Rain is forecast all day. I resisted the urge to leave home and go shopping. I avoided on-line shopping places as well. I’ve been reading more than usual and am developing a meal plan for the rest of 2024. I’ll be home alone a while longer as my sister-in-law gains confidence in post-surgery living. I look forward to the return of my spouse.
I feel pretty healthy today. That sentence is not always true.
Story ideas have been percolating. All of the new ones require research and developmental thought, so I started a blog post for each and pasted in relevant information. I don’t feel like finishing them. I expect a visit from the muses when it is time.
During the holiday trip I considered my next book. The working title is “Memoir in 25 stories,” although 25 seems like a low number. I want to cluster selected events in my life around specific places to be built out with historical information and memories. Those places include where we lived, significant work sites, and places we visited. For example, I call one place “The Calumet.” It is the land bordering the southern part of Lake Michigan in Illinois and Indiana. It will take some explaining to depict what I mean by the place name. In describing it, I set the scene.
Partly, the book is about what our family did. There are also major themes in which I have broad experience: breaking the unions beginning with the PATCO strike, the destruction of the post World War II society, and changes in workplace. It will also be a story of how people can be creative in a society that has limited interest in such work-product. I will focus on my writing, and partly on educating a child to be creative. I think there is a useful memoir in all this. Now I must revise the 62,000 written words to fit the new paradigm.
I attempt to stay positive as it rains. It is hard to do, so I work. The dishes are all done, the laundry is folded and put away, and the resonances of this difficult year vibrate my core. I may be living a life yet I feel I’m just skidding into 2025 while unable to gain traction on things that matter. I’m hoping and working toward a better year.
This is the face of a man trying to understand how his Android camera works. The background on the state park trail was planned. The green sweatshirt is my standard winter uniform, although I own sweatshirts in several colors. The watch cap was a gift from a farmer friend. My unshaven face is because I’m at the end of my once every three days shaving cycle. I’m looking at the lens because that’s what I think I should be doing. As selfies go, this is graded C-minus. It reinforces my belief I am not photogenic.
As if 2024 was not bad enough, today’s Cedar Rapids Gazette reported the University of Iowa is ending the American Studies Department in anticipation of anti-diversity legislation effective next year. I graduated from the progran in 1981 when it was a loose interdisciplinary group not even formalized into a department until 2000.
One of my valued possessions is a copy of Charles and Mary Beard’s The Rise of American Civilization with Alexander Kern’s signature inside the cover. I bought it for a buck at the library’s used book sale. I doubt Republicans behind anti-DEI knew of Kern’s early leadership in American Studies at Iowa, or of the Beards’ seminal work. I think that is the point of the anti diversity movement: public schools will only teach one version of American history, the one we legislators approve.
I’ve been around long enough to remember local folks questioning why we should build a big, fancy library in our town with population about 2,000. The money was donated, then the building was deeded to the city for one dollar. The expense of permanent staffing generated some griping. We live in a time when it is not a long distance from these attitudes rising to the surface again, and this time closing the library permanently. I hope not, but here we are.
On the positive side, this week a federal judge struck down key parts of an Arkansas law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing “harmful” materials to minors. Nevertheless, Iowa leads the nation in the number of banned books.
Let’s face it. These discussions and repression of information in public helped make 2024 a difficult year all around.
I’ll likely continue to make selfies. Once I figure out the camera, I might work on posing. For now, I’ll deal with life as it presents itself. What else are we to do?
I dug out my packet of hot chocolate mix from its hiding spot in the back of the pantry shelf. The shift to winter is palpable and I’m going to need a cup to get by. As a bonus, it was mixed and packaged by a friend of our child.
Late Friday afternoon, the Iowa Department of Health and Human Services reported the first case of bird flu jumping to a human in the state. According to the release,
The individual was exposed to infected poultry while working with a commercial flock in northwest Iowa. The individual reported mild symptoms, has received appropriate treatment and is recovering. The case was identified through testing at the State Hygienic Laboratory and confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
As of December 20, 2024, the CDC has reported 64 confirmed human cases of H5 HPAI across nine states. The majority of the exposures are linked to infected poultry or dairy cows. There is no evidence that human-to-human transmission of influenza A(H5) is occurring in the U.S.
With all the egg production in Iowa, this was bound to happen. It could be a big deal, and it could be close to nothing. Time will tell.
No one wanted to shut down the government right now and the Congress didn’t yesterday. I don’t presume to know what the president-elect and his wealthy sidekick were thinking about this. I do know:
A continuing resolution was passed until March 14, which gives the new administration the ability to influence budget going forward. Everything else we heard in the media during the last 72 hours has been posturing.
Democrats would like to eliminate the debt ceiling completely, and this wasn’t the time for partial measures. They rejected the president-elect’s proposal to suspend the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling is a leftover policy from World War I.
The Republican House could not pass a CR without Democrats helping them get the two thirds majority needed. The final CR had bipartisan, bicameral support, which is the way it is supposed to work, sort of.
If the Republican House had been doing their work and passed all of the funding bills in regular order, in a bipartisan way, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion.
The main news media wants there to be a lot of drama because it helps their bottom line. Over-dramatization of the lack of a budget was, in part, the media’s doing.
In the end, what was expected to happen did.
While reading my 1981 journal I found a record of dreams of Mark Twain visiting one of my fellow Army officers, and Norman Mailer, at whose home I arrived by water landing. I don’t know what either of them meant. I do not dream about writing or celebrities that much. What I like is talking about writing with friends.
The lake trail walk will be chilly this morning, with ambient temperatures in the high teens and low twenties. As soon as the sun rises, I plan to get out on the trail.
I had an early dinner last night with a friend. The restaurant was near where I lived while in graduate school. Plenty of seats were available at 3 p.m. The food was good, the service excellent. We talked for a couple hours about writing. While enroute home it sprinkled rain as warm weather held on to autumn in the face of winter’s imminent arrival.
Like many, I followed the U.S. Congressional hijinks regarding a continuing resolution to fund the federal government from tomorrow until March. So far, nothing passed. I had no expectations as the Congress has a poor track record of passing budget bills on time. The situation was complicated by Trump’s largest campaign donor taking the issue to his social media platform. It’s been more than a year since I deleted my account on X, so I don’t know the details. We’ll see if they pass something before midnight tonight.
When I sent 20 copies of my book to friends and acquaintances, I didn’t understand what a big ask reading it would be. Given that about half of the U.S. population didn’t read or listen to a single book in 2023, I should have been more skeptical of the printed book format. Reading appears to be in decline as a favorite way for Americans to spend their free time.
I discussed this with my publisher and they suggested my observations were accurate and recommended I consider an audio book format should I broaden the reach of my book. That idea is filed away with other sales pitches until I hear back from more of the 20 book recipients.
Writing a book will be the format for the second half of my autobiography. The die is cast on that, yet once it is finished, I may consider other types of writing as my main work product. Not as short as a blog post, but readable in the increasingly shorter attention spans of potential readers. How in the heck did we get to this place?
I’m bunkering in for the holidays, which this year are even weirder than in previous years. We gave up Christmas decorations five or six years ago, and the family is split this year with one of each of the three of us in different cities. We are in process of working something out. There are four or five days in which to do that. I am reasonably certain we will be more timely than the federal government has been in passing a budget.
Editor’s Note: This post was taken from one on Sept. 21, 2010 and revised. The message about what it means to be a writer seems as timely as ever. In 2010, it was a revelation.
A writer in the 21st Century writes at every opportunity. Spending a life writing a dozen novels has become a thing of the past. The interaction with readers is more intimate, direct, and often. An email, a book review on Amazon.com or Goodreads, a blog post, a letter to the editor, an opinion piece in the newspaper, a technical article, a poem, or a work of fiction, all carry equal weight in how they take up a reader’s attention. Add in social media, and there opportunities aplenty to write.
Readers have plenty of material in which to engage. The diversity and abundance of available writing is a proximate cause of the low number of books Americans read each year. We are using our eyes and ears to take in information constantly, just not reading books.
As the number of writing venues exploded, the ability to generate revenue was diminished. There are a few folks who capitalize on this multitude of writing opportunities. However, constructing a view of where they fit into the life of a writer who writes for wages is both customizable and unlikely. Earning a living wage primarily from writing is as difficult as it has ever been.
Yet the writer’s life is something to which to aspire. The quiet of morning and a few hours typing at the keyboard is important: an organized effort to bring order to a chaotic world with words. In a world where corporate media reminds us constantly that in order for our consumer society to maintain growth, we need to get out there and start buying things: consume the consumables.
A 21st Century writer lives close to the means of production. The idea of buying anything that does not serve our indigenous subsistence or our writing is outside the ken. Many contemporary writers don’t fit well into a consumer society.
Unawares, I have been developing an approach to writing that includes many media. I hope to refine my approach and continue my writing voyage, hoping it produces recognition for what it is among readers, if not a living wage. That this approach is uncertain is accepted. Inherent uncertainty is a risk worth taking.
It’s no secret I use a mobile device. I recently discovered a metric in settings called Digital Wellbeing which tallies the number of minutes of screen time on my device. I was shocked to see I averaged 5 hours, 50 minutes of screen time per day during the previous seven days. Just by being aware of my time I reduced it from 6 hours, 30 minutes on Friday to 4 hours, 29 minutes on Saturday. I need a more organized approach to reduce screen time.
Eschewing social media completely is not a good option. I rely upon the interactions with “friends” and “followers” and the relationships they have grown into. On Threads, these are mostly people I know only through the platform. On BlueSky, these are people I know in person or others I followed during my long time on X (2007- 2023). Threads is about art, photography, and sharing each others’ work. BlueSky is about staying tuned to whatever we call the national discussion inside a liberal bubble. Facebook is still there, although I am paring that group down to people with whom I have a tangible, in-person link. In most cases, I know Facebook friends from personal interaction. I have a couple of active friends on Instagram, but mostly I view posts by people I don’t know. I also view short videos there, something I hadn’t intended yet takes a lot of my screen time today. These four programs represent the as-is situation with social media.
Six hours of screen time in a day is not acceptable. While the entertainment value it provides is already baked into our monthly budget, the cost is in how my brain accommodates the input. Without completely understanding it, I know it has a deleterious effect. That is reason enough to cut back.
Killing time is not an interest of mine. So what am I seeking from screen time? I’ll just make a list:
On Threads, I curated a feed that informs me about what our small community is doing. Mostly, we share photos of cups of coffee, and daily, regular posts which are habit forming. One person showcases a different pair of socks each day. I see photographs, works of art, and short posts about how the day is starting across multiple time zones. When I wake, the Australian and New Zealand accounts are already on morning of the next day. While I’m doing this, I make my own daily post with the outdoors ambient temperature, time, a brief composition, and a photo of my coffee cup. I drink coffee while scrolling to see what followers are doing today. We all have morning routines, and this is mine. I return for updates a couple of times each morning and afternoon. By 6 p.m. I shut my mobile device off for the day.
After the November election there was a movement of people from X to BlueSky. A lot of the folks I followed on X made the transition. Some I followed on Threads decided BlueSky was a better platform. In any case, I’m there and posting a couple of times each day. It has been easy to regulate how much time I spend there because I am less interested in any “national discussion.” Threads is my go-to.
My sights are set on reducing time on Instagram. The number of accounts I follow there is small and only a handful post regularly. It has become a site with two main functions: automatically cross post photos I upload to Facebook, and following a few accounts that offer something unique. If I reduce screen time, the largest initial share of cuts will come from Instagram. I went into settings and set a timer to notify me when I spend 90 minutes in a day on Instagram. We’ll see how that goes.
Facebook used to be great, but now it has been reduced the way a balsamic reduction is made. Besides publicizing my work, I belong to two groups: my high school class group I founded to facilitate organizing a couple of reunions, and a group I started for our home owners association. These two useful functions are likely the reason I still have a Facebook account.
The gist of this is to cut way back on Instagram time, and not dally when I’m doing something purposefully. In theory, everything I do on social media should be purposeful. I’ll give that a week or so and see if my screen time is reduced. What I would much rather be doing is spending time face-to-face with my friends. Here’s an example:
I had a chance to spend an hour with a dear friend in a deserted cafe this week. We were bathed in sunlight, although I preferred a seat that was shaded. We talked about our books, our health, and our plans. It was an oasis of calm and warmth in the increasingly turbulent world in which we live. I need more time spent like that. Likely we all could use it.
Like with so many other parts of my life, my reading was punk in 2024. I had to cut back on my goal to 52 books because I picked some long ones that weren’t that interesting. There were some real winners this year and a bit of ticket punching. Here is the best of the lot. I’m on Goodreads so you can find me here.
The best book I read was Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. I recommended it to others repeatedly, and would likely read it again once a bit more water goes under the bridge. The combination of discrimination against women in science, a single mother, a cooking show, and daring women who view her television program to change the status quo was irresistible. I don’t often read a book twice, but expect this will be an exception.
I read multiple books that attempt to write the history of our times and forecast our immediate future. The best of these was Ari Berman’s Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People―and the Fight to Resist It. I’ve been following Berman since he emerged from his home in Fairfield, Iowa to become more prominent on the national stage. Few people have written about the Trump administration as he does in this book. It is worth reading just for that. Other books I would categorize with Berman include something lost, something gained by Hillary Clinton, Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen, and Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America by Barbara McQuade.
Important memoirs and biographies I read this year include On Call: A Doctor’s Journey in Public Service by Anthony Fauci and The Art of Power: My Story as America’s First Woman Speaker of the House by Nancy Pelosi. All told, I read ten books in the memoir/biography category in 2024. None of them was a dog.
I read a number of books from my “To Be Read” pile. Noteworthy are the ones that serve as historical artifacts: In the Spirit of Crazy Horse by Peter Mathiessen, Narrative of Sojourner Truth by herself, Starved Rock: A Chapter of Colonial History by Eaton G. Osman, Wakefield’s History of the Black Hawk War by John Allen Wakefield, and Chief of Scouts, As Pilot to Emigrant and Government Trains, Across the Plains of the Wild West of Fifty Years Ago by William F. Drannan. While the to be read pile is not as glamorous as getting new books, it is valid work to be done. These were all worth the work.
Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet by Hannah Ritchie is a new book by what I would call a young person (She was born in 1993). Ritchie brings a new perspective to environmental and nuclear weapons issues that has been wanting in the current literature. To say the book was refreshing would be an understatement.
The Cooking of Provincial France by M.F.K. Fisher discussed the cuisine of French provinces and provides many traditional recipes from these regions. More than that, it made the case for cuisines that rise up from the geography of soil, water, terrain, and animal husbandry to create foodstuffs, and by association, people, distinct to a region. This stands in sharp contrast to homogenized food ingredients as are available in grocery stores, or whose seeds are planted locally even though the environment has not nurtured them as if they were native to the region. The lesson from this Time-Life book was unexpected: when people are tied to food produced in a specific, local region, they gain a resilience some in the United States find wanting in our food culture.
I also read from my close circle of friends and acquaintances. Thom Hartmann published The Hidden History of the American Dream: The Demise of the Middle Class―and How to Rescue Our Future. Maureen McCue published Dancing in a Disabled World in October. I believe we have a duty to read books written by people we know. The conversations I have with Hartmann and McCue about their books inform my own writing.
The whole list of books I read this year is posted as a Reading Challenge on Goodreads. If you are on that platform, I hope you will follow me so I can follow back to see what you are reading.
In search of a decent cup of coffee, we turn from Thanksgiving Day leftovers to the promise of a happy end of year holiday season. This has been a special time since I spent a lonely few weeks after arriving in Mainz, Germany in mid-December 1976. Through the years the loneliness diminished. Part of this month is reflection on the immediate year past and planning for the next 12 months. It is a time to slow down and enter into a tribal time.
20 of 25 copies of my book are out among early readers. I need to conserve financial resources, so that will be it for now. The next decisions are what to do next: print more, publish it on various on-demand platforms, or take another whack at editing. I need to reserve a few copies until I make a decision. Finishing the book was the major accomplishment, so I am in no hurry to take next steps.
I cleared off a 42″ x 31″ space for a memoir writing table. On here, I will go through boxes of artifacts and store items in immediate use in the writing project. It may not be enough space, yet it will serve the purpose for now. The next memoir task is to re-write my outline and go through the manuscript. I sense many of the 65,000 words already written need revision. If I’m lucky, I can finish some of that work before the new year.
Our family is scattered about this December. My spouse is helping her sister recover from surgery, our child has their own life in Illinois, and I am in the Grove holding down the fort: conserving energy, eating out of the pantry, and doing things to improve my health.
I ordered tomato and cucumber seeds. The best varieties sell out, so I want to get them delivered early. There are plenty of cruciferous vegetable seeds leftover from last year. I’m not sure what else I need. Because 2024 was a punk year for gardening, there is more prep work than usual to get ready for spring planting in the ground. I’ll place another seed order once my December pension payment hits the bank account the fourth week of the month.
The rest of today is going through files, papers, and magazines stacked in my physical inbox. I suspect some things were missed. That’s par for the course with so much going on in this life. The snow makes it feel like winter, yet it is not that. The lake is freezing over, yet tomorrow ambient temperatures are forecast in the 40s. One day at a time while living in Big Grove Township.
2024 was transformational. I feel like a different person today than I did a year ago. It is hard to describe, yet I feel more engaged in life than I have been, with a different attitude toward creative projects and mundane household chores. Four big things happened this year.
In August I published An Iowa Life: A Memoir. It brought closure to the autobiography process in a way that encourages me to finish the second volume. I have more confidence with part one finished. I had no expectation of that.
My spouse has been gone helping her sister for much of the year. Besides earlier extended trips, I delivered her in late August, and except for coming home to vote, she has been there since. My sister-in-law has been recovering from surgery and is not ready to live on her own. Neither am I, but I take stock in the fact that the situation is temporary. That commonplace “absence makes the heart grow fonder” is true in my case.
The coronavirus found me in August and on the 29th I tested positive for COVID-19. I wrote about this. While I’m much better, some aspects of my health remain affected. Specifically, my glucose level spiked and my liver function is out of the normal range. I am privileged to get great medical treatment. We’ll see how it is going next check in with the physician. Whatever permanence there may be to the condition, I hope to able to live with it. I didn’t think I would ever die, until I got COVID.
I’m reconnecting with old friends. My high school class decided to have a reunion this year, so I spent time organizing attendance. It also seems like we are getting the band of social activism back together. We need to mount resistance with conservatives taking over our governance. Politics in this election affirmed what I saw in 2022: the old way of running a campaign is obsolete. No one I know identified the new paradigm… yet.
These four things combined made 2024 a very different year. No more of the commonplace issues of finance, gardening, reading, and cooking in plain sight. I found the end point for my autobiography in my infection with the virus. While a number of normal concerns fell off the radar, I like where this post-COVID life is going. It is a great place from which to enter 2025.
Listed below, in descending order by number of views, are my top ten posts thus far in 2024. Statistics from Blog for Iowa and Journey Home were combined in the tally. Each item has a link to the original post.
My review of Nancy Pelosi’s memoir of her time as Speaker of the House was most viewed. Click here.
My review of Barbara McQuade’s Attack from Within. Click here.
House District 92 candidate Ana Banowsky’s story of being a delegate to the Democratic National Convention. Click here.
Reporting on Julie Persons’ campaign to become Johnson County, Iowa auditor. Click here.
Interview with Iowa House Democratic Leader Jennifer Konfrst. Click here.
Reporting on the poorly attended 2024 Iowa Precinct Caucuses. Click here.
I bought a three-quart saucier and wrote about it. Click here.
In the face of insurmountable pressure to withdraw from his presidential campaign, I wrote “Progressives Stand By Biden.” Click here.
“Nuclear Power Isn’t It” provides an update on the lack of progress with regard to nuclear power generation. We should look elsewhere for power. Click here.
I wrote a remembrance of childhood friend and neighbor Katie Tritt. Click here.
Journey Home 
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