Categories
Living in Society

Twitter Take Two

One day after Elon Musk acquired Twitter I protected my tweets. For the uninitiated, that means only people who follow me can see them. I cut back on posting as well.

Two days afterward, I opened this can of coffee and chicory to make a pot. The coffee reminds me of a trip to New Orleans where I had some with beignets at the French Market Cafe du Monde. After Katrina, it reminds me of the peril of living close to the mouth of the Mississippi River. Happy times a plenty, yet the brass band is always on standby for a funeral procession. Today is a Saturday tinged with sadness for more important reasons than who owns Twitter.

I began blogging in 2007 and created a writing process that includes blogging and social media. Twitter has become an important medium for my writing as 12 percent of my blog views this year came from their website. The 63,000 tweets I’ve written since joining in 2008 have taken time and thoughtful consideration. The years have been a process of learning how to write in public. I summarized it in a note to Donald Kaul’s last publisher after he had a heart attack.

How oligarchs and big money impact social media was in the background until now. After Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the process to which I referred in this note needs re-engineering. It needs distancing from social media. My writing needs protection from the vicissitudes of oligarchs. It means breaking the comfort of patterns developed over many years. That period began specifically on Nov. 10, 2007 with my first blog post. The new period has arrived as I take up my autobiography again this fall. Let’s say it began on Oct. 27, 2022.

What about the friendships developed on Twitter? A few in my circle are unique to Twitter. I know and have had social relationships outside the platform with more than half of the 177 people I follow. I would miss those interactions, even if from time to time they make me mad. They are the strongest case for preserving my Twitter account. I may yet do that, but not before the post-acquisition period plays out.

There are complications. I’m reading Alice Wong’s memoir Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life. Wong has muscular dystrophy and despite being disabled by it has written an eye-opening book, which I recommend. In it she writes how Twitter enables disabled persons to participate in social activism in a way they couldn’t if it didn’t exist. We should be building people up, not tearing them down. If Musk and his investors are unsuccessful in producing the amount of revenue he wants from the platform through ownership, that could lead to something terrible regarding the disabled community. The complications are complex when we consider how many users exist and the many things it means in their lives.

I’ve been encouraged to wait the transition out. I’m in no hurry to go dark on Twitter yet accept that as a possible outcome. In the meanwhile, I’ll post less and lurk, waiting to see what happens. I have plenty of writing and reading to do offline.

Categories
Living in Society

Roof Inspection Day

Garden on Oct. 27, 2022 from the roof of the house.

It was a perfect day for inspecting the roof and cleaning gutters. No wind and moderate temperatures, the whole job took less than 15 minutes. At age 70, I feel confident climbing the ladder to do this work. I’m not yet ready to pay someone a hundred bucks to do this 15-minute job. I don’t know how many more years I will continue.

I took a traditional photo of the garden.

Categories
Living in Society

Leaves Fall

Fall colors are pretty, yet past prime.

Not much to say today, or any day before the midterm election. Here’s a photo of my front yard with leaves piling up. It’s great mulch for the garlic and more work to do! Thanks for reading.

Categories
Living in Society

Fall Scene

View from our dining room.

Requests to vote by mail in the Nov. 8 election declined by 39 percent over 2018, the last midterm election. Republicans have successfully suppressed early voting by mail in Johnson County. Democrats are advising people to vote early in person if they have to, instead of risking the uncertainties of the United States Postal Service. An average 836 voters per day are voting early at the county administration building. With 14 days left, it seems unlikely early voting, especially in Big Grove precinct, will reach the level of 2018. It’s still early, yet if that holds true, it will be problematic for Democrats who are already in the minority in our House and Senate districts.

We cast our ballots at the administration building yesterday after returning from Des Moines. I’ll walk in the university homecoming parade on Friday with Mike Franken who is in the county most of the day. I’m door knocking with Kevin Kinney’s campaign this weekend. I sent in my last letters to newspaper editors for this cycle. I volunteered to be a Democratic poll watcher and the training is next week. In 2020 Republicans sent no poll watcher to our precinct even though most of their voters cast a ballot on election day. I don’t expect any trouble, yet there are stories of voter intimidation. These are the last days of the campaign and it feels a bit eerie, like we are not yet over the pandemic.

Categories
Writing

Vote on Nov. 8

Woman Writing Letter

As the midterm election approaches, my hope is everyone eligible to vote will do so.

When I served in the military the disgrace of President Richard Nixon was on my mind. With Nixon gone, I didn’t care who won the 1976 election. While shipping overseas to serve in an infantry division during the Cold War, I hoped everyone back home did their duty and voted. I was ready to accept the results of the election.

This year there are candidates on the ballot who continue to say the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. What malarkey! I will accept the results of the 2022 midterm election because I understand our elections are secure and honest, and every vote that can legally be counted will be. In Iowa we are very good at running elections.

Nov. 8 will be here before we know it. Make sure you do your part, study the candidates and the proposed constitutional amendment on the sample ballot, and vote. It is the least we can do to secure our democratic way of life.

~ First published in the Marengo Pioneer Republican on Oct. 26, 2022.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

End of Apple Season

Gold Rush apples at Wilson’s Orchard and Farm Oct. 22, 2022.

On Saturday I made the last trip to the orchard this season. There were lots of Gold Rush on the trees and I picked 32 of them. The refrigerator bin is now full of apples, enough to last into 2023.

There are also a few Honeycrisp and Snow Sweet apples in the bin, yet Gold Rush is the main event for storage. They keep surprisingly well for fresh eating. As long as the orchard continues to operate, I needn’t plant my own trees.

It is noteworthy the fate of orchards isn’t always growing apples and other fruit. When we were married, well before Wilson’s Orchard and Farm was planted, we went to the Sand Road Orchard south of Iowa City. A family of Dutch immigrants operated it and featured Dutch chocolate as an added item for sale. The property was sold for development. It appears Wilson’s Orchard and Farm is sustainable. It is always an open question when development seeks to fill in all the blank spaces on the fringes of the county seat, and farming can be a dicey business.

We live in the present, and this year there are Gold Rush apples.

My spouse has been at her sister’s home for three days now. The main change is the quiet, which I don’t relish. My diet has turned to using more hot peppers along with the contents of the pantry, refrigerator and freezer.

I ground up most of the remaining hot peppers from the garden and froze them in a cupcake pan. The small portions are just right to use in dishes that call for hot peppers. I also froze the remaining fresh parsley in the cupcake pan, covered with water. A couple of these parsley cakes will go well in winter soups. There are two bags of Winterbor kale and with the warmer weather there may be another harvest. I have to use up the sweet bell peppers, yet there were so many of them this year, if a few go bad I’ll tolerate it. I struck the third garden patch yesterday. Four more to go.

Laundry is caught up, even the garage rags. Rain is forecast today. That may enable me to burn the brush pile tomorrow. For now, there is plenty to do before she returns home later this week.

Categories
Living in Society

Twitter and Me

Transforming to autumn yellows.

After the general election I expect my Twitter use will change. Instead of using the platform for editorializing, I expect to revert to news gathering as its primary function. That’s to be expected after a long campaign season.

It is also a reaction to Elon Musk’s potential acquisition of the social media platform. We don’t need oligarchs structuring our social media any more than they already are.

There is also this from the Washington Post:

Twitter’s workforce is likely to be hit with massive cuts in the coming months, no matter who owns the company, interviews and documents obtained by The Washington Post show, a change likely to have major impact on its ability to control harmful content and prevent data security crises.

Washington Post, Oct. 20, 2022.

Whether or not this is accurate, I don’t know. Musk told the newspaper he would seek new ways of extracting revenue from the platform once the acquisition is consummated. It would be another blow to the foundational attractions of social media.

More than anything, composing a tweet helps me think things through and put ideas into words. Sometimes the process is successful, sometimes not so much. It seems essential to a writer to have some method of taking abstract, random contemporary experience and render it into something meaningful. Twitter accomplishes that, even if it is not the only methodology I use.

While working on my autobiography last winter, the writing process served as Twitter does, arguably to more useful purpose. I would locate some artifact or piece of writing, then think through what it meant in context of my narrative. I would either incorporate or discard it. I’ll need Twitter less for this type of function as I return to autobiography.

When I referred to Twitter use as having a news gathering function, I mean a person can follow specific people writing about current affairs without the structure of a news organization. I read seven newspapers yet it also matters what Jane Mayer, Naomi Oreskes, Elizabeth Kolbert and others have to say. If they have written something new, they are likely to post it on Twitter soon after publication. The same is true of a number of journalists and commentators I follow. This puts me ahead of the news curve.

There is a human side of Twitter. I met many of the 180 people I follow in real life and have a relationship with them. I would miss updates from them. At the same time a lot of accounts I follow are utilitarian in nature. Someone is running for office, or is important for a project, and there is a timeline on their useful nature. There will be a purging after the election.

After the election, I expect to protect my tweets to minimize the tweet-crashing experience and focus on what I want to say and write there. Life seems too short for distractions.

I haven’t studied how much time I spend on Twitter yet by reducing its use, I should free valuable time for other projects. There is an addictive quality to the platform. While aging I need less addictions. In my post-pandemic retirement, I also yearn for connection with people. That feeling will grow as I age.

I joined Twitter in September 2008 after our child graduated college and left Iowa. I needed a way to stay in touch. Twitter was okay for that, even if I feel a bit like a lurker. Lurking is actually a good thing on social media platforms like Twitch. One hopes our real life relationship continues more than our social media one.

I’ll remain on Twitter for now and see how the Musk deal proceeds. One useful function is to refer people to this website to read my posts. That may be reason enough to stay.

Categories
Living in Society

Radio in the Hinterlands

Field corn.

When a person lives in Iowa it is hard to avoid noticing the harvest.

74 percent of Iowa soybeans and 38 percent of corn had been harvested as of Oct. 17. We are running a few days ahead of historical averages because it has been exceedingly dry. The entire state is experiencing drought conditions. I held off burning the brush pile because there is a Red Flag Warning, which means extreme fire conditions combined with high wind and low relative humidity. Everything is parched.

As I write this post on a Saturday afternoon, the ambient temperature is 78 degrees with a high of 82 expected in a couple of hours. The average high temperature here is 61 degrees in October. For Oct. 22, it is warm. One needn’t be a scientist to understand something is going on.

On Thursday I delivered my spouse to her sister’s place in Des Moines. We had a lot to talk about as we passed fields with farmers harvesting corn and beans. Between Williamsburg and Altoona, Interstate 80 is a hinterland of row crops, wind turbines and the detritus of retail establishments grown up to service a few locals, but mostly travelers. Towns and cities are hidden from sight.

On the way back, I turned on the car radio and began searching for channels. I avoided the religious stations and settled on a couple of country music and classic rock programs to help me make it back within range of my usual ones. From the ads, it became clear that Republicans dominate rural Iowa.

Governor Kim Reynolds has a substantial campaign war chest and attorney general candidate Brenna Bird just got a major donation from the Republican Attorneys General Association to defeat incumbent Tom Miller. These two Republicans have money to burn on their campaigns. The radio ads repeated during my trip. Whether any farmers were listening while running the combines and grain wagons, I don’t know. Republican messaging filled the vacuum left by Democrats.

To be effective, radio advertising must exist and be repetitive. In the Iowa hinterlands, it is the domain of statewide candidates and big money. Tom Miller was unlikely planning to spend millions on his campaign. Republicans are trying to buy an attorney general.

Our gubernatorial candidate, Deidre DeJear, simply doesn’t have the money for radio advertising even though it is cheap. My worry is her television advertising goes dark as we enter the last two weeks of the campaign, leaving Republicans the only voices heard there as well. During the primary, another Democratic candidate for governor dropped out of the race because he couldn’t get a meeting with major Democratic donors.

As the miles fell behind me the ads repeated. Running down President Biden and associating the Democratic candidates with him because of his unpopularity. Every sentence repeated was a pack of lies. When it is the only political voice rural people hear, it’s hard to stand up to it.

The election is in 17 days. Whatever the outcome, we have to do better to dig out of the hole we dug for ourselves. It’s possible, yet without the rural areas, I’m not sure how that happens.

Categories
Living in Society

Autumn Sky

Autumn Sky.

Some days it is best to just be.

Categories
Writing

Road to Everywhere

Single ingress/egress for the place where we live.

The coronavirus pandemic changed our family’s lives. It goes without saying the pandemic had us withdraw from society. I left paid work, quit all but utilitarian travel, spent more time at home, and downsized our operation to being a one-car family with a newer, smaller automobile. Change is not finished. The pandemic is not finished either, although it is being normalized.

When I consider leaving the property it is about trips to retail merchants, on political errands, or to visit family or friends. That is it. I did my traveling for education and adventure when I was young. Career work with a large transportation services firm had me traveling as well. We took a few vacations when our child was young. These days, when driving along the single egress from our home, I seldom leave the state. Usually a gallon of milk accompanies me on the trip home.

While the chip and seal access lane to our development is a road to everywhere, is it really if we choose not to travel it? Going left at the main road takes me to the dairy store, to my dentist, to political friends in Iowa County, and to the airport. A right turn takes me to town, to the clinic, to the county seat, to shopping, and to visit family. It is a much bigger world than that. I know, because I have been there.

I may plan a trip for recreation or learning. The Stanley Museum finally opened on the University of Iowa campus after being flooded out and permanently evacuated from its previous home along the Iowa River in 2008. Maybe I’ll visit and try not to get grumpy about repatriating all the African artifacts Maxwell and Elizabeth Stanley brought back from their travels. After all, seeing Joan Miró’s A Drop of Dew Falling from the Wing of a Bird Awakens Rosalie Asleep in the Shade of a Cobweb inspired me to learn more about the artist and eventually see him making a film in Saint-Paul de Vence in 1979. I have no desire to see Jackson Pollack’s Mural, which was a gift to the museum by Peggy Guggenheim. So maybe there is a possible non-utilitarian trip in the future.

For now, I appreciate the opportunity to walk along the road and take a photo on a beautiful fall day. That is travel enough in a time of pandemic.