a severe thunderstorm is coming in, but i'm up, unable to sleep, hanging around in my chair with the puppy, listening to the thunder outside. it's been stiflingly hot and muggy all day. i decided that i had to protect myself from it; it was too hard to keep coming and going from airconditioning to that kind of weather, so i started to lay low, and got more involved in my book. i drank a third cup of coffee, late, because i was having trouble functioning. but that did it. now i'm wide awake, listening to the thunder, while everyone else is zonked out.

they were asleep by about nine. most of them had been up since the night before - a long night, thursday night, while i had gotten a whole night's sleep. most of them were so tired, they were gone early. i alone stayed up with my coffee buzz, went to bed late, and still couldn't get to sleep.

on my book, i got deep into the early days of harvard, when john leverett was trying to control rampant drinking and carousing on campus. they finally had enough students to pay the bills, but their success brought problems: just enough that they could go out in packs, causing trouble and raising eyebrows. that's as far as my reading has gotten me.

i have a son who is in the hospital. my heart is hurting from worrying about him, but my guess is that he will be doing ok by now. i will probably go to des plaines to pick him up in a day or two. i am not sure when he'll be ready and it's causing a lot of stress. the reason is, we have way more than enough problems already around here.

a little rain would really help this situation which i refer to as ninety-nine ninety-nine. that is, ninety nine degrees, ninety-nine percent humidity. sauna or hot tub. in my present condition it's duck out and stay in the air con.

the intensity of it all - two trips across the state through high cornfields, in the midsummer heat, one to get his car which had its engine light on most of the way - and the uncertainty of where to put him, where he can recover and get better - this has been hard on me.

i dive into my book sometimes. it's actually doing well. it has plenty of work to go, but i can see the finish line. it was an intense time, those 1700s. i wouldn't wish them on anyone.

Tall Corn State

An Iowa Story
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on Amazon

my older brother came for a visit. we are very close, two years apart, and at the same time, very far apart. he is very cerebral and i am the opposite. but i have always loved him in spite of the tension between us.

his wife is blind, and brings a wonderful dog along with her everywhere, and they are on the back end of a huge trip out to the west coast and to kansas. after kansas, here, illinois, and then home to pittsburgh. they rented a car in kansas and had it here.

what they really wanted to do was see lots of relatives, namely my two children at home, my third down in a nearby town, my stepdaughter and family of three kids, another stepdaughter and two kids. none of this was really possible. even my own children were somewhat shy to come out and really talk about everything. but one day i decided to take him to burlington, and the wives pushed us out the door since they wanted to stay and talk things over. that turned out to be a godsend since both of them needed an ear to voice their complaints.

but my brother and i drove off on a familiar path, as it's only about forty miles to the river and we had been there before with my father-in-law. the problem was that burlington had big roadblocks and a broken bridge so you really had to know how to get to the place we were going. after about ten minutes of driving around aimlessly we found it. a green hill overlooking the mississippi, with an old settler's cabin right there and a path down into the nearby woods, which we hoped would go down to the river.

my brother, being from pittsburgh, could have had a steep wooded path at any time, but wasn't really in the habit of hiking much. he was grateful that his wife wasn't along, because the path, steep as it was, had a lot of roots and walking wasn't easy. about two minutes into the path we ran into a woman and a boy, the boy about twelve, who had just seen a snake. they were impressed. i myself figured that that snake was probably well-hidden by now, and i wasn't going to worry about it.

but as i looked around, i saw a wondrous site. water was coming down the hill toward the river in two different creekbeds, which joined right in front of us, and then it came shooting out of a cave right there as well, making a third stream which joined the first two on their relentless journey down to the mississippi. the woods enveloped us and reminded me of the hiking we did in west virginia and pittsburgh when we grew up.

the people were very friendly and wanted to know where we were from. we told them, pittsburgh and galesburg. they let us go and we walked around the cliffs; the path did not go down to the river as we had hoped. i was right that there was no snake in sight. he was right that it would have been a bad place for his blind wife to try to walk. at one point we both ducked as we came to another cave in the bluffs with somewhat slippery rock to walk on.

it was at this point that i noticed that i was a little more spry than he was. i swim every day, and walk quite a bit more than he does, i guess, while he, though he has become more careful about food, has still not really done much exercise. he is busy as a wikipedia editor these days, making sure biographies about chess masters are updated and current.

i thought this was a good thing to do when one retired. in a sense he's a very practical kind of biographer; while i like to tell a good story, he likes to make sure that wikipedia pages are up to date, have good links, and tell the truth.

back where we parked there was an old stone cabin run by the historical society, for the "iowa natives" society which has long been defunct. the cabin was restored to its original form, though, and the guy in it let me tell my story of our iowa native relative who walked 100,000 miles of the midwest figuring out how the glaciers had receded in this area. i realized that i should bring my book down to burlington and push it around a little, as it has burlington and denmark in it, and reveals a little about the history of the area.

when i walk into these history areas i seem to talk more than the guides do, as i have learned a lot, and generally my own relatives are tired of having it repeated to them. a good history docent is a captive audience. earlier in the trip we had gone to the train museum and the same thing had happened although that guy knew a whole lot more than i did about trains. i did know, though, how awesome they are.

speaking of awesome, my brother, at seventy-one, has seen my grandchildren before i have, and has managed to bring his blind wife all the way across the country, not to mention to mexico and florida earlier. as i watched him gingerly managing that path, i appreciated that. such moments will not last forever.

it's friday evening in galesburg, illinois. a heavy storm appears to be coming in from the west; in fact, my wife's computer showed the weather radar, a big wide orange splotch moving right upon us. yet out my living room window it just appears that it's going to hang there threatening for a while. it could be one of those storms that twists and moves and doesn't really hit us. or, it could pound us like crazy in the next few minutes.

i've been read-marketing hard all day. sometimes i put off my own writing because i start reading first, thinking that i'll write as soon as i wake up better. but upon starting to read, i'm both engaged and occupied by what i'm reading, and impressed by the vast number of projects i've taken on, and i never really let up. the day gets along - today, i went to urgent care and then to peoria - and then, if i get a minute to sit down, it's back to reading again, because it's interruptable. i clearly need a new pattern.

i went to urgent care because i'm constantly getting wax backup in one of my ears, and they are the only people who can get it out. in peoria the hearing-aid people told me that my hearing aids were working just fine.

that for some reason wore me out, so when i got home i just sat and read some more. slowly i get my marketing back on track after a week on the road and a little while catching up on things. marketing is ok, it's the writing i'm totally neglecting. the kids are ok too though they are spending the summer somewhat despondent.

i wish i could just slip into a groove with one of the many things i've been writing and not finished, so that i could just finish something. it starts to wear even on the marketing, when i have nothing new to peddle. it would flow so easily if i could just get out there with something new. and yet, when i pick stuff up, i'm saddled with the expectations i started with, and the unfinished mess i've created. i don't quite know how to finish, otherwise i'd have never set it down.

now the reading stares in front of me, and frankly i'm a little tired of it, so i'm watching the guardians game on the side. the guardians are up, but they're slipping. texas is coming back ruthlessly and chipping away at the lead. the storm remains perched outside the window and my various reading has worn me out, to the point that i'd rather do this.

the blogs are the one area that i'm still way behind on, from the trip. i like to have my dozen different blogs entered by the fifteenth, yet that's tomorrow, and i only have four. this is one of them, but it doesn't count if i do it twice, and this entry as just a warmup for hopefully a few more i can do tonight if i can figure out what i want. that's easier said than done, though.

guardians are up again. no sign of rain at all outside of a few sprinkles. the humidity is like a too-warm blanket. i chose it though, the humidity, the green grass, the rain, the rivers with water in them, the whole thing. i won't complain. it's a slice of life, and i'm enjoying it, even peoria.

our eighteen-year-old felt like he'd been run out of New Mexico (true, he had been) and hadn't had a chance to say goodbye to some close friends, and was dying to go back and reconnect with them. It was true, a lot of the people he knew wouldn't come see him; we knew there'd be some resistance, but it was important to him to show up. so we packed up and headed off, with two friends, for a three-day trip.

the two friends were a couple of illinois boys who wouldn't mind seeing some mountains and meeting a few new people. he convinced them that it would be good for them, and to him, it would be a chance to get his old friends to meet his new friends.

first we set off straight west across southern iowa, and veered south through kansas city to my daughter's house in lawrence. the following day it was all kansas, oklahoma, and texas, but we ended up in new mexico. on the fourth we went down to see my son in las cruces and ended up in alamo where the kids would allegedly connect. they did, and it was okay, though some did not show up from up in the mountains, as perhaps peer pressure forced them not to? not sure why they wouldn't.

after three days we packed up and went back, same route, same pattern. a night in a cheap motel in clovis, a ten-hour drive to lawrence, and then the last six, through missouri and southern iowa. twenty hours into the drive, a motorcycle swerved into me and i had to brake hard.

i wasn't entirely faultless; he was going too slow in the passing lane, maybe fifty-five, and i, going the speed limit of sixty-five, snuck up on him way too fast. i'd decided not to get on his tail and brake, although that might have been smarter than trying to go around on the right, but he appeared to be just easing along and i thought, why bother him? by the time he figured out he should have been on the right, it was way too late and his moving to the right lane could have cost him his life. instead it caused the three boys to jump a little, and get out of their stupor.

they'd gotten in the habit of staying up all night, particularly in the cheap motel in clovis, as driving was no fun anyway, especially with me as i always go pretty close to the speed limit. when that motorcycle thing happened i was going exactly the speed limit, and if i'd been going any faster we'd all be finished.

my daughter had a new tesla, and stories about how friends in the area had new ones too, and everyone just plugged them in at night but had to look for charging stations on their travels, and in fact she can't use it to visit us in illinois later in the summer, because there aren't enough of them up here. that bothered me a little, thinking the midwest was behind in such things, but it's nothing new, and even she pointed out that it's a problem that will take care of itself in a year or two. the different car companies are making charging compatible, so any electric car can charge from the same cord, and pretty soon the whole country will go electric, and we'll be living in a new era.

it's about time, i must say. the whole world is now putting so much burnt gas in the air that it's literally choking to death, and we really should have converted like yesterday.

new mexico looked very dry, oppressively dry; the rainy season was supposed to start, but it seemed it hadn't started yet, which meant it had been maybe eight or nine months since it had rained. in such an environment it's kind of surprising that people set in roots and live, but they do, it's just a sign of the times, with all these people sitting in desert towns like phoenix as if the whole thing is somehow viable. it's not. sooner or later they'll be fleeing to places like illinois, just like we did.