Not even a MILF or a scissors-wielding Mitt tops the snap on this lid.

Just sticking my head through the blogversational door for a few brief comments before heading back down to the salt mines. I'm surely not alone in seeing loads of stories worth earnestly discussing. Even with the current distracting titillation offered by stories on prep school bullying and being way too attached to certain parents. Amidst all that you've probably missed that the U.S. Postal Service threw a bone to rural America by deciding to keep a ton of small offices open a few hours a day for at least a few years. The deal likely will come to stink. But at least huge swaths of America can still make the trip into town to pick up and/or mail their manifestos. In even easier to miss news, the Labor Department has backed away from the overstated tempest in a teapot some feared might prevent farm families from hiring their own bairns. Or is it utes? Depends on the holler from which you hail, I reckon. As of now, this just means lots less job searching for farm kids throughout small town America. I can feel the collective disappointment for a subset of America's youth who lament never getting their shot at bagging your groceries. Takes one to know one, if you catch my drift. Finally, a totally missed case with an engrossing narrative effectively came to an end in Iowa yesterday when a last jailed defendant was paroled from prison. To mark that fact, not a single news story was filed, even though the parolee made the front page of the "Washington Post" two months ago. I'd link you somewhere worth going, but this case turned into Gertrude Stein's Oakland, if you know what I mean. Rest assured, I won't keep you hanging forever on that note.

In non-newsy news for a totally different reason (since I've not yet mentioned it), I'm about waist-deep into planning my next roadtrip. And it's a humdinger. This time I'm looking at two weeks and change spent traveling through densely-populated - and way in the middle of nothing - parts of Canada and the northeastern urban corridor of these United States. Mix in a little rural New York State and you've got me on the road from just after Memorial Day through mid-June. By then I plan to have some new tools up and running for everyone to keep tabs on the work in progress. Maybe more definite show to go with the rarely clear tell. However it's construed, check back. Please. And, thank y'all for doing so.

What is the "ag gag" - chill bill, speech reach, or just a lame name?

Some pieces of legislation have catchy titles, or at least garner shorthand headlines that raise their profile. Bills for "motor voter" and "cash for clunkers" come to mind almost immediately. Others miss the mark by more than a little or just plain try too hard. In this category, I would most definitely place a new category of legislation dealing with outlawing undercover video taken in agribusiness settings - so called "ag gag" laws. Some blame/credit Mark Bittman for coining the term, but he's surely not alone in pointing a small degree of attention at the debate over these laws. I'm just getting up to speed on not only what's the "gag" but also who's the "ag" in this debate. Utah, Iowa, Minnesota and New York represent the first states where laws have been drawn up. And then Iowa was the first state to pass a version, as of last week. The basic dividing line is between those who say it's an "anti-whistleblower" law versus those who see this as a way to protect agribusiness from bad actors. Aside from a snarky desire to ask Sacha Baron Cohen and Morgan Spurlock where they stand on gonzo reporting being countered with the threat of prison, I'd love to hear the various justifications and/or chilling effects people see from this. Just this morning I asked a contact back in Iowa who's in the business of enforcing these laws. Always the professional, he declined to comment. But he made a point by saying that if a law's on the books, it gets enforced. Next up on the "ag gag" front is Utah - they might pass a bill and send it to the Governor very soon. That is unless Katherine Heigl and Cloris Leachman have anything to say about it. No word yet on where either Rhoda or McDreamy fall on the issue.

The search for a narrative recipe that works

I'm back in Seattle and just dropped my mother-in-law off at SeaTac - the value of her help in taking care of our daughter and keeping the homefront under control in my absence is impossible to quantify. The cliche` about "it takes a village to raise a child" certainly applies when one of that child's parents needs to get out of Dodge for a mental stretch - I really couldn't do the work I'm doing without that sort of help. So now I'm back, digesting what I found along the way. I put 1800 miles on a rented Hyundai criss-crossing a wide swath of Iowa and Wisconsin (with just a toe tap into Illinois). For anyone who spends enough time on the road in pursuit of what often they alone hope to be a grand story, I'm sure the revelation is not surprising that the places in between the places on the itinerary really spin the web upon which to hang a narrative. Without being able to fill in too much detail, I must still say that this was a singularly valuable trip for me. I talked extensively about the science, politics, statistics, culture and back breaking work of agribusiness. Hours and hours of interviews remain for me to parse and digest. But the overall takeaway is obvious. Planning leads to insight. Insight - in turn, I hope - leads to good output. Output provides the foundation. And in the case of this project, the foundation is what you need to build something new. Seattle is a long ways from almost everywhere I visited over the past week+ - both physically and metaphorically speaking. I'm nonetheless grateful that I've now got at least some of that insight that I'll use to flavor the recipe I've got in mind for this book. In so many ways, the grind begins anew. Then mix, taste test, add the flavor, and taste test again. To mix the metaphor completely - that's how the good sausage gets made. Not that I know anything about making (aside from cooking) sausage. Mmmm...sausage (drool).

Sightseeing in the offseason

Yesterday featured a long drive - across the full girth of Iowa, skirting along the southern edge of Wisconsin, and ending just a stone's throw into Illinois. Great hotel this time, with a hidden roadside sign adding an extra sense of accomplishment when I actually settled in for the night. I had lots of time to reflect and hatch grand plans. With one poetic moment disguised as a stop to stretch my legs and recharge before pushing on Eastward. I stopped at the "Field of Dreams" cornfield baseball diamond outside of Dyersville, Iowa - about 20 miles West of Dubuque. I'm a bit of a sap when it comes to that movie. My recent trips to Iowa have coincided with the news coverage of that site's sale and proposed re-purposing. Interesting, maybe. But the field itself is a tiny bit of fabulous, even covered in snow and with what should be the magic hour of light just around sunset being somewhat obscured by clouds on the Western horizon. It didn't matter. If you've got an extra hour on your way to Waterloo, I can think of nothing better to recommend. Straight up sentimental cheese - I loved it. Here's some proof of my visit, for any doubters out there lurking.

Finding my priorities on the road

I'm on the road this week, doing first-hand research. Which means a wide array of cool things - new places, new people, long stretches in the car with the iPod on Shuffle and life's random playlist timing itself to the vast landscape of 'Merica. Another thing that this sort of road trip means to me is sketchy hotels and motels. The cheaper and more poetically located, the better. I stayed at a tip top version last night here in western Iowa. Without boring anyone with the details, I rolled into the parking lot just in time to head up to my room for the GOP Candidates' debate in Florida. I thought I'd timed it perfectly after a long day on the road. I opened my assigned room's door with barely a minute to spare. What I found bore the indistinct feel of a recently cleared crash scene. A vague sense of recent death might even have still lingered in the air. Or I'll just paint with the picture with that and ask you to skip over the details. Save one thing - my damn TV didn't work. It was, in fact, upon close, antic inspection missing most of the buttons. Cue the scene of me dashing to the front desk, where I exclaimed that "I need a new TV or a new room or could someone please help me because the Debate was starting?" Don't believe it when you hear that everyone in Iowa takes the nomination process seriously, because the slow walk back upstairs to test the TV ("oh, that doesn't look good" was the prognosis) and shuffle to the next room took what seemed like four of five insults worth of prime debate clock. But I'm pleased to report that the replacement room was, well...better. Not quite lovely. Certainly less murder-y. I caught the lion's share of the debate (even a junkie feels good after a fix). Recharged overnight. Woke up to single-digit temps. Which is better than what was forecast. And after a morning of getting what I hoped for on the interview circuit, I'm heading back East. Maybe I'll be in another hotel room tonight for the President's State of the Union. Here's hoping it will be just as random and delightful in the way it offers safe harbor. Or at least an equally entertaining snapshot of a completely different State, with a similar state of mind.

Still rolling with this thought

At the risk of sounding totally random and confusing to those tenuously paying attention to what's going on here, a little vignette's been playing over and over again in my brain for nearly a week. It involves how I almost lost my wedding ring last week in a grocery store parking lot in western Iowa. Yup - the sucker flew off my cold ring finger and went flying as I grabbed for the door handle on my rental car.  Aside from the memorably odd physicality encapsulated in that moment - fumbling around on the ground trying to tease out how far the ring had flown given the sounds it made once it hit the pavement - a powerful metaphor is still just out of my grasp. Somewhere in this is the lesson of how a trip with one focused purpose can instead become another altogether different preoccupation. Maybe the point is how I drove around Iowa looking for one thing and ended up thinking about something related but altogether different. I'm really glad I found my ring. Now I can talk about it with a joke and a colorful vignette. Still, what if I'd left this meaningful piece of me behind there? Could I ever think of Sioux City as just another flyover spot on the American map? And what about others who lose something in just such a random place, with equal (or greater) unintended impact? Obviously, some thoughts roll on to points still unforeseen. I'll let y'all know when I figure out where it comes to rest.

Clarity found on the road

I drove across a healthy swath of Iowa yesterday. Starting the early morning in Sioux City on the western side of the state. That followed a sprint from the Twin Cities the night prior - 4+ hours on the road with next to no one but longhaul truckers to fly by, ever believing in the saving power of cruise control. There's something well worn yet validating about driving a serious chunk of American highway. The rhythms of shuffling through on an iPod jacked into a rental car stereo being the only essential update on a ritualistic transit that feels occasionally necessary for anyone born in flyover America. After a morning out west, I drove to central Iowa. I eventually made my way into Des Moines where the area around Drake University's campus gave me some evening time to regroup and gather my thoughts over good coffee served by mildly distracted hipsters. Not that the drip coffee served in the gas stations and diners is bad. Tastes change, but the buzz remains the same. Much like that found on the road. I've gone poetically lowball on my accommodations the past two nights - motels, where the free WiFi provides a distraction from the otherwise questionable bedding. That's another update to this America we've all seen shift beneath us. But is it meaningful? Depends on what you do with it, I suppose. Regardless, I've been talking with the sort of people I know so well even if in the particular cases of these Iowans, they're new to me. And then this morning I took a satisfying, mind-clearing run to and through the Iowa State campus (last night's motel was a Super 8 just off I-35 in Ames). I loved how this weekend's NYTimes profile piece on Haruki Murakami gave further voice to how his running sustains him. I share that needful passion. A run in the morning orders my thoughts like no other constitutional act. Especially before, in my case, the day ahead means many many more miles on those highways. Today, more of Iowa. Then, Wisconsin. Like a salmon swimming back upstream. In short doses this sort of migration is what connects me - and maybe more of us than we take time to realize - to the country we miss so much.

Siri, is this Heaven?

I'm off to do some research on the ground in Iowa. Then Wisconsin. With just a touch of Minnesota dusted on my arrival and departure. I'm hoping to do more with Twitter this trip as way of quicker updates and commentary. You can follow me over yonder @ emaggie. This is all the more alluring as a distraction thanks to my brand new iPhone. Which arrived as a result of my old iPhone (a rotary) seemingly throwing itself under the bus at such a time as the new model's arrival. Coincidence? I think not. But whenever I ask Siri wassup with that, she just snickers.

A time ripe for new coinage - Opportunify Now

One of the well-traveled memes surrounding the various "Occupy (insert location here)" movements around the Nation concerns how social networks are being used. That's the shortest of lazy shorthand - I'm as guilty as the next feller for bringing it up. But I'm nonetheless thinking - and seeing in action - how things like Twitter, Facebook and network updates on YouTube offer a bulletin board for everyone to stick up their "I need a ride to..." and "Looking for a bassist..." equivalent announcements. What might have happened back in the 90s if specific groups of activists had such tools at their disposal? Not just to get people to join whatever action, but to publicize whatever happened after the fact. Just so that there's no confusion given the above and prior mentions of committed people and actions they take - I'm talking in very narrow terms about a very specific cause that was gathering steam in the 90s which I've seen echoes of recently. It should also be noted that these networking tools have a serious double-edge to them. Non-movement individuals can monitor and maybe even claim that they know what's going on. So my questions go to what might be called the off-center or tertiary movements that just may be recently rejuvenated. Not the anti-"Wall Street" or "besmirch the damned influential" movements. For this mental and physical exercise in finding the protest, you must take it a step further. I'm looking at those taking what I've always seen as a class-based argument to a very distended place. Those folks who are now, in effect, saying that they've had a bone to pick for years and this is the time to bring it up again. Opportunify (insert location here), if you will.

With that platform somewhat set, I'm prepping to head to Iowa with these and other questions in the quiver. Iowa, you ask? Believe it or not, the Great State that gave us the fictional Corporal Radar O'Reilly and the setting for the extended Dockers ad that was "Field of Dreams" is indeed an environment rich with material for what I'm researching. Expect many more clues to that end supplied here in the week-plus ahead - both prior to and during my visit. Please check back (or sign up for the email updates using the form in the right hand column to do so). As always, thanks for reading.

An October stir amidst the falling leaves

For all the blather surrounding the "Occupy (Insert Location Here)" wave, I'm left wondering one thing - why protest in October? Is there something inherently more activist-friendly or inspiring about this time of year? I may be overstating the correlation thanks to the most-cliched historical example (Russia in October of 1917) or the surging focus upon current protests. But I'm also thinking about a much less covered brand new example in the area I'm trying to better understand that has deep roots in October activism. I'd love to hear anyone's crackpot theories about why certain segments of society get their collective Underoos all up in a bunch in October. Maybe it has something to do with the baseball playoffs, or lack thereof for certain folks? Go Brewers, by the way. Or maybe folks get unduly lathered up by overpriced corn mazes? Undiagnosed pumpkin allergies? Yes, these are all highly plausible. Nonetheless, I think the harvest of such ideas is not all in at this point.