So today was interesting. Make that HOT and interesting. I think it was about 95 in Fairfield Iowa today when I left there in the mid afternoon. Ugh lol. I mark today as the first official day of serious research for the Iowa Prairie Documentary Project. I drove the one hour and change from my home in Iowa City to Fairfield and marveled at the endless rows of corn. I mean…I can’t say enough about how much land here is ruled by corn. It’s really bonkers to me to see all this land under the dominion of a single crop…a practice that any farmer knows breaks the land. I’m not a farmer and even I know it. You can simply look out at any non farmed piece of Earth and see that nature has a different set of rules, a different kind of design. Diversity is nature’s design because it’s what works. And here we are, trying to force dollars out of the ground against all logic, using more and more fertilizer like amphetamines to resurrect the tired and overworked soil.
One of my favorite quotes of all time is this: “A Fallow Field Is A Crime Against The Land” I thought it was a direct quote from Steinbeck’s book “Grapes of Wrath”, but it seems it is not. I can’t find where I discovered that exact quote, but what it meant to me was quite poignant. For me it meant (please note the past tense usage) that the land was the victim. The land was suffering, because it wasn’t under the command of what people wanted. It meant that not growing food is wrong. Not making the land productive is wrong. As a young person I strongly identified with this mandate…that it’s our right to put the land to our designs however we see fit. In my mind, we didn’t have to justify it. That began to drastically change when I became an outdoorsy hippie in my twenties.
Now, to me, a monoculture field is a type of crime against the land. And a fallow field is a chance at recovery. A fallow field never to be plowed again is a chance at redemption, to undo the harm that’s been done. Not in all cases mind you, but compared to King Corn, yes.
I am 53 years old ya’ll…and if you had told me even 2 years ago that I’d be writing this down this post in an Amish town’s (Kalona, IA) coffee house, after returning from Fairfield where I toured 2 different restored prairies…I would have quite simply said “but I will never live in the midwest, so that’s impossible”
Today was wild though. I learned so so much about what is happening with restored prairie. I met with folks, who between the 7 of them, possess over 100 years of combined prairie restoration know how. I got my first glimpse of actual restored prairie, got to walk barefoot along the firebreak pathways…oh…and now I know what a firebreak is. It would be too cumbersome to recount everything that I gleaned from these folks. And I won’t have to, because at least one of them is going to tell us in her own words…I am returning next weekend; one of them has agreed to commit to an interview for the Iowa Prairie Documentary Project Podcast. And three of the others I met are pondering doing the same a little bit further down the road.
Stay tuned for that interview. And if you’d like to listen to Episode One, which is me talking about my motivations and influences that led to the beginning of this project, that was released yesterday. Currently I believe it’s only on the main Simplecast site…not quite filtered down to Spotify and the others yet. Click on the pic to listen.
And finally here’s two pics I took today…
King Corn on the left in a field outside of Fairfield, Iowa.chamaecrista fasciculata…the Partridge Pea that I spotted along the way.
Yep, I know I have a lot going on. My hands are full already with releasing weekly episodes of my podcast, lining up screenings for a movie about how Russia is ravaging Kherson, Ukraine with drone warfare…and just you know…working for a living and trying to keep my head above all the challenging things happening around the world right now.
But…ever since I arrived in Iowa, literally…I fell in love with the history of the prairie. I’ve also been learning a lot about the dismal water quality situation here. And more recently the cancer rates as it likely relates to agricultural practices. I And so…I am just starting the process of creating a documentary series (podcast and film formats) about the history of Iowa’s prairies. I plan on focussing on the changes primarily from just before pre settlement to current circumstances, how those changes have impacted water quality, species, etc. I mean…that’s a wildly brief summary but it gives you an idea of where I am coming from.
If you live in Iowa… I am hoping to connect with people who might fit into some of the following categories: 1- interested in being recorded while talking about their knowledge of prairie flora and fauna…with a perspective on how things have changed over the last 175 years. 2- don’t want to be recorded but are happy to talk about it off the record. 3- folks who can tell me where I should be filming to best capture existing prairie that never went under the plow 4-you know who I should talk to…if not you
5-you have drone footage or photos that you think would help tell the story.
If you are interested at all in helping, or asking me questions about the project, feel free to DM me. Forewarning: I am 53 years old and prone to actually talking on the phone as opposed to lots of messaging haha!
Hmmm…I thought I would have more BIG things to say but you know…it’s already been said, in the podcast and the video. It’s all there and ready for your ears and eyes.
I guess the most important thing I can say is who the intended audience is for this broadcast.
Oh that’s an easy one.
It’s humans.
We all die.
We all have parents.
We all are of a nature to die someday and we are also going to be faced with taking care of loved ones as they die.
All of us know someone who has had cancer.
Increasingly we all at least know someone who knows someone with dementia.
We all went through the pandemic.
A lot of us grew up with at least one parent who gave us plenty to talk about in therapy.
What can I say lol…this podcast is a one stop shopping trip for humanity in the modern world…it’s Us At Our Worst.
Share. Listen. Watch. Enjoy. New episodes every Friday until I finish the book.
I have done photography for a pretty long time, starting back in 2008. But I never ventured into HDR and photo bracketing. I was usually taking images of things in nature that were constantly in motion. But anywho…I have a new gig where I will be shooting stationary objects. And since I am anti-Adobe I am going to be using Photomatix Pro for my HDR merging. Today I was using the free version to test it out. It’s pretty amazing to work with. It totally changes the way you think about photos, setting them up, establishing what bracketing/exposure ranges work.
This is just one test shot I took of my car. One click of the button, 3 bracketed shots, one merged image in the software with some tinkering. I mean…it’s rough still but for a quick experiment, quite a lot of fun.
Yesterday I gave a presentation to an audience of about 35 employees at Oaknoll Retirement Residence.
The topics I was invited to speak on?: -my time as a full time live in caregiver for my mom as she died from cancer and dementia -her art, that she somehow managed to create while under those circumstances
I consider it the first of many such talks I hope to give on this important matter. Caregivers need a voice. On that note I give a big shoutout to Kamaryn and Lindsey (both staff at Oaknoll) for being so progressive in their approach to community and the care of those who need it.
The brain does so many things. It works so well that our experiences of sound, light, balance, thought, motor skills and feelings are seamless. That’s by design. It’s astonishing how much we take for granted.
I learned this the hard way on June 23rd, 2024 when a car hit my stopped car. They were going about 25 mph. Simply put, my car stopped their car because I kept my foot on the brake of mine when I saw them speeding towards me without slowing down. It bent the frame of my car, airbags deployed…and I swear that I felt my brain smack into the back of my cranium right after my skull whipped backwards into the headrest of the driver’s seat.
Over the last month I have learned what it’s like:
to not be able to walk in a straight line.
to not be able to keep my balance.
to have headaches nearly every hour of the day.
to have my left eye no longer tracking correctly with my right eye.
to have my mind not know how to set the volume on sound, so it was all too loud.
to become afraid of sunlight and pretty much all projected light because it hurts to view.
to live like a vampire in the dark for a full week, only going out at night when the sun was down.
to forget conversations right after they happened and who I even spoke with.
to wonder if all these symptoms will become a part of my life moving forward as my new norm.
I also learned about cutting edge treatments for severe concussions. Within a week of my accident I learned about a clinic near my home in Iowa City. It’s a humble practice. They don’t brag about what they do. But wow, what they do is amazing. And getting access to treatment right after a concussion is definitely the way to go about it. I am so lucky that I live near the facility and that I knew about it. No one locally told me about it. Not the Emergency docs after my two visits. It was a friend on the East Coast who had heard about “Dr. Fitz”. Syntonic Light Therapy…holy shit. I literally walked in wincing in pain, off balance, blocking out light and sounds, a mess…and after my first SLT treatment I experienced immediate relief. The thing is that they didn’t tell me a thing. Not one. There was no planting of ideas. They literally were like “we’re going to stick you in this room now and show you some light…hang out for a bit til we return”. The point being, they didn’t set me up with preconceived ideas of how to feel after the treatment. They only asked afterwards. And when I walked out and had my balance and the sun wasn’t like a laser into my brain pain centers…I was amazed.
That isn’t to say that this was without frustrations, plenty of setbacks and fears of not getting better. That first treatment lasted for about 3 hours til the symptoms returned. My brain needed time to heal. My accident was on June 23 and I only was cleared to drive late last week. I have had moments of feeling like I was totally fine…for a few hours. Thinking I was done. Then crushing headaches and memory loss and 3 hour naps and fatigue for whole days. It’s not a linear healing track. It’s not like a broken bone. Concussion healing is absolutely nonsensical and not predictable. Again and again I would be tricked by feeling good for a few hours, only to be thrown back under the wheels again.
I am writing today because I have felt good for 3 days in a row…a first in the whole month. I am still taking everything slowly but it’s amazing to feel this normal again. I still can’t work full time. I don’t have that kind of energy yet. Oh…I lost a steady job I had landed, unfortunately. Too much time missed due to the concussion. Luckily I do have some sweet part time work irons in the fire that I hope work out. I will be easing back into the working world slowly for sure.
I have been very lucky to have my son to drive me places and support from both of my kids and friendly check in calls from friends and family around the world. Good stuff.
I think (I hope) that I am getting back to real recovery now. I will even remember that I posted this blog writing lol!
Meanwhile…The Last Shark premiered online on youtube. In 12 days this movie has received 21,000 views. With a marketing budget of zero. Not too shabby. It also screened on TV in South Africa to the tune of 158K viewers. Again…well done to everyone who made this happen.
And below is a hint of the European Premiere to come!
For all the jobs I am getting hired for, I might have to change the name of my website from The Video Slab to something more like “My Book About How Mom Died”. That’s what I have mainly been working on. One can only send in so many job applications and not get hired for so many obviously natural job fits…before you just acknowledge something different is planned for you. I now live in a UNESCO City of Literature. I have an entire book to copyedit before I start hunting for literary agents. So, yeah. It seems like the writing is on the historical building’s walls…it’s time to finally finish this book. That’s what I am working on. While the HR people either add or subtract my wide ranging life on paper from their slush piles, I am perfecting this book about my time as mom’s caregiver during the hardest year of my life. It’s a pretty wild experience.
Copyediting nearly a year’s worth of journal entries, 4 years after that worst year of your life is ummm…fuck. I dunno. Different conflicting things. It’s enlightening. Refreshing. Shocking. I read what is there and I don’t understand how I survived it on an actual literal level. When 60% of caregivers for people with dementia die before the person with the illness does…I have no idea how I am still alive.
Snapshot from a portion I was just editing:
“Update 2 PMÂ – Hospital waiting room at the UVA Radiation Clinic
We arrive at the Rad clinic just in time to see the guy walking out of his treatment who always wears his “Real Men Rock Pink”. He’s been here I think every day that we’ve been. He also wears a pink baseball hat and pink Nike’s. I say this all like we’ve been doing this for months. We already feel like veterans. This is only our 6th day in the Radiology clinic. Also…why can’t my mom be THAT guy? Fired up. Facing the facts. Embracing the suck and getting it done with flair. That’s the mom I wanted to have. That’s the role model I needed.
It’s not an exaggeration to say it feels like we’ve been at this forever already, like we’ve seen pink shirt guy 100 times by now. He’s like the seating arrangement we already take for granted in this subterranean waiting room. These places have a time bending effect. Time moves slower down here, beneath street level…in the basement of the hospital-where people get irradiated, get sicker and pray for miracles.Â
You hear the shusshing of the piped in air. You hear the occasional beep of someone’s phone, reminding you that somewhere out there, there are people, without cancer, sending messages, to us unfortunates, way way way down here. Nurses walk in and out, you hear the swishing of their clothing. The bored person behind the reception desk has three fingers pushing into her cheek, elbow on the desk, probably checking her Facebook.”
Besides the book? I exercise a lot. My son and I have a deal going where we go the gym Monday – Friday. I go into a local park to walk at night just about everyday. I hit up local coffee shops and diners. I hang out with both kids whenever they have decided I am not annoying them 🙂
I read history books. Just picked up a new memoir. I saw the author give a talk last night. So I will be diving into that today, in my hammock, swinging somewhere in the wooded park.
Probably my favorite thing, besides being with my children, is walking through a graveyard on the way to the park. It’s a large one. It’s got style, somehow. It says a little something more about the dignity of death in the way the land lays with the trees and site stones in agreement of some kind. Walking through it in darkness and alone always feels like a powerful metaphor.
Hey…hey Charlie. Are you afraid of death? Walking through a large cemetery at night makes one wonder. The ghosts of all those people. Are they here? What I do, is invite them to show me something. After all, they have been where I am. They have walked around and wondered about how to make a living, about how to tell their stories, about how to be a good person. All of these headstones know more about life than I do. Before I join them in the ground, I just hope I can do so knowing I did things in a good way.
The “BLACK ANGEL” from the Oakland Cemetery in Iowa City.
So…yeah. I love freelancing. Kind of. If you like always searching for your next gig while working on your current gig, then yeah, I love it! So, not so much. I love the work. But I don’t love the constant hustle. To break the hustle cycle I have been looking for real live full time jobs with benefits. And it’s been a while since I have been out there in that world. And it’s like traveling in an astronaut suit through space because it’s a creative vacuum. It’s hard to breathe in an atmosphere that is trying to replace me/us.
I am seeking job postings with titles like: communications coordinator, creative director, social media manager, video editor, scriptwriter. And what I see coming back at me is:
-…you will be working with AI to craft best of class content… -…utilizing ChatGPT, you will be crafting original… -…must have experience using Canva to create original content for social media posts… -…Hi, I am a lifestyle influencer (who is about 19 years old) and can no longer keep up with the demand for creating my makeup videos, I have 1 million followers on YT and need to… -…if creating content set to extremely tight deadlines and using your skills to help market the latest product releases sounds exciting to you…
All hard won creative energy and talent is being harnessed by an economy that marches to the steady beat of “hungry for faster, more, right now”. For me, it’s sad to see that artists are asked to make things that make the world a worse place. When we apply the creative impulse for things so banal and useless, for too long, we invariably lose the feel of what creating ever meant. Creativity has always been a spiritually satisfying act. That has changed. We are way off script now.
That’s first level bad. What’s on the second level?
Our creative efforts are now being funneled into teaming up with AI, Canva and more…automated programs that (ironically) humans use to replace our creative endeavors that, oh yeah, have become inextricably linked to keeping a roof over our heads and food on our tables…shoes on our feet.
What’s wrong with Canva, with AI and more? Check out the phrasing from their own site about using Canva to create:
“No Design Experience Needed”
I began building my first website in 1997. My company was an outdoor guide service and I wanted in on marketing via this whole internet thing. I helped with the layout. I wrote the words. I took the pics. I paid two humans (real live people who needed food and shelter) to design the site in HTML code. PHP didn’t exist. WordPress didn’t exist. Their effort meant their company could thrive. I didn’t shortcut anything.
Now it’s “No Design Experience Needed”?
Soon, Canva will be making the entire site, the entire IG post, including the AI generated photo. Soon it will be commonplace for graphic designers to be using their skills to enter into other crowded job silos. But it’s not because AI is out to get us. It’s because many of us have subscribed to the “hungry for faster, more, right now” work culture for far too long. The economic machine we created (albeit in the past before it was “us”) has reached a tipping point, indeed surpassed it. The scary thing for me is how many of us (humans) are thrilled to embrace AI. Don’t be excited unless you are ready to help your friends pay their bills in the next few years. Because it’s coming.
Here is the progression:
“hungry for faster, more, right now” leads to “No Design Experience Needed” and finally… “No paid humans necessary”
This wouldn’t bother me if we weren’t simultaneously still living in an economy that requires us to work for our money. We can’t all go out and start growing veggies and tending livestock any longer. If you don’t have money, you lose access to healthy food, safe housing, medical care.
And yes, in a real way, Canva is just a symptom. In a world where someone can make a million dollars a year by simply putting on makeup in videos that AI can edit for free, that’s a symptom. We are all forgetting that being skilled at something useful is actually important and valuable. It’s a fact that using our hearts and minds and hands to make things, makes for a good life. If we can make money doing essentially nothing…we will also feel nothing…and then need distraction…say, like…a makeup video tutorial, or 10, on a Friday night-alone in our overly expensive rented room in a shared apartment in NYC.
By using our minds to create machines that replace our usefulness-well that’s a world that none of us are ready for. The only way out is to stop “hungry for faster, more, right now”.
How to convince people that it’s actually okay and beneficial to slow down?
I dunno. Ask Chat GPT?
As for me, I am on Team Human. Let’s slow down. And stop watching makeup videos like they are as important as a major world event.
I am always a bit self conscious when walking into a diner. I shouldn’t be. I am always in good company. Today, strung along the street side window are three men over the age of sixty.
Two of them are wearing beanie hats. One of them has the classic baseball cap. All of them hiding their bald heads from the chill or hiding the fact that they lost that hair long ago. I rebel, and remove my gray wool beanie, setting it down pointedly on the table. I haven’t had hair on top of my head since I was 25. Unfairness in the handsome department struck me early in life.
It doesn’t work though. I still look just like them. For we are all the same. Alone, older and lonely looking. Oh…and all of us are wearing glasses in order to read the menu. Hello 53 years of age. I wasn’t planning on meeting you and being single still but here we are at the Bluebird Diner in Iowa City, Iowa. My theory is that you don’t really notice the older-lonely-beanie boys in diners early in the morning unless you are one of them. I think we are invisible to most. I don’t like belonging to anything by virtue of default. This is my least favorite label. The lonely older guy sitting in the diner at 8 AM. The romanticism of sitting alone in diners wore off for me about 13 years ago.
My favorite past is sitting across from me. They just walked in. My favorite of all time…the period of my life that brought out my best. It’s a 6-top. Four kids and all of them under the age of 5. Within minutes the three older ones have knives in their hands, they are shaking the salt shakers, there are napkins on the floor. There is squealing and laughing. The parents are calm but also taking a lot of deep breaths and looking at one another across the milieu-wan smiles. I only had two kids to their four, but it’s the best thing I ever did.
That’s why I am here in Iowa City. My two kids, now 22 years old and 26 years old somehow both decided to move to this town in the last year. Then the requests for me to follow began late last year. And after I was done saying “but why did you have to move to Iowa City of all places”, I visited them for Christmas and actually found that I liked the place. And then came the plans to move here on my part, driven by many external forces, but all of my own design.
First of all, any parent who has adult children asking them to live nearby to them, must say yes. It’s an unwritten rule of life. If you have kids that enjoy your company enough to make this request, despite your uncountable mistakes as a parent…count yourself exceedingly fortunate and make haste to their location.
Secondly, I have “lived” in 123 places in the last four years. No. That’s not an exaggeration. I made a spreadsheet. I counted them up. And for the last 11 months I have been doing nothing but volunteering for things I believed in. I have been creating more than I have at any point in my life. I created a 19 episode podcast and directed a feature length movie.To keep my costs low so that I could focus on this work I decided to do housesitting and petsitting up and down the east coast of the USA. It’s unpaid. But you get a dog or cat to watch after and a free place to stay. Usually it’s a very nice place to be and in a very choice location.
I have been, in a real sense, without a place to call home since August of 2019. I had some short stints in a rented place here or there…but for all the rest of that time I have either been taking care of my parents in their home, camping, staying with friends, at an Airbnb or doing the housesitting/petsitting thing.
I haven’t had a home to rest within, in any real sense. And by this January, during my last scheduled petsitting gig on the shores of Lake Champlain in Burlington Vermont, I realized I couldn’t do this any longer. The free wheeling sense of adventure had evaporated. I got to the point where I was daydreaming about living in one town, having one job, and just being as stable and boring as humanly possible.
And so, Iowa City made sense for a lot of reasons.
I now live in a house built in the 1850’s. The ceiling in my room appears to be 15’ tall. The windows are about 12 feet tall and they have two layers of heavy wood paneling that folds to act as a solid curtain against the light and cold if need be. You can feel the history in the exposed floorboards with every delightfully creaky weary wooded step. Steam coaxes deep grumbles from the heater in the corner. The massive front door of the house probably weighs over 100 pounds and was shipped by horse and buggy, overland from a train station in Chicago in 1853. The streets out front bear the weight of cars on red bricks and the tires make an odd but pleasing squishy grubbly sound upon them. I can walk to town within minutes. 1800’s architecture and early 1900’s edifice are everywhere. One thing I gleaned from staying in 123 different places was a made list of “things I want to have when I finally stop moving around”. Because I made a study of how people who live in one place…lived. The main thing I noted is that most places don’t really have a sense of community if they don’t have walkability. If you can’t walk to a friend’s home, to where things are happening, to where you might take a bite or get a cuppa or read a book…that community is always lacking something. So top of my list was to get a place in a town where I could walk to the town center and where the town would have something worth walking to. To my surprise, Iowa City=A+ on that grading chart.
I also made note of the absurd housing costs everywhere I went. There was not one place where the locals didn’t trot out the now tired tale “after the pandemic housing prices are through the roof! People can’t find anywhere to live here now and even if they can find it, it’s too expensive!” When I found out how little my kids were paying for rent in Iowa City I really thought it was a typo. Or if not, it meant that Iowa City must simply be a truly undesirable place to live. Nope. Turns out it’s just mysteriously affordable. And local wages somehow are not far behind the cost of living here.
To wit…my plan was to settle in a lovely small Vermont town called Warren. I was just there last week saying goodbye to that postcard village. And a friend there told me that just recently a 200 sq foot bedroom, in a home shared with others, was going for $2000 a month. As I said, a number of reasons drove me to Iowa City. At some points, while I was living rent and mortgage free for most of the last 4 years, I have felt like an economic refugee. Fleeing the high cost of housing as a single person and knowing that if I rejoined the housing fray that my earnings couldn’t possibly land me in a home that I would want to live in. When you are single, it’s just way different. Your options for comfort are exactly cut in half, unless you are wealthy…which I am most certainly not. I am not Ken Burns. I have found a place to rent that I enjoy, in a lovely historic part of town…and it’s not expensive. It’s easy.
So, here I am. Iowa City. Day 1. There aren’t words with enough letters or enough lines on a page to explain my relief at knowing that I am living here. No longer moving. No longer searching. Just finally living in one place.
Work? Honestly…who knows? Though I planned on doing a very normal, very plain kind of job…alas. I am who I am. I have applied for those jobs and been passed over or turned them down. Currently I am feeling like I’d love to do something historical about Iowa City. Maps. Visual retrospectives. Maybe see if the city wants to throw some money into something interesting that visitors might want to use or see. I want to dust off my old cameras and take some still images. Maybe get back into some architectural photography? In short…I am feeling like freelancing is what I will end up doing again. And that’s sounding okay.
What I am currently doing however is:
-ghostwriter and business contact for a book about Ukraine and the work of one frontline humanitarian aid worker from the USA. We are seeking a publisher for the book! (screenshot for the book website that is still in development phase below)
-copyediting my prescriptive self help memoir about my time as a caregiver for my mother as she died from cancer and dementia during the peak of the pandemic. Seeking the traditional publishing route for this one too.
-self publishing a poetry book drawing from my last 15 years of writing poetry.
-possibly developing a podcast based on my movie 400 Feet Down.
The Video Slab 