Oh-Hello there keyboard

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Oh hi…hello there Mac Airbook keyboard, it’s been a long time since we hung out. Feels like months since you and I typey typed out my thoughts into letters onto a screen, just because I needed to write or just because I wanted to write – for fun. To clear my brain. To offload all the things that I am doing. I have missed this.

And I might not have anything important or critical to say whatsoever and I feel out of practice. Right now though I have about 40 minutes till I need to be somewhere so here we go.

I am at Deluxe Bakery eating a slice of pumpkin pie and a turkey shaped cookie for breakfast. To drink I am sipping down a delicious decaf cortado (no additional cream or sugar please and thank you).

It’s Saturday Nov. 8th, 2025 and about 11:50 AM. I was at work this morning trying to catch up on my hours. I took Thursday off this week because 1) I was feeling super run down and a bit ill 2) I had a friend coming through town and I wanted to rest up and see if I could feel better before they arrived.

I rested all day and didn’t work at my day job, the one that pays the bills. But in that rest time I had the time and restful space to catch up with some folks via text and email. The end result is that I scheduled 4 new interviews for the Iowa Prairie Podcast Project. This is a testament to how creative and proactive we would all be were we not “working” for a living. 

My friend is 28 years old. And my kids and this kid’s siblings all used to play together back in like…2007. It was such a lovely catch up with someone whom I have known since he was 6 years old. Also odd how you can be good friends with people who are your children’s age. Kiah, my visitor, has also been the one who created OST’s for most of my movies thus far and many more short videos. When he was here he informed me that the alarm tone or ring tone on his phone was a segment from one of the title tracks for one of my movies (that he composed). So nice to be reminded that we worked together on a movie that made a difference in land conservation. 

I felt better on Friday and worked from about 7 AM until 6 PM. Then off to the record store to buy this beauty:

I last owned this album probably in 1985, just before giving away all my records, because you know…no one was EVER going to listen to vinyl again. It’s now the 7th record in my newly building collection. I fell asleep while listening to it on the second play through but snapped a pic of my record player in the darkness because I like how it looked.

Oh gosh what else…hmmm….I have been working so incredibly hard on the Iowa Prairie Documentary Project. It’s got ahold of me all day, everyday. It’s really all I think about. Daydream about. I am constantly sending myself notes and messages to not lose track of an imagined sequence or new idea of a visual. This movie is happening so differently than any of the others. It’s really become my Hail Mary pass regarding the state of the world we live in…as seen through the lens of the state of Iowa. I can tell you it’s a sobering thing to realize that one can tell the story of how it’s all gone much too far without leaving home. All the worst stories are right here…and that’s really strange. It keeps me up at night but not in an awful way. More like a…how can I creatively convey these ideas that I have been pondering since the 6th grade, sort of way. Because that is literally when I first began really seeing our separation from and depletion of, the natural world. I started journalling about the topic when in study hall or detention hall. 

Today in about 30 minutes I will be picking up some used large diaphragm condenser microphones, some really old school ones…in hopes that I can record some warmer tones for the movie soundtrack. I will be recording the first segment of the movie, the first three minutes’ soundtrack which will be played live by a cellist. I’ll probably be recording on three mics at the same time. I have heard him play it through once already and it nearly made me cry, and def gave me goosebumps. 

There’s just so much going on that I can barely keep up. And yes, I do think of quitting. Quitting it all and just going back to simplicity. But the story needs telling and there aren’t enough people listening so far. I might not be able to pierce that particular veil either. But I feel compelled to try. 

I hope this weekend to finally give the project a proper website, FB page and IG account. Far fetched…maybe 1 out of 3?

(typed in a sort of hurry, please forgive typos and errors)

It Takes Time

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FYI the main tree pics in the gallery here is a frame grab from a video. Not the best resolution. It’s late on a Sunday night and I really just wanted to write and mark the moment. Today I went out to Rochester Cemetery in Iowa for the Iowa Prairie Documentary Project. It has, what is considered to be, the finest stand of Oak Savannah in the entire state. There is a lot to why this designation is given but the old growth oak trees are definitely a big part of it. This is my fourth visit to Rochester Cemetery. I am planning on visiting and documenting how the oaks change in each season. Today though was about taking shots of each remaining oak tree within the pioneer cemetery grounds, since that is where the some of the land has never been tilled, grazed or otherwise mucked with since the last glacier retreated from this area. The area stands as an island in a sea of cultivated humanscaped “progress”. Documenting via photography and video, each individual tree was quite an experience.

We have to spend time in a place to understand what it can teach us. It’s like the words it’s saying come forth ever so slowly. If you just pop in for a quick visit, you will barely get the first word. It takes time to let the land teach you. And it takes seeing a piece of land through different seasons to see what the larger world is saying to it, how it’s interacting with everything around it.

The other pics are just me in a hammock and my tea kettle boiling lol.

AI: Late Night Thoughts

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Late night thoughts about AI…

Common convo starts to the AI issue:

“AI does _______”

“AI is replacing ______”

“I created this using AI and ________”

“Check out this short video I made with AI”

Somewhere along the way we have forgotten that AI doesn’t create. AI is a creation of humans. Humans keep making AI tools that humans use. We don’t have an AI problem. We have 3 overlooked issues instead:

1) Humans are foolish enough to make a job replacing technology without first figuring out where all the newly unemployed people will find work.

2) We keep blaming AI as if it is somehow the agent making the changes.

3) The more people use AI, the more it is being trained to do more of our jobs.

If you are one of the people using the notion that embracing AI tools now makes you a leader in some new successful leading edge, you are quite literally training your replacement with every prompt.

Really what AI is, is a shovel. And we keep using it to dig ourselves into a hole that we can’t climb out of.

That Kind of Movie

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If you are going to document something, it means to faithfully represent what is/was there, so that it can be shared and understood. What happens when you document what has happened and you leave portions out of that documentary effort, is that you become a part of erasure. And it can happen so innocently. You may not want to impact someone’s reputation, for example. Or you need to keep someone on the record, so it means possibly that you have to exclude someone else…because they have beef with one another. People can lose their livelihood, often unbeknownst to them, for being involved in documenting the truth of what’s transpired around a certain issue. Moneyed interests can influence one’s decision or an organization’s choice to be a part of accurately documenting history as well as contemporary (right now!) events.

I guess what’s wild to me is that from day one of starting on my first documentary about exposing truths (in 2015)…I keep learning how you can’t tell the whole truth. Not in the kind of society that we have all agreed to live in. Call it an affectation of so-called “polite society” perhaps…or call it fear. Call it pragmatism. I’d say that our society is designed as a place for people to hide from the truth. I am not saying it happens on purpose. I don’t think it’s intentional. I think instead that we unconsciously seek to protect ourselves and so sleepily design a world of mattresses where we can take naps while it all falls apart around us. We’d rather not know…I mean…don’t interrupt our Netflix.

The bottomline line is that it’s difficult to say the whole damn thing and that’s frustrating as hell. The only way to have a pure documentary film or podcast is to interview people, and to be the kind of person, where your employment has no strings to the topic…where you won’t lose any friends for your honest words, where people are willing to put it all out there because they have stopped sleeping.

In every case, a conservation documentary hinges on the same tired premise; Money corrupts absolutely. There are many ways to effectively tell that story…which I don’t think we’ve seen yet. I want to find one of them, and put it to good use.

In this podcast, but especially when it comes to the movie…I want to really do something different with this film about the Iowa Prairie. I want to take a lot of creative directions that I have never attempted. I currently live in what is most likely the most environmentally degraded and abused landmass in the entire USA. But hardly anyone realizes it yet. Few understand just how bad it is here and what it means for the future. I have made some wonderful documentary pieces. I wouldn’t change a thing about them. But this one? Iowa needs a movie that makes the audience think “I can’t believe he just said that…and it was true” I am hoping that I can find enough people in the state who are willing to tell it like it is. Because a documentary without a community and without people who risk…isn’t one that makes an impact. And Iowa NEEDS an impact. I hope for a creation that leaves an indelible impression.

Anywho…here is Podcast Episode #2

Dusting off the Cobwebs

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Today I was out capturing potential “soundbeds” for the podcast and also testing a new mic I bought for interviews for the movie (The Iowa Prairie Documentary Project). Grabbed a couple of pics of this lovely stretch of land that Iowa City is allowing to grow back. There’s a really nice stand of Bluestem there. Some were 8′ tall! Also had a visitor on my mic. And grabbed a nice shot of a bumbler on what I think is called Carduus acanthoides?

A Fallow Field is…

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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.

Winding Up…for the Prairie!

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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! 

Podcast Launch!

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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.

iHeart Radio:

Apple:

https://podcasts.apple.com/…/us-at-our-worst/id1820334579

Simplecast:

https://us-at-worst-372bb0ec.simplecast.com

Youtube (to watch or listen):

https://www.youtube.com/@UsAtOurWorstPodcast

Spotify:

HDR eh? Interesting stuff…

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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.