The World According to Garp while living on Market Street.
More than anything, I sought to define my writing life as unique in a society of sameness. I had no intention of applying to the Writer’s Workshop, carrying a bit of residual skepticism about it from my days living with Pat Dooley, Darrell Gray, Pat O’Donnell, and other Actualist writers and artists I met in 1973 and ‘74. Gray described his time at the workshop as a “two years of duty on the U.S.S. Prairie Schooner which houses the Famous Poets School, a singularly enigmatic vessel that always seems on the verge of ‘going somewhere.’” I sought to enable my native, if somewhat naive impulses and culture. I hoped to discover what that meant, yet not in the context of the writers’ workshop.
I had three main accomplishments during 1981. By describing myself as a “non-academic Americanist,” I hoped to distance myself from formal structures of creativity. If I didn’t produce much writing beyond my journal, I neither wanted to be pinned down by ideas of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, or other categories of writing. As I read an 1855 facsimile edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, I felt I could embrace Whitman, who wrote, “I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” I felt just below the roof line at the Market Street apartment because I was.
In furtherance of putting my recent life in the past, I culled writings from my archives and produced a self-published book Institutional Writings. It was intended to be about the bonds that connect us to our common humanity yet it was more than that. It represented work I had done in institutional settings and was also my departure from institutions to seek a new creative path. I printed and distributed about a dozen copies to friends and family.
Finally, after settling in and suffering what I described in my journal as depression, I pieced together a life and was filled with the desire to do things. Throughout this year, old and new friends were supportive of what I sought to do, even if none of us fully understood it.
From a logistics viewpoint, the pieces were coming together. What I realized now, and didn’t then, was I needed something to write about. That gap made it difficult to get words down on paper in the time with most of my future ahead of me.
I kept a journal that recorded movies I saw, books read, and people I encountered. I described parts of my search for paid work. That journal was the primary work-product of the period from May 1981 until July 1982.
It was my time to be a writer, especially after I moved to my own apartment. The need to pay bills to support my new lifestyle emerged as a dominant force. Work was available. The money I banked in the military would eventually run out, so I needed income to pay monthly bills. I had no idea of supporting myself beyond the next rent payment. I could live paycheck to paycheck indefinitely, working a job that would leave enough energy each day for writing. The chance of long-term employment with decent benefits had already begun to fade from American society as Ronald Reagan was inaugurated president that year.
I looked for work that would pay bills to stay in Johnson County. It was tough to find work after graduate school, mostly because I hadn’t looked for any job since I enlisted in the military in 1975. I made a conscious decision to stop moving from place to place, from activity to activity, and settle down. I began the job search with what I knew. Buying every local newspaper, I marked each job in the help wanted pages with an “X” after contacting the company. The work environment had changed from a decade previously when all a person had to do was make the rounds of major employers to find a good paying, union job. No more.
My application for work got extra points for consideration at the university because of my military service. That led to more job offers. In July 1981 I took a job as a clerk at the College of Dentistry because it was offered. At the University of Iowa there was a small retirement plan, no pension, and no health benefits. The income resolved my immediate needs.
About a month later, on Aug. 3, 1981, the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) went on strike. President Ronald Reagan ordered them back to work and on Aug. 5, he fired 11,345 workers who did not cross the picket line, breaking, and ultimately decertifying the union. While on a later business trip to Philadelphia, I met one of Reagan’s attorneys in the PATCO action. We discussed the strike and Reagan’s handling of these government employees. My understanding of the action was confirmed. It was political.
What started in 1981 with the PATCO strike continues, without apology, as part of Reagan’s legacy of breaking unions. The unintended and maybe less considered consequence of Reagan’s union policy was to make life harder for middle class workers like me.
Beginning that July, I had a year to see if I could be a writer.
During my young life, several residences stood out as hubs of personal creativity: my apartment on Mississippi Avenue in Davenport, my bachelor officer quarters in Mainz, Germany, and my apartment at Five Points in Davenport. The apartment on Market Street in Iowa City was my last stand in creative endeavor. The coming year would either make or break my effort to write a book. During that time, I acclimatized to living in Iowa City and did many things. Starting a book was not one of them.
One of JG’s friends was MAM, a nurse who was studying printmaking at the University of Iowa College of Art. She maintained an apartment not far from Market Street. During that year, I felt welcomed to stop by after a run or enroute somewhere else. She and her artist friends provided an ad hoc forum to discuss creative ideas. I got several ideas about how to live and be creative in Iowa City from her. While I wanted more than a creative dialogue with her, I accepted the relationship for what it was and moved forward. I repeated this familiar pattern with other female artists I had known.
MAM encouraged me to purchase a bicycle, which I did. I bought a Puch Cavalier, one of the last of their bicycles made in Austria. She would give me maps of places to ride, including a route south through Sharon Center. I rode a lot, and eventually rode a century organized by the Bicyclists of Iowa City. The two of us met at the finish line and had something to eat at the Sanctuary Pub afterward.
The Century was the first time I experienced glycogen burn-out. My legs were shaking so badly, I didn’t know what to do. I stopped and rested at the side of the road until the shaking abated. I slowly made my way, first walking, and then riding, to the next rest stop where I ate fresh fruit to replenish my glucose supply. I spent a lot of time on my bicycle, mostly riding by myself.
MAM also encouraged me to keep running, which I did… for long distances. I would run out Prairie du Chien Road to the Coralville Reservoir and back. There was only so much to do in my apartment, so exercise helped me be constructive and feel stronger. That summer I ran the Bix 7 in Davenport, a road race that attracted international participants during the Bix Beiderbecke jazz festival weekend. Some of my Iowa City artistic friends, including MAM, came along to make it a fun day.
When I began work at the Dental College, I met a new group of people. Occasionally we got together and did things like seeing the movies Return of the Secaucus 7 and Gallipoli. Because we got to know each other at work, social activities seemed to fit. Mostly, though, we had one-on-one relationships.
MC worked in the records department in the lower level of the Dental Science Building. She followed her husband from Ohio to Iowa where he worked on his graduate degree in art. During my breaks I would often hang out with her. Eventually I helped her make a Super 8 film called “One Hundred Years in Iowa City.” In addition to exposing film for the project, we had many meet ups and conversations about cinema as an art form. We took advantage of Iowa City’s vibrant film scene. Our friendship was valuable to my creative life.
I continued to play music with JP who I met in graduate school. JP and MP were from California. MP worked at the Cancer Registry while he finished his master’s degree. They expressed a self-defined idea of being Californians. He was a fan of Stan Rogers and played many of his songs. From time to time, he would play at the Mill Restaurant Open Mike. We often played together. He was more talented at guitar-playing and singing than I.
My high school friends and former college roommates DB and DC were constantly in each other’s orbits through letters, telephone calls, and in-person visits. Both of them visited me in Iowa City, and DC brought his spouse TC. We continued our practice of talking about creative matters then, and for many additional years. My military friend from Mainz, LP, sent me an audio cassette in which he admonished me to re-join the military. I did not. Apparently, I was complaining about a lack of female companionship to my high school friend GG. During a phone call, he passed along the advice to “just fall in love.” Communication with old friends was constant during my time on Market Street. I didn’t always take their advice.
There were plenty of significant events in Iowa City. I heard Toni Morrison read at Old Brick, Chaim Potok at the Iowa Memorial Union, and James Laughlin, founding publisher of New Directions, at the Lindquist Center. The Morisson event was notable for a bat circling above the author as she read. I noted the Potok lecture was almost identical to the one he gave in 1975 when I lived on Mississippi Avenue in Davenport. I wrote in my journal about a Laughlin event:
On James Laughlin: Tonight in deteriorating body the consciousness that went in and out of the lives of so many of the 20th Century’s “great” writers lectured on William Carlos Williams. Full of memories, reading poems from a text prepared by many, he spoke of his view of Williams. He read poems and almost came to tears. And this is what remains of those like Williams. The stories of a friend who has survived, to tell of poems and flowers and love, engaged in humanity. (Personal Journal, Iowa City, Iowa, April 22, 1982).
I saw one or two films each week that year. I had been deprived of most films while serving in the military. I wasn’t sure what they meant to me, other than another form of intellectual engagement in which to find nourishment. The New German Cinema was in vogue in Iowa City. I saw several films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder who died on June 10, 1982, of a drug overdose/suicide. His work had a lasting impact on me.
A writer must eat. My journal includes an early discussion of gardening and cooking. I lived within walking distance of the HyVee Grocery Store on North Dodge Street and John’s Grocery at Market and Linn Streets. I became more aware of buying ingredients for cooking. Among the dishes I described in my journal were soup, chili, souffle, and Sergeant Juan San Miguel’s hot sauce. I wrote about the importance of growing my own food as soon as I had sufficient resources to buy a house on a plot big enough for a vegetable garden. I enjoyed cooking.
In the kitchen – I’ve got a pot of bean soup cooking, a cultural heritage to be sure, a family tradition, a piece of ethnicity. I’ll enjoy cooking and eating that soup and really, this gives me a lot of satisfaction – cooking. But I have little desire to make a living or an income from my interest in cooking. It is a source of satisfaction, yet I like doing it here in the privacy of my kitchen, where I’m busy writing and thinking. (Personal Journal, Iowa City, Iowa Jan. 10, 1982).
Cooking was part of living a good life. I believed cooking and eating was not for mere nourishment. We created a meal of each repast, seeking to please our palate, and soothe our souls. Contentment with our diet is equated to soothing our souls. “Before we commence anything else, we must first of all get our kitchens in order,” I wrote.
“If I could but learn to cook chicken well, I believe my troubles would be over.” (Personal Journal, Iowa City, Iowa, March 21, 1982).
In May 1982 I went on an extended weekend getaway to Northeast Iowa. I stayed at the Guttenberg Inn and visited Galena, the Vinegar Hill Lead Mine, Harper’s Ferry, Gays Mills, Wisconsin, and other places. I remember a walk I took from the motel to town on May 13:
I walked down the hill to town, along the river and through town – I noticed people in their homes, shades up, in the kitchen, or watching television. How it distresses me to see those televisions going. I admit I like to watch certain T.V. shows, but the engagement of a Thursday night: Television – ugh! Here, as in so many other things, this national, institutionalized force captivates the people. They seem to have no will of their own.
In their tidy houses, with well-trimmed lawns, and groomed gardens, life goes on, but there is something missing here. (Personal Journal, Guttenberg, Iowa, May 13, 1982.)
The time alone in Northwest Iowa served me well. I had to make something better from my life.
On April 16, 1982, President Ronald Reagan issued a proclamation that designated Memorial Day, May 31, 1982, as a day of prayer for permanent peace. Beginning at 11 a.m. local time, Americans were to unite in prayer. I don’t recall participating in this event. That weekend I did write at length about being a writer when I returned to Iowa City.
Shall I go on writing? There are so many things in the world to be done, yet I go on writing.
I think a majority of people in my generation would “like to be a writer.” That is, they would like to deal with images. But a writer cannot deal solely with images. He must address the realities of his and all the people’s situation. The writer must be socialized into the culture of which he writes. As a member of a culture, a writer has a vested interest in his culture. He seeks the continuance and survival of the vital elements of his culture.
Too, he seeks change. Not only change that is the essence of a day’s spontaneity but change in terms of his conception of both the past and the present. Although a person can have misconceptions about the nature of the world, the meaning of the world, he is required to act based on this knowledge.
In every case, this is far less than a science of action. In fact, the notion of science we share is obsolete. There is science only insofar as we can all agree on what that is.
But shall I go on writing? Yes, at least in the pages of this journal. For it is one of the things that has sustained me for so long I cannot give it up yet. Nor shall I. Yes. I will go on writing. I’ll fill the pages of this and many another book like it. For this is the path I’ve chosen. (Personal Journal, Iowa City, Iowa, May 30, 1982.)
Though committed to writing, the journal posts ended abruptly after the July 11, 1982, entry. JC and I began dating and became more than work acquaintances.
January turned into a tough month for writing. The main concern is a lack of productivity in writing my autobiography. I’ve written in it on nine days this month for a gain of 1,814 words. Volume two stands at 64,739 words today and is quite rough. While thinking about memories and documents and how they might fit the narrative is part of my time usage, I need to get more words in the draft. Six days remain in January, so I may be able to do improve the editing and word count.
This makes my 23rd post on Journey Home this year. There is more to write about, and once I sit down and write a first paragraph, the rest flows pretty easily. Because of my long experience writing blog posts, this work comes easily and for now I expect to write regular posts. Viewership is up in January.
I expect to deactivate my Facebook, Instagram, and Threads accounts by the end of the month. I joined FB in 2008 to follow our child. They don’t use it any longer. I am of an age where I experience being alone as many elderly people do. Social media reinforces loneliness for me. I’d rather do things besides social media to address this. We’ll see if I actually pull the plug, yet at the end of the Meta Blackout, I’m not missing those platforms very much.
I continue to spend a lot of time writing carefully worded emails. I am a fan of Gmail because it stores every email written through that platform. For my autobiography, I am reviewing older emails, even before I joined Gmail in 2006, for potential content and history. Email is personal, so I expect there will be more of it when I pull the plug on Meta.
While it is not writing, telephone and video calls have become more important. There are more of them and they have a longer duration. Voice communication is becoming increasingly important.
While the weather continues to be wintry, I spend most time indoors. My reading and writing have increased even if I was discontented about progress on my autobiography. This is a winter of discontent, yet I feel a burning hope for better days… for days when I’m planning my next big writing project.
Journey Home 
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