An advertisement circulates that the only AI people over 40 use is ChatGPT. Okay. I don’t pretend to know a lot about AI, and my experience with ChatGPT began in earnest only last week. I accept that AI can be a reasonable part of life, although I don’t understand the bigger picture. Larry Ellison of Oracle is one oligarch who talks like he gets it.
“I think it’s very, very clear: AI is a much bigger deal than the Industrial Revolution, electricity, and everything that’s come before,” Ellison said in a video conversation with former UK prime Minister Tony Blair.
“We will soon have not only artificial intelligence but also — much sooner than anticipated —artificial general intelligence and then, in the not-too-distant future, artificial superintelligence.” (Oracle’s Larry Ellison on AI: ‘Most Important Discovery in Human History’, Cloud Wars, Feb 25, 2025).
Bigger than electricity? We mere mortals must live our lives and depend upon basic science that produces electricity. How shall we adapt to AI? Who will change our flat tire on a long stretch of deserted Iowa highway?
This recent statement is tainted by my memory of Ellison from when I attended OpenWorld in 2006. He was onstage with a penguin to announce Oracle’s full support for Red Hat Linux. In other words, he was co-opting the open source software and branding Oracle’s support. What a prick. Well, the penguin was interesting, if concerned about being in a room full of people.
What did I learn last week? I asked, “What are best practices for using ChatGPT in writing?” The answer was long and confirmed my natural impulses on how to use it. To a degree, AI is all about what I’m thinking. It cautioned me to use ethical and transparent practices:
Disclose AI assistance when appropriate (especially in journalism or academia).
Don’t claim AI-generated content as wholly your own if it’s substantial.
Always fact-check: AI can make confident errors.
I found ChatGPT is an uninspired writer. The assignments I entered returned something wooden and definitely not mine. Its editing skills were positive for short paragraphs. I expect to spend time determining how I might use it. When I get stumped on how to word something I’ll paste the paragraph into the dialogue box and see what comes back. I have yet to use something the machine sent back without further editing. It will become one more tool among many in the writer’s workshop.
The machine helped improve the structure of my daily life. Through five iterations, I wrote daily work plans. The culmination was a template to use on writing days. Even without a daily plan, I have ideas on what to do to forget my worries and work on things in my personal life that need it. ChatGPT brought everything into sharp focus and I’m the better for it.
My morning wake up regimen began after a visit to a podiatrist for plantar fasciitis. By the end of last week, the machine and I added exercises to address not only plantar fasciitis, but balance, upper body strength, and my core. The process was much quicker than looking through websites or books on my shelf. After a few days, I’m feeling positive results. In a few months, I will take another look at the regimen.
In my quest to become a better photographer, I asked the machine to help me with a plan to capture half a dozen shots of the No Kings rally on Oct. 18. It proposed a series of different types of shots and refined it when I uploaded a map of the site with a description of the topography. It even gave me specific places to stand to get the shots. When doing an amateur photo shoot, we have to be alert for developments as they happen. Having a plan makes the experience better and hopefully produces better photographs.
There is a balance between using ChatGPT and Google search. The search engine incorporates AI, although I find it a bit annoying. Spare me the machine-generated narrative and just give me the facts. It won’t take long to determine which method to use for different types of queries.
Because of the internet we have AI in Big Grove Township. As we spend more time at home in retirement, managing daily affairs keeps us engaged and that’s good for our longevity. Like many people, I seek to spend less time online. ChatGPT is not really helping yet I want to use it. There in a nutshell is humanity.
Cooking collards with onion, jalapeno pepper and garlic.
News this week was that Substacker Bari Weiss will be taking The Free Press to CBS, where she’ll become editor-in-chief of the news division. Ana Marie Cox had comments about this:
If the Free Press leave Substack, it would be an enormous hit to the platform. Their 10 percent vig generates $1 million a year, representing roughly 2.5% of Substack’s total annual revenue (estimated around $40–45 million).
As a reminder: Substack has never turned a profit, and yet it’s still valued at $1 billion based on VC rounds. I’ve argued before in this newsletter that Substack cannot make money if it stays true to its promise of being a home for independent journalists wanting to preserve their voices. It’s a high-minded and laudable goal—one I’ve been seduced by myself, and one that has drawn many writers I deeply respect—but the business pressures don’t align with that vision.
Sooner or later the gravitational pull of investors will drag the platform toward something else entirely: the “YouTube of newsletters,” with all the churn, AI slop, engagement bait, and radicalization that implies.
Losing The Free Press wouldn’t just be a big financial hit; it would accelerate the enshittification. (The Freed Press, by Ana Marie Cox on Buttondown).
In that context, I remain 75 percent sure I will move my public writing to Substack beginning in January 2026.
My issues with WordPress are two.
The main contractor through whom I got my WordPress blog printed went out of business. Replacement services are much more expensive. With Substack I get an email every time I post, so there would be hard copy backup by printing it out. Not ideal or fancy, yet it would work. I am old school and know how to operate a three ring binder.
Secondly, I get way more views on Substack than WordPress. This is a major factor behind my move. Partly, they track them differently and one viewer can make multiple “views” on a single post while reading it. Even with that, the numbers are too great to ignore. After all, the reason we write in public is to be read.
Yes I have read Cox’s multiple issues with Substack, including all about the Nazi sh*t there. I can live with that, I think. If I can’t, I’ll do something else. I looked at Buttondown, Cox’s current home, as an option. I am not famous with a large following as she is. I need the density of people I know on Substack. I have three months to get ready.
Changes will be coming for pauldeaton.com. I don’t want to lose the domain, so I plan to take the current content private and reassign the domain to one of the spare blogs I keep in the background and put that in public. I still need a place to post letters to the editor and cross post written work I do for other sites. Substack does not seem like that kind of place. While I have the paper archive, I use the blogs I’ve taken private to search easily. I have hidden posts from multiple platforms loaded on WordPress going back to 2007. That site will always be a resource.
My view of this may change once I finish my autobiography. If my eyesight deteriorates, that would be a factor and I would likely stop writing in public. Moving to Substack appears to have more rewards than risk. Now I need to get the rest of the way there. This week’s news did not help.
On the last day of September I walked through the greens plot and picked what looked good. It included this kale plus a generous amount of collards and chard. While it was challenging to push through the tall foxtail weeds, at the end of season I leave them so small birds can light on them and eat the seeds. I washed and stored everything we did not eat for supper in the refrigerator. Wednesday morning for breakfast, I cooked and ate a bag of collards picked on August 30. Cruciferous vegetables store well in the refrigerator, although the oldest should be used first. They truly are a mainstay ingredient in our kitchen garden.
On some days I sit at my desk without an idea of where I will go with the day’s writing. I do sit down, though. Perhaps that is a sign of habit and discipline of the kind required by a writer. I am mostly sure I will ground what I write in some kind of local reality, like the greens harvest I just finished.
As I have written before, this blog is a way to get my writing juices flowing. I keep the posts short so they can be finished early in the day and I can move on to whatever creative endeavor is next. As fall progresses, that is usually a couple of hours writing and editing my autobiography. It also includes other work around the property. Writing is the foundation of my current life.
Writing in public is distinguished from producing a journal, email, or other private writing. This blog serves that purpose and because I get feedback in the form of comments, contact from people I know via telephone, text, or email. Each post is a work in progress after it is posted. While most posts remain unmodified, the conversations I have result in changing wording or changing how I think about a topic. My writing here is the public facing part of my life. It is essential.
Some call my writing political, yet I don’t know about that. When I write about politics, my personal experience and perspective are adjacent to it. It is better to criticize the administration about inflation by talking about how much the cost of a home-brewed cup of coffee increased this year than talk in vague generalities influenced by journalism and social media. In the end, political topics must necessarily be grounded in this place I call home to be meaningful.
I didn’t know I would be harvesting greens on Tuesday. I didn’t know how far I would get in the apple harvest this week. These are pragmatic unknowns with which a writer lives every day. Through practicing the craft of writing, without presumptions of what it should be, we can get better at it. That’s something I hope I am doing.
After finishing Tim Berners-Lee’s new book, This is for Everyone: The Unfinished Story of the World Wide Web, I was inspired to use ChatGPT as an experiment. I typed in the following ask:
Write a 1,000 word essay about local food using the style and information on the website pauldeaton.com
Within seconds, the text below appeared. I honestly don’t know what to make of it. I can see why writers might use AI to help draft a chapter. This essay provides a perspective which I recognize, yet doubt I would come to through analog writing. (Is analog writing a thing?) There are faults which could be corrected. However, it is not wrong about me and what I write. I don’t plan to use the tool in my current project, yet it is very powerful when a person has a lot of words on the internet for the machine to read and digest. So, I don’t reject AI out of hand. I will cautiously take one step at a time and refrain from using it in finishing my autobiography… if I can. Like so many things on the internet, AI could be highly addictive, especially for a writer.
The rest of this post is verbatim what ChatGPT returned to my screen in a couple of seconds. Note the final question asked by the machine: “Would you like me to refine it?” A characteristic of AI is to enter a conversation with the human operator. In doing so, it learns more about me.
Below is an essay of about 1,000 words on the subject of local food, written in a style inspired by Paul Deaton’s Journey Home blog (and related posts). I try to echo his reflective tone, his mix of personal detail and philosophical reflection, and his attention to the seasons, the garden, and the kitchen.
Of Soil, Seasons, and Sustenance
In early morning light I walk through my garden plots, hands deep in cold earth, turning over soil that has held the memory of past seasons. The hoses lie coiled; the beds rest after summer’s rush. When I pause and look across my rows of tomatoes, garlic, beans, and leafy greens, I sense not just vegetables but time itself — time rooted, slow, generative.
This is what local food means to me: not simply food grown nearby, but food grown in place, over time, in conversation with weather, insects, soil, and the gardener’s own persistence. To eat locally is to internalize part of that conversation. It is to bring pieces of place — rain, sun, dirt — inside one’s bones.
Paul Deaton often writes of the kitchen garden as both laboratory and refuge. In those posts he describes the mundane tasks — turning compost, sowing seeds, cleaning up tomato vines — as acts of attention. The kitchen is not separate from the garden; it is its complement. In that sense, local food doesn’t stop at the fence line, but continues in the pot, the canner, the pantry jar. Journey Home+2Journey Home+2
The Kitchen as Local Food Stage
When I bring into the house the first ripe tomatoes, or the last garlic bulbs from the fall plot, the kitchen becomes a stage for place-based transformation. I peel, slice, simmer, strain, and jar — each act a small reenactment of the garden’s season. The moment when the steam rises from tomato pulp is a moment of alchemy: heat, time, and elemental ingredients turning into something new.
Deaton often describes his canning rhythms — “the food part of summer winding to a close,” or “the last batch of tomato sauce being water‑bath canned” — in quiet, observational prose. Journey Home+1 He lets us sense the boundary between high summer abundance and autumn’s preparation. I borrow that rhythm. My afternoons in September are measured out by jars of applesauce, bushels of apples, trimming garlic, and sealing my harvest for cold months ahead.
Cooking from local food isn’t always showy; it can be beans and cornbread in midwinter, the loaves made with local honey, greens wilted with garlic. Deaton reflects on cornbread and beans as a winter staple — simple, elemental, deeply tied to place. Journey Home In this way, local food reveals its best character not in a restaurant’s plating, but in the humble daily kitchen.
The Limits of Purism
One of Deaton’s recurring themes is that he is not a purist. He recognizes that food is a global network: seeds, seedlings, crop varieties, even herb species often originate elsewhere. “The seeds and seedlings come from elsewhere and not here,” he writes. Journey Home He also buys from grocery stores when local food doesn’t fill a need. His local food commitment is pragmatic: he uses local produce when it makes sense and does not punish himself when supply or variety fails.
I feel the same tension. I plant tomatoes and herbs from seed lines that may have come from distant catalogs. I may buy citrus or imported olive oil when I desire it. Yet each time I choose local, I am bending my habits toward place. The import becomes the exception, the local the norm. That shift is more meaningful than any exuberant purity.
The Social and Ethical Layers
Local food is never just about flavor or self‑sufficiency. It carries ethical weight: support for small farmers, resilience against long supply chains, connection to land, and engagement with community. Deaton engages these ideas in his reflections on SNAP (food assistance) cuts in Iowa, and how those cuts affect local food security. Journey Home For him, local food is one element in a larger food justice vision — but not a cure‑all.
In rural and semi‑rural places especially, local food systems depend on many hands: farmers, gardeners, home cooks, neighborhood buyers. Each weekend farmers market purchase is not just consumption, but a signal of value, a vote for sustainable practices, a thread in the local economy. Deaton captures this when he writes of the “local food Saturday” practice and how home cooks can sustain the system by shifting from passive consumption to deliberate purchasing. Journey Home
Moreover, local food faces real stresses: unpredictable weather, drought, pests, and the sheer labor it demands. Deaton often references risks — frost, hail, deer, insect pressure, soil variation — as part of the bargain for local food. Journey Home+1 Writing about spring apple blossoms, he says that a gardener must accept risk; soil, insects, weeds, and weather are adversaries one cannot fully control. Journey Home To grow locally is to live with uncertainty, to welcome failures alongside successes.
The Season’s Pulse and the Gardener’s Time
One of the most compelling dimensions of local food is the rhythm of seasons. Deaton’s posts frequently reference the shift from tomato season to apple season, from summer growth to autumn canning, from garlic planting to winter rest. Journey Home+2Journey Home+2 These transitions are not merely calendar markers; they are lived experience. The gardener’s year is cyclical, anchored in soil and solar altitude.
When the first frost is rumored, the gardener scrambles to harvest, to finish preserving, to plant garlic, to clear beds. Late summer’s leisurely abundance gives way to urgency. The quiet months that follow are a time of reflection, planning, seed catalogs, mending tools, imagining the next season. In that sense, local food is also a temporal discipline — a practice of waiting, hoping, recoiling, and renewing.
A Plate from Place
Let me imagine a meal drawn from local food in mid-October. I begin with a soup made from butternut squash, carrots from the late beds, onions cured in September, garlic cloves peeled by hand. The broth is made from vegetable scraps I saved, simmered slowly and strained. I stir in chopped greens from the day’s harvest (perhaps kale or collards), plus beans I dried earlier in the season. On the side, I slice a loaf of bread sweetened with small amounts of local honey; I drizzle olive oil lightly over the soup and sprinkle with fresh herbs grown in a protected bed or pot.
Nothing in that meal arrives by miracle. Each element carries a history: soil, sun, rain, human hands. The flavors may be modest, not shocking or exotic. But the meal is deeply rooted. To eat it is to commune with time and place.
Deaton would say that the dishes prepared are different every year, depending on yield, weather, soil, pests, and human chance. He writes: “Each iteration of a dish, prepared in a moment of time, has consequence in our lives.” Journey Home And indeed, the same set of ingredients in one year may taste quite different in another — the tomato sauce richer one season, thinner the next; the apple sauce yellower or more tart; the squash roasted or stewed.
Recipes and Remembrance
Deaton’s style often weaves together recipes and memory — a bowl of pear butter, the last tomato soup of the season, applesauce handed down in a red, hand‑written cookbook. Journey Home+1 In his writing, the recipe is not a static text but a memory enshrined. The act of cooking becomes a bridge between past and present, between table and memory.
In writing about local food, I am drawn to the same: memories of the first tomato, the smell of drying garlic, the sweetness of a just‑picked peach. I want, in essays, to tether my future eating to those memories — so that the next season, when I pick tomatoes or press apples, I carry forward not just horticultural knowledge, but emotional resonance.
Toward a Local Food Attitude
If local food is more than marketing, more than a label, then it is an attitude — a posture toward food, place, and time. That attitude says:
I will pay attention to what grows well here, and plant accordingly.
I will observe what fails, and adapt.
I will put time into preservation, so that abundance extends.
I will support local farmers by purchase or labor.
I will, when necessary, balance pragmatism with place — buying something from afar when it adds meaning or variety.
I will think of food systems not as abstractions but as networks of neighbors, soils, kitchens, and markets.
In the end, local food is not an ideal to reach but a practice to inhabit.
In closing, I return to my garden in the faint light of dawn. The air is cool, the soil damp. I lean over a row of lettuce and pick leaves for breakfast. Each leaf is small, tender, flavored by dew and morning. I wash them in a bowl, spin them dry, and dress them lightly. I take a bite. The flavor is subtle but rich, tied to place. The pulse of local food beats in that bite.
Paul Deaton’s writings do not prescribe a local food gospel — they invite you into a season, into a plot, into the kitchen, and ask you to see how your life might grow in relation to soil and sun. For those of us who garden, cook, and eat here, the local is not an abstraction. It is the everyday, the quotidian, the place we inhabit in taste and time.
May our gardens be generous, our kitchens lively, and our plates full of place.
If you like, I can polish this essay further, adjust tone, or tailor it to a particular region or audience. Would you like me to refine it?
Restaurant where we held our 55th year high school class reunion on Sept. 25, 2025.
The combination of a punk reaction to my influenza shot and massive intake of information at our high school class reunion led to Saturday being a challenging day. I made it through the fog and by 4:30 p.m., felt like doing stuff. In quick succession, I finished yesterday’s post, canned a batch of applesauce and apple juice, and worked on laundry I started in the morning. In retirement, that makes a busy day.
Our time together at our high school class reunion Thursday night was precious. I don’t want to let go of the conversations. There are only so many of the 8.2 billion people on this jumping green sphere with whom an individual shares a life’s experience. Grade school and high school mates are unique in that regard, in my stable culture, anyway. Through conversation I became aware of developing a tunnel vision of my own history by focusing on a subset of experiences to produce an autobiography. The reunion opened my eyes to a broader experience that exists, of who I was and who I have become.
When we dig ourselves into a tunnel of memory, it seems useful and important to find our way out into our broader experience. I believe the brain captures our experiences yet some of them get relegated to places where they don’t get our attention. Too, our way of seeing filters out parts of our experience so we remember only the filtered events. John Berger said what I am trying to say more directly in his book Ways of Seeing:
Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. (Ways of Seeing, John Berger).
Our class reunion helped me be more aware of the surrounding world, one that is specifically relevant to me and my classmates.
In addition to memory, my writing focuses on journals, letters, photographs, and blog posts created over a period of fifty years. For every detail captured, there are multiple that exist elsewhere if I can summon them. Talking to people with shared experiences is one way to do that.
A five minute conversation listening to a classmate that worked for an insurance company for 40 years, or another who lived in California for a similar amount of time then returned to Iowa and married a classmate, are ways to do that. Reading an email about how one classmate recruited the widow of another to attend is the same. The easy familiarity of one with whom I played basketball in the grade school playground is another. Spending time with someone who was a neighbor to a close friend I lost in an auto accident shortly after graduation is another. All of these remind me of the broader, yet common world we inhabited, at least for a while. We now inhabit the present together, at least on Thursday night we did.
I don’t seek to wax nostalgic about my high school experiences. The recent conversations remind me of who I once was and help to become a better me in the present. It’s no wonder I don’t want to let go.
The jump I made in 1989, from working for a top truckload common carrier to working for the ninth largest corporation in the world, freed me to be more creative. I read my journals from that time in the Calumet region near Lake Michigan and find in them the kernel of all that I would become as a creative person.
I am thankful my creative self came up through a grueling career as a transportation and logistics manager. It grounded me in the unpleasant reality that is society in the post-Reagan era. In particular, the more than 10,000 interviews I had with job applicants in transition changed me in a way that would not have been possible without them. For creativity to have been forged in this kind of life gives it an edge.
This passage came from my life experiences in the Calumet.
The book written by Jack Kerouac has the same validity as his presence here. What do the creators of these texts have to say to me? What shall I say from this outpost of civilization?
What becomes significant in this studio is not the clutter in it, but the words and texts produced here and sent into the rest of society. Things take on significance to me, but it is more important that I begin sending things out. Messages in a bottle if you will. (Personal Journal, Merrillville, Indiana, Sept. 15, 1990).
Because of my high level of engagement at work, it was exceedingly difficult to “send things out.” Likewise, there were not many platforms for doing so. I survived on letters to a few friends, trips to visit them, and time in my writing space contemplating life in society. When I could, I spent time in the garage or at the word processor in the dining area being creative. I never gave up being creative and that led me to today.
When I read a book, I image the author as if they were sitting across the room. Sometimes that works and indeed what Jack Kerouac wrote in any of his books is not far removed from his life. When I read one of Robert Caro’s books I imagine him in his workspace in New York, turning every page. When I read John Irving’s writing about Iowa City, I remember the occasional times I saw him near the English-Philosophy Building or visited one of the places mentioned in his books. When I read William Carlos Williams today, I can’t help but be influenced by the time I spent in Iowa City with his publisher James Laughlin. Laughlin got teary-eyed when he spoke of his last meeting with Flossie Williams. I want my writing to be like that: one step or less removed from the reader.
I mentioned clutter and sometimes such clutter gathered from projects of mine, auctions, and the detritus of living a life found its way into what I produced. I’m not sure it was particularly good, yet it reflects my urge to create something new and original. A collage of photographs, old calendar pages, and magazine advertising was something I found visually appealing at the time. That I still have this piece is remarkable.
Livelier than Andy Warhol by Paul Deaton, 1989.
Leaving the trucking firm freed me from my Iowa connections and enabled new ones in the Calumet. I became more of a creative being. When things didn’t work out at my new job I returned to the trucking firm. Yet I did something after leaving that stays with me. I was able to better balance work, creative endeavor and family after the experience. There is a straight line from that realization to today.
The race to 2026 begins. As we age, time seems to move faster. On days like today I want to slow down and breathe.
We cope by taking one day at a time and living it as best we can. That doesn’t mean we eschew longer term goals. Rather we live consciously in the moment and make what good from life we can. It takes awareness to experience success at this. I decided long ago to make things from the experiences and artifacts of my life and put them out in the world. That is a main reason I became a blogger and have persisted.
My to-do list for this fall is short: Continue to finish daily chores. finish apple season, plant garlic, close down the garden, maintain health, and resume writing my autobiography. These things should be familiar to readers of this blog. I need to take up a new task: combating falsehoods clogging our information wavelengths. How I will do that is a work in progress.
I’m having a bit of a China issue. As I write, my blog has had 1,545 September views originating in China compared to 343 in the United States. I recognize many international visitors here, yet not like this. Something is going on, and I don’t understand the increase in views. The increased China traffic started August 14.
I’m familiar with the “Great Firewall of China,” designed to restrict access to the global internet within the borders of the Chinese mainland. Apparently there is a leak. The way views tally up is one at a time at a rate of 3-6 per hour. Seem like if a machine were training artificial intelligence with my posts, it wouldn’t be so slow. The other thing is Chinese “viewers” are seeing older posts and downloading a lot of files stored in my media file. In particular, files relating to climate change and nuclear power have been download quite a lot. The downloads otherwise seem somewhat random and related to specific posts. In the scope of the Chinese population, a couple thousand views per month is insignificant. Yet, it has me worried.
Bloggers make a decision to post our content on websites like WordPress. From the beginning we understood the possibility of piracy, yet I’m not writing posts for which I expect to get a Nobel Prize in Literature. If I determine the risk is too great, I will transfer my website address to one of the spare blogs I keep hidden and reduce the amount of public access to the old stuff. Who is really interested in what I wrote twelve years ago? That was when I took the whole blog down and started anew.
Anyway, this autumn is a time for writing. I hope to get back in the saddle with regular posts here, beginning today. It feels like fall. “God’s in his heaven— All’s right with the world!” ~Robert Browning
An early reader of my autobiography asked about this paragraph.
When I was born, Davenport was already a tired town. I hadn’t realized it, of course, because my family life was positive and supportive. I felt I could be anything I wanted, and this notion was reinforced once I started school. I grew up in a time of hope, despite challenges. We had vague knowledge of Davenport’s beginnings. I came to believe while being from there, I was not of there. (An Iowa Life by Paul Deaton).
“I am most surprised by your statement that you did not believe you were ‘of there.’ Looking for more explanation here,” they wrote.
In response, I wrote:
My mother and father brought a defined culture with them when they moved to Davenport and I was born. I came up in that culture, which for Mother was based in rural Illinois where she was born, and for Father, it was in western Virginia. In going through the history for this book, it occurred to me that I did not experience any culture indigenous to Eastern Iowa, but rather what my parents brought with them and lived. Yes, I was from Davenport, but not a person who grew up in a culture that was local. I contrast that with Provincial France where people are a literal extension of the soil, the sea, and the air. Mine was a distinctly American experience. (Letter to a friend, Sept. 6, 2025).
When I re-write the book, which I will once its companion is finished, I plan to add this explanation. As long as we live in a consumer society where the work to produce our lives lies in places, corporations, and people with whom we have no relationship, except for a commercial transaction, we cannot be of there, much though we yearn to be.
Green slime on the state park lake due to over-application of nitrogen in the watershed.
Weeds will grow anywhere in Iowa with open ground. I use plastic fabric to suppress weeds in the garden, yet a weed will find even the tiniest pinprick, plant itself, and grow. The purpose of weeding is to favor one side in the competition among plant life and improve crop yields.
This post isn’t proceeding how I thought it would. I am from an agricultural state, so when I think of weeds, I think of how it impacts row crops, corn and soybeans. I feel obliged to discuss that first.
On Sunday crop dusters flew over the house most of the day. It’s time to spray pesticides and herbicides, I guess. In 2024 Iowa corn yield was 211 bushels per acre according to the Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship. According to Farm Progress, failure to control weeds, especially early in the crop cycle can lead to anywhere from 20-40 fewer bushels per acre. When the corn is taller, and has established a canopy, competing weeds can reduce yields by about 3 bushels per acre for every day they are left uncontrolled, according to Iowa State University. Corn farmers live on tight margins, so they usually don’t hesitate with a generous application of glyphosate. Those 20-40 bushels can mean the difference between a good year and a bad one.
I have been reading Chris Jones’ book The Swine Republic. In the way the universe sometimes comes together, Monday morning’s reading happened to be the chapters on glyphosate and Dicamba, two herbicides widely used in Iowa. I was already writing this weedy post, so it added a certain something to my mood. This isn’t the rabbit hole I intended when I began.
I would use the weed paradigm differently. Whenever I enter the room where most of my artifacts live, they compete for attention. By getting rid of some, they would be out, freeing me to follow the vein of an idea where it may lead without distraction. Part of me doesn’t mind the diversions. Empirical me understands I only have so much time left on this jumping green sphere and I’d better make the best use of it.
I should weed out things of marginal interest to the broader thrust of my work. I don’t want to. My wants and urges have little to do with logic. They arise from a complex experience of a life that seldom conformed to social norms for their own sake. This is part of what makes me unique. Unwillingness to execute a plan to downsize possessions is a feature of my creative life, not a problem. Rational me understands the house will explode if we try to fit much more in it. Creative me says if it will, let it explode and we’ll see how it unfolds.
When I’m in the garden I pull weeds as I go. This is especially important as soon as seeds germinate and emerge from the soil. Like the corn farmer, I know this is the time to eliminate competition for nutrients, light and space. It is better to do it before seedlings emerge. I do what I can to produce a bountiful harvest. My creative issue is the seedlings in my life emerged long ago and have grown to become part of the living landscape. Weeding the stuff would create a new way of seeing. What if I don’t like it?
Maybe I’ll feel better about weeding my stuff after I finish the autobiography.
Anyway. It’s time to set all that aside and get to weeding. We can’t take it with us and don’t want to leave a big mess for my heirs to clean up.
It was hot and humid outdoors all day Tuesday. I managed a hike on the state park trail between thunderstorms. A little after 10 a.m. I drove across the lakes to the wholesale club to secure provisions. My usual three-pound can of generic Colombian coffee had increased to $20.99 from $13.99 the last time I stocked up, a 50 percent price increase. The tariff on Brazilian coffee goes into effect on August 1, after which it will cost even more. I did not replenish inventory at $20.99.
At the end of June, I replaced the whole house water filter. Yesterday I sat down to order a replacement and the new price was $20.19. In February I bought the exact same part for $13.40, a 51% increase in 5 months. I only get two of these per year but this increase and others like it will make household financial management more difficult. It is a preview of what life under the oligarchs will be like.
The garden has me distracted from work on my autobiography. There is so much produce to process, there seems little time for anything else. To preserve the harvest, immediate action is required, so writing is pushed back. In the annual cycle of my life, this is a feature, not a bug. Our lives would be the worse without the garden.
Hours in the kitchen enable my thinking about life and writing about it. I am certain I have at least one more book in me as the urge to write an autobiography has been with me as long as I can remember. At its core, writing autobiography is part of a life well lived. Once I finish and get a copyright, what then?
I envision creating a new document, using the first two books as a base, to which I add autobiographical information and stories. The published books will stand on their own as moments in time, yet my story will continue to evolve as long as I live. Part of it is finding aspects forgotten during the first telling. Part of it is recording new insights on the same stories already told. It will be a continuous work in progress that may never be published the same way again. It will be a never ending memoir.
There are other books I imagine publishing. The most obvious one is collections of my essays first published on this blog. There is enough here to make a book about local food. There is another about sustainability. While I’ll cover the coronavirus pandemic in part two of my autobiography, there is a much longer story to tell about its impacts on my life and on society more generally. That story is just being revealed. Whether I get to any of this is an open question.
For now, I continue to process fruit and vegetables so we’ll have something for our dinner plate long after the frost comes in October. As the harvest winds down, I’ll work again on my memoir. I still hope to finish the draft by the end of year holidays.
Journey Home 
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