I ran out of bread and didn’t want to leave home to go shopping. I baked a loaf instead. We need more of this as the Republican sh*t storm approaches. We must get along in society, conserve resources, pay down debt, use the automobile less, and eat from our garden and pantry. A bug out bag would not hurt. We must go into survival mode until the dust settles, if it ever does. It will be a while before we can see where we might impact the new society.
Last week a podiatrist said I have to start wearing shoes indoors if I want my feet to heal. Not any shoes, but special shoes that are more expensive than what I usually buy. I bought a pair of these expensive, special shoes. Buying cheap shoes may be part of the original problem. My feet feel better already and my outlook is on the mend. After discussing process with my spouse we developed a solution to prevent tracking dirt all over the house.
The problem is I am a creature of habit and can’t remember to keep them on. When I leave my downstairs writing space, five or ten minutes can elapse before I realize that comme d’habitude I took off my indoors shoes at the bottom of the stairs. My habits are so ingrained, I don’t turn on lights when I get up in the middle of the night, finding my way by memory. Breaking some of my habits is also in the works in the new Republican society.
As Americans , politically, we are sailing into uncharted waters. At home we try to get by, increasingly drawing on friends and acquaintances in multiple virtual and physical communities. For now, we withdraw, resupply, refit, and get ready for what maelstrom is next.
I spaded the garlic patch on Saturday. It was too wet to till. I’m not in a hurry, yet I’d like to finish planting garlic soon. Rain is forecast all day today.
On Sunday, someone who helped edit my memoir pointed out the whole book was an origin story. Upon reflection, that seems accurate. It takes my story from the earliest times up until my beginnings as a married person in society. After that point, I drew on the origin story, and still do. However, what happened afterward was built on the foundation of my origin story, and is much different from the earlier period.
Last week I visited the new, multi-story University of Iowa clinic at Iowa River Landing for the first time. My physician and attending staff seemed competent. The facility is very nice. I noticed the presence of double-wide chairs in the waiting room and in the examination room. That furnishing is making a statement about the obesity epidemic in the United States. It’s not subtle. It did feel like I was smaller than I am when sitting in those.
I have been visiting various clinics a lot the last 3 months since I had COVID. It took me 2-1/2 hours to read everything that documented my visits and make a plan to heal. With that kind of time commitment, no wonder folks don’t always follow doctor’s orders. It’s a long and complicated process if done right. I noticed physicians often pointed to me as the decision maker. I mean, what do I know about whether I should take a medication or not? I ended up asking a lot of questions.
If you are an Iowa Democrat, Sunday’s front page article in the Cedar Rapids Gazette is worth reading. I believe much of what was said is wrong, especially the assumptions about how messaging functions in politics. All the same, one has to understand the establishment viewpoints if we want to change our politics to regain the majority. The authors rounded up the establishment for us. Here’s a link to a printed copy of the article.
On Sunday I called my Aunt who lives in Southwestern Virginia. According to my phone, the call lasted 37 minutes and 51 seconds. We had a good talk. The last time we visited in person was more than 40 years ago. We shed the preliminary pleasantries and got right into the conversation. That’s how we did it back in 1983. Unfortunately, I couldn’t answer some of the questions she asked me about my grandparents. What she asked was never discussed.
She refreshed my memory on some of the old stories, like the “Dude Hole” where the three boys (my father and his two brothers) would swim in a creek next to the railroad tracks, then hop on the train as it passed to ride through town. They found it to be fun, she said. We recounted the story of my grandmother’s death in Summer 1947. My grandfather was away in prison so they split the three boys up among grandmother’s siblings. “You can imagine, three boys! There was not enough food (to keep them together).” My great aunt and uncle adopted my aunt, who was much younger than the other three.
We retold the story of the coal mining company that strip mined the valley near my great aunt’s home. They augured out the coal from the high wall and spoiled the well. The family got no money from the mining company for ruining the water. For years my aunt hauled jugs of water out to my great aunt so she wouldn’t have to use the “sulfur water.” She updated me during the call that she had paid the fee to run clean water out to the property. Her daughter now lives there.
We discussed a number of other topics of a kind that is best left within a family. At the end of the call she said “this call isn’t over.” I agreed and made a note to call again before the end of the year.
I come to a breaking point in the narrative of the United States. When we married, Ronald Reagan was in the second year of his first term in office. He was a popular president, garnering the electoral votes of 49 states during his 1984 re-election campaign. Reagan won 58.8 percent of the popular votes that year. What he and his minions did to our country is unforgivable. This year, Donald Trump won re-election. Votes are still being counted, yet it appears he will win the popular vote at or slightly below 50 percent of those cast. Trump is expected to change American society even more than Reagan did, if that’s possible. My chosen role is to write about something other than the decline of the United States. I’ll need to write about other topics. Here is what’s on deck for 2025.
My main 2025 writing is continuing with my autobiography. This involves a daily writing and editing commitment. Sometimes I post chapters here to get feedback or to work with the language. In addition, sometimes I learn more than is needed in a chapter. The excess material can often make a solid blog post.
News not reported in other media is always popular. There will be a school board election next fall. Information I gather locally about national issues is another source for posts. Likewise, issues about Lake Macbride, public lands, extreme weather, and such are also potential topics.
I sense another transition in my views about local food, gardening, foraging, cooking, and food shopping. Cooking is a constant learning process, so there will be posts about that. I set a goal to redesign our garden and grow one again in 2025. This has been and will continue to be a rich topic.
Book reviews, rites of passage within my circle (mostly deaths of friends), travel reports, and reports on local activities of significance beyond the region are all likely subjects.
Aging in America has become an important personal topic. I will have a few things to say about health, medicine, chronic illness, Medicare, Social Security, and adjusting to getting older.
Few people in Iowa are reporting on nuclear weapons and nuclear power issues. A group is advocating for the Duane Arnold Energy Center near Palo to reopen their nuclear power plant to generate electricity for data centers. It is an important issue where I can add to the public discussion.
When I finished my graduate degree in 1981 I was increasingly aware of racism in America. It seems evident that issue is not going away. The protections of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution remain the centerpiece of our lives. In Iowa, racism isn’t talked about enough, even though it runs right below the surface of what used to be called “Iowa nice.”
2024 was a presidential election year and 2025 is not. I hope to decrease my posts about politics unless it impacts one of the other topics listed above.
Lastly, I will write about the craft of writing and what I am learning about it.
These topics seem like a lot. Hopefully they will organize my thinking for the coming year and help produce a blog worth reading.
I’ve been trail walking earlier in the day since the general election. To make it a better form of exercise, I pick up the pace to get my heartbeats per minute elevated enough to do some good. I don’t know what I will do for exercise once the snow flies and I’ve shoveled the driveway. If autumn continues the way it has been during the hottest year in recorded history, I may not have to worry about it as we could well skip winter.
On Saturday I made a stew with plant protein meatballs. I found some old carrots and celery in the vegetable drawer and wanted to use them up. After peeling the carrots and cutting them into big chunks, they went into the Dutch oven with the chopped celery. I added the rest of the small-sized garden onions, and peeled and halved a pound of garden potatoes. I covered everything with vegetable broth and seasoned with bay leaves, salt, pepper, oregano, dried parsley, and powdered garlic. Once the root vegetables were fork tender, I made a slurry of corn starch and vegetable broth to thicken the stew. Toward the end, I added the meatballs and a couple handfuls of green peas. It came together well. With my spouse away from home, there will be leftovers for days. The flavor reminded me of a dish Mother made using beef. I took that memory into the next day and made rice over which to ladle leftover stew for lunch. It wasn’t her cooking, yet her presence was strong that day.
It seems doubtful I will reconcile with the Iowa Democratic Party. Donald Trump grew his support in the most liberal county in Iowa from 21,044 in 2016, to 22,925 in 2020 to 26,069 in 2024 or a total of 23.9 percent growth during the eight years. Democrats here walloped Trump with Clinton getting 50,200 votes in 2016, Biden 59,177 in 2020 and Harris 58,772 last week. The strong Johnson County performance this year did not win the election in the First Congressional District. Winning there takes gains in the rural vote which wasn’t there in sufficient numbers. Trump increased his winning margin in Iowa overall. We knew we had to do better than this after the results in 2020. Everyone I knew, including me, was doing work to get Democrats elected. The electorate was not receptive to the Democratic presidential candidate this year or since Obama won in 2012. Iowa certainly is Trump country today. More’s the pity.
I will continue to take walks along the state park trail. I will continue to cook a lot of our family dinners. I will work more on my physical and mental health, and overall wellness. As a septuagenarian, I realize there are only so many years left. There is not enough time to spend on activities that don’t produce needed results. For now, and maybe permanently, politics can take a holiday.
The Republicans I know are, for the most part, good people. Misinformed, yet the kind that will help a neighbor or contribute to community projects. There is some racism and misogyny as there has always been locally and in American society more generally. Any improvements I make in my politics will be close to home, among people I know well, and despite our differences.
There is no going back to what was. Today, it seems like a long way home.
I changed my digital footprint now that the election is past. I deleted some social media accounts, reduced the number of friends in the remaining ones, and evaluated how I get news. It is part of a self-care process to improve my physical and mental health after the recent traumatic revelations about American society. I feel better already. It was a suitable landing zone after the election.
Journey Home is a public blog and I intend to keep it that way. Writing here helps me develop narratives that can be used in other parts of my life. It is part of a process of understanding the world and society. It also provides a constant struggle to say things better with fewer words. My typos here are frequent, yet I eventually catch most of them. Each of us needs a way to think through the experiences we have and this is mine.
I resisted the recent reaction to Jeff Bezos putting the kibosh on Washington Post political endorsements before the election, and kept my subscription. Subscription to a national newspaper is needed for someone like the author of this blog. All the other national newspapers have similar problems and I don’t want to punish the reporters because of what their owner did.
The Cedar Rapids Gazette has done a good job in 1). staying in business, and 2). creating a diverse community of readers. One sees this by reading the editorial page, or what they call “Insights.” Liberal advocates, conservative crackpots, and everyone in between abound there. I welcome them all. Usually, because of their printing schedule, I hear news they report from other sources because that’s the kind of society in which we live. Subscribing to a newspaper is about the writers: local reporters, syndicated columnists, and readers who write letters to the editor and guest opinions. I wouldn’t miss some of them if they were cancelled, yet we also need them all.
For social media, I’m down to: Goodreads, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. Goodreads is how I keep track of my reading and find new books. Facebook is people I know from my experiences in the real world. Instagram is a place to post photos and auto post them to Facebook. Threads is a way of live blogging my life. For now, this is enough to manage. I deleted my BlueSky and LinkedIn accounts this week to reduce the clutter.
People know me from writing in public and tell me so when we meet in person. Unless we enter a police state where political enemies are harassed by the government, and citizens spy on and get nasty with their neighbors, I will continue. What else am I going to do?
The morning after the 2024 general election I went walking on the state park trail at dawn. It was light enough to see the ground, and the sun rose in the east as I entered the main part of the trail. The air was clean and I took deep breaths. I needed that a few hours after reading the general election results.
I was as prepared as I could have been for Trump to win. As a result, I am weathering the aftermath reasonably well. I can’t say that about everyone else to whom I spoke in the last two days. Some were on the verge of tears over the disrespect to women the majority demonstrated by voting for Donald Trump. The country has descended to a very different place than we thought we were.
Something needs to change in my life. The best advice I give myself is to take time to plan effectively.
It has been two months since I tested negative after suffering from COVID-19. While the main symptoms are gone — the constant coughing, particularly — there have been substantial changes in my muscles, blood pressure, and the tests the clinic does for diabetes. Things are not normal so my plan is to evaluate my health today. That’s going to take a while and a better action plan. It is not only me that needs to change.
To return to a majority, Democrats need to change how we live. We must recognize that political campaigning is a subset of everything else we do. We must build relationships more broadly than within our small coterie of like-minded people. We value our relationships, yet to succeed in politics new ones must be in our collective future. My modest proposal is to blow up the current organization of the Democratic Party and start over. We do not understand the electorate and need to. The bonds of affection we developed over years are hard to break, yet we must.
I have gotten good at picking myself up after failing to effect needed change. At some point, our goals for society need calibration. Our methods need to change. It makes little sense to get back on the same horse to keep riding when what we need most is to send the beast to the glue factory. Doing this is harder than we think.
I have a long to-do list today. I expect the sun will rise again in the east. It is time to dust myself off and get back to work building new goals and a new way to achieve them.
After my post-masters degree tour of racism in America I decided to stay in Iowa City. My reasons were not complicated.
I had to decide whether to be in a relationship with someone, and Iowa City was a regional social hub offering a large pool of potential friends and mates. The rest of the state seemed a primitive agricultural landscape, desolate and barren of intellectual engagement. As a young Iowan possessing two degrees, of course I chose to live in Iowa City.
Having established my desire to write, Iowa City seemed an excellent place for that. It offered a broad intellectual life, not to mention being the home of the writers workshops. I expected to find other writers of varied skills, along with what it took to support a writers community.
Work was available. The money I banked in the military would soon run out. I needed a job to pay monthly bills. I had no idea of supporting myself beyond the next rent payment. I could live paycheck to paycheck indefinitely, working a job that would leave energy each day for writing. The idea of long-term employment with decent benefits had already begun to fade from American society as Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president in January that year.
In the pre-internet days, relationships were in person or they were difficult. A long-distance relationship involved telephone calls and letters. We made our life where we lived and it took a year to discover what was possible in Iowa City. It became my year of being a writer.
In undergraduate school I saw writers come and go in the shared house on Gilbert Court where I lived. The pattern was simple. Find a place to live and write, find enough income to pay bills, and then go on living with a view toward producing a book of poetry or prose. It was no different when I finished graduate school.
When it came time to get my own apartment, I found a small one with a kitchen while most students were out of town on summer break. When I toured the apartment, a tenant still lived there. I deduced she was a writer of some kind, “a writer’s workshop type.” She had photographs of writers on the walls, and many books by workshop alumnae in a peer cabinet in the living room. My quick analysis of her book shelves was she displayed types of books I tried to avoid. My future landlady had had a run in with her, and described her as a little backward. I didn’t care much about all that drama. I was ready to move in and get started with the next iteration of my life.
The apartment on Market Street had six windows. It helped me feel more in touch with the world after living in a windowless basement with my friend Joe. I felt in union with events going on around me in the vibrant county seat. I felt a power living in the old part of the city, and I was in its midst. It took me two days to settle in.
From a logistics viewpoint, the pieces of a life were coming together. What I realize now, and didn’t then, was I needed something to write about. That flaw made it difficult to get words down on paper in the time before we knew what Reagan and his coterie were up to.
This is a draft of the first chapter of the second part of the author’s memoir.
Michael Alden Hadreas, better known by his stage name Perfume Genius, is an American singer, songwriter, and musician. Photo Credit – Wikimedia Commons
Why are there no more geniuses?
That’s an easy one to answer. Our culture no longer recognizes people as being geniuses. But, you might say, what about Einstein, or Leonardo, or others? Weren’t they geniuses? The answer, of course, is yes they were, but we now call them geniuses only in hindsight.
Today we see people as people, innately of potential equality, with various forces at work which inhibit the realization of that potential.The case of women artists is one, there are others. There is a dangerous assumption here: that genius is a goal or state of being to which a person aspires. An individual begins a human like other humans and develops to become a genius. They go through a process, they progress. I reject this.
Genius becomes a function of being recognized as such. If a genius is “ahead of their time,” then they will not be recognized in their own time for their accomplishments. In short, genius, like all other words, is defined in a cultural context. As the culture changes, today’s geniuses might be tomorrow’s buffoons. We need a new word to describe genius. That word will not appear in the current American milieu.
~ This post was written in the author’s journal on June 14, 1981.
Rain and wind are blowing leaves from most deciduous trees, revealing squirrel nests in the canopy. Some, like the Pin Oak, hang on to their leaves until next year’s growth pushes them out. Most everything that’s coming down before winter has come down on the third day of stormy weather in Big Grove Township.
I set the election aside to focus on writing.
I’ve written about 60,000 words of the second part of my memoir. I feel I should start over. Writing the first part changed the way I look at writing memoir. I should incorporate what I learned, and will. That means a complete re-write of the outline and a chapter by chapter re-writing of the story. It will be a different book than what I first envisioned and hopefully more readable and engaging.
I left the story in Iowa City during the summer of 1981 just before President Ronald Reagan fired the PATCO air traffic controllers to break their strike. Reagan and his conservative progeny’s deconstruction of the world in which I grew up became a constant theme during my life. During summer 1981, they were just getting started.
There was a brief window of about a year before I proposed to my now spouse on Aug. 18, 1982. In that year, I lived in the Iowa City of which we’ve heard tell as a writer’s haven. I moved from my high school friend’s home to an apartment on Market Street. I found a job with the University to pay my bills. I sought to be a writer and did what many would be writers do near but not part of the writer’s workshop. It was something of a plan. It is important to recapture that time because in several ways, it is archetypal of what creative Iowans do to cope with this barren agricultural state which is increasingly devoid of creativity.
Because my focus was on writing, I have plenty of journal entries from that time to re-read. That summer, I compiled a number of my essays into a book called Institutional Writings. I printed 15 copies and distributed them to friends. I was determined to be a writer even though I wasn’t sure what that meant in 1981. Iowa City wasn’t a solution for me. It was more a transitional place.
I accomplished something significant today. I got started writing Part II. There is much to be done yet I’m moving, hopefully in the right direction.
I recently read The Cooking of Provincial France by M.F.K. Fisher, et. al. It raised awareness of how cuisine can be rooted in specific locales, based not only on locally-grown food products, but on the soil, air, and water specific to a place. Local residents literally spring from the landscape and food grown there, according to the authors. Regretfully, French cooking is immersed in animal products. Separate the dairy, beef, pork, lamb, fowl, and fish and it would not be French cooking. It cannot exist except in situ.
What does in situ mean?
In the United States, we have a long tradition of destroying places and then building settlements as if on a blank slate. Natural vegetation, evolved over hundreds of years, was razed, and replaced with farms. Then, when the farm couldn’t make it — even with government subsidies — it was parceled off and sold for residential properties.
We built our home in such a farm conversion and prepare varied meals in the space we built. None of it is native except for the harvest from our backyard garden. Those seeds and seedlings come from elsewhere and not here. The phrase in situ, in this context, includes some aspect of food grown locally.
It seems ironic that as much “food” as is grown in Iowa and in the fields surrounding our residence, most of the corn, soybeans, wheat, hay, and other commodities are not grown for direct human consumption. Much of these foodstuffs are used either in animal feed or as an ingredient in industrial processes like distilling ethanol, or making biofuels or corn syrup. In Big Grove Township, there is no in situ.
That’s not to say our household lacks a cuisine. Clearly it has a distinctive one. Perhaps the most characteristic food we prepare is tacos. That they are made from raw tortillas from the wholesale club, greens and tomatoes grown at home, and produce we sometimes grow ourselves and sometimes don’t, makes them ours. The Mexican oregano we use also lends distinctness to the dish.
The important thing is when I make tacos, I’m not trying to copy a dish I saw elsewhere. I’m creating something unique, from scratch, with ingredients we grew or have locally available. I use tomato sauce that varies a lot (just as each tomato picking is different). How I use each jar makes a difference in the outcome of the tacos.
Rather than produce a certain kind of soufflé according to the science and rules of French high cuisine, I’m more likely to scramble an egg or make an omelet. Sometimes I’ll make another serving of tacos, perhaps with scrambled eggs in it.
While a few people I know grow shallots, chervil, and tarragon at home, the seeds to grow them did not come from here. They may be typical of French cuisine, yet are not of here. It is important not to get too precious about certain ingredients and where they come from. If I grow these, I use them until they are gone.
Over the years I posted many opinions about local food. Today I’m not sure that matters as much as I thought. What I learned was the idea of local food is constantly evolving. I continue to purchase groceries from a large, retail establishment on a weekly basis. That doesn’t make me any less interested in available local foods. Am I a purist? No, I am not. Being a purist about food does not make sense. It is challenging enough to keep track of what local food is available and where.
I leverage locally grown food when it makes sense. The dishes I prepare are not any less good. So, I’m here, I grow food, and I’m cooking. I am still a latecomer to the upper Midwest, one who is trying to get by. What else can I do besides enjoy what I make here?
Journey Home 
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