Farmer spreads manure while we were on maneuvers with the French Infantry Marines in Brittany, late 1970s. They keep the horse before the cart in Brittany. Photo by the author.
Three and a half years into retirement I’m not close to being finished culling belongings. It takes time, yet it’s more complicated than that. In particular, when I find a neglected packet of photographs, I can spend hours chasing memories close to whatever main event prompted me to take them. Moving to digital photography in 2007 hasn’t made it easier. If anything the number of photos multiplied each year because of the ease in taking them. Digital files mount up and I developed a special back up process so I don’t lose them. There are so many.
Everywhere I look in my archives, I find more photos all arranged in a hodge-podge manner. Once found, I remember taking most of them, yet how to tap them for pragmatic narrative is problematic. Each batch leads down a different rabbit hole.
I enjoy time spent with photographs yet need discipline in how I use my writing time, which sorting photos is. With the explosion of film photographs when I was a pre-teen, followed by digital in 2007, there are so many that simply looking at them is a huge task. There are six decades worth!
Luckily, Mother was keen on downsizing while living. Included in her belongings were many photos and she let me go through them, taking some prints, but mostly scanning them to files. That, too, was a massive undertaking. I got the images I wanted leaving the hard copies for my siblings.
When writing any book, the number of photos that can be included is small. I’m reading Rachel Maddow’s book Prequel and she used one or two images per chapter. That seemed like a lot. When I print my blog book each year, the photographs make the pages vibrant. They are a small subset of what’s available. I recently changed the size of them after recognizing the photo was as important as the text in many cases.
Sometimes I use a photograph as inspiration to write a paragraph or two without planning to include the snapshot in the book. A photograph can stir living memory from that mystical storage place in our brains. Often the narrative is better than the image. It focuses the reader’s attention on aspects of the story that drive narrative. Too many photos can get readers distracted from the narrative.
I have a short term project in my writing, but big picture I need to distill the boxes and crates of belongings to a usable number. I should pick photographs that advance a narrative, or record some specific moment in time. Seems like writing 101 and I’m only just arriving at this forking path.
Modern Woodmen Park (formerly Municipal Stadium), July 29, 2013. Photo Credit: Bohao Zhao, Wikimedia Commons.
Municipal Stadium in Davenport, Iowa was an important part of my growing up. As much as anything, it was a central gathering place for big events for the local proletariat in this sleepy city on the Mississippi River. Our family or I attended events there, including musical performances, high school football games, professional wrestling matches, and a revival meeting. I once attended a Minor League Baseball game there.
By the 1950s and ’60s no culture of big community events existed in Davenport. Segments of the population did gather at a stadium for events tailored to their interests. Promoters tried to make something of our sports teams, yet everyone seemed to have their own life with accompanying other things to do. Here are four things in which I participated at Municipal Stadium, as we called it then.
Herman’s Hermits
On Aug. 27, 1966, Herman’s Hermits played in Davenport at the Municipal Stadium. In the wake of Beatlemania, this was the best our Midwestern city could do. My cohort had watched the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show and talked about it at school. I had visions of becoming a musician, having gotten a guitar at the King Korn Stamp Store soon after the British Invasion began.
I don’t recall how I got tickets, but I had income from my newspaper route. Mother made the arrangements for bleacher seats. It was a sunny day for the concert.
If I wrote down everything I remember about the concert, the paragraph would not be long. Besides the concert, the Times Democrat story of Peter Noone and other band members shopping in the book section of the M.L. Parker Department Store struck home. It was the same place I had begun buying books with my own money. That made everything pretty real. A few of my classmates also attended the concert. The songs the band performed were not memorable, even the ones played on the radio.
All Star Wrestling
Father and we kids attended a professional wrestling match at Municipal Stadium. The stands were not packed although because of the popular Saturday morning television program, All Star Wrestling, the event drew a good-sized crowd. Patrons were unruly, with arguments breaking out among them. I almost got into a fight after mouthing off to a stranger. That day there was a cage match during which constructing a cage of chain-link fencing was part of the spectacle. Young women would visit the motel across the river where the wrestlers stayed and attempt to accompany them on tour. Such plebeian entertainments were typical in my home town.
The American Wrestling Association (AWA) was an American professional wrestling promotion based in Minneapolis from 1960 until 1991, according to Wikipedia. It was founded by Verne Gagne and Wally Karbo, originating as part of the Minneapolis Boxing & Wrestling Club. Unlike modern professional wrestlers of the WWE, Gagne was an amateur wrestling champion who was an alternate on the U.S. freestyle wrestling team at the 1948 Summer Olympics. He ran the AWA with a conservative sensibility, Wikipedia said, firmly believing that sound technical wrestling should be the basis of a pro-wrestling company. Cage matches reflected no basis in technical wrestling as Gagne had come to know it.
New Flying Buttresses
When Mother settled with the elevator company in 1973, after Father’s death, we kids got a share. Mine amounted to about $4,000, which I hastily spent on a Volkswagen micro bus, a Fender Telecaster Thinline guitar, a public address system and two Peavey guitar amplifiers. Some stage crew buddies and I formed a band. I’d call it a garage band but we mostly played in the basement of the bass player’s family home, or in Mother’s dining room. Because we invested in equipment from a music store on the Illinois side of the Quad Cities, when they staged a concert for bands to whom they sold equipment, we were invited to perform.
Municipal Stadium is the largest venue in which I played. We only performed a song or two, which made the rigamarole of setting up and tearing down, the main part of the time we spent there. We were all stage crew, so we lived in that realm. We played Six Days on the Road by Earl Green and Carl Montgomery. I remember breaking a string during the performance. We didn’t have a name and were introduced as Paul Deaton and his New Flying Buttresses. The name lasted exactly for that single gig.
Johnny Cash
On July 22, 1974, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and their band traveled to Davenport to perform at Municipal Stadium at the request of the Rev. Tommy Barnett, then of the Westside Assembly of God. During his tenure as pastor, Barnett grew the congregation from 76 to more than 4,000 members. Westside buses could be seen each Sunday, plying the neighborhoods throughout the lower part of Davenport, picking up its church-goers for service and then delivering them home.
Carl Perkins and Johnny Cash playing at a Tommy Barnett Revival at Municipal Stadium. Screenshot from a video of uncertain provenance.
Cash was supportive of Barnett at the time, although he recanted his support in one of his memoirs. In researching this post, I found numerous stories about the concert, and having been there, found almost all of them to be greatly exaggerated. A short video of Barnett and Cash includes a panoramic shot of the crowd at Municipal Stadium (Link is here). The stadium and bleachers show the concert was well attended. I’d come to the concert to hear my shirt-tail relative June Carter Cash, but she stayed behind in Tennessee at the last moment. Since I had already been baptized, I passed on the opportunity to walk to the stage and be saved.
These are the kinds of events that attracted working class families in Davenport during the 1960s and ’70s. We weren’t Marxists, yet the word proletariat fits.
The year has been okay, yet nothing to write home about. In fact, most of the year was spent at home with three months of my spouse being gone to help her sister. Whatever happened mostly happened in Big Grove Township.
Each year, beginning at Thanksgiving, I review my life. In the past I reviewed my most viewed blog posts. There are additional highlights to include this year.
Writing
My most viewed blog post was History of a Wing Nut published Aug. 25, on Blog for Iowa. I wrote, “(Mariannette) Miller-Meeks has become a wing-nut institution. Iowans deserve better.” I reviewed the influence of the fossil fuel industry on her work in the Congress, as well as her six congressional campaigns. It was the third most popular new post on Blog for Iowa this year.
On Journey Home my remembrance of friend since high school Joe Garrity was the most popular post. Joe died March 22 of complicated health issues triggered by COVID-19. It makes no sense this post would get so much traffic, except for the fact his obituary was not widely published. I continue to miss Joe and our many conversations, letters and emails.
The worm turned for me regarding the climate crisis this year. In a Sept. 21 letter to the editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette, I wrote, “Environmental activism seems unlikely to solve the climate crisis. All the talk about climate change distracts us from the fundamental problem: the effect of unmitigated capitalist growth ravaging the resources and systems of the earth and its atmosphere.” The words “climate change” have become a lightning rod for people who seek to sustain the unsustainable status quo. A single activist can do little unless they team with other, like-minded people. In the meanwhile, Earth is experiencing it’s hottest temperatures on record in 2023.
Health
My almost 72-year-old frame still carries me along. I developed a regimen of exams, tests, and monitoring. If I’m not in perfect health, I feel aware of my deficiencies. I can no longer jog the way I did and now walk 30 minutes daily along the state park trail. The path is similar each day and I have been able to watch the turning of seasons up close.
In our household, my spouse is vegan and I am ovo-lacto vegetarian. We’ve been working through menu planning since she decided to eat vegan during the coronavirus pandemic. We developed a core ten or so dishes which we prepare in rotation. We need more than that. This was an unexpected development, yet there is unique engagement in trying new things while shifting our diet. Much more to come from the kitchen on this next year.
Reading
As of today I finished reading 62 books in 2023.
In fiction, my favorite was Whose Names Are Unknown by Sanora Babb. I also enjoyed The Last Chairlift by John Irving, and American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins.
None of the poetry stood out particularly. I read Plantains and Our Becoming by Melania Louisa Marte. I believe she has a bright future and look forward to her next book. I revisited Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck. I first read this in graduate school. She’s an important poet, although reading her is a bit like taking medicine.
More than half of what I read was nonfiction. I interviewed Thom Hartmann regarding his new book The Hidden History of American Democracy and published my review here, on Blog for Iowa, and on Bleeding Heartland. I asked if this would be his last in the Hidden History series and he said he didn’t know but is negotiating with his publisher.
Timothy C. Weingard’s Mosquito: A Human History was likely the best nonfiction of the year. Other top nonfiction includes The Farmer’s Lawyer by Sarah Vogel, A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan, Democracy Awakening by Heather Cox Richardson, and White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg. Each of the nonfiction books I read had redeeming qualities. That’s likely because of how I selected them.
Three other books stood out yet defy category. I re-read Martha Paulos’ Doggerel. Martha and I were friends at university and we had constant conversations about art, literature, and living a creative life. Someone had given a mediocre review of the book on Goodreads and I felt I had to balance it with a positive one. Marilynne Robinson’s When I was a Child I Read Books was exceptional. I’m not a fan of some of her work, but this one… holy cow! The other was William Styron’s Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. I had no idea of his problems when I heard him read in the English Philosophy Building at the university. We often live for such reading experiences as these three books represent.
Kitchen Garden
For the first year, deer got into the tomato patch. I changed the fencing to allow more space between rows and it was a disaster. Deer were able to land between rows and eat the tender leaves of recently planted tomatoes. Once inside the fencing they couldn’t figure out how to get out and bent the stakes over to make their exit. I’m going back to the old way in 2024.
Bell peppers were poor quality and cucumbers, zucchini, and cruciferous vegetables thrived. There was a bumper crop of hot peppers and fennel. There was a problem with the garlic mulch which cut production by about 20 percent. There was still enough garlic to last the full year.
We had all the pears we could eat. All four varieties of apple trees produced something and two were abundant. I put up all the apple cider vinegar, apple butter and apple sauce we would need for a couple of years. We filled the produce drawer of the refrigerator to preserve fresh apples, and there remains a bushel with which I need to do something soon. I didn’t hardly touch the production of Earliblaze and Red Delicious apples. The deer made out with nightly visits for an apple feast.
The portable greenhouse didn’t make it through the season and will have to be replaced in the spring. Row cover was great for herbs and lettuce, although the fabric saw its last crop in 2023 and will be replaced. The freezer and canning jars were filled early in the season with leafy green vegetables and vegetable broth. I figure I have 14 more seasons in the garden before age catches up with me, at least according to the Social Security Administration.
Overall the garden was a success, as was the use of produce in the kitchen. I put 100 cloves of garlic in the ground in October for next July’s harvest.
Photography
My Instagram account is a record of the best photos I’ve taken. The subjects are the kitchen garden, hiking, and sunrises, with a bit of travel and indoors shots thrown in. The quality of photos produced by the camera in my mobile device is remarkable. What once was a throw away snapshot process is now something more.
Sunrise on Lake Macbride October 2023.
Financial
Living on our pensions was a struggle so we had to borrow money. Maybe it’s because the mechanical systems in our home were mostly the original ones installed in 1993 and needed replacing this year. We are also living with a car loan for a couple more years. There are some health care bills but most of those expenses have been covered by insurance. Compared to most Americans, we are doing okay. There wasn’t as much discretionary spending in 2023. There will be less in 2024.
Compared to previous years, this one wasn’t stellar. All the same, it is important to give thanks for our many blessings this time of year.
Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter led me to a dismal place regarding social media. Whatever I thought I had before him no longer exists. The whole idea of social media seems bankrupt. There is some good in that, accompanied by a lot of bad.
A couple of weeks ago I logged into every social media account I have and tried posting on them at least daily to see what best served my needs. The list is as follows:
Facebook
Instagram
Threads
X
Post
Blue Sky
Spoutible
LinkedIn
It is time to make some decisions, and here they are.
The trio of Meta applications is going to stay. I use Instagram to post an almost daily stream of photos about my life. Most of it is gardening and trail walking, with a few other things added as serendipity provides. These are all cross-posted on Facebook and are my main contribution there. A lot of people comment to me they like my photographs, both on the platforms and in real life. I publicize an occasional event on Facebook or post a link to a blog post I wrote. I also created Facebook groups to support my high school class and the home owners association where we live. Facebook and Instagram are mostly outlets for my creativity, not sources of news outside the two groups mentioned.
Threads is new with new opportunities. I plan to stick it out there until the inevitable advertising begins and things shake out as to whether or not I will develop the same kinds of relationships I had on X before Musk. In general, there are a lot of people posting as it relates to their jobs, and I fell into a place where creatives hang out and for now am enjoying the vibe of sharing less job-related stuff. The app is clean and easy to use. Because of habits developed at X, I don’t hesitate to block people/bots/porn sites as needed. I am open to staying or leaving, whichever is best for my mental health.
LinkedIn is the odd duck. I discover a lot of useful information there and connect with people I’ve known for decades. I keep saying to myself now that I’m retired and printed my LinkedIn resume there’s no further use for it. Right after that someone from a past life surfaces wanting to get in touch. Will let LinkedIn ride for now.
I haven’t been able to get any meaningful traction on Spoutible, Blue Sky, and Post. I won’t close my accounts, yet likely won’t use them much either.
I need to pull the plug on X. What keeps my account active is relationships formed over the 15 years I have been on the platform. The trouble is Musk’s politics and attitudes as manifest on the site. He is a bad egg and poisons the entire experience. Who needs that?
The one time I heard B.B. King sing Thrill is Gone live was at the Col Ballroom in my hometown of Davenport. My sister and I went together and a grade school friend from our neighborhood was the opening act. It was a great evening. I don’t know how he did it — maybe that’s part of his genius — but King put feeling into every song he sung. Here’s the money verse. May you have happy landings on social media.
You know, I'm free, free now, baby
I'm free from your spell
Oh, free, free, free now, baby
I'm free from your spell
And now that it's all over
All that I can do is wish you well
It is totally shocking that I’ve been procrastinating getting back to work on my memoir. It’s not like there is anything better to do.
Today I started with a small piece of editing. The task has been languishing on my to-do list and now it’s done. I decided to work on Part II, which is my life after university and military service, beginning the summer of 1981.
After graduate school, I took a trip, found a job, and met my future spouse. I wanted to stay in Iowa and Johnson County is an oasis in a cultural desert of corn, soybeans, hay, oats, hogs, cattle, and sheep which was and remains Iowa. I had no interest in returning to my home town of Davenport. There was really no other place to live in Iowa, I reckoned. The challenge today is memory and artifacts from the second part of my life are too numerous to mention them all in a book. I don’t relish going through everything to cull items for the narrative. Hence the procrastination.
I worked as an admissions clerk at the University of Iowa Dental Clinic after graduate school. We saw patients from all around Iowa — wealthy patients with private insurance, indigents with limited means, and everyone in between. Anyone who came to my desk was accepted for treatment. The exposure to people from diverse backgrounds was inspiring. In 1981 I didn’t worry about much beyond getting to work on time, learning what I could about people, and doing my best.
Outside my admissions work I put hours and hours into researching and writing fiction. I developed a couple of frameworks, read lots of books, and viewed countless movies. Somehow I failed to realize that writing means producing a certain number of words on a regular basis. I know that now and thus far produced about 127,000 words of an autobiography. All the same, I’ve been avoiding the big task of culling things into a viable narrative. I feel there are one, maybe two chances to go through everything while I’m alive. I want to gain what insights I can and get the story right.
I wrote a task for tomorrow: read the next 100 pages of the draft and take notes. This will lead to updating the outline and help identify where the narrative devolves into a series of snippets from journals and cut and paste paragraphs. The best way to get going is take one step each day and make sure it gets done. I don’t know any other way to get started, and time’s a wasting. This is what I mean by it’s time to get to work.
One last shot before the deciduous tree leaves have fallen. Oct. 27, 2023.
The first hard frost is a couple weeks late. The forecast is Sunday night with ambient temperatures in the 20s. I’m ready. Perishables are harvested from the garden, the garden hose rolled up in the garage. I plan to mow one more time. With any luck it will be before the Trick or Treaters come Tuesday evening.
Kale harvest before the first hard frost, Oct. 27, 2023.
The wheat straw covering my garlic patch sprouted. I assume frost will kill it. I’ve never had that much seed in my straw. Buying it from a different vendor makes a difference. If wheat survives the cold, I’ll have to turn the straw and kill it myself. I am reluctant to add the descriptor “wheat murderer” to my resume. Garlic takes precedence over making a few wheat biscuits.
Golf carts of Halloween.
Halloween trick or treat night is an occasion for parents of young children to get out the golf cart and run with their neighborhood peers. I get around the neighborhood by walking, but I’m old school.
Short post today. It’s turning out to be a busy Sunday. Thanks for reading.
Past peak fall colors on the state park trail on Oct. 25, 2023.
Rain and thunderstorms are forecast through 3 p.m. We need the rain. On my trail walk yesterday the culvert where water runs off the watershed remained bone dry. If winter arrives, and there is inadequate rain, we will start the growing season behind the curve. That has consequences.
An acquaintance saw Rachel Maddow in Phoenix last night. Maddow is on her book tour for Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism. My copy is waiting in queue to be read. I delayed reading Prequel because I needed a break after reading Wallace Stegner’s intense history of the opening of the American West. With social media we all do everything together all the time. Books I recently read have a page on this blog, here. Do join in and try one of them!
I started the first task on a sorting table. The sorting table is a place in my writing area where I bring boxes and piles and lay them out so I can dispose of the contents. It serves a number of functions, the most important of which is doing research for the main creative work in progress. In addition to determining dates and ideas to be included in writing, the sorting table serves to identify books to be taken to Goodwill, books to go on the to-read shelf (which is now overly full), and documents and artifacts that need further sorting and contemplation or recycling. Today’s stack had a box containing mostly bookmarks along with receipts for events I attended and my military driver’s license. There is good stuff in the box yet it’s a hodge-podge of life’s detritus. Some of it is going in the trash bin after all the paper gets shredded to start brush pile fires.
There is garden work to do after the rain. For the time being I’ll hole up at my writing table and focus on getting a few things done. Thanks for reading.
I haven’t written about how qualified and competent Joe Biden is as our president. He is uniquely qualified to be president, especially right now. That I haven’t written about this may be due to possessing that certain Iowa bias based upon his three dismal appearances in the Iowa caucuses, including in 2020. I don’t blame him for axing Iowa in the nominating poll position. No one asked for my opinion. He is successfully holding back the forces of authoritarianism and fascism.
Vice President Joe Biden, May 2010 in Cedar Rapids. Photo by the author.
While returning to writing my autobiography it’s immediately clear: I have a lot of work to do. Given the limited window of October 2023 to March 2024, what work will I do? I need to get Part II framed up with main events so I can later hang details upon it.
The early part of a life is easy to describe because during education and early work experience, a single thread can tie everything together. That’s less the case as a person moves on to next steps, which may include marriage, a family life, relationships, work, and pursuit of health, welfare and happiness. I wrote previously about this and what I said then holds true. Part II is to describe the life for which I spent 30 years preparing.
A related process is going through boxes of belongings and downsizing. Partly this helps focus on aspects of the story I might have forgotten. Partly, the unused detritus of a long life should be passed on to people who might use it today. This is better done by the owner than left to heirs. Our child doesn’t want all the stuff that fits into our house, so I would be serving her interests by processing it now. For a while, I’ll be going through and eliminating possessions, keeping what best fits the story as it evolves.
Lastly for today, I need to set aside a specific time of day to write. That’s likely to be after I finish morning tasks and eat breakfast. I hope to settle into my desk by the eight or nine o’clock hour and write until noon.
Writing desk while living at Five Points in Davenport in 1979-1980.
For three weeks after graduate school in May and June 1981, I visited a number of friends. The trip took me to Springfield, Illinois; Columbus, Georgia; Fort Rucker, Alabama; New Orleans; and along the Mississippi River north through Vicksburg Mississippi; Portageville and Ballwin, Missouri; and then home to Iowa City. It was the last trip after finishing my education and before applying said education to my life. I had no idea how things would turn out.
The trip was unlike the Grand Tour I made after undergraduate school. Since then, I had served in the military, lived in Europe for three years, attended graduate school on the G.I. Bill, and moved through degree preparation like a fish swims through water. Two artist friends brought a bottle of champagne to my place and helped celebrate my graduation. We discussed audiences and art. How much are artists influenced by their audiences? Should they be influenced? I believed then, and more so now, a writer must concern themselves with an audience. In 1981, I had no art, little public writing, and no concept of audience other than people who held a certain undefined social status.
Each place I went held vestiges of antebellum life. From the black housekeeper of an IRS worker, to racist attitudes among my former Army buddies, to a local culture where the next Ku Klux Klan meeting was all the social buzz, it was everywhere I went.
What struck me more than anything was the ordinariness of people I met. People stood at odds with the American culture I know. Or maybe, they represented an American culture I hadn’t come to know. While Lincoln’s bones rest in Springfield, the living there seemed unprepared to take up the unfinished tasks of the dead. Instead they participated in a culture devoid of life as they performed old, well-patterned ceremonies of living that had lost their meaning by 1981. My trip was a hard reckoning with reality.
Near Columbus, Georgia I visited a place that today is called Historic Westville. The ticket I bought is printed with the message, “Westville. Where it’s always 1850.” Westville is a fabricated village made from buildings built before 1850 and moved to what was once an open field. It was to represent the zenith of cultural life in the antebellum south. People who had visited Colonial Williamsburg would be disappointed by Westville, yet the designers did the best they could. Attendance was slight the day I visited.
In one building I met a period costumed woman who showed me an example of home spun thread. There was a spinning wheel and she showed me how it worked. However, despite the knowledge, she didn’t know how to make homespun herself. I found something about this disappointingly characteristic of modern day Americans. We may know the ideas behind how things work, to actually do such work, to put ideas into motion, is a step too far for many. Americans, above all else, must practice those things they know are important. When it came to equality under the law, the south of my trip failed to measure up.
After finishing my long education I had to get going in life. I felt an urge to put into practice what I learned during the first thirty years. I knew then I couldn’t be like some of the friends I encountered on this trip south. What I would become was both unknown and an open book. As much as any other time, I began writing that book in 1981.
When I created this blog in 2007, I hardly knew what social media was. Twitter and Facebook existed. I soon joined Facebook more because our child was there and had moved outside Iowa. I was not on social media to promote this blog by posting links.
Over the years, I moved through numerous social media accounts. The main ones remaining are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. I developed different editorial values for each and used Twitter and LinkedIn as main vehicles to promote my blog. The various WordPress applications are by far the largest source of my views. With Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, everything is changing.
In April WordPress sent a message that the Twitter API was no longer working. That means links to my articles could not automatically post on Twitter. The problem is not fixed. I continued to manually post on Twitter yet to no avail. Traffic from Twitter to my blog dropped by 58 percent beginning in May.
Determining the cause of traffic loss is a dubious proposition. My blog has small viewership compared to most news organizations and popular blogs. Losing a few regular readers who linked from Twitter makes a difference in my world. I suspect the reason Twitter referrals declined was people were leaving the platform rather than discrimination by the designers of what became X. Whatever happened, a number of factors — loss of the API, changes by X in who saw my posts, and my readers leaving X for other platforms — Twitter became less relevant to my writing.
At the same time my referrals were in decline, National Public Radio got into a spat with X over how they were described. Because of it, they and some of their affiliates ceased posting on X in early April. What they found is it made a negligible difference in the number of views they experienced on their website. In short, it wasn’t worth the work, from a viewership standpoint, to post on the X platform. Because each reader is important to my overall viewership, my problems are not the same as NPR if my conclusion about whether it is worth the work is similar.
What does all this mean? Less time on X, more time focused on my writing, and some thought given to how I expand readership. While social media is a good place to meet and make friends and acquaintances, it is not the reason we blog. It begins with having something meaningful to say with which readers will engage. It also means working to keep readers coming back for more. I’m not sure X ever did that for me and soon it will be time to move on. In the meanwhile, I hope readers will pass along a link to my blog to a friend when they find meaningful content here. It’s an organic way of growing viewership, and may be the most enduring.
Journey Home 
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