this staying home has become a habit, though we take our kids to town every once in a while, sometimes every day for a while. at home i'm plenty busy. i've decided to write everything i've ever wanted to write, and just plug away until i've said everything i've ever wanted to say. there's plenty left; there are at least five or six unfinished books on my desktop. i started a novel finally, about iowa. and since i always loved iowa, it's kind of a love story. but i get to throw in everything i always loved about iowa - and there is a lot! particularly iowa city - one of my favorite cities ever.

but to be specific about it, what's favorite about it is the way it was in 1975, so that's where i'm setting the novel. iowa city, 1975. i don't really like what it's become, or even especially what it became while i was still there. there was this tiny little time while i was there that i really liked, and that's what i'm writing about.

the good thing about novels is the kind of choice you have going in. you can have any plot, any characters, any setting, any time. it's a lot of power.

but you have to have a goal going in. a lot of times i go in, and i have things i want to say, but i don't have a complete picture. i have two unfinished novels just sitting there. and i've been determined to finish them, before i start this iowa one. but the iowa one i just started anyway. i figure, with the coronavirus and all, you have to just say it all, while you have the chance. get it all out there. tell the world. you might be on a ventilator tomorrow.

it's a little mixed up with my autobiography, which is also very heavily leaning on iowa. so much of my growing up happened there, and i did so much. with this novel i can make the vast majority of it true. i just have to make an overlying plot, a reason for the reader to keep turning the pages. and there weren't any major scandals at that time - big murders, or financial scams, whatever. i end up making the story much more nuanced, a real picture of real people, all with different names. to protect the innocent and not-so-innocent.

you might ask about my relatives - the settlement of the territory of nebraska and all that. well they're still there, and i have to print that one, and read it, and finish it, but basically i got so far on the civil war, and i kind of wore it out. i had to come up for air. i had to do the seventies, my own seventies, to remember who i am.

more later, things are happening here, even as the clock turns, and we go into july.

i go on hiatus from marketing sometimes; i just get discouraged and avoid it. besides, i'm working on my book (see last post). deep into the civil war, the panic of 1893, the atchison topeka & santa fe. i want to finish it. it's intense.

my wife pointed out that i hadn't been working outside, which is true. it got real hot afternoons and i've turned into a wimp; then it rained a lot and that was a pretty good excuse. actually i like it out there. i'm smoothing out piles of ground stump and dirt, where a stump grinder turned up the earth a lot. he actually didn't see every stump, so i have a few yet to pull out. it's a kind of landscaping, making it so grass can grow during the rainy season, which is coming.

to some degree it's already here. it's rained three or four out of the last five days. it's glorious, because june is so darn dry it'll about kill you. a little rain makes it so i can pull those stumps, and i can make things better if i want to. the raking is good for me.

while i'm out there, i mull over the characters in my book. they are real live people, who leave some clues and say some things, if you can find them. they live through the civil war, then they live through the panic of 1893. they travel around the country - for a while, in horse and carriage, then later, they get an auto. they're kind of on that cusp where, at first, you're not going to go out to colorado or california, it's just too far. three weeks on a horse and wagon, the scorching sun donner pass and all, too much. but then you get an auto, and everyone wants to try it. meet you out in sunnyvale. you can catch their excitement. they take their pup tent with them. sometimes they stay in a motel, and that's real treat.

i sit in the center of our village counting mask rates. some people wear them, some don't. my own kids don't, but should. we tell them to. the minute we're not watching, they don't. they're young, and really really don't believe they're in any danger. meanwhile numbers skyrocket in florida, texas, arizona, california. it makes us nervous; we're surrounded. things look bleak. a deadly virus is winning the war.

in our little town, it hasn't claimed a single person. we have about eight hundred people, and we're all still here. about five hundred of us are real nervous. lots of us wear masks regularly. i stay in my truck where i won't feel the obligation to wear one, because i'm just sitting here, not going anywhere. i watch the people who walk in the downtown boardwalk in front of me. 50%, 70%, sometimes 30%. the percentage changes according to what time i'm out here.

our friend says it's locals that are the worst. we're actually a tourist town, and all our tourists are from texas, where it's really out of control. so we're nervous about having a town full of texans walking around with the virus. but it turns out, those are the ones that are wearing the masks. they're sensitive; they know the law; they don't want us thinking bad of them. whether they have it or not, they're at least following the rules. it's the locals, and a few of the visitors, who just don't believe in it. they make up stories about how they really don't work. hey, if i was single, i'd probably have a fewof those stories. you delude yourself when you're on your own. people can be influenced very easily; it doesn't take much.

we came out of our little valley the other day to sign some papers to lease our house. i realized how country i was. i was virtually unable to keep a mask on; i couldn't hear myself talk. i didn't really know what was happening here in town. i hadn't talked to many people about the situation and i'm more and more uncomfortable, even going anywhere. just now some guy walked next to my truck and coughed. he was carrying a mask in his hand. i'm hoping the outside air, the gentle breeze, took care of it. but i put on my mask anyway. i'm not letting that virus get in there.

my wife also is obsessively checking the news. just a few years back we lived in texas. her deepest fear is, no icu beds, no care. she's got a point. lubbock is now up to hundreds of new cases a day, in lubbock alone. almost ten thousand new ones in florida, a day, in a state that is full of old people. four 9/11's a day, you could say, in florida alone.

yet we still have zero in our mountain zip code, and hope it stays that way.

there was a little girl in our family story who was very interesting. her parents died when she was about three. She had a younger sister, and four older sisters; one was a half-sister, having the same father but an earlier mother. When her parents died, all six girls were in Ohio, near Cleveland. Her younger sister was adopted by a family in Wisconsin, relatives.

they had a gregarious uncle, freeman tisdel, a wealthy man who ran a hotel in warren, illinois. many of them ended up out there. he was involved in the founding of warren and was its first postmaster.

her oldest sister, the half-sister, met my great-great grandfather and married him in warren in 1858. there was a depression in 1857, and everyone was just trying to get by, but they had their baby pretty quickly as they were trying to make it. as i understand it, the young girl, ellen, who was now about six, looked up to her oldest sister, hattie, who was more like 20. that older sister was watching out for her. young ellen helped hattie with the baby.

word came of gold being found in pike's peak, colorado, and there was lots of excitement. menfolk were tired of the depression already and thought maybe money was to be had by going out there and mining for it. after all, it was only back in 1849 that gold had been found in california, and there were plenty of people around bragging about how they'd gone out there, found it, got rich, or at least knew someone who did. you needed certain tools, like pickaxes, and horses and oxen to lug things around. and you needed to get out there; the first problem was getting across the mississippi, which was wide and shallow but very muddy and treacherous in its own way. after that it was wild, uncharted plains all the way through iowa, nebraska and eastern colorado though there were wagon ruts on most of it.

the mnefolk included hattie's husband, james walker leverett, but also freeman tisdel. freeman tisdel had been wronged in a dispute over the founding of warren, and had begun selling everything out, preparing to vacate, hotel and everything. what about all these nieces he'd taken in? i'm not sure; some of them went back to ohio. they were not without resources. hattie and the baby waited for word on where the menfolk ended up; ellen remained in warren with her. the menfolk gathered up teams of oxen and tools and wagons and set out across the mississippi for pike's peak. pike's peak or bust.

the mississippi was as rough as its reputation, but in iowa city they caught the mormon trail west and settled into a rhythm. when they got west of des moines they saw little stone towers marking lane's trail which cut south at nebraska city and helped settlers make kansas a free state. lane's chimneys, they were called. but also they saw eastbound travelers who said pike's peak was a humbug. there was gold, yes, but it was too hard for normal people to get with a pickaxe. might as well turn around right here, they said.

instead they followed lane's trail, cut south in nebraska city, and before they got to the kansas line, stopped in the southeast corner of nebraska and settled a town called salem. it was 1859. nebraska was still a territory. there were very few houses, but james walker leverett had brought a sawmill, and he started making one. they sent one man back to get the womenfolk.

the women at that time included hattie and the baby, but also ellen. what else could she do? she was sticking with hattie at all costs, and if they were going to live out there, she was going with them. there was a cool way to travel now that the west was opening up. they could take the steamboat down the river, from warren, to quincy/hannibal, then take the new railroad from hannibal to saint jo, in western missouri on the missouri river north of kansas city. then there was another steamboat going up the missouri, from saint jo up to rulo, nebraska, in the southeastern corner. they'd get off the steamboat in rulo and go the last eighteen miles by horse & carriage, to salem.

the new railroad was scary enough - war was brewing and outlaws were robbing the trains - and the steamboats were a wild ride, since they didn't know the missouri, and it was a wild river - but what really scared ellen, who was nine, was the stage ride through indian country. it seemed to her so wild, so dark, so wild-west. as it turned out, there were so-called indians there, between rulo and salem, the sauk and fox, but they turned out to be friendly. when they finally met her, they were quite taken with her blonde hair and offered to have her come live with them, and they meant it. they would have taken her in that minute. but she was a nine-year-old girl, being brought up in salem, a pioneer community. she went to school with other children. she helped hattie in whatever way she could.

life was not easy, and the baby died. hattie had three more, while they were out there, and kept taking care of ellen, as well as freeman and a few other people. james finished building their house. war broke out back in the east. it was the civil war, war of all wars.

ellen lived the life of a kid in a pioneer village. she liked the people and came to like the place. she came to not be afraid of the indians, and to be useful to hattie and the family. the following year, the five thousand settlers in nebraska voted against statehood. two men were shot and killed in nearby falls city in a dispute over which town should be county seat of richardson county; salem ultimately lost that opportunity to falls city itself. neither town has more than a couple thousand today, and rulo is dinky too. it's the plains; it's pretty hard to get food out of the ground.

in 1864 the family turned around and went back to illinois. they heard about indians in the west, coming back east, and burning everything down on their way. these, the pawnee, were the original residents of southeast nebraska. they had been promised protection from the sioux, if they were to just move west and out of the way for the settlers, but the promise had been broken. they were angry. they had lost their homeland, and they'd been attacked in the west. and they were coming back.

the family loaded up everything they owned in their covered wagon, and set off the same way they came, into iowa, across the nishnabotna, across the plains on lane's trail. the nishnabotna was flooding because of heavy rains. by now ellen was 14. she was watching the babies in the back of the wagon, on their straw beds. there was a rickety bridge on the nishnabotna and everyone was allowed to walk across the bridge while the team tried to get the wagon across the river. eventually they made it, and made it across iowa, too. one had to figure out how to feed one's horses; but if that was done, everything else was easy.

back in illinois, her sisters had gone back to ohio, so ellen just kept on going. but when she found her other sisters, she told them about nebraska. she sold them on nebraska. in 1867, she was to go back, marry, and have eight children or so. her sisters would follow and do the same.

all except hattie. hattie, with her new family, ended up in wisconsin for twelve years, and then south dakota for eleven. south dakota was much like nebraska - a territory, wild, just developing, with a wild river running through it and nasty, cold winters. in the panic of 1893 hattie and james decided they had to leave, and turned to their friends down in southeast nebraska.

their best friend lived across the state line in kansas, so they moved there. by now they were in their sixties; their children were grown. but ellen was in the area, and her sisters too. hattie got to see everyone again.

ellen had maintained all along that it was a good place; people were nice. they helped each other out. winters were hard. it was not for the faint-hearted. but ellen was tough. she had seen much of the world, from ohio on west anyway, and it suited her. whe was considered one of the early founders of southeast nebraska.

it's pouring down rain, and that's unusual for june - usually the "monsoon" season doesn't start until the fourth. so the ground, which has become crackly dry and brown, is getting a good soak. it's the kind of rain where heat that has been packed away by the top foot or so of earth now becomes steam, and rises slowly all through the land.

we are of course worried about the virus. we sent a kid to town today, ostensibly for a basketball practice later - and we have no idea who's on that team, or where they work, or who might have picked it up at some point. arizona and texas, which surround us, are flooded with it; we, in our mountain zip code, still have zero, but know that won't last forever. for one thing, tourists are flooding the place. everyone is feeling trapped and feeling like getting away. the mountains are their chosen destination, especially when they feel they can't do what they want to do at home. given true choice - low price of gas, time off work, a hot and dry spell in the valley - hundreds will come up here on any given day.

i feel, sometimes, like stopping to use a bathroom at the campground on the highway; it's called sleepygrass. actually any of the alternatives are dangerous - the public bathroom, the one at a popular and always-open restaurant, and sleepygrass. a much better alternative would be the side of the road, but even that only works some of the time. i try to go before i leave home. this almost never works. i'm in the car, i'm in town, i have to go somewhere. i'll have to develop my system so i'm not in such a jam. i can understand how rvs have become so popular.

finished my transposing of the 80-page tirade of my great great grandfather. if he is to be believed a professor of divinity simply had it in for him, and ruined him, got him taken out of his treasurer's job, committed all nature of personal offenses, when he had done nothing, basically, to deserve it. it's a story that is dying to have the other side told, but i don't have the other side; i have only his, so that's what i'm telling. from a family perspective it explains a deep almost ingrained distrust of organized religion. if this is a doctor of divinity, a supposed fine man, who is ruining a person who has done nothing wrong, what's' up with that? if even, he feels like he has to tell the story, and it's in writing, and it's typed out on old crinkly paper, and it was therefore probably not heard or believed elsewhere, what's up with that?

i sometimes wonder about the nature of justice in this world. you have these cop cases, and i think that cops are just as likely to be human, or likely to be just as human, as anyone, which means that, given a hot chase, a criminal situation, and the fact that they are armed and trained, they will just as likely use their gun as not - this is a dead setup for a lot of injustice. i don't know what's passing for an "innocent man" these days as i think a lot of people, george floyd included, are not perfect and the mere fact that they are out of jail, on the street, even walking down the street, makes them more innocent than your average person, who is dead or in jail. it's a constant struggle to stay alive, to have enough food, to take care of one's health, and then these cops come around with a kind of snide arrogance, which i've experienced by the way. but when they are in charge and trying to regain control and trying to get a decent outcome for the average person, they have a lot of pressure on them. and i'm not going to tell them how to do their jobs. i would say, yes they should be fair, yes they should consider carefully before pulling out their gun and just firing around. they are in an unenviable position.

the rain, now, has made the mountains smell very nice. the pine trees are breathing. what was brown, you can almost watch it turn green, or at least think about it. i'm grateful i'm way out here at the end of the road, with lots of deer and elk all around me, hummingbirds coming up and hovering, to see if i've brought them some honey. a blue bird, with an orange breast, landing nearby, probably looking for the same kind of advantage. they all have enough water now, and that will make a big difference in the next few days. the deer and rabbits will come round, hoping the grass has that green fresh-growth edge and they can pick it right off. the cows will tread with huge hoof-prints, pulling some things right out of the ground and leaving huge poops. our own animals will stay excited - they are excited both by thunder and lightning, which are plentiful today, but also by the promise of change in the air, the excitement in the animal kingdom and even the plants. the world is still alive - and after an earthquake in mexico, and a long hot dry summer, to come back around to just a little bit of rain, it's, ahhhh, pretty nice. you can breathe it in, all the way.

lost track of my marketing, gave it up because it wasn't doing much good. i enjoy making pop art but only when i'm in the mood. lately i've been eager to finish four more books. really there are a few beyond those i'd like to get to as well. and they're urgent, my reason being, vulnerable as i am, i may not be around forever. and i may not be around forever, just in the sense that i might become unable to write. i'm already a little too sloppy with my writing, and the best i can say is that because i do so much of it, at least i'm used to it enough to produce full sentences.

one of the things i'm doing is affecting me strongly. i found an 80-page, single spaced sketch of the life of one of my great-great grandfathers. it was typed out very carefully on brown paper that still has some of its integrity, i.e. it's not falling apart as i type it out. he's a very clear writer and never uses contractions; he also limits his paragraphs. i am almost done typing it. but it's a diatribe, setting the record straight on people who wronged him. he was treasurer of hillsdale college for many of its early years - but he was ousted, and had incredibly bad luck at every turn. he documents it all very carefully.

almost done with my other great-great grandfather - actually at that level i have eight great-great grandfathers, but i'm really only exploring two of them - and his life is plenty interesting. i've kind of plowed through the years when nebraska rejected statehood, civil war, a farm in wisconsin, and the panic/depression of 1893, as it affected south dakota. this would be his life. of course i also have this other great-great grandfather, and perhaps a few more, and i haven't even got to my mother's side yet.

if you go up twelve generations, you get over four thousand people who helped make me who i am today. in some cases people are marrying cousins and relatives so that might make it a bit fewer. i was surprised to find one of my great (12) grandfathers to be william brewster, who was a pilgrim leader. some of the others, i'm just not clear on, if you go all the way up twelve generations. it's interesting that i'm clear on him, yet not on my father's side where the leveretts, going all the way up, have some serious clouds.

short stories - all about mcdonalds. also, autobiography. lots going on, not enough time to stay home and write, which is what i want to do. more later.

of course i am glued to the news, wondering if demonstrations will choke tulsa just as the president arrives to have a 19,000-person rally that has been described as a "petri dish" for covid. of course the demonstrations would be the same, if they materialize. it's all reality television at its best, or worst, since i never cared much for "survivor" or "hunger games" in the first place.

my genealogical research has led me in several directions, once i get out of the civil war. in the civil war my father's side of the family is out in southeastern nebraska helping nebraska decide if it wants to be a state. nebraska doesn't really want to be a state, until much later, but lincoln and washington republicans want them to be a state, so they can be a free state. it's all high drama, but the upshot of it is that my great great grandfather goes up to be a delegate in the constitutional convention, and the democrat majority adjourns it before they can write a constitution, because they don't want to do anything that might help lincoln.

then it turns out that i have another great-great grandfather who has written his whole sad story, typed, about eighty pages single space, and i've undertaken to transcribing it so as to use it in some way. he was treasurer of hillsdale college and was totally into the michigan pioneer business before becoming treasurer. but a world of catastrophe befell him in hillsdale and the upshot of it was that my great grandmother, who was a little girl, was lucky to get out of there with her life. his story is so egregiously horrible and spelled out so carefully that i am compelled to print it one way or the other, just so it gets told. but i'm not sure hillsdale college would want it. in fact, they haven't even answered my e-mail. i'm about 65 pages into typing it, almost done, and know it's a powerful little document. but what is my place? it seems that self-publishing may be the way to go, but even that is a somewhat odd outcome.

but then here's the last development. as i finish writing about my great-great grandfather, and we come into the 20th century, they start driving autos, going out to california occasionally, and that kind of thing. but then i come to people i've actually met, namely my grandfather, whose first wife (my father's mother) i never met, but who had an interesting story of her own. to tell the truth, someone who has his story laid out in eighty single space typed pages at least has a profile that we can recover to some degree, but there is much less about my father's mother, whose family emigrated from germany in the late 1800s, and didn't write much down, in terms of life stories. so i'm back in the shed digging through old papers and finding some names of them, as my mind has moved forward a little, to the point where these german immigrants, in chicago, decide to transplant themselves to a small town in western iowa which is full of german immigrants anyway. probably they knew somebody, or even perhaps a relative, who had ended up in this small town and told them life was better out here than in the city. all that is what i intend to find out - who they were, and even where in germany they came from. i tend to not do so well with research on the european end, though, because i get less patient with geography i don't know.

and back there in the shed, i found a bunch of pictures of my aunt. my aunt grew up in des moines and was about eighteen when her husband went off to the war. right as she was having her baby, my only cousin, she found out that that husband had been shot down and killed. that did it for her, and schizophrenia won. from then on, she didn't quite know who was who, and had to be put in a home, as the family was unable to care for her. at one point i moved to iowa and made a point of visiting her, and she didn't know who i was either. i did make an effort to know her, but her lack of real awareness of the family or even who i was was kind of overpowering. she was happy though. they were taking care of her.

anyway, the pictures show her as a young, and very aware teenager. and she's a very different person; you can even see it in the picture. that's what's so odd. i never knew her as a real person, with hope and a future, and a husband, and even a little child - although that picture is not quite the same as the others. it brings up the question of whether you can actually determine anything from a picture really, about what someone's thinking. but it's also because we're in the era where my father is coming into his own as a photographer, and one of the reasons these pictures come down to me is simply because they are good pictures.

in any case, it's my role here to preserve this history, all of it, if there is time, before the steamrolling covid comes around.

there are statues to onate all over the place; there's even an onate high school in las cruces. in some ways he's one of the more visible of hispanic "founders" in new mexico. he was definitely one of the first spanish "conquerors" to come north into new mexico, from mexico, and establish a presence making new mexico part of mexico and by extension, part of spain.

but he did it ruthlessly, as his men were better armed than the natives whom he encountered. there was supposed to be gold in new mexico, but instead of gold, the spanish traveled from village to village for years, and only found one where they did metalsmithing, and rather than the riches in gold that they'd found in aztec mexico, mostly they found little rings and jewelry. or it could be that the native villages knew they were coming and simply hid the good stuff while they were up here.

but onate, constantly angry and frustrated, took to cutting off the feet and hands of natives that disobeyed him, and became more ruthless and despotic as time went on.

new mexico really has three substantial racial communities, because a large community of navajo and pueblo peoples never really mixed in with the hispanics, and never appreciated onate or the way they were treated in those early days. new mexico was part of spain for a while, then of mexico, and then the spanish settlers, some of whom had come with onate, agreed to become part of the usa. but the native people had never really agreed to anything; they'd simply been conquered and / or killed, and forced to agree to a couple of different sets of armed rulers.

in the war on statues onate's statues have been targeted before. one statue had its foot cut off one time; it was as if the local native people had simply never forgotten who he was and what he had done.

there was an interesting aside to onate's mission that should not be forgotten. at that time jews were forced to convert in spain, or else had to find someplace way remote and out of reach of the spanish empire, where they could practice their faith. onate had a few of these jews with him, who figured that by accompanying onate north as far as he could go, they would find some remote mountains where they could get away, and not be found, and be able to practice their faith for many future generations.

and that's what they did. having arrived in santa fe, and among the pueblos north of albuquerque, at some point they escaped into the mountains, most notably the san juan mountains north of santa fe. now i don't think those few that were with onate were the only ones, and i also don't think that the san juan mountains was the only place where they settled. and i have no idea how they got women out this way to convert or to start the kind of community that can sustain itself for generations. in fact, they were unable to sustain themselves for more than a few generations, though such things as candles and menorahs have been found, both in the san juans and down here in the sacramentos. dna tests have confirmed that the mountain communities were settled, at some point, by "marranos," or crypto-jews, secret jews. for some reason the term "marrano" has become offensive, but at the time, their goal was to find a place remote enough that they could practice judaism freely - and that's what they did. new mexico has that in common with the amazon, and the remote areas of mexico and central america. it was a big issue in onate's time.

new mexico has a history of settlement by a widely diverse group of people of all kinds. for the most part, they have gotten along, over the years. we cannot say that onate got along - he was ruthless, violent, vicious. i think that mexican-americans, who have been here for many generations in most cases but who trace their origin at some point to mexico, will have to find a better champion than onate, and will need to get statue-makers busy working on someone else.

why the anglo militia folks would rush to the defense of an onate statue, is beyond me. there are people out there who don't know onate from ulysses grant, and also don't know from wearing a mask. it's a crazy world. when we are in the news, it's a sign that maybe another great change is coming over the land. but those of us in the mountains will hope that we can just stay back up here, pass along our own culture, and live to see another new mexico sunrise.

so i'm knee-deep in the civil war era, when nebraska was a wild territory, and i had lots of relatives kicking around trying to settle unsuccessfully. they finally feared for their lives, after a terrible raid of lawrence kansas by the quantrill gang, and decided to pick up and head back to illinois in their covered wagon. i've been copying from old yellowed pieces of paper, typed on and saved for maybe a hundred years, so i have what in history is called first-hand accounts. the problem is, i might not be able to throw it away even after i digitize it, because it just seems so original. some of it has this gorgeous handwriting that you just don't see anymore. my goal is to make it all published, in a series form, to entertain the reader as one moves through history.

and now, deep in the civil war, they've gotten into their covered wagon, and it's kind of a hoot having the whole family on a single boxy carriage, with chests, beds, everything they own, a white covered sheet over it, the whole works. and it rains, not once or lightly, but a nebraska type rain, all-encompassing, huge, several days worth. they cross the nishnabotna in western iowa and it's jumping its banks. they get robbed by bloody bill anderson but that may actually be on another trip, in missouri (see map above), or somewhere. i'm not quite finished putting the pieces together.

the finishing of the railway through northern missouri changed their options considerably. that was a well known wagon trail, and if they took it, that would explain bloody bill anderson - that's where he was, in central missouri, even going after trains or hanging around that trail. but if the young girl is right - she wrote her own account - they rode their wagon through southern iowa, from the nishnabotna to burlington. and then anderson would have had to have been somewhere else.

missouri at that time was hostile, dangerous, lawless. even jesse james was robbing people, and saying no doubt that he was with bloody bill anderson's gang. lots of people were unhappy with the union's occupation of missouri. and lots of people didn't quite give up easily. they made missouri, and possibly the land around it, a little civil war hell.<

today historians argue about how important the "western theater" was in the civil war. very important, at least to my family, I would say. i had to stop typing this story of quantrill's raid in lawrence - a little too graphic - even though it was technically just a story. my great grandfather grew up hearing stories like the one about quantrill, and eventually just wrote it down. i try to stay true to the story - there's a lot more to it than just "then we went here," since they were in a covered wagon, and it was territory, and anything could happen, and did.

i am actually quite radical and in my heart i would have been out on the street long ago. the guy is criminal, ignores the constitution, robs and steals from the american people. we need him out of there and we may not be able to wait until november/january.

now as for police brutality i have a slightly different take. i am grateful that i know the police in this area and consider them my friends. i think we need police until we have a better system in place and we need them to be cooperative and friendly and hold themselves to standards of equality.

but here's the thing: i think most do that just fine, and they even do it in places like here where it's ultraconservative and the racist trump voters wouldn't mind them beating on a few people of color. police know that it's their job to treat people equally, and it's their job to maintain good community relations, and they by and large want to do their job well.

so you have one cop that murders someone, and three other that watch, and a city explodes in anger against the cops? actually to be more accurate a nation explodes in anger against the cops. my sense is that they sense a little racial hostility on the part of the police - now this could vary from one city to another, and as I say, doesn't seem to be true for here, out in the mountains. every place is different. but was police racism actually getting worse? my sense was that it was getting better, at least until trump came along.

so it could be, trump gave racists permission to be mean, and that included a lot of police, and people couldn't take it any more. or it could be, trump gave all the bailout money to his rich friends and people got hungry and couldn't take it any more. or it could be that police are by and large fair, but people took advantage of a blatant murder to just go out and break stuff and steal. and itould be a combination, and it could have turned out differently depending on your location.

anyway i process this stuff with pop art, so here goes:

i've decided to applying myself to marketing the same way i apply myself to writing - with a kind of random but totally focused burst of energy. random in the sense that if i were really trying to build the whole thing up gradually and steadily, i'd have been doing this all along.

i went back and took a hard look at my blogs. here i get hundreds of visitors every month - over a thousand on this site - and I'm just spewing here. i'm a writer and my blog links to absolutely everything i do, but the words, all in small letters, are just whatever i'm thinking at the moment. and yet, you look for a way to get people to notice you, a thousand hits a month isn't a bad start.

of course the non-commercial nature of the blogs is part of their draw. they just collect information, for me, and so are kind of repositories of certain kinds of information. some i've let go for about five years. and they're still getting fifty or a hundred views a month, just because they're there, they're useful, they're in the right place at the right time. but if it takes a thousand views to get one hit, and a thousand hits to make one sale, might as well start in with the views. i have well over a thousand on this blog alone.

a i started this blog with the purpose of practicing my writing in a constant state of present relaxedness - practice practice practice, noticing, putting everything in words - and it's all here, my whole life, family pictures, everything. eventually i added the links on the side. and the pictures. and kept track of the stories. i advertise my books; it isn't enough. i don't write enough of them, and i'm not done. but these blogs are where my life is. i can give you a report, but let me just say, follow the links, and you'll see what i've been up to.

so my relatives got out to quincy illinois in 1834, just when steamboats were getting serious and the railroads were getting out to the mississippi and pushing out to the missouri and beyond. the railroads were competing with the steamboats and were winning because they could build lines straight west, whereas the missouri set you up in the dakotas and montana and that wasn't as good. when pike's peak happened it was all about colorado. but my relatives ended up in the southeast corner of nebraska, and when my great-great grandfather got his wife and kid to come out from warren illinois, they took both - steamboat from warren to quincy, down the river; train from hannibal to st. jo., and then steamboat again up the river, from st. jo. to rulo nebraska. you'd never know there was a rulo, nebraska, but apparently you got off there and went eighteen miles west, by horse again, to get to where they were.

the problem was, their first baby died immediately after arriving in nebraska, in the summer of 1849. the civil war was just starting. it was a wild town. but here they were, burying their kid out on the prairie, and blaming themselves, i suppose, for putting her on all that public transportation where she could have picked up something.

in the end you can't help these things. that's why everyone is going on living their lives - because at some point, disease is just going to take some of us. the great-great-grandfather himself, he'd grown up with a brother, one year older, but at the age of about 23, that older brother took a steam boat up to st. paul and got cholera. it was fatal, those days. he knew it was all over.

mark twain lost a brother, too. i went and dug up the whole story. first, he got the younger brother a job on his boat, a steam boat called the pennsylvania. then he got into a fight with the captain - the captain was about to beat a kid with a large chunk of coal, and he clobbered the guy with a chair. the guy was the captain, so he pretty much knew his time was limited. he corrected the captain's grammar as the captain was chewing him out. out on the curb, talking to his brother, they mused about life and growing up together. but the brother got back on the pennsylvania, and its boiler exploded a few days later. everyone dead and injured; the brother was both. Mark Twain saw his brother die and never forgot it.

my great great grandfather had both those things happen - lost a baby, and lost a brother. i can only imagine. he still managed to raise six, though, and they were all ok in the end. one of them was my great grandfather, who now is only four steps above me. this guy too is an interesting character. as are all of them, i presume.