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I have never had good eating habits. It goes back a long way. I am learning that it also goes forward a long way, which has me concerned.

Growing up I lived on a working farm. For the first ten years of my life the farm was busied with both field planting and a sizable herd of dairy cattle. During the remainder of my childhood years the farm was strictly field work, and even that was reduced over time as my dad transitioned from farming to other careers.

In my experience the stereotypical farmer is a voracious eater of heavy food. My extended family of farmers had terrible habits around eating. It makes some sense. In the crucible of harvest season you are working near constantly for weeks, getting little sleep. You are burning tons of calories. You are under stress hoping the yields of your crop are adequate for profit, managing the breakdowns of your equipment, and feeling the winter weather creeping into harvest season, threatening it all.

Typically someone would be back at the house, preparing large meals for the work crew, and these meals were always centered on meat and potatoes. The eating style was that of people knowing all the food would be gone soon and you better get yours before it disappeared. Even though the amount of food prepared looked like mountains to us flat-land Minnesotans, the food was indeed eaten down to crumbs within minutes. For my extended family, all this habit has not only led to obesity, but also the ailments associated with obesity, such as heart issues, diabetes, and kidney failure.

My kids have gone to lots of first days of school over the past fifteen years. In those years none of these days were too emotional for me. I was happy to have my children out of the house for part of the day. They were learning a couple things, and getting some much needed social time with people their age. They were figuring out how to navigate relationships. It seemed like the right progression.

Thankfully I had little enough foresight to get caught up in the eventualities of this process. Year-by-year I’d send my children out into the community schools. They’d come back every day. That was that. No need to think about the future slowly creeping up on me.

Some might call this lack of foresight a lack of empathy. Though in this case it would be a lack of self-empathy, and I think by definition self-empathy cannot actually be a thing. In any case, I spent little time imagining myself in the shoes of my future self, and boy did this save me a lot of pain.

Last week I dropped my eldest daughter off at college. This is a whole different category of first days of school. It was incredibly emotional leading up to her departure. She had feelings of excitement and nervousness. She could anticipate the homesickness as well. Her parents and her siblings had feelings mostly of the more selfish variety: we were going to miss her terribly.

I’m writing the day before we board a plane to fly to Las Vegas, and then drive up to southern Utah. We are all pretty excited to have a vacation even though the temperatures are going to be brutal. It’s time for me to learn what a dry heat truly feels like!

Those of you reading along have probably experienced both my desire to write with some frequency and my inability to keep up that habit. Recently Arun shared with me this blog post and I think things have finally clicked. I have since written in my journal sixteen of the past seventeen days.

It’s an odd feeling because my writing in this journal has not been substantial. My total words written in these past few weeks have been less than many other stretches throughout the past years. The big discovery here is that I’m not worrying about it. I’m just forming a habit, and worrying about doing it “correctly” is sure to end things before the habit forms.

In order to start journaling I only wrote 2-3 sentences a day. These would be the thoughts at the top of mind, or the experiences that seemed the most relevant. I start by describing the events of my day.

While driving back from a soccer game this morning I realized I had not written a newsletter this month. It’s now Saturday and tomorrow at three in the morning I depart for a trip to Orlando with my daughters’ marching band. The newsletter will thus be short and possibly sweet.

Looking back at my school years, almost all my distant trips were based around band. In high school I traveled to California to march in the prestigious Rose Parade (A picture can be found in issue #2 – did I not write my Jennifer Lopez story yet?). We also marched in parades near Washington D.C. and NYC. In college band took me to Arizona, Chicago, Minneapolis, Tokyo, Beijing, Seoul, Bismarck, and more. Oh, and our biggest family trip before I was in these bands was to follow my older siblings’ marching band to Portland, Oregon. So listen here, kids. If you want to travel, join band!

This time we are chaperones on the trip and I can’t help but remember the trouble I witnessed on those band trips. After hours swimming, overfull hot tubs, bus rides, late nights, and plain ol’ mouthy teenagers. I was fairly well-behaved, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t help eliminate all the water in an Arizona hotel hot tub.

I’m hoping the kids on our trip are at least safely behaved. I’m hoping I don’t have to report anything or deal with anything I can’t handle. I’m hoping they are so warn out by the heat and the amusement parks that they collapse into bed so they can do it all over again the next day. I’m hoping.

I don’t think I’m the first to feel like the United States is in a cold civil war. It feels like we are so at odds with each other that the relationships are irreparable. This conflict is being encouraged through the behavior of our “leaders” in order to hold on to their positions and enrich themselves. Meanwhile the behind-the-scenes power structure is controlled by corporations and ultra-rich donors.

Growing up I was taught a deep respect for this country and its institutions. Continuing to maintain that respect for the institutions of today very much feels like disrespecting those same institutions of yesterday. Though I understand that perhaps none of these epiphanies are new; perhaps these conflicts and power dynamics have existed in some way, shape, or form for most of American history.

Still, the dynamics of today, and my understanding of them, sure makes the Gettysburg Address hit different from when I last read it a year ago. (Emphasis below is mine.)

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

My father played fastpitch softball until his forties. His final season was in the early nineties. As he says it today it was less that he wanted to be done to go golfing, but more that the manager was not his favorite. In any case, the game was no longer fun and it was time for him to transition to his next competitive endeavor. He’d go on to win numerous club championships golfing near-scratch. Now he is seventy-two, still golfing almost as well as he was twenty years ago.

I was only fourteen or fifteen at the time he stopped playing. I have lots of memories of attending softball games, but they are mostly of the wavy sort, as if they’re in amongst the fog of a summer morning. From time to time I’ll repeat these memories to my parents to see if they match reality, and surprisingly most of them check out.

Fastpitch softball in southwest Minnesota was a community event pulling involvement in from throughout the countryside. The county where we lived had around 11,000 residents, and by my count there were nine fastpitch teams. Over half of the population for the county was in my home town, which had two teams. The second-largest town of 1,100 residents also had two teams. From there every little town of 200 people had a team. In all cases these teams were also drawing from the surrounding rural area farmers.

Back then golf had not come to the fore Slowpitch softball was a thing these seasoned ballplayers joked about, if they even were aware of its existence at all. Townball has ruled Minnesota for decades. While townball was big in this region in the sixties and it returned in the aughts, fastpitch softball ruled the southwest corner of the state at the time. If you wanted to keep active and have some beers with friends during your summer, fastpitch softball was the way to go.

I tried to read Ducks, Newburyport. I really did!

This is a book that has been lauded with praise in the literary community. It is a book that a couple of acquaintances, both of whom seem to have good taste, completely fawned over. It was the best book they read that year and maybe the best book they’d read in years. It was a book they felt was a top all-time work. An amazing book.

So I checked it out from my library and took it on vacation. My first concern landed immediately. The book clocked in at over 1,000 pages. I’m getting older and when I see a book, or series of books, that wants this much of my time I get suspicious. I don’t have as much time left as I used to! But I figured this book is said to be amazing and what else better do I have to do with my reading time? I’ll finish it eventually.

So I set about reading. The style, for me, was immediately off-putting. This book is written as a single run-on sentence. It is the protagonist’s stream of consciousness. There are connecting and filler words galore, just as you might expect there to be if you dictated your mental spaghetti to someone. The biggest connector is the phrase “the fact that.”

In early June, 1989, I went to my friend Alex’s family cabin. I was eleven years old. Many things about the weekend are hard to remember. I think they had a dirt bike, but I was too nervous to ride it. I believe we went golfing one day, though I don’t remember how I played. We must have spent time on the lake? I don’t recall.

I will never forget what happened the last day of our visit. Alex and I were out in a nearby grassy area. Maybe it was a pasture. We had his BB gun. It wasn’t far from the surrounding cabins, but there were 180 degrees of no people in one direction. We set up cans as targets. Since we were careless eleven-year-olds, we probably tried to shoot at flying birds.

Eventually we got bored with that, turned around, and trained our eyes on the pavement leading down to the water access. This is where vehicles would play the back-up game, maneuvering their boats down into the water before gently releasing them into the waves. There was a truck by the lake, it’s cargo floating. There were people near the shore, helping to manage the driver. Talking idly amongst themselves as managers do.

We were in our own world, though, when we decided to shoot our ammunition at the pavement twenty feet in front of us. It was warm, but not hot. As tar gets soft in the heat, we may have been curious if the BBs would lodge themselves in the pavement. We may have just wondered if the BBs would deflect and how high they would travel. I doubt we had very detailed thoughts about what we were doing.

Hello!

I hope 2022 has been treating you well so far. I’ve found it to be a decent year so long as my head is sufficiently in the sand most of the time. At the very least it has been a surprising year for me.

My long lost itch to blog has returned. This wasn’t a new year’s resolution, but it entered my brain around that time. I spent a fair bit of time trying to decide on a platform. Did I want to stay on my antiquated Ruby/Sinatra blog running on Heroku? Did I want to dive into static site generators (😈)? Or did I want to use some sort of service?

In the end I chose Micro.blog. It took me a while to wrap my brain around it, but once I did it gave me in a nice, big hug. I don’t think it’s for everyone. If I wanted something turnkey that I didn’t plan to style, I’d probably pick Write.as. Blot and Wunderbucket are also very intriguing.

As I get older I have realized that a lot of my ways of working, my ways of motivating myself, are tied to the culture around me. Specifically these motivations are tied to the culture of my geography; the culture of America. In this case, when I speak of culture I am talking about the work ethic that “made America great” and the moral value tied to that work ethic.

A read a book that opened my eyes to how many of us have been manipulated by this intentional culture creation. Things like the protestant work ethic were latched on to by capitalists in order to tie morality to work. In the first half of the 20th century literal war-time propagandists were enlisted by the business world to conflate workers’ senses of self worth with their ability to achieve results in the workplace.

(I’m 90% sure the book was Do Nothing. I don’t know if I recommend it. Parts were “Woah?!” and parts were “Wha?”)

It has been a minute. Summer came upon me and time spent with the family became a priority. I also worked on a few woodworking projects. And we took a glorious, two-week road trip. Writing took a backseat.

Don't expect any consistency from this little letter going forward. Sometimes I might write one, though. It could be a week between letters or it could be months.

Organizing

The GOP strategy of motivating voters by sending out operatives to disrupt shit at the local level has arrived in my city. “Public challenges School Board on rights during open meeting.” It’s all around (there was a high school class with that same name school year, but no such class is on the schedule this school year).

It’s my good friend’s birthday today, and so he is the inspiration for me to write. (I don’t mean that he inspired the specific words. This isn’t an homage. Mostly I mean that I wasn’t going to write, but it being his birthday makes me feel like, well, I really should write. It’s like a gift to him!)

Regular activities are starting to pick up around the household. Soccer, gymnastics, and marching band practices are happening near daily. The oldest is at the beginning of working through her college decision. Standardized tests are frequent. Spring sniffles are also bringing about Covid tests. All negative so far!

We live in a five-star world. I am definitely not saying everything in the world is amazing. (Though who wants to go back in live in 1904? Nobody, that’s who.) What I am saying is that many of us engage this world as if the things we purchase and partake in always need to be five-star experiences.

Years ago when one had a need for a tool, article of clothing, or whatever, one visited a store, looked at the selection of things available, and picked a thing. Over time one would learn about trusted brands and tend to buy them more frequently. Or one would learn about a good product by the social experience of talking to friends or family. In theory this process is costly in terms of time. Travel to the store, dig around the shelves, travel to another store to compare products, purchase, and travel home. It is much more streamlined to open a web browser, purchase an item, and receive it in a few days.

The drive to Arkansas was a long one, but not excruciatingly so. We picked the location due to a self-imposed we-won’t-drive-more-than-ten-hours radius from our home base in southern Minnesota. As we drove through the states we noticed more green buds in the trees, though the difference between here and there was not as great as we had expected. As we hopped from gas station to gas station we noticed fewer masks.

As we went through Kansas City we noticed fewer signs than we’d like to have seen. Then we were on a road we were not supposed to be on. Siri kept asking us to please cross four lanes of traffic to exit in one-quarter mile. Eventually our helpful vehicle, via advice from its GPS system, intoned, “Welcome to Kansas.” Those in the know realize that Kansas City is in Missouri. Well, except for little-sibling Kansas City that is actually in Kansas. In the end we visited both Kansas Cities (Kansas Citys? Kansases City?) on our drive.

Since my sixteen-year-old and I were on a call list at our local pharmacy, we were able to get the vaccine on Tuesday evening. These lists are for when a pharmacy has vaccine that is going to expire and get thrown away. This is especially applicable to the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, which can only be out of refrigeration for six hours. These lists are long because people from around the state have called numerous pharmacies to get on many lists. The pharmacist called many people before us, but they all either didn’t answer or were not able to get there quickly. Fortunately since we live so close we could actually get there in time to get the shot.

I am writing today’s letter from a Toyota dealership. What started as a routine oil change has turned into a three-and-a-half hour oil change, alignment, and tire change. I’d say today’s letter is sponsored by Toyota, but the money is flowing the wrong way for that. Does this mean it’s a reverse sponsorship?

Yes, it pains me to be changing tires at a dealership. Everything in my being distrusts car dealerships and maintenance shops in the same building as car dealerships. However, we bought an all-wheel drive minivan, it needs , it had two holes in one tire, and the price looked more than reasonable. The reasonable price was a big surprise, and while I still distrust their tire-wear measurements it seemed prudent to just get it done before going on a road trip to Arkansas next week.

Oh, baby, is it getting springy here. I even made some guacamole! We sat around a bonfire with our neighbors. It was 30 degrees. Springy!

With spring, comes the introduction of a March of Time theatrical reading. It comes from my friend Mike who hears the title of this letter in a .

It was good to get outdoors this week and do a bit of walking in the woods. We have a nice park nearby with several trails amongst the trees. It does require a drive to get there, and that always feels wrong to me. Wrong enough that I don’t visit as frequently as I should. I think I’ll go again today.

The Consumption

I’m back!

The past week has seen absurdly cold temperatures where I live. For six days prior we were not even above zero degrees. Some days the high did not get above negative ten degrees and at one point the air temperature was approaching negative twenty-nine degrees. I know where I live and that I should not expect different, but that’s still a bit colder than necessary methinks.

Who else is excited that this past Wednesday did not include nation-altering events? Is the curse of the Wednesday over? Or did I just miss the thing?

We’ve been passing our time here with movies, online cribbage, online video chats, and shoveling snow. The first polar vortex of the year arrives tomorrow and it is going to be quite a thing. Several days of not getting over 0° Fahrenheit will be unwelcome, but we were already passing our time here with movies, online games, and so on. So, really, what’s the difference?

The week has flown by since I last sat down to write this thing. I’m not feeling incredibly inspired, so this will probably be a short week. Certainly shorter than last week!

How are you doing out there? Feeling content? Living life? I hope so.

Happy 12121 (Jan 21, 2021)!

I know I’m not the only one who feels a little lighter today. It just feels nice to unplug a bit from the daily dread. A dread that sticks in the back of one’s mind even when one isn’t paying attention. For the moment anyway it has fallen out of the brain like a loose chunk of orange ear wax.

As I sit here awaiting an impending blizzard and listening to a piano quintet by Ernst von Dohnányi, I’m feeling pretty content. The world is a bit crap right now, but the space I occupy and control is rather nice. I’m quite grateful for that.

With everything on fire in the distant world, I hope those reading are not experiencing localized blazes. If you are, please let me know what I can do to help. If not, let me be the one to give you permission to put down the phone, shut off the computer, and pick up something you enjoy. Whether it’s a book, an album, a game, or a movie. Whether it’s a pen, a brush, a chisel, or a crochet hook. Just go do it. And maybe call a loved one.

Happy New Year! Has everything changed? Will it be changing soon? Do you have resolutions? Have you broken them, or are you waiting until the end of them month?

I hope you didn’t think I’d leave you empty handed during my week off the grid. Here is my wafer-thin letter. It’s more to check the box of “I didn’t miss a week” than anything else.

Leading into the holidays I converted some credit card points to Apple gift cards. There was a promotion making the points more valuable. What else was I going to do with them? Book a flight?

It’s that time again. That’s right, it’s time to take a week off the grid. If you’ve never done it, I highly recommend it. And by recommending it to you, I’m also recommending it to me because for a while now I’ve been terrible at taking my own advice. Friday-to-Friday it’s going to be books and games and movies and my family. It’s going to be nice.

Winter is landing in Minnesota. Frigid mornings and brisk afternoons make it “indoor time.” The snow has stayed away thus far. More and more it looks like we’ll be having a brown Christmas. It’s not romantic, and my children would probably prefer the play material, but it keeps me from having to clear snow!

This past week Jesse and I picked up a new kettlebell exercise routine, which we are working on with our friend Arun. Our prior group effort was to complete 10,000 kettlebell swings in five weeks. Jesse was the only one still swinging all the way to the end. Amazing! I was able to get to 9,000 swings before my back told me to stop.