Notes from the Ironbound

I'd been too busy back in my hometown to write much, but now I am back on the road and staying the night at a hotel in Iowa City and abl...

 I haven't been posting due to being on the road. I went on a cross-country journey to my Nebraska homeland, where we wrapped in a trip ...

  For the first forty years of my life, a September Saturday meant college football. I will never care about a sports team again the way I c...

I recently returned to my road trip out to Nebraska, where my whole family was together for the first time in two years. It was restorative ...

Today we started our trek back to New Jersey to Nebraska. After some time fishing with my dad this morning, we got as far down the road as I...

At the end of the school year, with my reserves of energy depleted, I was in a meeting and for an ice breaker we were asked to say what the ...

Quarantine has had plenty of negative effects on my life, but not being able to go home and visit my parents is at the top of the list. We w...

This time of year, as late fall fades into winter, has become very tough for me. Six Novembers ago my grandmother died, a person who had ...

While baseball may not hold the preeminent place in American culture that it once did, its metaphors still permeate the American vernacul...

One of the more brilliant acts of political resistance in my home state of Nebraska The flood waters in my home state of Nebraska are r...

This week I got the sad news that Prairie Books, a mainstay of my hometown of Hastings, Nebraska, would be closing . I had known this day...

I have another piece on the great Tropics of Meta. This time I wrote about Ben Sasse, the most prominent politician from my home state in m...

I was back in my rural Nebraska hometown this weekend for my aunt's funeral. As usual, I was hit hard with cultural whiplash. One day I ...

This morning I got the sad news that my aunt Kathleen had died. She had been ailing for a couple of months. I last saw her at Christmas time...

I've just returned from a Christmas visit to my Nebraska homeland and on the way there and back got to read Sarah Smarsh's excell...

My home state, which produces corn and passive-aggressive Republican Senators As loyal readers know, I hail from the prairies of Nebras...

The Chautauqua Pavilion, a relic of my hometown's Progressive Era boom years When I was back in my rural Nebraska hometown of Hasti...

Saw this at the county fair in my hometown. Evidently 2nd Amendment porn is a category I just arrived back home in New Jersey from visi...

Tropics of Meta was kind enough to publish another essay of mine, one that I am proud of and was the result of a lot of thinking on this bl...

I am proud to say that I was born, grew up, and went to college in the Cornhusker State. While life has taken me elsewhere, most of my f...