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.

The country is split down the middle by… oh, wait a minute, I just did it, started to talk about how we are feeling by beginning a story, by using narrative to talk about how we are feeling. It’s hard to avoid storytelling as a way of sharing information, and this time I’m not going to try. Instead, I want to recast the story of what’s going on at this moment, change the metaphors in hopes of shining a light from a different direction. Because whether left or right, once we identify, our narratives bind us.

I won’t pretend this…

Deep in an L.A. afternoon, I get a call from Wavy Gravy. “Gas, Nick Ray needs some help. Do you know who he is?” Nah, not really, I don’t have a clue. Well, Nick Ray is the guy who directed Rebel Without a Cause, and The Lusty Men, and Johnny Guitar. He’s a legend in this town but he’s a broken one. Plagued by demons, done by drugs he still has a few friends but he’s totally washed up. He’s staying at the Chateau Marmont in the bungalow where he rehearsed James Dean for Rebel Without a Cause. The management…

The Hog Farm Reunion, Wavy Gravy and the Bus I used to live on

I joined the Hog Farm in 1969, a long time ago. I left a year later, got back on the bus for a minute here and there, spent time hanging out with the family at Pacific High School, met up with them at other stops along the journey, but as a family member, I was gone. I left, but I never quit. I became an executive, an Academy member, a temple goer, I lived a hundred other layers of life, gathering identities as I went. …

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…

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. …

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…