After moon rise and before sunrise on the state park trail.
Like with many Americans, a lot is on my mind these days. Not enough for a full post, yet the flotsam and jetsam of living a life in the Republican dominated United States.
The No Kings rally was fun, yet it is over. It was good to catch up with people I know. By studying the terrain in advance, I think I did a better job capturing photographs. It is important to live engaged lives and mass organizing events like this, combined with a modicum of thoughtful photographic work make it easy.
After much study of my October activity, I determined the thousands of views of this blog originating in China are likely a Bot or Bots scraping me to train artificial intelligence.The views are neither human activity, nor do they necessarily originate in China, whose “Great Firewall” blocks WordPress. Combine that with posting my high school class reunion photos the same month, and I received more October views than I did in the five previous years combined. I don’t feel good about it because the rate is not sustainable. Once the Bots have their way with me, I will be jettisoned like an empty chewing gum wrapper.
I planted garlic last week, so the garden is done except for the gleaning. For some reason, it took a lot more energy this year. I truly needed Sunday as a day of rest as in I took four naps during daylight hours. I feel more rested now, and pulled out the manuscript of my autobiography.
I reread the chapters last written and they stand up okay. I decided to write through my work at the transportation and logistics firm I called home for 25 years to clear space for topics I find more interesting: things like cooking, gardening, political activism, and such. I’ve been toying with ending the second volume after becoming an empty nester, yet reconsidered. I’ll write all the way to the end and see the word count. In any case, due to some unforeseen expenses, I’m not as liquid as I’d like and don’t have the money to publish volume two or any volume. It is possible I will push through the draft of the entire story by end of year. I changed while writing it and that means a rewrite of a couple of big sections. I do want to publish the rest. At the same time, I expect to start drafts of the entire story to which I will add on a continuing basis as I find new material and gain new insights. It will become a never ending story.
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.
Artificial intelligence is everywhere on the internet. The most common encounter I have is in responses to queries on Google search. It is annoying, yet that feeling might be my failure to adapt to modernity. Time will tell.
In an article posted at the National Library of Medicine, author Michael Cheng-Tek Tai wrote, “Artificial intelligence, known by some as the industrial revolution 4.0, is going to change not only the way we do things, how we relate to others, but also what we know about ourselves.” Like it or not, AI is already affecting me in those ways.
Earlier this month I got a free account with ChatGPT and began querying. Thursday, I typed in the dialogue box, “I received a number of responses to queries in October. In about 100-150 words, please analyze and describe them.” Following is the response I received.
In October, your responses showed a thoughtful, organized approach to learning and productivity. You explored practical topics such as meal planning, time management, and writing effectiveness, often asking for customized, actionable outputs like recipes, essays, or PDFs you could use on your mobile device. Your questions balanced curiosity and precision — for instance, refining a vegetarian enchilada recipe to fit available ingredients or requesting productivity adjustments for specific times of day. You also engaged with public affairs by seeking factual background on Dr. James Zogby, reflecting intellectual breadth. Overall, your October queries reveal a pattern of reflective self-improvement, efficiency-minded planning, and attention to detail across both creative and analytical pursuits.
I don’t often receive such positive responses to questions in real life. Of course the machine is giving back what I gave. I recall Dale Carnegie’s reminder, “Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” Since I got my account, the machine never mentioned my name, although it remembers stuff about me better than I do. The machine is quite seductive.
Once I start something, I am quick to adapt, and I don’t reject AI out of hand. I find uses for the technology even though I remain generally skeptical about machine responses to my queries. Substantial impacts in my life, less than two weeks in are:
Instead of providing detailed sources for its work, the machine presents a returned narrative with a few links. The Zogby query is a good example. It gave me significant things to know about him. I know each one of those to be true from studying his work. It won’t always be the case, so a new dimension of query returns using AI is evaluating the quality of the information. The seductive tone of responses might have me overlooking this important aspect.
It can help with writing. AI is limited to what is currently available on public sources on the internet. That means I can’t usefully ask it to write long essays for me. What I can do is when I’m stumped about how to word something, type a draft sentence or two into the dialogue box and ask the machine to edit it. Without asking, it produced multiple examples of better ways to word something. If I continue to use it like this, it will be a time saver. I am confident AI won’t get it right for how I write. It will make me think about language in a constructive manner.
I’m four days in using AI to help plan a more productive day. With its”Balanced Day Plan,” I immediately eliminated a background concern that there is too much to do and not enough time in which to do it. I am fond of the saying an air traffic controller can only land one airplane at a time. So it is with tasks I have before me. AI finds a way to get it all into a day. If it can’t, it tells me. This serves as a stress reliever, helping me focus on the task at hand, and I do a better job with it. For example, I need to drink more water to stay hydrated. The balanced day plan actually schedules it, resulting in me drinking more water. This pursuit is just getting started and my best hope for AI lies herein.
There are plenty of tools to use ingredients on hand to make dinner. A most formidable one is my years of cooking experience, especially since when I lived in South Georgia 25 years ago. Because ChatGPT is interactive, a thread about vegetarian enchiladas can go back and forth, resolving issues, until I have something usable. Each cook has different approaches to doing that work, and using AI to help with cooking may be a short-duration fad. It does have capabilities to use if we ask the right questions.
Next step is to just use it. If I discover anything more, I will be sure to post about it.
On Oct. 1, the machine at ChatGPT told me I had used my allowance of queries for my free account. It was fine. It offered me a lesser quality query until my account reset. I logged out instead and quickly found other things to do.
After re-reading my post about using AI, which includes an essay I asked the machine to write, I decided it was a good call to refrain from using ChatGPT in my autobiography. The main issue is it relies on what is available on the internet on a given topic. Because my autobiography is being written from journals, photographs, memories and other in-real-life documentation, such information is not available for the machine to read. It will produce a present-biased, internet-derived account about whatever I ask about my life. That is not what I want in this project.
While it did a reasonable job drafting something from the contents of this blog, it only knows me that way and that is a deficiency that cannot be easily corrected. For example, I asked the machine to write a brief autobiography of me. It’s response tells the story: “I couldn’t find enough reliable public information to write a full, detailed 1,000-word biography of Paul Deaton of Iowa.” This was despite my essay of that name, which lives on this blog and is my most popular post since I began in 2007. Either the machine is lazy, or it has programming that discourages this type of query. This discovery of the limits of ChatGPT is of value.
What can I use ChatGPT or another AI program to do? I see three applications based on asking these questions of the machine.
Give me ideas in how to use ChatGPT as diarist. I have been journaling since 1974 and the evolution of styles and content is striking. They developed over time. Naturally the machine wants to talk about events in my journal all day so it can learn as much as possible about me. I won’t do that, yet the occasional query can help me find direction in that kind of writing. It also made these suggestions for how to use the machine: “The key is deciding whether you want me to be: An analyst (finding themes and patterns); A recorder (storing entries); An editor (shaping them into narratives); or A mirror (asking questions back).” Even though I am alone when journaling, I don’t need a machine partner with which to interact.
What are some ideas for vegetarian and vegan enchiladas? Using ChatGPT to determine what to cook and eat seems solid. I entered on-hand ingredients and the machine suggested a specific recipe that used them. It provided grouping of ideas by flavor-type, such as hearty and savory, bright and fresh, protein-rich, toppings and finishing touches. So often, my ideas are pulling out a familiar cookbook and paging through it. AI could be an alternate way of figuring out what’s for dinner. There is value in that.
What are some ways to balance household work for today? I also entered tasks for the day. Personal productivity is important and the machine gave me useful ideas on how to structure my day. Because we are creatures of habit, we need to break out of what we do to improve how much we get done in a day. AI did not hesitate to tell me I scheduled too much to do, suggesting tasks that could be done tomorrow. It also changed how certain tasks were scheduled in the day, for example, moving cooking to the afternoon and spreading meal prep throughout the day. Going forward, I expect to use AI to help restructure how I spend my time. It may get to the point where I’m satisfied with how my new daily schedule is going. If so, then I will step away from AI for a while. I do know I was productive but exhausted by mid afternoon the first day I tried using an AI planner. This despite more scheduled rest and recovery time throughout the day.
It seems important we get AI out of our system. Like with everything, moderation of use seems essential.
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
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