In 2018 with some trepidation I bought my first mirrorless camera, a Nikon Z7. It wasn’t because I thought it was better than the DSLR I had been using but because my old muscles were spasming with the weight of the camera I was using and I hoped that a package a pound lighter would help me keep on working.

Then slowly I began to learn what I had bought — a camera with major advances over any camera I had ever owned, film or digital. I hadn’t expected that. …

When this thing is over there will still be gas stations and liquor stores, and places to eat fast food. Doctors and grocers will survive, and a host of others, but I’m afraid a lot of the galleries will be gone.

The roads and towns of Central Kansas, and the people who live there

When I first told my friends I was going to Kansas, most of them said: “Why would you ever go there?” and to tell you the truth, I didn’t have much of an answer. The simple answer was to shoot some vintage motorcycles, but that didn’t explain taking five additional days to drive around central Kansas looking for pictures and stories. The more complete answer was because I didn’t know what I would find. I like being in new places, ones where I don’t know what’s around…

You guys surprise me, you readers. Looking at the stats for my stories what I see is that the stories you like are all over the map. You visit stories about crappy movies I worked on, tales of fast cars and bikes, childhood memories, thoughts about photography, a mixed bag for sure. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, I’m the one who remembered them, asked them what they were about, wrote them down. But now, seeing them all together in a list I wonder why out of everything they are the ones that call you over time.

I don’t…

Building a fancy nightclub in seventies L.A. and working with big-time schemers and scammers left me with stories I always meant to tell. I finally wrote something about those times and boy did it get a warm response. Readers have been writing to tell me their experiences or how my story has brought that time alive again. So here’s a link to Paradise Lost — and here are a few things people have been saying about it,

GD: ANDY!!!!!!! Holy shit this is one of the best. Thanks for making us beautiful and cool

HM: That opening evening I was…

Flint Hills, Kansas. The light is good here. In October, the sun is not so deep overhead, and there are long mornings and deep afternoons that give shape to the landscape. There are fields and rolling hills and miles and miles of dirt roads that take you to places little seen. Then there are the towns. Hundreds of them, each with its main street and a few blocks of houses spread around, each unique in its own way, almost all alike in that they are shrinking.

I got vaccinated yesterday, and the microchips are already at work!

In the end, it was easy. My wife and I got into the car, drove up to Magic Mountain, snaked through the endless rows of cones, answered the few questions, let the smiling woman make a perfect painless injection (practice, makes perfect y’know, they do thousands of shots a day) waited fifteen minutes to make sure the microchips were safe in their new home then drove away.

Damned if this story hasn’t been banned from Facebook. Well, not the story directly, but me when I try to post it. After putting it up this morning, FB is telling me I can't post to groups until January 23rd. The telling is frank, but my god it’s within the bounds of civil discourse.

Here the story that’s caused the ruckus. In it, I recast last week in Washington as a biker brawl hoping to get a grip on the broader outlines of what’s happening to our country.

https://medium.com/stories-ive-been-meaning-to-tell-you/bar-brawl-fc120e9188b8

I’d love it if you read it and if you like it, just this once I’d appreciate it if you would share it.

Andy