After hiccups, snags, and life throwing haymakers, we finally got out on the water as May came to a close. It was a few weeks later than we hoped, but honestly we were all just so thankful we were still able to do it after the chaos life threw at us as April ended and May marched on.

I don’t know about the others, but I certainly had high hopes.

Not that I planned on seeing us limit out or anything, but I was ready…READY with a capital “R”… to feel that tug on the line and enjoy doing battle with some walleye’s.

We never go out on the fishing opener here in Minnesota. Too many people and it always falls on Mother’s Day weekend and I’d rather spend that weekend with my Mom and my Wife and family.

This year, life had other plans as most of May was spent in and out of the hospital as we worked through and dealt with a fairly serious health scare for my Dad and in the face of that, getting out on the water wasn’t a concern any longer. The only concern was a lot of prayer and trust in the doctors to bring him through this situation and get him back home with a clean bill of health.

God must’ve been listening because even though it was a very stressful and scary stretch, he’s now back home and as of now seems to be making a full recovery. I don’t want to delve too deeply into what was going on as I don’t know if he wants me to say much on that front, but it was all serious enough that both he and I worried at times if we’d ever get out again.

Thankfully, last weekend, we did.

The day was perfect, if a little windier than we’d like. Temps were in the 70’s, mostly sunny, and with a thankfulness in my heart that we were getting out again and he’d pulled through the big scare, Dad, my uncle, my son, and I hit the water on Saturday afternoon.

As we nosed around the lake, checking some likely spots we thought might be holding fish early in the year, checking some of our usual lucky spots, and even checking a few random areas along the way, we found that the fish must have been very much scattered still as we just didn’t seem to be seeing much on the graph.

As afternoon turned to early evening, Dad had caught one keeper walleye and my uncle had caught one tiny walleye and one small northern that were both released. My son had quit fishing about halfway through the day as he was having more fun running the trolling motor for us and digging into the plentiful snacks Dad had packed for him.

I changed things up a few times, but no luck.

It doesn’t matter much what lure you’re rigged up with if the fish aren’t there at the moment.

Finally it happened.

We were in a small bay that we usually have some luck in. We had graphed just a couple here and there but suddenly — BANG — I felt it hit.

Setting the hook and making sure I wasn’t just snagged up, I felt that familiar twitch and pull, so I sighed with relief and said “Finally! Fish on.”

It wasn’t a long fight as we were checking out some shallower areas to see if maybe fish were bunched up shallow. But as I reeled it in it felt like it had a little weight to it, though it wasn’t fighting back real hard, but it was jerking and tugging the whole way in.

I knew I should be seeing it flash, but as it neared the boat I saw nothing.

Finally it broke the surface and all I could do was laugh.

My big catch. My return to the walleye scoreboard for the year.

In that instant I felt like a total boob when no fish popped out of the water, even though Dad had the net dipping in, ready to land what seemed to have been fighting like a bit of a lunker sized fish.

No. It wasn’t a walleye. Wasn’t a fish at all.

Somehow I had caught the top section of a large branch, about three or four feet long from top to bottom, that had multiple small branches shooting off the sides. The “jerks and tugs” I felt, mistakenly thinking it was a fish making a bit of a fight, was the branch twisting and turning as all of those small branches caused the whole section to lurch as I reeled it in.

It was waterlogged, slime and mud covered, so it had some weight to it which, when combined with the splayed branches dragging against the water as I reeled it in, made it feel very much like a fish.

I kick myself for not posing for a quick photo with my big catch of the day, but at least in that moment, before it surfaced and ruined the illusion, I truly felt the joy of catching a bigger walleye as the fight felt very similar.

So, no fish fry after this first outing. Though I suppose there might have been more fiber in that branch I hauled in than in the fish?

At least we all had a good laugh and now, hopefully, the tone is set for the year and we can enjoy plenty more laughs, good times, and hopefully better fishing!

I’ll leave you with this, a short quote that sums up my first fishing experience of 2026:

“As you probably know, fishing is a hobby, a way to relax without putting food on the table.”

― Jeremy George Lake Charles

See ya’ soon!
TWN

That vivid blue paint, soaking the small pine and dozens of others along that hillside, splatters coating the pine needles on the ground, might as well have been the deep crimson of blood.

That brilliant blue marked the edges of a coming wound in which large swaths of trees will soon be harvested, all that remains will be a mess of branches and brush piles which will give way to thick brush and maybe saplings of rapidly growing pine, leaving a scar upon the woods I have spent nearly fifty years hiking, hunting, and learning how to live.

I’ll never see those wounds heal and the forest return.

It’s a necessary part of forest management, the logging, when done responsibly, benefits the forest by eliminating blowdowns and dying trees that become a messy fire danger. Mostly it benefits a pulp or paper plant somewhere and lines the pockets of another corporate industry.

An industry I’m fully aware exists in part for my own benefit, be it through the notebooks and journals I write in or even through occasional lumber production. Though truth be told, most of what they harvest around here is not usable for lumber and gets harvested and sold to pulp mills for making pressboard and paper.

It’s like slaughtering your herd of cattle only to turn around and sell it all to be ground to sausage and hamburger instead of the prime cuts of steak or roasts. I’m not sure why it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, but it does.

This isn’t the first logging these woods have been through, far from it, and it won’t be the last. Just a few years back they clear-cut a large section nearby that still stands devoid of anything other than the mess they left behind and a whole bunch of scraggly brush trying to force its way to sunlight. You can hardly walk through it because they left such a mess of branches and tops that the ground is more of an ankle breaking obstacle course than walkable, replanted clear-cut.

The other end of the valley that is now marked for cutting was last cleared sometime between 1997-1998. It’s now grown thick with red pines that are choking each other out and stand roughly 10-12 feet tall. The deer, rabbits, and squirrels love it, which means so do the wolves, but it’s growing so thick that the heavy winter snows bend these young trees to the ground and in many areas it is nearly impassable on foot. Sadly, most of these trees will stay stunted and die off because the replanting efforts were handled so poorly by the state. Other adjacent areas were cut when I was a kid, or before I was born, and they are just now starting to contain mature timber again.

Which is why I found myself feeling a particular sense of loss and sadness while hiking through this area marked for clearing. Nearing the half century mark myself, I know that when they cut this in the near future, I’ll likely never live long enough to see it return to the way it stands right now. Maybe it’s the reality of my age having a moment, but as I hiked through I made a point to soak it all in. I made a few photos, but photos can’t truly capture the feeling of a place. They only serve as a bookmark that can be used to spark the memory held within. Instead of hundreds of photos, I made a couple and then I spent some time sitting on an old tree that had fallen on the side of the hill. I’ve used this particular tree as a resting spot a number of times over the years. It’s a nice place to sit and watch the hillside and the valley, I’ve even meandered to this spot during deer season in the hopes of surprising a buck sneaking through the valley bottom where the cover is thickest. While I’ve seen many deer here while hiking, I’ve never spotted one during season, but it’s a spot I keep in my back pocket as a you never know option when I want a change of scenery.

I sat letting the feeling of that place sink in. The way the light splashed across the south facing hillside as it skipped through the canopy of branches overhead. The smell of a forest floor carpeted in the rust colored pine needles that have accumulated over the years, especially in the still crisp spring air in which snow lay heavy at the bottom of the valley and in the shaded areas. The particular sound the wind makes as it hushes through the pines and the updraft pushes up the hill or swirls alongside before dipping into the valley.

These are the things that stick. The things I sat there trying to commit to memory and lock into my soul. Wordless things that exist in the glow of memory as a feeling that outshines any photo I could make, any word I could write.

Over the years I’ve found a number of shed deer antlers where the bottom of that hillside meets a small bog at the lowest point in the valley. The deer like to sneak along that edge before ducking into the thick pines that now clog the rest of the valley. One January my Dad and I found the intact skull of a beautiful ten-point buck I had been chasing for a number of years, only seeing him on trail cams but never getting an opportunity in person. It appeared he had either been wounded and never found during deer season or had passed away from exhaustion and old age after an intense rut. It was sad to see that monarch I had been playing cat and mouse with for so many years meet a grisly end like that, but I was honored the forest allowed me to find him so he could be honored in memory with his final crown resting in my possession. My Grandpa used hunt these same hills using a climbing stand in a tree not far from where I sat on that dead tree that afternoon. So many memories flooded through me as I sat on that old log.

Back in 1997/1998 when they cut the adjacent valley, I brought my then girlfriend to that valley on a four wheeler ride. We parked at the top of the hill and walked the edges where I shared some of the history of this place with her. We didn’t date all that long, only about three or four months, but looking back I realize this was one of the first signs that things just weren’t going to work out for us. She looked at me like I was a weirdo because I had such a connection with these woods our family has spent a century or more getting to know. Not only that specific place, but the entire forest up here that I grew up in and still love today, were just another bunch of trees to her. Like I said, we didn’t last long. That dismissal, coupled with the fact I found out she’d been sleeping around the whole time we dated, made for a nasty breakup that taught me some very important lessons about what I most definitely did NOT want in a partner.

My amazing wife of nearly 20 years doesn’t hunt and doesn’t necessarily have that connection to those woods either, but she fully understands my connection to that place and never has she made me feel stupid about what it means to me and I appreciate her so much for her understanding. I guess you could say I learned an important lesson.

Sitting there on that old log, the bark long since rotted off, the wood gray and separating as the remaining branches reach in scraggly fashion to the sky, I feel the coming loss weighing heavy. Maybe it’s my age and the knowledge we are entering our final moments together, this stretch of our woods and I. Maybe it’s the added layer of spending time recently going through boxes of unseen photos rescued after the passing of my Dad’s cousin. Photos that show our land, these woods, through the years. So many photos of how it was through the decades, some going back to the Great Depression era when my Grandpa was but a young boy. A lot of photos of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, where I remember what things looked like and can see just how much this little corner of northern Minnesota forest has changed.

Yet, so much has stayed the same. In an odd way the recognition of these places springs forth, even though they are from times long before I was even a twinkle in my parents eyes. It’s akin to seeing photos of my Dad or my uncles when they were young children. They look so different, unrecognizable to most. But there’s something about them, their posture, an expression on their face, the way their hair curls just a certain way on the side, that allow me to recognize them as my family. I’ve devoted most of my life to this land, hunting, hiking, scouting, and exploring. Trying to learn and understand everything I can about this place. But in that time, after countless hours and miles spent within it, this forest and these lands also know me. At least I like to think they do.

While I feel loss looming heavy on the horizon, there are still a great number of years ahead, new mysteries to uncover, and we’ll adapt and evolve together like we always have. For now what remains is allowing these moments to soak deep into my soul so that the warmth of their memory can be called forth and live on for years to come.

I’ll leave you with this, a short quote that sums up the relationship we build with a place:

“The land knows you, even when you are lost.”

―Robin Wall Kimmerer,Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

See ya’ soon!
TWN

Yesterday evening I sat in the living room, headphones on, the sounds of Coltrane, Monk, Brubek, and Davis keeping me company while I read more of 4321 by Paul Auster.

It had been overcast for most of the day. The kind of overcast in which everything has that flat gray feeling, the sunlight dimmed to half power. I tried to get out with my cameras a couple times when it looked like just maybe the sun might peek through enough to give some interesting light to help liven up the blegh of springtime snow storms we’ve been dealing with, but no luck.

We did a little grocery shopping, a little prep for a super busy week ahead, ate dinner, and my wife and daughter continued a binge watch of the tv show ‘Blindspot’ while we waited for my Dad to drop off my son from their usual weekend hangouts.

I won’t bore you with details about the book here, you can read those thoughts over at , but if I’m being honest I found myself focused on making a significant dent in the remaining pages because I’m beginning to feel a bit bored by the story overall.

Being engrossed in the reading, I only vaguely noticed my wife get up and walk over to me. With my headphones on and music playing I didn’t hear what she said until she nudged my leg and pointed to the living room window to my left and I noticed she was telling me to check out the sunset that had just popped.

Sure enough, the western sky was awash in pinks and oranges, streaks of red and gold forming a perfect backdrop to the silhouettes of bare trees and partially snow-covered rooftops across the street. For a brief moment I felt the urge to grab my cameras, run out to my car, and attempt to get somewhere fast. Somewhere that I could put something interesting in front of that beautiful canvas painting the sky at the moment.

Truth is, I knew I’d never make it. Sunsets like this show up quickly out of nowhere. They vanish just as quickly.

Instead I nodded to my wife and just watched as the melodies of the jazz masters washed over me. I watched and let my my wander a bit, allowing those pinks and reds and oranges to attempt to clean away some of the clutter that has been building so badly in my head. Stress, anxiety, worry, it all begins to stack up in there and before you know it the mess has infiltrated every crack and it takes time to clean that up.

One beautiful sunset wouldn’t do it all, but just like the mess, those small good moments also accumulate and stack as they slowly replace the mess of stress and anxiety currently spilling everywhere.

As I watched that brilliant sunset blaze for the few moments it strutted on display for us, vivid reds and oranges fading into pinks and dusky purples, I genuinely felt content. It didn’t last long before the stress and anxiety slapped it back down, but it was a moment none-the-less.

And it was welcome and good.

This time of year is always so terribly difficult to get through. We’ll get days of pretty nice weather, the kind that gives you the false hope and belief that maybe winter has finally released its grip on us and the snow will sink enough that getting out hiking in the woods can become a reality again. Then two days later it dumps another 8”-10” of wet heavy snow, laughing the whole time. It feels like Lucy stealing the football from Charlie Brown.

It happens every year, without fail, and I don’t know why we still fall for it.

We know full well that early March means we have at least another month of winter realistically. Some years we get lucky and by mid-April things are feeling pretty good. Most years there is a race to see if the ice will melt off the lakes in time for the fishing opener in the early/middle part of May.

I can’t say it’s truly cabin fever for me because we certainly aren’t just stuck at home all winter. In fact, winter is one of our busiest seasons due to constantly being on the go with kids sports and school activities. Not cabin fever, but the blanket of knee deep (or deeper) snow in the woods, the fact that this time of year is directly in the dead zone where no hunting or fishing seasons are open, and the long busy winter resulting in a serious need to get back in nature to get back to center, makes me more than a little stir crazy.

It’s that kind of thing where I feel restless all the time, like I’m spinning my wheels and wasting time. I know I should be making more of an effort at truly staying present and appreciating each moment. I’ve been working hard on this over the last year or so and while I’ve gotten better with it, I still have a lot of work to do. The feeling of being stuck due to the time of year and lack of ability to be able to get out in nature like I need to is a constant distracting pull away from the here and now.

There are so many projects around the house I need to tackle, none of which I can do anything with until spring arrives. I hate sitting around doing nothing. I’m not built to just sit down and relax. My dream scenario is never going to be having a few days to kick back, hide at home and enjoy some quiet time where I never leave the house. I’m not all that social, very introverted in fact, but I can’t stand just sitting at home all day doing nothing. When I sit down to watch movies, play video games, or even read during daylight hours I’m constantly fighting the feeling that I’m just wasting time. Time in which I should be using it to get any something accomplished.

I am someone that has to work really hard at forcing myself to remember that sometimes we all need some of that no-obligations, non-productive, down time to recharge. This time of year is hard, there are so many things I want and need to do but with the weather and winter still holding on, there’s nothing to do besides wait.

Wait and be patient and try not to wish my life away.

Which is why last night, as that sunset blazed along the western horizon, I let the music keep playing and let my eyes soak it in instead of rushing to reach for a camera and likely missing it entirely in the process.

That sunset was a reminder that it was great to spend a Saturday hanging out with my Dad and my Son, then meeting up with my Wife and Daughter for dinner before heading home. It was just grocery shopping at Walmart on Sunday, but it was great to spend a little one on one time with my Wife yesterday afternoon, something in short supply in this phase of our busy lives.

There is a lot to be appreciative of every day, including this brief glimpse of a blazing sunset before the gray skies took over and night settled in.

I’ll leave you with this:

“You see, one loves the sunset when one is so sad.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

See ya’ soon!
TWN

Two newsletters. Multiple years. 458,427 words. 3721 pages.

That is the equivalent of roughly four to six novels. It doesn’t include all the writing I did prior to these two newsletters for a couple different websites I ran for years writing blog posts multiple times per week or the hundreds upon hundreds of episodes of podcasts I wrote/produced/recorded that total somewhere in the hundreds to thousands of hours. It doesn’t even include the more than 100 YouTube videos I filmed and published.

A lot of me in the written word or the spoken word exists from the last ten to twenty years and right now I feel myself metaphorically scratching my head as I contemplate what I’m doing and why I’m doing it.

I’m well aware that my approach to writing is a quieter approach. Introspective and not a good fit for our short attention span loving, hot take craving, environment that exists everywhere online. Logic tells me to just ignore the stats, the numbers don’t matter.

All of those words, those hours, that effort.

None of it regretted because I truly enjoyed all of it. But when I look back at all of that I can’t help but wonder if I should have just stayed offline and dedicated that effort, those words, and that time into something more productive. At least then I’d have a fistful of books on my shelf as a tangible reminder that I’ve accomplished something.

Before you start wondering where I’m going with this, I accumulated those numbers as I have been working on creating an offline text backup of all my writing so that if something crazy happens and Substack disappears, at least I’ll still have a record of my work. From there it was simple curiosity that had me peek at word counts and page counts.

Seeing those numbers got me thinking, that’s all.

The more I thought about it, one thought kept bubbling forth. One I’ve fought with for longer than I can recall. You know I’ve spoken about my intense distaste for the need to niche down. The thing is, I still recoil at the idea of having to strip away parts of myself just to share the smallest sliver in the hopes it will more easily find an audience. Though I’m also realizing that my internal struggle in which the wide open freedom to write what I want, when I want, in one place actually made it more difficult for me to think of something meaningful to write.

When the options are limitless nothing feels important enough to warrant your attention.

Too many options led to scattered, unfocused writing and while I feel like over the last year I have done some of my favorite writing (I won’t say best because that’s completely subjective and not for me to decide necessarily), my difficult year in the real world that left my brain feeling foggy at best was made only more difficult as I wrestled with trying to live up to some imaginary expectations and lofty goals I had created for myself.

The one constant is that I read almost every day. I love stories. Fantasy is my primary genre but I’ll dip into other things from time to time, much like my current read of a book called 4321 by Paul Auster. I love movies and tv shows, though I don’t watch anywhere near as much as I used to since I opt to spend more of my free time reading than watching tv.

When I started 4321 last weekend I realized two things:

1. This book is very uniquely written. It’s beautifully crafted wordsmithing that I wanted to take nice and slow.

2. This book is going to challenge me in the “this is a lot to try to keep track of” kind of way. See the premise is that we see four versions of a person named Archibald “Archie” Ferguson. It starts with a chapter/preface of setup of his family history prior to his birth and then moves through a rotating cycle of chapters with each telling the story of one version of Archie’s life as it might have been. Essentially it’s structure is Chapter 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4 then Chapter 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, etc.. Which means that every story version of Archie is interrupted and not picked up again until the next 4 chapter cycle.

So I put the book down for a bit, thought about how to approach it, and decided it was time to break out a reading notebook once again. I settled on a basic structure. One in which I would record simply the pages read in each session, favorite lines or quotes from that session, some quick overall thoughts on what happened during that session, and lastly a brief “Emotional Weather” check in to see how the story was making me feel during that session.

What I realized as I put this process into play is that I could see myself 5, 10, 20 years from now with a shelf FULL of filled notebooks containing my feelings and thoughts on the books I’d read over the years. Not reviews. Not technical critique or performative posturing as if I’m an expert in literature. Simply my emotional response to the story from each session of reading.

An archive of sorts.

Then I realized that it would be easy enough to include any movies or tv shows I watched into this same format because it’s nothing crazy intensive in terms of time commitment. Just 5 to 10 minutes to jot some notes after each time I read or watch anything. Not only that but even though lately I’ve been slacking in my journaling, I’ve been largely keeping a notebook or journal nearly daily anyways for a long time.

I loved the physical idea of it and enjoyed the way it felt like I was able to have a conversation with the book in some ways.

That’s when it hit me that it wouldn’t be too hard to share these thoughts online here on this newsletter because maybe my conversations and thoughts with the book as I read it would invite conversation from other readers/viewers of the books I was reading and movies/shows I was watching as well.

But I didn’t want to muddy the waters more here at The Wayward Northerner and frankly I worried that it would irritate enough of you that you’d decide you were done with my “free form, no boundaries, anti-niche” writing style.

So I’ve done something (probably stupid) and created a new substack newsletter for ONLY the books/tv/movies thoughts. There are no reviews. No posturing myself as a professional critic. Just a quiet archive of the books, movies and shows I’m exploring along with the thoughts they leave behind inside of me.

If you’re interested in that sort of thing, I’d absolutely love to have you subscribe and join the conversation I’m having with the books, movies, and shows while I build my own personal archive of thoughts and experiences.

You can find it at:

The Quiet Archivist

A quiet archive of books read, films watched, and the thoughts they leave behind.

By Dave Szweduik

I’m not going to spam you about it here, I’m also going to keep MOST of my book/movie/tv discussions over there so I can keep this space for the already insane number of other hobbies and passions I have such as hunting, fishing, nature and the outdoors, music, photography, and the stories of nostalgia and family moments as they come to mind.

I guess in the end I’m caving to the gotta niche down crowd… it kind of annoys me, but it also just makes a lot of sense.

I’ll leave you with this:

“You know how creative people are, we have to try everything until we find our niche.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

See ya’ soon!
TWN

Have you ever read a book that, by the first 100 pages, you already knew you’d revisit again. Looking for hidden connections, teasing out the subtle brilliancy of wordplay, savoring the multitude of interesting quotes?

I have no clue where this book is headed, well maybe a slight hint of an idea but the whole book has been such a winding tale that I don’t trust my own instincts on where the story is headed.

Yet I know I’m going to revisit it at some point.

Even though I’m still just 516 pages into the 1158 total, Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 has captivated me. I don’t know how it’s possible, but it feels like a page turner that keeps drawing me forward while also encouraging me to take my time leisurely through it. A leisurely page turner? Is that a thing?

I haven’t read enough fiction from other Japanese authors to know for certain if it’s the writing style of the country and culture or if it’s a uniquely Murakami approach, but there is this wonderful contrast of calming intrigue that sucks me in and invites me to linger while nudging me ever forward to see where the story is headed. It’s like the author and his words are enjoying the process of leading me down a winding path, eager to reveal the secrets coming while staying disciplined with the pace.

This isn’t a typical fantasy tale, not in the epic Wheel of Time, Lord of the Rings, or Stormlight Archive way. There’s an element of the unknown, the magical, but it’s a very human connection type of story.

Currently I’m at a section in which one of the main characters is visiting his aging father in a care facility. The father is suffering from some sort of cognitive disorder, sounds like dementia/alzheimers, and it has me thinking a lot about my Grandpa and his final months. Though the father in the story, nor his personal demeanor or situation, bear no resemblance to my Grandpa or his situation.

This section hit hard with an earnest quote about those suffering from dementia and the like:

Cognitive disorders move ahead, never back. Or so I’ve been told. They’re like gears that can only move in one direction.

Murakami, Haruki. 1Q84 (Vintage International) (p. 501). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

The thing is, that quote holds so much truth for life in general.

Personally lately, life has been very difficult. Very stressful. I’ve been in a place mentally where I’m having to fight every day to remind myself to just breathe and let things go. Don’t worry about what hasn’t happened yet. Live in the moment and actively seek the positives to savor and cherish.

Easier said than done, of course, but I’m trying.

Yet reading that quote gave me pause. I finished the chapter and closed the book because I kept thinking about that quote and one other at the end of the chapter. I thought about my Grandpa and his life, found myself wondering if he ever struggled with things like this privately. I feel on some level like he had to, even if he never said anything or showed it. Afterall, we’re all human right?

But I think about his life. He was young when WWII kicked off. He lied about his age to enroll in the Navy so he could fight for his country. He fought in the Pacific theater, saw some heavy action and even heavier horrors. Friends died. He never talked about the war much, other than in generalities. He lived through the Great Depression. Raised a large family successfully even in the toughest times. He wasn’t a wealthy man, in terms of money, but he did well enough to survive and carve out a life he could be proud of.

I remember so often during times of work, be it in the garden, plowing a field, fixing a tractor, clearing brush, or even when simply mowing the lawn, when he would stop to take a short break. A small shot of coffee maybe or a cold glass of water would be taken and he’d find someplace to sit for a few minutes where he would just sit and look. Lost in his own thoughts. Thinking and not rushing to fill the quiet with words.

During those times, was he talking himself out of stressing over things he couldn’t control? Was he taking stock of the positives, the good things, in his life? Maybe I’m reading too much into it. It could be he was simply taking a moment to appreciate being alive, to enjoy a cool glass of water under a hot summer sun, to reflect on the work he was doing, thinking about or planning the next steps needed to be completed, or simply to daydream about an upcoming fishing trip or hunting season.

As I get older I’ve noticed that externally, when I get mired in anxiety and stress, I tend to get quiet and pull away from everything around me. Not that it’s a healthy response because internally I’m like a coiled spring vibrating under the tension and feel like I can’t sit still.

The thing is, this passage from Murakami in 1Q84 has me thinking a lot about my Grandpa and about my Dad. I’m realizing that maybe I need to find a way to just stop and think. To enjoy a cool glass of water for a moment before going back to work and letting life unfold however it will. I think I’m getting better with this. Maybe I’m just getting numb to it after a long stretch of some pretty difficult years. But I realize this comes from a place of learning to be comfortable and confident in myself.

Unfortunately, self confidence is not a great strong suit for me.

Murakami’s approach to storytelling, that leisurely page turner feel in which curiosity leads the way forward as we are invited to savor every minute, is a wonderful approach to daily life. Being able to let the stress and anxiety just be. Ignoring things won’t make them disappear but we don’t have to give them more agency in our heart, mind and soul than absolutely necessary. Living a life in which we invite ourselves to savor every moment while staying curious about what the next moments will hold seems to be a very calm and satisfying approach to living a good life.

I mentioned another quote at the end of this chapter that gave me pause as well. While it didn’t hit home in the “man, this is speaking to me because I’ve never felt loved” kind of way, it hit home as it made me think about the first quote, of the gears of life only moving in one direction, and how maybe I better find a way to come to peace with my own self-confidence and self love.

It’s something that no one else can give me, or give you, it’s up to each of us to find that acceptance and celebration of self on our own. I’m fortunate to both love and be loved, yet I still struggle greatly with loving myself. Strange what places our minds wander simply from taking an adventure through a novel.

I’ll leave you with that quote here:

A person learns how to love himself through the simple acts of loving and being loved by someone else. Do you understand what I am saying? A person who is incapable of loving another cannot properly love himself.

Murakami, Haruki. 1Q84 (Vintage International) (p. 512). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

See ya’ soon!
TWN

I heard a sentiment recently about loving the feeling of “chasing your headlights down a quiet road at night.” and damn, it dove straight into my soul. For the life of me I can’t figure out exactly where I heard it or even what the specific quote was, but the words struck light lightning and lit something deep inside.

Quiet drives chasing my headlights with either a podcast or music playing are a nightly ritual for me. A way to decompress (or at least attempt to) before bed, a small attempt to banish some of the stress that has accumulated over the day. It’s a habit that began probably as soon as I earned my drivers license when I turned 16.

I grew up out in the country. The nearest town was about 15 miles in one direction or about 25 miles in the other. Whether I was headed to school, or later to work before I moved out on my own, I had a drive of at least 20 minutes in which I could enjoy the quiet of the road, a little music, and my own thoughts.

In fairness, maybe it started earlier as I used to spend entire summer’s on a bicycle doing the same thing. Fast forward a bit and these drives became an integral part of the foundation with my then girlfriend and now wife. We’d spend hours and hours just driving and talking and hanging out. It’s a hobby, a habit, a ritual of sorts.

Sure, it wastes a lot of money in gas and puts a lot of unnecessary miles on my vehicle, but as a vice I guess it’s not the worst thing in the world.

The other night I heard the song ‘Against All Odds’ by Phil Collins pop up in a commercial in the background on TV. For some reason it linked in my head to another song I had heard a few days earlier, ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ by John Denver. These two very different songs made a terrific duo in my mind, though I’m still not quite sure why. Something about the feel, the vibe, as they say.

On a whim I created a tiny playlist on Spotify, just those two songs, so that I could see what other music Spotify was going to recommend in an attempt to match said vibes. I didn’t even get a chance to test it out because I read/heard the quote about chasing headlights and I started grabbing music on my own. Music that captured that feeling of behind behind the wheel, cruising down a dark highway with no traffic around, lost in thought while you chase your headlights ahead into the darkness.

No destination in mind. Maybe feeling sad or lonely, maybe thinking or worrying about loved ones. Maybe feeling optimistic and hopeful, maybe lonely, overwhelmed, and emotional. Maybe like getting lost in the warm haze of nostalgia while keeping a more chill mood going instead of anything heavy and fast.

I’ve got to say, I’m really enjoying this playlist. It has grown from those two songs to 63 songs equaling 5 hours of music. A variety of genres and styles, moods and mindsets. Maybe it’s just the new levels of chaos life has dumped on us in the last week, but I’m finding this playlist to be much needed right now.

You might think it’s pretty lame, but maybe you’ll enjoy it too so I thought I’d share it with you in case you wanted to check it out or in case you needed something to set the “vibe” to try to relax and destress.

I’ve called it simply “Where the road gets quiet”. Enjoy.

Looking and listening to this playlist I can see a few blind spots I’ll have to sort out yet. I feel like a few excellent jazz pieces are needed, maybe a couple of my favorite modern Americana songs, and probably a couple favorites from bands like The Decemberists, Dave Matthews Band, and I can’t believe I’m even going to say this but some classic country. Gross. I know it fits the vibe but I’m just not a country guy and I’m even less of a hip-hop/rap guy, but sometimes the overall vibe is more important than any one song/genre/style.

Life doesn’t always give us explanations about why things are happening how they are happening. I’m overwhelmed, stressed, and a writhing mass of worries. But I can hit play and let the music take me away, even if for just a while, while I chase my headlights through the dark.

I’ll leave you with this, a quote from a book I’ve never read or heard of yet the sentiment of the quote feels right in light of the benefits of my nightly drive ritual. Even though my drives aren’t road trips per se, the benefit to my brain matches this quote nicely.

“Now, on this road trip, my mind seemed to uncrinkle, to breathe, to present to itself a cure for a disease it had not, until now, known it had.”
― Elizabeth Berg, The Year of Pleasures

See ya’ soon!
TWN

Well friends, we’re into February.

I’ve been very quiet here, I know. I’m sorry. I’ll be honest, lately I’ve been feeling like I’m pushing as hard as I can just to keep moving one foot in front of the other. My focus has been on my wife, kids, and family. Stressful house and vehicle situations, did you know old houses over a century old like to speak to you in all sorts of random ways? Everyday feels like an adventure, but never the kind in which you knock a hole in the wall to remodel or fix something and find a huge bag of cash or ultra valuable comic book that had been stashed away for safekeeping and then forgotten about.

No, these are the kind of adventures that leave you feeling stressed out as you try to work out if the things you are observing and noticing are normal operations for an old house that you are just now noticing after 18 years or if there is a larger problem beginning to show itself. Thankfully so far it all seems to be the former, but my anxiety is soaring thanks to a hyperactive imagination that loves to spin a good tale for the logical side of my brain.

Along with all of that we’ve been in a pretty fun cold snap, more on that later, and I’m watching a repeat of life in 2016-2020 in which you dare to poke your head online to take a quick peek at what family and friends might be up to and you’re greeted with insanely high levels of anger and outrage, doom and gloom is their business and right now business is good. For that reason I stay mostly dark on social media, the ever dwindling positive reasons for being there are far outweighed by the overwhelming reasons it just isn’t worth it. Everyone is pointing fingers, name calling, placing blame for this or that.

In short, I think a lot of people have up and lost their damn minds.

Every news story, photo, video, or sound clip we hear has to be put through intense scrutiny because AI slop is invading everything at an alarming rate and the current process for “news” or “journalism” is to say whatever you feel like as loud as you can and if it ends up being wrong you can slide out a quiet retraction a few days later that no one will see because the damage from the initial outrage is already done. Add in the steady contradiction effect in which one real event happens and there are two distinct groups of people engaged in a war trying to convince as many people as possible that what they say is happening is the “real” story and that what the other side says actually happened is just lies. All the while we are bombarded by a non-stop campaign that is essentially telling us we are too stupid to actually see things with our own eyes and make up our own minds.

But… whew… take a breath. I’m not gonna bother getting spun up or sucked into it because I learned the hard way how much of a toll getting wrapped up in social media chaos can destroy mental health back in the 2016-2020 times, culminating in the ultra divisive Covid era. Unfortunately, the division and constant spewing of hate and condescension of that era seems to have come back with a vengeance and the people that are spending all their time being outraged have gotten even more divisive and more removed from being able to remember that we don’t, we won’t, all agree on everything all the time.

So many seem to have forgotten that friends and family are more important than a difference in political views. Especially when you take some time to turn off the news, stop the endless scrolling, and just go talk with people face to face about anything in life besides the “current hot button topics”.

In those situations you realize that your friends and family are more than just another face on the internet and by and large most of the people you come across are just happy to have been gifted another day on this earth. They have tons of things they’d love to share with friends over coffee or a good meal that have nothing to do with politics.

Maybe they’ve been reading a super interesting book that they are dying to share with their friend that is also an avid reader, or they’ve watched a movie they thought was so bad they need their fellow movie lover to hear about so they can enjoy a good laugh about it and decide if it was so bad it was actually good or just so bad it’s not worth watching. It could be anything, but unfortunately too many are too invested and addicted to the rage fueled chaos of social media and so we as a people are rapidly losing our ability to recognize and properly value real human interaction.

I don’t know.

My approach ever since that covid era has been that I’m just not going to comment or post about anything political or “hot button” publicly anymore. Even with that approach I’ve recently had a handful of friends and people I know still decide that even though we’ve known each other for years, all the history we have in which I would have hoped that we understood that we can disagree about something while still valuing the friendship because there is more to life than hot takes about the topic du jour, it was all worth throwing away due to the nonsense.

The thing is, people want to advocate for being open minded and respectful of everyone’s beliefs and feelings, as long as those beliefs and feelings align perfectly with their own. What we’ve lost is the ability to simply agree to disagree on a subject and realize that we as people are more than just our belief or feeling on a single topic. More importantly, we’ve lost the ability to recognize that true in person friendship and relationships far outweigh any ranting and posturing on social media.

More and more I look at social media and I can’t help but feel like it’s all nothing but a huge performance, with people posting anything and everything for the sole purpose of feeling like they are the main character in whatever story they imagine themselves to be in. I think about that even here with this newsletter, am I just as guilty of this performative behavior? I don’t know about this newsletter, but I do see it more and more with the rest of social media and it makes me care less and less about anything to do with it. Worse is that we are starting to see it bleed into real life more and more, people walking around, being rude as hell to anyone they want, acting like they are somehow special and shouldn’t have to play by the same rules as everyone else. It’s a steady erosion of common decency among people.

It’s all so sad, demoralizing, and depressing. Like I said, I think a lot of people have gotten swept up in the moment past any sense of the reality of true human friendship and interaction…they’ve up and lost their damn minds.

I’m not here to lecture anyone. I’m not going to pretend to have all the answers. But I do know that staying off social media and the constant doom and gloom it provides is simply the very first step towards a more positive outlook on life, at least in terms of myself.

Sorry about the little rant there. I didn’t mean to start this letter that way, especially after being somewhat absent here for a while, though I feel it’s only right to let you know a little about where my mind has been at lately as a way to let you know why I’ve been a little M.I.A..

I was thinking back to New Years Eve, my wife had gone to bed before midnight and I had gone up to bed at about 11:30 pm myself and was enjoying reading on my new Kindle Colorsoft that my wife gifted me for Christmas. (spoilers, I love this thing!) When midnight rolled around I put the book down I was reading and lay there in the dark, thoughts wandering while I drifted off for the first sleep of the new year, and I had a grand thought circling back around and around my mind.

It was a small plan, comforting sounding, but more importantly a highly achievable sounding, plan. I could already see it in my mind, waking up the next morning early, the morning winter light filtering through the dining room window. The house would feel a little chilly in the cold January winter air here in northern Minnesota but with a hot cup of coffee on the tray next to me and a blanket across my lap I would be comfy. I’d been neglecting my journal writing for too long and the morning of January 1st would be the perfect time to set a new morning routine.

A routine consisting of hot coffee, a quiet house with my family still asleep upstairs, and my thoughts pouring from my mind onto the pages of a brand new journal that has been so patiently waiting for me to begin to fill it. I was (am still) debating if I want to fill this one with ink, as I usually write with my trusty TUL 0.7mm pens in various colors, or if I wanted to explore the slightly more tactile experience of filling this entire journal with graphite from my favorite Pentel mechanical pencil. Both are an equal joy to write with, but I’ve always written longer form stuff in ink while the pencil is reserved for my smaller pocket notebook I use for stuff like tracking fishing results while on the lake, thoughts from the deer stand, making measurement notes while working on projects, jotting quick random ideas on the go, or even just keeping track of game stats/results for my daughters basketball and volleyball or event times for my son’s swim meets.

Maybe it would be fun to switch it up and write long form in pencil, who knows. I’ve even heard it said that, allegedly, pencil is more “archival” or long lasting than ink, though I struggle with whether or not to believe this. But legends like Steinbeck and Hemingway loved to write with their pencils, so who am I to argue?

I even had my opening line ready to go for my triumphant return to journaling and thinking on the page:

Well old friend, it’s been a while. Life has been chaotic and I’ve let slip our regular visits. But here we are, January 1st, the start of a new year. We’ve missed some time but I mean to rectify that beginning now.

It’s now a few days into February and I’ve yet to sit down with a cozy blanket, a hot coffee, my journal and a pen or pencil to begin the process of rekindling my practice of daily journaling. Sadly, until I typed it just now, I’ve yet to actually commit those words to the first page of my journal too.

Partially from a lack of mental bandwidth due to life staying very hectic and me feeling like it’s all I can do to put one foot in front of the other each day. There’s also the element of my lack of self discipline. I’ve been lazy about it, alright? I’m only human.

While life has felt so busy I also can’t say I’ve accomplished too much. We are in the thick of overlapping girls basketball, girls junior olympic volleyball, and boys swimming seasons so with no exaggeration I tell you there have been many weeks through January where we have been either in a gym or in a pool three to four days per week. I love being there to cheer on my kids and wouldn’t trade it for the world, but it sure chews up time and leaves little room for anything else.

We are fighting now to come out of a pretty long cold snap here in northern Minnesota as well, at its peak we had around 5 days straight where low temps with windchill factored in were touching -40°F to -60°F. I don’t mind the cold, except for the stress of trying ensure water lines and sewer lines don’t freeze up and making sure cars start. Unfortunately none of our vehicles are equipped with block heaters, which means I spent this cold snap starting cars and letting them run for 15 - 20 minutes every 3-4 hours around the clock. A serious lack of sleep that made me grateful we don’t have an infant in the house anymore.

The downside to the cold is that there is nothing much to do besides huddle up inside. It’s not the type of weather I want to take off on back roads to explore with my camera in. Even though I’m not too worried about our cars breaking down, if something did happen it could be literally life threatening, making it not worth the risk. Not that it matters much, my ambition and motivation creatively feel depleted lately. Even though I had a short burst of creative energy for photography when I last got out to photograph in the fog and frost from my last letter, it was short lived. Maybe it was the long hours of darkness that January brings, maybe it was the cold putting motivation in a deep freeze, either way I find myself very blegh and whatever about all of it at the moment.

On the flip side, I’ve spent some time watching some movies and tv series, most of which have been enjoyable. Some classics I love to revisit now and then, some new to me stories. I caught up with Adam Sandler in The Waterboy and Happy Gilmore, explored the sci-fi series Pluribus and laughed at the hijinx of Jason Mamoa and Dave Bautista in The Wrecking Crew.

I also got to be cautiously excited about the news from camp Sanderson where we recently found out that the beloved Cosmere might finally be coming to a screen near you… well in maybe a few years. Brandon Sanderson signed a deal to bring his popular Mistborn trilogy and Stormlight Archive into the world of television and movies. Sounds like as of now Mistborn will be a film trilogy, while Stormlight Archive will be an episodic series. The only downside is that it’s a deal with Apple +. Not that they are bad at making hit series/films, just that it might severely limit the audience. However, hopefully it means that maybe they’ll actually complete the films and series rather than cancelling them after a season or two. Time will tell.

Naturally I’ve also been reading.

I finished up my visit with James Rollins’ Moonfall series, though I was surprised(and more than a little bummed) to learn that upon finishing books two and three in January it was not in fact a trilogy as I initially thought. Instead it appears there is a book four yet to come, though I have not found a date for it’s release yet.

I also donned my mirrored, wrap around shades and my leather jacket, kept my fingers limber and quick, as I ventured into William Gibson’s cyberpunk world of Neuromancer, which honestly fell a little short of expectations for me. I totally understand the respect it is given within the world of sci-fi and cyberpunk storytelling, but the hype was so high that it just didn’t live up to the lofty expectations I had for it. It might just be a me thing because I’m starting to realize that I think I prefer to read fantasy stories and watch sci-fi stories.

The final book I tackled, and I am still working on it currently, is the new 900 page doorstopper from Joe Hill called King Sorrow. I’ve avoided reading any reviews or learning too much about it, but it too was highly hyped. The little I did hear (all spoiler free) was the caveat that it does get a little slow in parts and felt maybe a bit unnecessarily long. I can absolutely understand why some might feel that way, however my experience has been wonderful with King Sorrow. It’s kept me engaged from page one and I’m continually in awe of the way Hill can write such horrific and brutally violent scenes in such a flippantly, casual way. It straddles that line of ooh this is gonna get graphic while also not crossing into well that felt a little overly gratuitous for no reason. There is so much tension and just enough of the fable/fantasy element bleeding into the ‘90’s and early ‘00’s setting of this story that I’m really ripping right through this one. I never like to recommend something I haven’t yet finished and had time to think about, but so far it has been a fun and wild ride. As my first foray into the writing of Joe Hill, I’m looking forward to seeing how the final 250 pages of this story unfold.

While I know I’ve been a little quiet here lately and I apologize again for that, I hope you can appreciate that there are seasons and flows in life that happen and right now I’m in a chaotic down cycle in which I’m working overtime just to be there day in and day out for my family, which leaves little gas in the tank for much else. I try to keep reminding myself that this isn’t permanent, we all travel through these cycles, and we have to give ourselves the grace to understand this and take care of that which is most important to us — those we love.

On a positive note, there has been one wonderful observation I’ve made sure to mark mentally everyday in appreciation. Not only is it not pitch black when I go to and get home from work everyday anymore, but it’s staying light for a solid hour after work so warmer weather and fishing season are inching ever closer!

I’ll leave you with this, a quote from King Sorry by Joe Hill about the beauty of reading and specifically the magic of a library.

“No one needed a magic wardrobe that opened into Narnia if they had a library card; if you had a library card, you had a thousand magic wardrobes to choose from, ten thousand.”
― Joe Hill, King Sorrow

See ya’ soon!
TWN

Whether it be on a glassy calm lake at daybreak, the smoke and fog rising from the surface of the water in a quiet hush, or a crisp fall morning with the vibrant explosion of color from the leaves splashing into visibility amidst the golden fog of sunrise, foggy conditions are some of my favorite to explore with my camera. If I’m being honest, they are some of my favorite conditions to just BE in nature in period. But there is something special we get now and then when temperatures warm just enough to allow the frozen, snow covered ground to clash with slightly warmer air to create that soupy haze. In winter, my beloved fog leaves just enough moisture on everything to form frost. From a distance it’s a soft coating that envelopes everything, up close the spikey nature is revealed in patterns as unique as snowflakes.

I haven’t had time lately to get out with my cameras, but one morning between Christmas and New Years the fog settled in, the frost began to build, and I happened to have a free hour in the morning. While I wasn’t feeling well due to our house being hit with the crud going around, my camera would not be denied. It nagged and tempted me with the beauty happening right outside my front door, so I grabbed my bags and headed out to explore for just a bit.

I’m so glad I did.

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The Wayward Northerner

Rooted in the North. Wandering by design. For those who stray and stay a while. Staying awake to the world by creating and sharing what moves me, from time in the field to geeking out over books/movies or music, and encouraging you to do the same.

By Dave Szweduik

“There was fog, but behind the fog there was morning.”
― Naomi Alderman, The Future

“And the fog. The purple fog, blue fog and white fog. Film noir fog. How I love the sheer romance of it; disorientating, dominating, concealing and revealing.”
― Caroline Eden, Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Travels

There is something I find so peaceful, so magical, about fog any time of the year, but especially in winter. The trees have shed their leaves and it is just their naked skeleton emerging through the haze. Standing dark against the various hues the fog brings they are calm and stately in the hush of the still air. The clutter and chaos of the larger world fades at the edges and in that moment it is only you and the natural elements within your sphere of sight. Sound is muted so the normal sounds of town feel like a distant memory. There is something about being out in the fog, especially in nature, that makes me feel like I’m getting a little one on one time with something special. Something far bigger than me. Something more full of grace that is giving me a gentle reminder to just breathe and stay in the moment.

Over the last week my camera has been screaming at me as we’ve seen temps warm and conditions settle in which had left everything foggy, icy, and frost covered for at least four straight days. But now I’m back at work, arriving before daybreak and leaving in the dark so while my camera and heart protest, yearning to be out exploring the visual treat we’ve been gifted, I’ve only been able to enjoy it and daydream while seeing it through the window of my office. Responsibility has won for now, maybe someday I’ll make it to retirement and I’ll be able to follow the call more often.

But at least for this one morning I have these photos to look back on. To enjoy. To savor.

I hope you enjoyed them as well!

See ya’ soon,
TWN

How in the world are we in 2026 already? 2025 was punishing on a personal level but sitting here writing this and realizing that we are now closing in on 10 days into January already has left my mind a little blown.

I’ve not sat down to write you for a while, partly due to the chaos of the holiday season, partly because I’m tired. I feel like the toll of last year caused my vacation time to blur by in a haze as I tried to rest and recover a little and instead feel like I’m still kinda buried in stress and anxiety.

The new year has not started off on a grand, optimistic and hopeful, note. It’s closer to a limp as I cross the lap marker on the track, taking a deep breath and starting the process of getting one foot in front of the other.

If you follow the news there is no doubt that a feeling of the world being a soupy mess of chaotic nightmare fuel has bled into your life, regardless of which side of the aisle you find yourself on politically. The never ending cycle of doom seems to have ramped up to record levels, with everyone on every side of things declaring that if something isn’t done we are doomed as a country. We, as average citizens, are told that we should be outraged about this, that, and well…everything. But I find I don’t have the mental capacity to deal with solving the world’s problems because life living in a home that is more than a hundred years old is an adventure in and of itself. Not to mention trying to navigate parenthood through the teenage years with our kids, juggling schedules, trying to be everywhere and everything at once while feeling like it’s the bare threads of coffee and concession stand pizza for dinner that keep the ship afloat most days.

Yet I wake up each morning, walk outside to hear the sounds of winter in town and see the blanket of snow covering everything and I have to do my best to remind myself that all of this will pass. The world keeps spinning and nature doesn’t care about if you are offended by that joke told on that one radio show two weeks ago. That sounds like I have my shit together but let me assure you now, I don’t. I’m holding on by my fingernails on this crazy ride and just hoping I don’t screw things up too badly.

A friend shared this meme on New Year’s Day in our discord chat:

I replied two days later saying “I’m only on page 3 but I’m not so sure. This author seems to have totally lost the plot already!”.

It was said in jest, but the more I thought about this knee jerk, joking reply, the more I realized just how true it felt. Life is messy, it’s chaotic, it’s uncertain and inevitable all at once. Sometimes we feel like we are in control, well maybe not in control of what happens but more of a I’m surfing comfortably on top of this wave and life is good. Other times we feel like we’ve been dumped headfirst into the spin cycle where someone is washing bricks and it’s blow after blow raining down on us from all directions while we seek even the smallest spark of something normal or solid to hold tightly to in order to ride it out until we can find the surface once again.

Since we are on the topic of meme’s being sent as Happy New Year’s wishes, another friend in the same discord shared this absolute banger of a Lord of the Rings meme with us that same day:

My wife will hate this one as she bears the brunt of way too many short jokes in our house now that our youngest has passed her in height over 2025, leaving her in sole possession of the shortest member of the family award. But it DID fit well with the mindset I’m trying to stick with this year.

I tend to be a heavy worrier. I will analyze a problem from every possible angle, trying to figure out every possible outcome from best to most awful, just so that as I tackle the issue I know what I might expect out of the situation. I’m also not a big fan of setting New Year’s Resolutions, so I don’t set them. But I have quietly told myself that going forward I’m going to do my best to focus on trying to be a little more optimistic in life, a little less pessimistic, and try to shift my perspective on things when possible to reframe them in a little more healthy and positive way.

I went to bed as New Year’s Eve transitioned past midnight and into the New Year on January 1st with a tiny, nagging thought. A joke I was going to tell my two best friends via text when I texted them Happy New Year in the morning once I woke up. It’s silly. It’s kinda crude. But it made me laugh and when I texted it to my friends, it made them laugh. For the record it made my wife roll her eyes as she suppressed a smile and acted annoyed with me for saying something so crude, which I count as a victory. That text was simply this:

“Happy New Year! I’ve decided 2026 is the year I’m focusing on perspective and staying positive. For example, if you got a little action last night — congratulations on starting 2026 with a bang! If you went to bed alone, no action to be had — congratulations and here’s to no more getting f*cked this year!”

For a little context, this friend group of mine all had a rough year between family health issues, divorce, financial surprises and so much more, so we all felt more than a little beat up by the events of 2025 and in many ways felt like there were times in which 2025 f*cked all of us at various points.

But there is some truth behind the jokes.

Perception is everything. As someone who is chronically worried and trying to stay 10 steps ahead of every problem which leads to me often feeling despair as I imagine the worst possible outcomes, I truly need to find a way to balance that need to think things through so I can see my options for a clear path forward with the ability to shift my perspective a bit in a more positive fashion so that I can avoid some of the downward spiral mentally.

In other words I need to be better at simply being able to live in the moment.

Those vines are a good reminder. They grow along the fence that our neighbor and I share and were planted by the neighbors previous homeowner. Through much of the year they are a bit of an annoyance as they make mowing and trimming the fenceline difficult, snowblowing can be frustrating as the vines will be hidden under the snow and occasionally get yanked into the auger and wrap around the blades. But they also give a little privacy along the fence and come fall these berries explode in color and I love looking at the red/yellow/orange colors of the berries scattering through the heart shaped leaves of the vine as it crawls along the fence.

Perspective is key.

Another reminder I’ve had along these same lines lately is in regards to our favorite tv series. If you weren’t aware, the super popular Netflix series Stranger Things just wrapped. A lot of people are pretty upset about the way it ended. Too many plot holes and a large number of plot lines leaving only questions and no resolutions. I personally haven’t watched the series past season three. No real reason other than that after season three came out I had to wait for season four like everyone else and in the meantime I shifted to more of a read a book before I watch tv mentality, so I just don’t watch a lot of tv or movies these days.

Because of that I personally can’t comment on how good or bad the ending was, however people online are big mad about it. There are even theories that the ending delivered last week wasn’t actually the real ending and that there will be a surprise ending popping up on the evening of January 7th. I guess time will tell if they are right. But it has me thinking a lot lately about these popular shows and our perspective with them.

I can’t help but wonder if we as fans are better served by our favorite shows getting a chance to run through all the seasons that the writers planned and getting to see the writers full vision, including an ending they had planned. Or if we are better off to see our favorite shows cancelled before they get a chance to end it like they hoped. It seems like every major show that runs to a natural end, The Soprano’s, Game of Thrones, Lost, and now we can add Stranger Things to this list, end up with fans in an uproar over how it ended because it didn’t end they way they hoped or wanted it to. Meanwhile shows like Firefly, The Wheel of Time, and countless others get cancelled prematurely so we never see the full vision the writers had for the story and everyone is mad at the studios for cancelling their beloved show but everyone goes out on a high note with the show itself because they were still loving it when it ended.

We need to keep a little perspective though I think. It’s very rare for any tv series to be able to run from start to finish with the writers getting a chance to tell whatever complete story they wanted to tell. Equally rare is a show running that planned arc without the writers and producers deciding they have a cash cow on their hands and keeping it going well past the point the story should have ended.

Perspective-wise though, I’m not sure which is the more optimistic view?

Getting to enjoy a few seasons of a great show that is cancelled without getting to see the end BUT you got to enjoy every moment of the show or getting to enjoy the full run of the series with a complete ending BUT maybe that final season or episode lets you down because it went a direction that doesn’t align with where you hoped to see it go?

Coming up I have a small series of frosty morning photos that I plan to share with you soon, though I’m not sure if I’ll share them on the main page here or with subscribers only so make sure you’re subscribed if you want to see that just in case.

Like I said, I’m not a big fan of making New Year’s Resolutions but I do know that alongside the perspective thoughts I DO have a few things I’m hoping to get back in the swing of doing more frequently — one of those things being more photography (both in the creation of and sharing of sides of the equation).

I’ll leave you with this, a few quotes about New Year’s resolutions:

“For a change, don't add new things in your life as a new year's resolution. Instead, do more of what's already working for you and stop doing things that are time-waste.”
― Salil Jha

“Let go of what was and embrace what to be.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind

“There is nothing magical about the flip of the calendar, but it represents a clean break, a new hope, and a blank canvas.”
― Jason Soroski

And my personal favorite from the legendary creator of Calvin and Hobbes;

“I'm resolving to just wing it and see what happens.”
― Bill Watterson

See ya’ soon,
TWN

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As evening settled on the familiar woods around me, the creaky wheels of my mind began to turn as I started to envision a grand plan for a full deer season 2025 recap style letter to you. I had collected notes every day I was in the woods, every sit, every stand location, every deer sighting, and I found myself getting a little excited at the possibilities of how I could write that story.

Now it’s the middle of December, the cold days in the deer stand are nearly a month behind me. Thanksgiving has come and gone. Sports seasons are in full swing for both kids and suddenly I find my excitement for that letter has seriously dropped off a cliff.

In part because I’m not sure that you’d actually want to read about it, the old yet ever present “who really cares about any of this” ghosts still roam the empty hallways in my head. In part because now that it’s nearly a month later, it feels like the moment has passed and I should be writing about something else more timely, current or in the moment. Though as my friend wrote about recently on the , maybe we put too much personal emphasis on the feeling of what we should be doing and not enough on what we want to be doing.

The short summary of this deer season is that we have a very decimated deer herd in our area due to more than a decade of heavy wolf predation that has largely wiped out most of the deer. In fact, we are in one of the very few bucks only zones in the entire state of Minnesota and last year the MN DNR reported that our zone saw just a little over a 12% success rate among all hunters in 2024. We knew this going into this season, much like the last few years where we’ve been in the same boat.

That means I was ready for a lot of time spent in deer stands enjoying the peace and quiet of the largely empty woods. We ended up with 3 deer in our party, with my Dad, one of my uncles, and myself connecting with bucks while many did not even get a chance to pull up the rifle. Not the numbers we normally end season with historically, but pretty average performance based on recent history since the wolves moved in heavy. It’s pretty bleak, but it’s still great to spend time in the woods and time with family enjoying this tradition.

Thanks to my note taking, I was able to look back to tally things up and over the full season I saw a total of 25 deer. Out of those 25 I shot one, which was the only confirmed buck I saw. 4 others out of that 25 seen I could not confirm if it was a buck or doe for various reasons. The rest were all confirmed does and fawns.

I felt thankful and fortunate that I was able to have that many encounters with deer this year as I didn’t expect even half of those numbers.

Now that I’ve had a month to rehash the season in my mind and spend a little time in the woods doing some post-season scouting, I am very confident in a couple of my set-up locations. One that has been a mainstay for me for many years now and one new location that I feel has a ton of potential if I can just narrow down the best tree to set up in. The tree setting up in next season will likely be the best option based on what this first season there taught me.

Also I’ve found myself chewing on a question:

If I could dedicate my life to becoming an absolute expert in anything, what would it be?

I’m still not positive on my answer but I think being able to expertly read any woods and water due to years of familiarity would be high on that list. In a few short years I’ll turn 50, which means I’ll have been learning these woods for at least 40+ years with my family and on my own, so I guess I’ve made a good start.

What about you? What would you choose?

I saw a quote recently, from of , that I loved. The article tells a story of a moose calf trapped in barbed wire in one of those stretches of woods that she feels most at home in, check it out here, it’s an excellent read.

It made me think of these woods I’ve roamed my whole life and how beautiful a sentiment it is to think that in spending so much time learning to know these woods that maybe they reciprocate in some way.

So in the end, no, this isn’t the detailed and immersive story version of the season that was. The vision I had on that cool, late November evening as daylight faded and the 2025 deer season came to a close may still find a way to bubble to the surface, but for now I just haven’t found the words to make it happen how I envisioned it.

Reading Nicole’s writing above makes me realize how much I’d love every one of my letters to you to feel like emotionally hitting, impactful storytelling instead of my rambling notes. It’s something I’m working on understanding better, something I’m continuing to learn more about and practice with, something which will become a familiar traveling partner in my quest to learn these northland woods and waters ever closer while also allowing me to more clearly tell a story in these letters that will leave you feeling inspired, engaged, and interested regardless of if I’m writing about the woods or about books or even just a song stuck in my head.

I’ll leave you with this, another wonderful quote from The Westrn piece I linked up above:

“I hold my own energy out like either an offering or a gift. When things seem overwhelming, I go there and it lifts from my shoulders. I think maybe I’ll only walk this far and then I keep going, called forward, by the pair of moose tracks, by the birdsong, by the coolness against summer heat. There’s always a reason to stay longer. To relish the place.”
― Nicole Qualtieri of

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve decided that I’m going to try to send more letters directly to you. Letters that will be for ONLY you as a subscriber, so if you know someone you think would enjoy joining this journey, please encourage them to get subscribed so they don’t miss out on anything!

I’m not sure yet of how much of a distinct schedule I want to keep between the subscriber only vs public for everybody letters, or even if I know what I want to send privately ONLY to you as subscribers as something special vs what belongs in a more public for everybody letter. But I DO know that I really enjoy sending letters directly to you so I plan to do more of it going forward so again, be sure to get subscribed! I will be sharing something about this and updating things on my “About” page to let everyone know this is happening as well but for now…

See ya’ soon,
Dave

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It was around 10:30 am on a Thursday morning. It was super slow at work due to frigid below zero temps outside with a healthy breeze making the “feels like” temp plummet to a brisk December -31°F. I was all caught up on my paperwork and had no customers at my desk, no appointments scheduled, and just under 20 pages left in the book I had started reading on my Kindle app on Sunday afternoon.

So I decided to fire up the Kindle app and finish those last few pages. That’s how I found myself fighting back tears from my eyes, hoping no one noticed, as I read the final words.

Embarrassing.

I hadn’t expected that to happen. I had ‘Before The Coffee Gets Cold’ by Toshikazu Kawaguchi on my “someday I’d like to check this out” to read list for quite a while. I’d heard good things, but actual reviews are fairly mixed. For some reason I thought it would be more fantasy than it was, but I really didn’t know too much about it other than that it was a collection of connected stories revolving around a small and mysterious coffee shop in Japan that allowed some sort of time travel.

It’s a small book, under 250 pages, and upon starting it I quickly realized the flow of the writing was very easy to breeze through. I haven’t read enough from a variety of Japanese authors, but what I have read I have enjoyed. There’s a strange yet pleasing mix of lyricism and formality that I find very enjoying in the storytelling, though I admit my exposure is limited to Haruki Murakami and this title from Kawaguchi, so what do I know?

All I knew is that I didn’t have it on my shelf yet, though I’ve had it in my hand many times over the years and never pulled the trigger, but there it was in Kindle Unlimited right when I was looking for a good palate cleanser style book as I tried to recover from my book hangover from the wonderful John Gwynne trilogy called ‘The Bloodsworn Saga’.

Halfway through the first chapter/short story I realized that this wasn’t what I was expecting and it might not be something I’d normally gravitate towards, but it was a quick read so I decided to stick with it. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it, just that I thought it would be more fantasy/magical realism/maybe even sci-fi than it was, given there was a time travel element involved.

Sure, the time travel is there and it’s an interesting plot device, but at its core this is a story of human emotion, relationships, heartbreak and redemption. It’s a love story, not in the explicitly saucy romance way, but in the real world love for your sibling, child, spouse kind of way. As you progress through the connected stories each emotional punch hits harder and harder, especially as a parent.

I found myself thinking repeatedly about people I’d like to have five more minutes with, especially as we just passed the anniversary of my Grandpa’s passing on December 1st of 2019. I thought about what moment I’d want to go back to revisit with my wife if things went south for one of us and if I’d rather visit my children in the past or see them in the future to know everything turned out ok for them if I knew I was going to be leaving this world forever. This tiny little book made me feel like Wile E Coyote, opening a small box to find a comically oversized boxing glove on a spring launching out to smack me in the face. In some ways I felt blindsided, in others pleasantly surprised.

Like I said, I wouldn’t normally gravitate towards something that I know is going to drag me through the emotional mud. I struggle with enough stuff in my head from daily life that I don’t usually actively seek out entertainment that provides more of it. Though this book has me wondering if maybe I should seek to add a little more of this here and there. The uplifting sadness of the emotional gut punch this book provides felt a little satisfying, is cathartic the right word?

To give you a non-spoiler overview of the book and it’s connected short story format as well as a look at how the time travel aspects work I’ll just sum things up briefly this way. There are four chapters, four short stories, that are all interconnected via the staff and visitors to the small coffee shop. They all involve some sort of emotional and relationship based premise and the only one that I didn’t really connect with in a personal way was the very first of these stories in which a woman wants to travel time to confront the man who left her.

This is followed by a story of a woman who travels time to receive a letter from her husband who is losing his battle with Alzheimer’s. This one hit hard as this is how I lost my final grandparent with my Grandpa’s passing in 2019. It made me remember something he told my Dad when we were visiting him towards the end in the hospice facility he was in. He had a few moments in which the dementia loosened it’s horrible grip and he became aware of where he was and what was happening before slipping back into the depths of the disease. In that moment, when he was himself, he told my Dad that he wouldn’t wish this on anyone because in moments like this he’d understand and realize what was happening and he felt so horrible about it because of the impact that disease has on those you leave behind. It’s a difficult type of grief because as it steals your mind from under your nose, your loved ones have to watch you disappear one memory at a time. It’s not like a sudden car accident or heart attack, your there one minute and gone the next. It’s a slow march towards the inevitable in which there’s a point where you no longer know what’s happening but your loved ones are there to bear witness to it.

It was the hardest death I’ve endured so far in my life, watching this man who was perpetually fit and active and sharp as a tack while we hunted and fished and worked in the garden suddenly be reduced to a frail shell of himself, only confused memories from the past to keep him company. Though the experience did have me thinking about the idea of reincarnation, oddly enough.

As I watched my Grandpa lose all sense of the present, instead he was reliving moments from his own past, it made me wonder if this was in some way him stepping through the multiverse to a new timeline in which he was able to live a whole new life over again. Maybe it is just wishful thinking, but I took solace as we watched him fade over the last few months in thinking that he was losing the now but was stepping back into his own childhood with a chance to relive a full and happy life once again.

The third story finds a woman traveling time to see her sister one last time, which made me think about when I would travel back to in order to just see spend a cup of coffee worth of time with my wife if she were to pass away before I do. I can’t imagine a life without her or my kids in it and there are so many moments I could choose from that hold such intensely special meaning. The obvious ones like standing at the altar saying our vows, being by her side as she gave birth to our two wonderful children, random car rides filled with conversation while cruising back roads. But the more I thought about it the more I think I would go back to a night we spent sitting on a bench near a small lake we used to hang out at. It was summer, the stars were out and there was just enough of a breeze to keep most of the mosquitoes away. We hadn’t even officially started dating yet, but it was the summer we built our relationship. That night we sat there talking, laughing, enjoying the sounds of the night in silence, and it was that moment among others like it that I can look back at and realize that even though I wouldn’t understand it for a few more months — I had fallen head over heels for this amazing woman.

As the book winds down there is one more story, the one that had tears flowing, as a woman travels time to meet the daughter she never had the chance to know. I’ve been struggling lately with how quickly our kids have grown, how close they are to being adults and out on their own, how soon until the moment arrives when their childhood is gone forever. I have so much fear over if they’ll be ok on their own, did I do right by raising them to be kind and hard working and respectful? Will they still want to talk to me every day or will they move out on their own and I’ll have to make due with random calls once a month or so. I know I’ll always be their Dad and I hope they’ll always want us to be a close part of their adult lives too, but how can you not grieve for the years of childhood when my wife and I were their everything?

This last story hits hard because this woman never had the chance to know her child, but through time travel she gets a chance to meet her. It’s heartbreaking, heartwarming, and very inspiring as a parent. Serving as a not so gentle reminder to never take a single moment for granted, especially with your kids and loved ones. In fact, that’s the overarching theme from this book and it’s that perfect mix of happy sad.

Regarding the time travel aspects, it’s handled very interestingly with some very specific, yet at times still unexplained, rules.

• Use a specific seat:
  There is only one specific seat in the coffee shop that will allow you to travel time.

• Stay in the seat:
  Once you travel time you can’t leave that seat, so you have to stay seated there in the coffee shop in that specific spot for the duration of your visit. If you stand up you are forcibly returned to the present.

• Meet specific people:
  You can only travel time to meet with specific people that have also visited that coffee shop. Makes sense since you can’t leave that seat.

• The present cannot change:
  No matter what you do while you travel time, nothing can change the present. This takes out the risk inherent in most time travel stories.

• Drink the coffee:
  This is the most interesting rule. You must drink the entire cup of coffee before it gets cold to return to the present. Failure to do so will result in being stuck as a ghost in that seat in the coffee shop until someone else fails to do so.

That last rule is the one that really haunted me because wait, what?! I love the short time limit imposed by this rule, I love that it gives some gravity to the situation in the “do I really want to risk that” type of way. But it also just leaves so many questions. How is a ghost involved? Who is the current ghost? How did they get there? What is THAT story? It’s the only element of this book that jumped out at me as one of those sure it’s wild but just go with it kind of ways that fantasy books sometimes do. Though in this case, VERY MINOR SPOILER HERE, we never find out anything more about this ghost or why this rule exists or how it came to be. It’s just there as a rule to be followed, don’t question it.

Just go with it.

I’ve said many times, when it comes to books I’m just not all that interested in doing “proper reviews”, I’m not an expert literary professor, I’m just a guy that loves to read and loves to share interesting things with you. Especially when it has such an emotionally charged surprise gut punch like this book did.

Like I said earlier (and probably far too often) this isn’t the type of book I thought this would be and if I thought it would be like this I likely would have never picked it up and read it.

But I’m glad I got sucker punched by this one, it was an interesting and enjoyable emotional ride.

I’ll leave you with this, a few quotes that stuck in my mind from the book:

“Water flows from high places to low places. That is the nature of gravity. Emotions also seem to act according to gravity. When in the presence of someone with whom you have a bond, and to whom you have entrusted your feelings, it is hard to lie and get away with it. The truth just wants to come flowing out. This is especially the case when you are trying to hide your sadness or vulnerability. It is much easier to conceal sadness from a stranger, or from someone you don’t trust.”
― Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Before the Coffee Gets Cold

“People don’t see things and hear things as objectively as they might think. The visual and auditory information that enters the mind is distorted by experiences, thoughts, circumstances, wild fancies, prejudices, preferences, knowledge, awareness, and countless other workings of the mind.”
― Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Before the Coffee Gets Cold

“I want my child to be happy. How can such a simple wish be so terribly scary?”
― Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Before the Coffee Gets Cold

“We can’t let someone’s death be the cause of sadness. After all, everyone dies. If being born into this world has meaning, the so too does dying.”
― Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Before the Coffee Gets Cold

And lastly, a quote to perfectly sum up how we all feel after finding the coffee gone and the cup empty:
“She reached for her coffee, from which all heat now had gone. With the sweetest part of the experience lost, her mood plummeted further.”
― Toshikazu Kawaguchi, Before the Coffee Gets Cold

If you want a quick, emotionally charged read maybe you want to check out this one. There are more books in this series but I don’t know when/if I’ll get to them, I think it’s too much heavy emotional storytelling for me to read it anything more than small bites at a time.

See ya’ soon,
Dave

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With less than an hour left on the clock I managed to wrap up the book I had been working on through the last few weeks of November. This was a great thing since I honestly barely read anything over the last month. Not only that but I didn’t watch anything much either.

I spent most of November in the woods, chasing whitetails, enjoying the solitude of the woods, and trying to find a little mental peace here in the tail end of a super stressful year. All that adds up to a pretty lean ‘Noted Media’ letter for you this month!

Hopefully your November was better? Read, watch, or listen to anything good?

Leave a comment

📚Last Month In Books

The Hunger of the Gods (The Bloodsworn Saga #2) by John Gwynne

I saw a few reviews of book one of this series being dubbed as “a 700 page prologue” and at first I sort of laughed it off. After finishing book two I can understand where they are coming from with that statement about book one…to a degree. However, I felt like book one was very enjoyable and not just filler and set up at all. Book two takes a big leap forward and we get a bigger sense of the direction this series is taking. Couple that with the addition of a couple more POV characters thrown in the mix and you can feel the epic adventure ramping up nicely.

“We decide what is the way of the world. Us. People. It is not imposed upon us by some greater force.”
― John Gwynne, The Hunger of the Gods

The Fury of the Gods (The Bloodsworn Saga #3) by John Gwynne

This series took me way longer to read than it should have. Between the excellent storytelling pace and the alternating POV chapter structure of the book, it’s one that feels designed to propel you forward through it at a breakneck pace. There are twists and turns, some more predictable than others, and plenty of “Oh no/Oh shit/Are you kidding me/Hell yeah” moments to keep the pages flying as the tale unfolds. Even a moment when a long held prediction I had unfolds and I had to put the book down and silently cheer for a few minutes until I realized what the next logical step for that progression would be and I instantly felt the “OH NO, NO, NO” moment of impending doom settle in. The series is as advertised, gritty, dark, norse-inspired fantasy fun. It never spends too long getting overly explicit in describing the gore of battles, but explicit enough to make you feel the moments. The character moments and interplay felt a little distant through book one, warmed in book two, and by book three I found them to turn a corner and suddenly I was super invested in some of the characters and the emotional beats that happen between the action. Admittedly there does seem to be much more focus on the action in this final book than on the character/emotional side of things however, so your mileage may vary with that here. It just took me too long to read it because of my November “time in the woods and away from it all” schedule this year, which is entirely on me and is not a reflection of the books. Highly enjoyable if you want a fast paced, norse-inspired fantasy series to dive into.

“The sheep follows the farmer blindly and with trust. That does not mean it won’t get eaten. Do not trust the promises of gods. They broke the world, remember. They did not care for the lives of anyone then, Tainted or not, they used them for their own ends and will do the same again now.”
― John Gwynne, The Fury of the Gods

📺Last Month On The Screen

About the only thing I’ve spent time watching through November has been staying caught up with the new format of the Bowhunt or Die YouTube channel, which I watch via the app on my Roku TV. It’s been interesting to see them putting out episodes following members of their team that don’t always result in successfully killing a deer. Often times it’s just cool encounters, struggles, and of course occasional frustration to go along with some amazing bucks killed during their hunts. I have tons of respect for these guys and their ability to nail the self filming aspect while also trying to successfully kill deer. It’s so difficult to manage all of that and they make it look so easy.

🎸 Last Month In Music

November here is punctuated with a remembrance of the lives lost on Lake Superior when the ore ship, The Edmund Fitzgerald, went down in a November storm. Of course we all probably know the famous song by Gordon Lightfoot, but there have been many covers done of the tune and I found this playlist on Spotify that I thought was pretty clever.

The Many Wrecks of the Edmund Fitzgerald features a whole bunch of cover versions, as well as Lightfoot’s original, so you can hear a wide variety of takes on this iconic song. Some are fantastic, others didn’t quite do it for me, but it’s a neat way to hear the story and most importantly remember those lost in this tragic event.

🎤 What About You?

What are you reading/watching?

Any favorite lines or quotes, even scenes that have stood out to you?

Have you seen anything on the horizon, be it a book coming out soon or a trailer/preview that you’re excited to check out once it is released?

What music has been on repeat for you?

Leave a comment

📰Last Month On Substack

A little hunting, some photography, and what I feel I should just make a regular feature here called something like “The Lawson Atlas Update” because I love reading his newsletter! Here are a few good things from writers here on Substack that I enjoyed in November.

• Whitetail Anxiety by of

• An Everyday Camera Will Change Your Life by

• When Photography Became Content by of

• A Crisis of Keeping by of

• Happy Thanksgiving by of

It is now December, Christmas is steaming towards us quickly as the year winds to a close. Our schedules are hectic with work, school, band concerts and kids sports juggling between my daughter’s basketball and my son’s swimming, family gatherings, the emergence of what feels like daily shoveling and snow blowing as we seem to be in a pattern of getting another dose of snow every day recently, and well… the list goes on.

All of that combines to leave little time for reading, watching, and listening to much — and sadly it leaves little mental space for sitting down to write regularly as well. To say I don’t know what December holds would be an understatement.

On the book front all I know is that after finishing up The Bloodsworn Saga I had a definite book hangover and wasn’t sure what I wanted to jump into next. I had started Haruki Murakami’s 1200+ page doorstopper, ‘1Q84’ in October and got about 100-150 pages in and never got back to it. I was enjoying it quite a bit even, but just didn’t have time to sit down with it through November and now I feel like I might need to start it over because after more than a month of not reading it I can’t quite remember all the details of what was happening. Maybe I’ll restart that here in December, we’ll see.

I also needed something as a palate cleanser to clear my book hangover, so I started ‘Before The Coffee Gets Cold’ by Toshikazu Kawaguchi. It’s a collection of short stories that all revolve around this mysterious old coffee shop and while I can’t say it’s blowing my mind, it’s a pretty easy and comfortable feeling read that is interesting and working well to help me shift gears to something new after the enjoyment of The Bloodsworn Saga.

Other than that, I guess I have no real idea of where I’m headed or what’s coming up next. Things might be a little hit an miss with the chaos of the season so I’ll see ya’ when I see ya’.

Merry Christmas ya’ filthy animals!

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In the cooling November air as I sat chasing whitetails and watching the trees with their bare branches settle in for what is usually a nice long winter here in the northland, I had a lot of time to think. A dangerous thing because I start to look inward, to pick at things that probably don’t warrant it.

One of those things was the simple name of this newsletter.

Since I was taking a little break anyways I thought if I was going to make a change that now was the time. I found myself hyper focused on what message the name “Noted Nonsense” was portraying and more and more I became convinced that it simply oozed and begged to be viewed as “optional and nonsensical”.

It’s not that I view my writing or these newsletters as something terribly serious and Nobel Prize winning in importance, but I certainly couldn’t shake the feeling that the name “Noted Nonsense” was basically letting people know that “this isn’t anything important, if you get around to looking at it that’s cool. If not, no big deal.”. It’s something that had truthfully been nagging at me for a few months prior, I just couldn’t quite put my finger on what was bothering me until November when I had a lot of quiet time alone in the woods to think.

I had to figure out, if I wanted to make a change in name, what to change it to that would better reflect me and what I’m trying to do here. From the beginning I’ve fought to avoid niching down, struggled to create a space in which I could stray and wander through all of my various creative pursuits and interests at will, geek out and share all the things that I’m enjoying. After a lot of thought, a few good conversations with some close and trusted friends, and more than a little hand wringing and indecision, I settled on a plan of action.

I introduce you to “The Wayward Northerner”, that’s me.

I’ve summed it up this way because it feels a little more “hey you should read this, it’s not just some random nonsense” and also indicates that there is more than a little wandering to be done as we stray from here to there, not niching down.

So I’ve decided a name change was in order.

I’m not going to reinvent the wheel here, not blowing everything up and starting over. In fact, the writing will likely continue on as before (though I’m going to try harder to add in some more of the stuff that I’d been kind of hiding away from - the books, the movies, the music. All the stuff that I’m enjoying and want to geek out over) and you probably won’t notice much of a change at all… except hopefully a name that feels somehow more “right”.

Welcome to The Wayward Northerner

Hey, I’m Dave, The Wayward Northerner, and I’m excited you’re here!

“The Wayward Northerner” is a warm letter or long phone conversation with a close friend, casual, curious, and random. Each entry captures the spirit of a well-worn notebook: messy, unfiltered, and full of beautiful chaos. Sometimes connected, usually not - the goal is to embrace life’s everyday wonders and tangents while rebelling against the pressure to niche down.

Rooted in the North. Wandering by design.
The Wayward Northerner is my ongoing and ever evolving attempt to stay awake to the world. To notice, appreciate, and celebrate the things that move me, from time in the woods hiking, hunting or fishing, to time spent exploring a book, a song, or a photograph. It’s where I share the things I feel are worth getting excited about and, hopefully, spark something in you too.

I’ve decided to call myself and this space ‘The Wayward Northerner’ as a nod to both place and mindset. The place I live, the northlands of Minnesota, and the mindset, a deep rooted desire to fully embrace a multi-disciplinary approach to all of my creative(and non-creative) interests. This space lives at the intersection of the natural and the creative world. The place where observation, creation, fandom and inspiration overlap. It’s a reminder that staying curious and taking time to explore is needed for a life to feel satisfied and when all of that is viewed through the lens of our own unique vision it serves asa kind of compass, one that can guide us to new places as well as back to ourselves.

This isn’t a place for polished reviews, expert opinions or lectures, it’s an invitation, a field guide for the quietly curious. Each issue is a mix of what’s been catching my attention lately: nature and notebooks, music and movies, drum fills and football games, books and big thoughts, the little stuff that feels like it matters more than it should.

Conversational and reflective, a note for a friend or a connection sparked while we grab a coffee and chat.

What you’ll find here:

• Long-form essays — Reflections on nature, creativity, life in the North, and whatever else is lingering between my ears.

• Short-form/magazine style letters — Shorter musings and recommendations: what’s been lighting me up lately in books, music, film, or anything else that has my mind buzzing.

• Projects & Experiments — Deep dives into creative obsessions: read-alongs, photography projects, and whatever else is grabbing my attention and begging to be explored further.

My goal is to celebrate my own multi-disciplinary creative interests, pursue a return to a time when we all loved to geek out and get excited about things instead of the current culture of seeking the negative via hot takes and keyboard warriors. I’m not an expert, I’m not reviewing or critiquing, I’m creating, consuming, and sharing from a desire to enjoy geeking out and getting excited about the amazing all around us. Big or small, everyday mundane and ordinary or once in a lifetime experiences, there is a lot to be excited about if we make the time to appreciate it.

If you’re into notebooks and nature, if you love good stories and strange details, if you find yourself chasing curiosity just to see where it leads, you’ll feel right at home here.

Like I said, no lectures. Just an invitation.

Who It’s For

The Wayward Northerner is for those who find joy in wandering, be it through woods, ideas, or enjoyable entertainment.
For those who love stories, sound, and stillness in equal measure.
For those who want to make things, and those that simply want to pay better attention to the things that make them feel alive.
The Wayward Northerner is for you, for me, and for anyone wanting to experience the joy of feeling free to create without boundaries while also celebrating the works of others without shame.

Why Subscribe

If that sounds like your kind of wandering, I’d love for you to join me.
Subscribers receive each new essay or letter directly to your inbox — a small reminder to pause, notice, reconnect, and celebrate what matters.
It’s free to read, and there’s always room by the fire.

Rooted in the North. Wandering by design.
For those who stray and stay a while.

There’s no algorithm chasing here, just a guy with a notebook, sharing what’s been on my mind and hoping it might spark something in yours, too.

I’ll leave you with this, a few quotes that stuck in my mind as I spent time thinking in those bare November trees.

“Fancies are like shadows...you can’t cage them, they’re such wayward, dancing things.”
― L.M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea

“There’s a point, around the age of twenty, when you have to choose whether to be like everybody else the rest of your life, or to make a virtue of your peculiarities.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia

“If I start giving people what they like I’ll turn into one of them and I don’t want to be one of them I want to be one of me.”
― Craig Ferguson

“Maybe my passion is nothing special, but at least it’s mine.”
― Tove Jansson, Travelling Light

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Talking to Dad the other night after work and he told me he had his boat put up in the garage. The gas had been run out of the motor and now just some cleaning up and it’d set for next spring. This gave me a pang of sadness as we, well maybe it was just me pushing for it, had hoped to get out once more at the end of October. But the winds kept us off the lake and we had work to do in the woods anyways as prep for the upcoming deer season and it just wasn’t meant to be.

The more I think about it the more it feels like maybe we had the most perfect, full circle, ending to the season that we could have had. The universe literally told us “time to pack up for the day and call it quits”. We had gone out on a cold saturday that saw high winds, 40° F temps, light rain and drizzle on and off. The forecast was for clouds in the morning and clearing by afternoon.

It lied.

At least up on the lake. By all accounts it was absolutely gorgeous weather everywhere else, including just 10 miles back towards home off the lake that afternoon. But we were in the gloomy, windy, cold, and wet soup all day. A day that started off promising as we graphed what looked like a nice school of baitfish immediately after arriving at our first spot and when I dropped my line for the first time that morning it never made it to bottom before a nice fat crappie hammered my jig and found itself in the livewell. But in the minutes it took to land the fish and get it in the livewell, the wind blew us off the spot before we could mark it and try as we might we couldn’t find those schooled up fish again.

As the day progressed we hit a few of our usual spots, but the wind was making things difficult and the bite was slow. We caught nine fish but only kept two, the crappie and a walleye. By late afternoon we were working our way back to a couple favorite spots quick before packing up and getting out of the cold. Coming around a rocky point we graphed a couple real nice looking fish but Dad got snagged and before we could get it out the line snapped. Frustrated and cold he opted to pack up that rod and grab my Mom’s rod since she wasn’t with us and it was already rigged up. He dropped her line in and bang, immediate snag resulting in that line also breaking before we could get it out. He called it quits, said he was done for the day.

I told him to give me just a few minutes as I was going to cast back to where we had graphed those larger looking fish just to see what happens. First cast and retrieval, nothing. Second cast the jig bumps bottom, I give it a twitch or two and bang, a huge strike! Just what I was hoping for! As the fish hits I pull back and set the hook only to find complete slack in greeting, the lure is gone and the fish has snapped or cut the line when it hit.

Just like that we lost three jigs in less than ten minutes. As the realization of what just happened set in I laughed and shook my head as I told Dad it appeared that I was also done. The universe was clear, we needed to pack up and call it quits for the day.

In the immediate aftermath I was frustrated at the way the day ended. Being late October I knew there was a high likelihood this could be the last trip of the season. I resolved to not let my fishing season end like that, losing three lures in a freezing span of ten minutes. Even if we couldn’t get back out on the lake I’d find a dock or a shoreline along a couple small lakes nearby that I could likely grab even a sunfish off of, just so I could end the season on a high note.

As days went on and we got busier in the woods I found my mind changing about the whole scenario. Was it the familiar rhythm of hanging stands, checking trail cameras, and seeking sign of increased buck activity? Was it just time doing what time does, sanding down the rough edges and allowing the frustration to fade? Whatever the reason, the sting of frustration faded to a sense of gratitude garnished with the warmth of humor. The more I thought about it the more I saw it for what it was, a perfect, full circle ending to an amazing summer fishing season full of great moments and memories.

We started on a snowy day in April attempting to chase trout in a small river near home with no success. Our first lake outing of fishing season found us on the same lake we ended on, in very similar weather conditions. That opening day was also cold, windy and from a weather perspective — fairly miserable. But we caught fish and from there proceeded to have a fantastic fishing season, maybe not always in terms of numbers of fish (though we did alright there) but in terms of excellent memories made and quality time spent together on the water.

There were trips with just Dad and I, many more trips when Mom joined us so it was all three of us, a number of trips with my uncles joining my Dad and I as well, and my personal favorite was finally in late September getting my son to come with us!

My biggest fish of the year was a nice 24-25 inch walleye, well aside from the big salmon we caught on our annual trip to Lake Michigan every June. We had to release the walleye as that particular lake has slot size restrictions, but it was still fun to catch. We saw a lot of wildlife, from eagles and geese to family after family of loons. I got sunburned a few times, cooked in the sun and froze in the wind, rain and cold. Saw many beautiful sunrises and sunsets, and feel like I learned quite a bit about the two lakes we primarily focus on. I still have a lot more to learn, but that’s the fun part because the learning never ends.

But it can’t go on forever, that’s why it’s called a season. And while frustrating in the moment, the ending of this season feels somehow perfect in hindsight. All that is left is for me to go attempt to throw a line in that same river, likely with the same lack of success, and the circle will be complete.

This fishing season was about more than simply chasing fish. Sure we caught plenty for a few fish dinners and have just enough from that last trip for one final meal featuring northern Minnesota surf & turf as we fry up the last of the walleye and crappies and serve that with the last of last years deer from the freezer.

This fishing season also felt like a counterbalance to a chaotic personal life that felt like maybe the most difficult year we’ve faced yet as a family. Medical scares with both kids, car and house issues, and so many funerals in that short time. As life kept throwing haymakers and I stood on wobbly knees absorbing one blow after another, one more chunk of stress piling on, the fishing provided a rhythm. A balancing force of peacefulness, reading the lake, feeling the jig work along rocks on the bottom, feeling that tug and snap as the line goes tight and the tip bounces.

More than anything, it reminded me that everything is about perspective. While we can’t control what life has in store for us, or if the fish feel like biting, we can step back and refocus our perspective and realize that even in the hard times there is good in the world worth being excited about. Worth keeping our head and eyes up for. Refusing to let life’s haymakers crumble your knees and send you to the mat. Most importantly realizing that even if we get knocked down, there’s always reason to get right back up again because there is good in the world all around us. Even when it doesn’t feel like it, the simple act of a line in the water, fresh air and sunshine all around, and most importantly our family is what makes it all worthwhile. Being present for my wife and kids is all that matters and these quiet times in nature help shift my perspective back to the here and now.

You see, nature provides the map and we, too often in our human arrogance, ignore its direction. Every season knows when to end. This year the lake told us, via the lost lures and cold winds. My own arrogance wanted to ignore the signs, to keep going. But as days passed I realized the season had ended, both fishing and hopefully the rough year are now behind us.

Fall is over halfway done, winter is preparing to settle in. The land is preparing, trees shedding leaves as they get set for the cold winter days and nights. Everything is preparing for the quietness to come, the rest, the next season. I’ll be turning my focus to this short hunting season and then to the season of family with the holidays. I’m realizing that a season seems to have ended for me too, a new season but a mysterious glimmer on the horizon.

I can’t say what this new season will bring but like I said, nature and the universe still speak to us. They let us know when a season is ending and when a new season is arriving. Right now the seasons are speaking, softly and gently, and for now I’m just listening.

I’ll leave you with this, a quote about the seasons changing from fall to winter:

“The quiet transition from autumn to winter is not a bad time at all. It’s a time for protecting and securing things and for making sure you’ve got in as many supplies as you can. It’s nice to gather together everything you possess as close to you as possible, to store up your warmth and your thoughts and burrow yourself into a deep hole inside, a core of safety where you can defend what is important and precious and your very own. Then the cold and the storms and the darkness can do their worst. They can grope their way up the walls looking for a way in, but they won’t find one, everything is shut, and you sit inside, laughing in your warmth and your solitude, for you have had foresight.”
― Tove Jansson, Moominvalley in November

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Hello friends!

October was a month that mixed slow, more introspective tales with gritty and violent norse fantasy reads. It felt like a perfect match to the chaotic state of life outside of books through October, which found me at my fourth funeral of a friend/family member/friend of the family since late June. It’s been a month of polar opposites in nearly every sense so why would my reading not follow the trend? I didn’t realize it until I sat down to work on this months Noted Media, but unintentionally it happened to end up that way. But the books were all damn good, so I’m not complaining.

How was your October? Read, watch, or listen to anything good?

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📚Last Month In Books

The Last Unicorn by Peter S Beagle

Dubbed a classic in fantasy yet I knew nothing about it other than that I had it on my shelf waiting to be read. Then a wonderful review from on her Bookstrider Substack popped up in my feed and I knew I had to make this one a priority. I picked it up at the end of August, read over half of it in one sitting, then got sidetracked for all of September and didn’t touch it again until the beginning of October. I can see why it’s dubbed a classic, it was a wonderful story that felt very “classic fairy tale” in many places while maintaining some pretty heavy topics that leave you with a lot to think about after the final pages have been read. Definitely worth a read.

“Heroes know that things must happen when it is time for them to happen. A quest may not simply be abandoned; unicorns may go unrescued for a long time, but not forever; a happy ending cannot come in the middle of the story.”
― Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn

First Person Singular : Stories by Haruki Murakami

There is something so special, so uniquely enjoyable, about Murakami’s writing and this one was no different. Though the title plainly states the intent, it wasn’t until I was 3 stories into this collection that I realized that all of these stories are told in the first person pov. Some are fantastical and fairly clearly fiction, others you just can’t quite tell if it’s actually his true story(mostly at least). Another very enjoyable read that left me thinking about my own writing approach and the way I observe life around me in general. It may have set me down a slow path of trying to read the rest of Murakami’s library of novels as well…

“Your brain is made to think about difficult things. To help you get to a point where you understand something that you didn’t understand at first. And that becomes the cream of your life. The rest is boring and worthless.”
― Haruki Murakami, First Person Singular: Stories

The Shadow of the Gods (The Bloodsworn Saga #1) by John Gwynne

Highly touted as an excellent series in a gritty, norse-inspired style, The Shadow of the Gods hits the ground running with a wonderful balance of fast-paced action, emotional twists, a subtle introduction to magic and monsters into this very “real world” feeling norse saga. I’ve read comments that this is a 500 page prologue to the rest of the series, and having not read books two or three prior to reading this one I can’t really comment on that for sure. But as a counter balance to the slower, more introspective reads earlier in the month with ‘The Last Unicorn’ and ‘First Person Singular : Stories’, this was the equivalent of going from a few weeks of enjoying some mellow jazz and then deciding to crank up the stereo to 11 and enjoy your favorite Metallica tunes. I am not prepared to say it’s “the best fantasy series I’ve ever read” but it sure is a fun story with a lot more emotional punch than I expected amidst the brutal snows of the norse world within.

“Pride and shame, she thought. Both enemies of a long life. He needs some ice in his blood, to see more clearly.”
― John Gwynne, The Shadow of the Gods

📺Last Month On The Screen

Other than maybe a few YouTube videos, catching some episodes of that Special Forces reality show in the background as my wife was watching it and ultimately enjoying seeing celebrities get humbled, and maybe a few minutes of NFL action here and there, there really hasn’t been anything I’ve sat down to intentionally watch.

🎸 Last Month In Music

With the announcement of Anika Nilles as the new drummer of legendary rock band Rush, I’ve been enjoying letting the masterpiece drumming of Neil Peart wash over my eardrums pretty regularly lately. Rush is an interesting band as I love hearing the professor at work behind his massive drum kit, but overall the music is the type I have to be in the right mood to listen to for more than a few songs here and there. But with Anika Nilles stepping in, I’m very curious to hear them all together because she’s a fantastic drummer taking on a role that will see her facing a lot of backlash no matter how amazing she is, the pressure is high, but I think she’s such a talent that she’ll crush it.

🎤 What About You?

What are you reading/watching?

Any favorite lines or quotes, even scenes that have stood out to you?

Have you seen anything on the horizon, be it a book coming out soon or a trailer/preview that you’re excited to check out once it is released?

What music has been on repeat for you?

Leave a comment

📰Last Month On Substack

While I do my best to keep up on reading all of the various newsletters I subscribe to here, this past month has been challenging and I admit that I have a lot of catching up to do. There were a number of letters that grabbed my attention though and maybe in some sort of subconscious way it seemed I leaned hard into books and photography.

• The Baker’s Dozen Canon by of

• Split Double Exposures by of

• A System for Reading by of

• Should I develop a Personal Style? by of

• Pretty Images Are Dead. Long Live Documentary Photography by of

• The Journey or the Destination? by of

• TURN OF THE C.A.D.A.S. & SEE WHAT HAPPENS. by of

With November upon us it is always a toss up on how much reading I’ll get to as I spend most of the month in the woods enjoying the whitetail deer season. Time will tell but this November may line up nicely for me to take a little break to recharge, maybe retool some things, get back in touch with my core gut instinct as to what direction to move with things here and all of that super interesting stuff (heavy sarcasm needed for that statement).

I’m continuing my first journey through John Gwynne’s ‘The Bloodsworn Saga’ and also planning on a luxuriously slow first-time exploration of Haruki Murakami’s ‘1Q84’. These are two very different types of stories but they work well as a tandem read because of the stark differences in style, pacing, and tone.

Other than that I plan to enjoy some time off work, time in the woods, time with family, and I hope you have an amazing start to November as well.

See ya’ when I see ya’.

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Welcome to Noted Nonsense
Perfectly imperfect notes from the pages of my well-loved notebook. Field notes from a curious mind. Thoughts with no plan. Stories with no rules.

I blinked and I missed it. We were just starting to edge towards peak fall color and a week of high winds coupled with on and off rainy weather basically knocked everything to the ground. I think I managed to get out and make maybe four photos during my favorite season of the year. Now I feel like I totally missed out, I’m frustrated and bummed out. Sure it’s still fall, but the parts of it I love to explore with my camera vanished before I got the chance.

Worse, much like the leaves littering the ground, I feel very scattered at the moment. Parenting struggles with teens wanting to push boundaries and find their limits, an old house that keeps me in a perpetual state of concern especially after a house in our town just suffered an apparent natural gas explosion sending the homeowner to the hospital where he’s still in critical condition just the other day, blah, blah, blah. No one wants to read about anyone else’s personal struggles, especially you, so I won’t bore you with details. It’s just that both internally and externally, small scale and large scale, everything seems to be total chaos in the world right now and it’s really impacting my ability to focus, to stop and think, to find a way to process some, all, or any of it.

Last weekend we went fishing, might have been the last time for the year as the weather and schedule look to be taking a turn into the “not conducive to getting on the lake fishing” territory. It was a slower day on the water, only one keeper and nine total landed, but for a last day it was pretty damn good. A little breezy, not too cold, plenty of sunshine and my dad and I finally got my son out on the water with us for the first time all year. If it was to the be last day for the season, it was a pretty good one.

Speaking of fishing, you might remember that I had a personal mission to try to catch a fish out of the small river near my parents and through spring and summer I had been having no luck at all. I stopped by there the other morning for maybe twenty minutes and wouldn’t you know it, I can now officially say I caught a fish in this river. Though, it wasn’t much of a fish… just a large golden shiner but I might go back and try again because if the shiner minnows are running then maybe larger predator fish will be following. Either way, the original mission was accomplished.

What has been your lifeline in the face of perpetual chaos that is life these days?

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Are you a fan of horror movies?

I heard a conversation the other day on a podcast I’ve listened to for years and the hosts were talking about some of the recent horror movie trends and one of the hosts made a very good point about how at some point, when the trend is to try and get crazier/more graphic or violent or gory/more extreme, we have to reach a pinnacle and he wondered if we’d already crossed that point years back. It got me thinking about it more, especially in a situation where the line goes from horror movies for the purpose of having scary stories to enjoy and into basically gruesome violence and gore porn where the line of “what is too much” becomes blurred, invisible, or outright crossed and left in the dust.

We’re at a point in time where true crime shows and podcast are at all time highs in terms of popularity, shows featuring detailed looks at real life serial killers top the streaming charts. People can’t seem to get enough and it seems the darker the material gets the more popular it becomes. When did society become so desensitized to crime and murder that storiels about it are some of the most popular forms of entertainment to consume?

At what point do horror movies, or horror stories for that matter, top out and reach a point where there is some sort of creative shift in viewers/readers in which a new direction comes along to change the current trajectory away from the outright murder porn we see now and into something less awful. That or the genre as a whole collapses under its inability to one up or outdo itself?

There is big difference in horror and horrible, and in many ways it feels like the current state of so many horror movies feels like a mirror being held up to the horrible state of so many people in the world today. So much anger, rage, pent up violence. We’re seeing more and more instances of random acts of violence happening across the world, more and more acceptance and encouragement of it, and I don’t believe horror movies are to blame, but I also don’t need to see the wonderful genre of horror stories reduced to how much blood and gore we can show in the most grotesquely violent ways. No one needs to watch videos of people being assassinated publicly, be it here in the US or on foreign soil.

I’ve seen two videos in the last couple months that have left me feeling sick to my stomach for days, Charlie Kirk being murdered while speaking at a college event and Iryna Zarutska senselessly murdered on the train after work. On one hand I understand that it’s necessary to know this stuff is happening, on the other I’m still sick to my stomach thinking about those graphic videos circulating everywhere with no regard to the viewers that shouldn’t be seeing things like this. Kids have access to all of this, they are seeing all of this, and it’s desensitizing them to the point where I fear for the mental well-being of every child growing up with this as the “normal way of life”, let alone we adults trying to raise loving, kind, and caring children.

Maybe I’m just getting old.

Maybe I’m just not loving the fact that horror movies are playing out publicly in real life so often that we regularly are shown videos of violence, murder, and more popping up in daily social media feeds as “sponsored posts”. Life is already hard, I don’t need to add extra violence and gore via horror movies and books that have left good storytelling in the dust in favor of pushing the envelope to the “massive shock value through intense gruesomeness” territory. Like I said, maybe I’m just getting old.

Old and tired of the BS.

I’m not sure how much more of it I can stomach before I finally have to go full hermit mode and abandon all internet access altogether. So I try to spend my time on other things, being outdoors, reading interesting books, and spending time with family.

I’ll tell you about it a little more when the next Noted Media post comes out, but earlier this month I read another Haruki Murakami book. His writing is so unique to me, I can’t quite put my finger on why exactly, but I really enjoy it. There’s a banality to the storytelling that feels like we’re getting a story about something completely normal and almost mundane, then he slaps you out of nowhere with something completely bizarre and strange. Then you find yourself thinking back and realizing that what you thought was happening was indeed happening but there is an entirely different layer of things happening at the same time that you never picked up on. So far I’ve only read a couple of his books, Kafka on the Shore and First Person Singular which I just finished. I have a few more on my shelf at home already but I’ve been thinking lately about trying to read his entire collection, the fiction and non-fiction. Maybe I’ll find after I read more of his work that I don’t care for it, maybe I’ll find I love it even more the more I read, and maybe something from his unique approach to writing will rub off on me and blend into the swirl of my own personal writing voice.

The more I think about writing lately, the more I feel like while the actual wordsmithing is a talent and skill to be honed and polished over time, the real power comes in the ability to sit with our thoughts, to spend time allowing ideas and thoughts to roll around and blend with other thoughts until we are left with something uniquely our own. I believe there is power in writing regularly, no matter what the method, as a way to keep growing in your use of words and language. I also am coming to believe that there is probably real power in sitting down and putting pen(or pencil) to paper and writing daily. I still haven’t picked up my notebooks or daily notebook practice again. It’s been a few weeks now and I just can’t find the ambition to do it, even though I feel the power of it might be useful.

I also discovered that for myself, as much as I love the look and feel of writing with a good pen, there is something I really enjoy about feeling a pencil scratch on the page as I write. I know I’ll disappoint at least one person with the next line, but I’m starting to think I’m becoming a pencil over pen guy… of course this is subject to change by the day depending on the varying moods I find myself in.

The bottom line is I need to spend time thinking and writing, be it notebooks or journalling or any other personal writing, to get back in the habit of daily writing.

With a hectic time of year approaching for me, long wonderful days spent in the woods hunting through November that roll right into Thanksgiving time with family and in the blink of an eye right into the Christmas season, I might take a little break from publishing here. At least on a consistent weekly schedule like I have been. I guess we’ll see what happens.

There are a lot of things with my writing here on this letter to you each week, that I’ve been thinking about. So many different interests and hobbies I want to talk about, so many different things I want to do, and I just don’t know if anyone even cares to read any of it anyways. And if you do then how can I best create an environment that works for both me as the writer and you as a friend and reader, what structure can I create for myself that will best encompass all that I want to do, does it even matter if there IS a structure?

Real “questioning everything and the more I question the more broad and narrow the scope of the questions until I’m right back at square one again” type of mental state at the moment, I believe some may say it’s a lot of chasing my own tail — so maybe a break is needed.

Pause, think, and just BE.

Though I’m not gonna lie, there is a part of me that has this desire to quietly start something new, something without my own name attached to it, something largely anonymous, and use that as a way to make a clean and fresh start in whatever direction I’m pulled to go.

I’ll leave you with this for the week, a quote from Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore:

“Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That’s part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that’s where I imagine it - there’s a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you’ll live forever in your own private library.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

— Dave

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Welcome to Noted Nonsense
Perfectly imperfect notes from the pages of my well-loved notebook. Field notes from a curious mind. Thoughts with no plan. Stories with no rules.

Robert Frost told us how two roads diverged in a wood, it’s become arguably one of the most quoted bits of poetry in the mainstream circles. By mainstream I mean in the widely known by people that are not necessarily avid readers of poetry. People like me, that dabble and struggle with really getting into a poem or poetry.

A short while back we attended the funeral of a family member and during the service her husband spoke about his deceased wife, their history together, their love for each other, and he opened with that famous line from Frost’s poem. It got me thinking once again about the many times in my own life when I’ve faced those forking roads, choosing to travel one versus another, and how all of those seemingly unconnected decisions lead to that which I hold most dear — my wife and kids.

As a senior in high school I was offered scholarships at a few different schools to come play football for them, most of them here in Minnesota but still hours away from home. Even at that time I knew that while the scholarships would be worth it from the schooling standpoint, I wasn’t going to make it past college ball due to my size and my position played. There’s no way my 6’2” 240lb size would cut it as an offensive lineman past the D-2 schools I had offers for. Taking one of the scholarships would have also meant moving away from my family, something I wasn’t sure I was ready and willing to do.

This was a fork.

I stayed local. Over the years there were moments when I wondered what would have happened had I made the choice to play ball at a bigger school. I am still pretty certain I wouldn’t have gone on to make it pro, who knows I suppose, but I doubt it.

Just after high school I got an invitation to tryout for a band that was about to head out on tour through the US, not stadiums or arenas or anything like that, just casino’s and small clubs. They had lost their drummer at the last minute and somehow my name was floated, they heard me play live somewhere, and invited me to come audition. I did and I nailed it. The job was mine if I wanted it. I would have had about 2 weeks of quick rehearsals and then we were on the road.

This was a fork.

Around this same time my Grandma had gotten real sick, she died soon after, but once again my roots in family and in this place find me choosing to decline the opportunity with many apologies and sincere thanks. In my bones I know I made the right choice, but still… sometimes I wonder what would have happened had I taken a touring gig with this band. Hell, I don’t even remember the name of the band anymore. For all I know they became the next big thing, changed their name and I’ve been listening to them on the radio for years. But it was a fork, nonetheless.

If I continue to look at those years there are poor choices made my first run through college that caused me to take some time off school and focus on just working for a little while until I decided what I really wanted to do. I spent time as an usher at a movie theater, a phone sales rep for a well known catalog company of those days, and finally as a tech support rep for a company providing internet technical support via a giant call center.

Taking any one of a number of forking roads could have found me someplace very different than that shitty call center tech support job. But, that shitty call center tech support job was precisely where I needed to be. It was there I would meet my wife, there that we would start hanging out and ultimately as we both chose to leave that job — her moving four hours away and me going back to school — we started officially dating and the rest, as they say, is history.

I can’t say if the forks in the road that I took were the “roads less travelled by” or if they were simply the safe choices as I still have a tendency to be a little risk averse. Some may see this letter and shake their head at my blatant shunning of multiple opportunities to do things I loved. I understand that. But I also know that had I chosen any one of those roads the odds are high that I never meet my wife and we never have our amazing kids.

Of course this brings to mind thoughts about fate or destiny. Did I make these choices back then, not knowing specifically why other than that I didn’t feel ready to move away from family, because ultimately my path was meant to meet with that of my wife to be? Was my pull to stay for my family a little foreshadowing that ultimately the paths I chose were leading me to my opportunity to find the thing that would become most important to me, starting my own family?

If fate or destiny is real, then I also must consider the idea that no matter what roads I chose along the way they would have somehow led me to cross paths with my wife. Maybe instead of meeting in a shitty call center tech support job we would have met after one of my football games or after a show I was drumming in, but all of that seems a little too far fetched for me to see it happening like that.

Obviously we’ll never know what we’d find down the forks we didn’t take and it isn’t worth too much of our time to dwell on as we can’t travel back in time to find out. We only move forward on this ride, no do overs, no going back. But I do know that I’m happy with the roads I’ve taken so far. Even though I worry constantly about if I’ve done a good enough job as a father to raise kids prepared for whatever life throws at them, I look at them and know they were my life’s purpose.

What is interesting is that all of the forks in the road that lead wholly to the pursuit of one or another of my passions, be it football or drumming or even photography, have all found a way into my life along the way. I still played college football, even got to play for the Minnesota All-Star team in New Zealand against a lot of dudes that went on to play in the NFL. I still bang away on my drums, spent years playing in multiple bands and making tons of memories, including many gigs with my wife by my side as me and the boys would provide the music and her and her friends danced the night away. Photography is still something I love and practice regularly.

Maybe they aren’t one-off, branching roads so much as they are options for a primary focus. Once you choose the primary path the gps of life re-routes those other paths and interests, finding a way to keep things knit together in some fashion so all those passions and roads stay a part of our lives? Even if they weren’t the primary focus, if I didn’t go on to play for the NFL or headline a major concert tour, those things were still a part of my life. Is it fate or destiny? Is it just that “Life…uh…finds a way”? Who knows?

All that I know for certain is that Robert Frost spoke of his two roads diverging in the woods and how he had a decision to make, while Tom Cochrane told us Life is a Highway and he wanted to drive it all night long. That tells me we just go with our gut feeling, make our decisions, and keep moving forward to travel as far down our road as humanly possible before we make our final pit stop. No use looking back or spending time pining for knowledge of what might have been.

Do you ever think about the major forks in the road of your life? What were some of the biggest you recall?

Leave a comment

Funerals always leave me feeling a bit introspective anyways, but this one found me really looking hard at the life I’ve built with my amazing wife, our fantastic kids, all the worry about things we wish we could do and all the joy of the things we’ve been fortunate enough to experience. It’s so easy to beat myself up, feel down on myself for not being able to give my wife and kids the world. But also I know the value of all that we have, the importance of instilling a sense of pride in doing the work to accomplish the thing without it just being handed to you.

In some ways maybe that is the final gift we receive as a farewell from loved ones we have to say goodbye to, the ability to pause and take stock of our lives. To realize there is so much more to appreciate than we normally see under the daily stresses of life.

We left the funeral the other weekend and my 13 year old son held my hand and walked with me to the car. On the way he told me “this was a good funeral. It was sad still, but it was more of a celebration of life.” He told me that “even though it hopefully won’t be for a very long time, it’s what he wants his own funeral to be like, a celebration of life, of the good memories, and nothing more.”

He’s absolutely right and whether he got his ability to step back and keep perspective on a situation from me or my wife, I feel like at least I must have done an ok job of being a father after hearing him say that.

I’ll leave you with this for the week, the final lines from Louis Armstrong’s ‘What A Wonderful World’:

I hear babies cry
I watch them grow
They’ll learn much more
Than I’ll ever know
And I think to myself
What a wonderful world
Yes, I think to myself
What a wonderful world

‘What a Wonderful World’ by Louis Armstrong

— Dave

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Welcome to Noted Nonsense
Perfectly imperfect notes from the pages of my well-loved notebook. Field notes from a curious mind. Thoughts with no plan. Stories with no rules.

Hello friends!

Are you serious, October already?!

I’ve officially hit my fall media practices in which I try to maximize my time outdoors which means my reading and media exploration slows. Last month was a bit of an exception for this year, with seven books read in August. September slowed down considerably, though I did manage to watch a full, eight episode season, of a show I’ve been meaning to get to. That and a little football, but all this watching combined with extra time outdoors has me back to a slower pace with the books I’m exploring. Though I DID finish (for now) another book series as well so that is exciting!

How was your September? Read, watch, or listen to anything good?

Leave a comment

Here was my September in media.

📚Last Month In Books

The Butcher’s Masquerade (Dungeon Crawler Carl #5) by Matt Dinniman

The longest in the series yet also brought the intrigue and emotional aspects up a few notches. There’s a lot more at play than Carl (and we) have been led to believe and things are starting to get much larger in scope and much more emotionally impactful. No spoilers but that dagger twist at the end was brutal in what it implies moving forward.

“This was also something that trauma could do. It could make you blind, and it could open your eyes wider than they’d ever been, all at the same time.”
― Matt Dinniman, The Butcher's Masquerade

The Eye of the Bedlam Bride (Dungeon Crawler Carl #6) by Matt Dinniman

Things are expanding and I don’t want to say too much out of respect for potential spoilers. We still get all the same humor, action, and mayhem of the dungeon but we also really see things begin to crack open in the “there’s a ton of stuff going on outside of the dungeon that might be even crazier” kind of way. The entire floor of the dungeon in this book focuses on the gaming convention of card games, a la Magic the Gathering or Yu-Gi-Oh, which adds an extra element of mayhem.

“But all I could think about was that lonely dog, left alone to guard an empty gas station on Christmas day.”
― Matt Dinniman, The Eye of the Bedlam Bride

This Inevitable Ruin (Dungeon Crawler Carl #7) by Matt Dinniman

That’s a wrap on Carl… for now. Book seven marks the final book that is currently out in this series. Book eight is looking to be a 2026 release, while the author has slated a 10 book target for the whole series. For now, I need a rest…much like Carl and company. Book seven really reminded me in many ways of ‘A Memory of Light’ (Wheel of Time #14) by Robert Jordan. Not in story similarity in any way, shape, or form, but in the way that the entire book was essentially one huge chaotic battle basically from cover to cover. It was very enjoyable, but a little exhausting as well. This book continues to push into bigger and more outlandish territory, to the point it teeters on the edge of being too much, but it’s still a lot of fun and I think the stage is being set for an absolutely brutal gut-punch moment or two in which we start to lose favorite characters as a rapid pace.

“The Inevitable Ruin. That’s what their queen used to call this moment. The moment you realized there was no hope, nothing left to do, and all that was left was to die and reflect upon what you’ve already done while you waited. To ruminate on how you’ve helped the colony, and to beg forgiveness of God for not sacrificing enough.”
― Matt Dinniman, This Inevitable Ruin

📺Last Month On The Screen

I finally have something here to share and it’s very bittersweet.

While waiting for the season to wrap so I could binge it the news came out shortly after it ended sometime letting fans know that the show was cancelled by Amazon, so I was dragging my feet getting around to watching it because I knew they planned eight seasons and this was just the end of season three.

But September was time and I hit play on season three of The Wheel of Time. Within the first five minutes I could tell I was in store for a hell of a fun season. As I mentioned before, there are certainly a LOT of changes from the books, but there are also so many pitch perfect references to specific moments in the books and overall the season was incredibly enjoyable. This was easily the best season of this show yet, and then Amazon pulls the plug. Clearly they were planning on the show continuing, given how season three ended, but now none of us will see where they were going to take it. As a long-time fan of the book series, having read and re-read it many times over the years, I am so crushed that we won’t get to see where and how they were going to take things, especially as there are some pretty pivotal scenes in the books yet to come that the series hadn’t even been close to yet. Scenes and entire storylines that now would HAVE to be different due to events that unfolded this season that changed from the books.

Ah well…

At least networks can stay loyal to churning out season after season of stellar reality tv *insert heavy sarcasm here*…

Maybe someday another network will pick this one up or a new version can be done… though I doubt it. It was certainly a joy to watch what little we got though.

🎸 Last Month In Music

I’ve been a bit unsettled in music this month. My usual comfort zone music just wasn’t scratching that itch. I searched and experimented with trying to find something new that would catch my ear, but nothing seems to have stuck. I found myself listening to a playlist of music most often that was decent, but didn’t blow me away. Kind of the perfect backdrop to cruising backroads with a camera and just thinking, with the music down low just to provide a little white noise outside of car sounds.

I do enjoy the kind of spooky/Halloween feel of ‘Meet Me in the Woods’ by Lord Huron, as you can get an idea of from these lyrics:

I took a little journey to the unknown
And I come back changed, I can feel it in my bones
I fucked with forces that our eyes can’t see
Now the darkness got a hold on me

But most of this playlist falls into that category where the music is enjoyable enough, but other than a couple artists like Mumford & Sons and a few others I really couldn’t tell you the name of any single song or artist as they roam through my ears.

🎤 What About You?

What are you reading/watching?

Any favorite lines or quotes, even scenes that have stood out to you?

Have you seen anything on the horizon, be it a book coming out soon or a trailer/preview that you’re excited to check out once it is released?

What music has been on repeat for you?

Leave a comment

📰Last Month On Substack

September was quite a month. We saw a lot of folks suddenly taking a look at the world, at life, and trying to figure out just what the heck was going on. I found that in some strange way many of my favorite writers here on Substack seemed to be sharing articles that were all finding me at just the right moment when I was still trying to work out of a state of distracted hopelessness.

Here are a handful of letters from other writers I enjoyed this month, check out their writing and let me know if any of these letters hit home for you! It’s a mix of personal introspection, advice, research, and a little look at art thrown in to round out the mix. Because there are so many more great letters than I can share here once a month, I’m thinking about adding in just one or two favorite substack reads with each of my weekly letters to you instead of one giant list once a month? What do you think of that? In fact, I’m wondering if maybe this once a month letter of just a ‘media roundup’ might not be better integrated into my regular weekly letters? Thoughts? I’m still on the fence with that, but we’ll see. For now enjoy some favorites from last month on Substack!

• Introverts, Read This When You Feel Like You’re Failing at Life by of

• Fear Not by of

• Artist Feature #58 by and of

• The Red Leaves of the Fall... and Sometimes I don’t know, and that’s ok. by of (Yes its a two for one, but c’mon — you need to just get subscribed to The Lawson Atlas because it is one of my favorite reads every month)

• How to Read The Bible by of

• Listeners Can’t Remember the Names of Their Favorite Songs and Artists and Subscription Prices Gone Wild! by of (Yes another two for one, but both were super interesting reads worth your time)

• You Must Recognize Your Victory Now by of

• Missed Connections by of

I still can’t figure out how October is upon us already, which is much the same as my plans for reading/watching/listening as my favorite season of the year unfolds. Truth be told, for the next couple months I don’t have high expectations or strict plans because every minute I can I plan to spend it outside enjoying my favorite time of year.

I had started Peter Beagle’s ‘The Last Unicorn’ in September. In fact I am over 2/3rds through it and made it that far in on my first sitting with it. It was good. Real good. But then I got busy and side tracked and when I went to pick it up again here at the end of September I realized I probably need to start it over, at least so I can glance through it enough to remember what exactly was happening up to that point. So I’m going to finish up(read again?) The Last Unicorn.

Past that… I guess we’ll see.

My only plan, my only hope, for both you and I stands from last month. A hope of enjoying an amazing fall full of family, friends, good books, great food, relaxation, and as much time in nature as you can squeeze in!

Most importantly — keep scribbling!
Dave

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Welcome to Noted Nonsense
Perfectly imperfect notes from the pages of my well-loved notebook. Field notes from a curious mind. Thoughts with no plan. Stories with no rules.

I knew better but I let it happen anyways.

Remember the last couple weeks when I’ve mentioned that I haven’t been writing in my notebooks over the past couple weekends? When I mentioned that I’ve been a little unsatisfied with my current approach to keeping a notebook and if it’s actually bringing me the value it once did as my entries have devolved into a few dear diary style observations per day? When I questioned whether that more bullet point style daily notebook approach was helping my writing or actually hurting it?

Well… It’s now been nearly a full seven days since my last entry into my notebook. I should have seen it coming, but not writing over the weekend at all as we were busy and on the go quickly blended into a busy Monday and next thing I knew my notebook had not left my bag and I have not jotted a single note all week.

There’s a slight feeling of being a bummed about the streak being broken, a little shame at failing to keep up with daily writing, but the part that worries me most is the bulk of my feeling like it’s no big deal. Even though it was a big week with a lot of pretty big things happening for our family, who cares really, it’s only my own self-imposed task anyways. But I know better. If I give into that train of thought it’s a greasy, slippery slope to why bothersville.

So I write.

Maybe it’s not in a notebook. Maybe it’s typing and not pen to paper. But I write. About what is the question? What do I want and need to share with you this week? Everything feels at once too big to tackle, too ominous and dreary, and yet too trivial or unimportant. The world has been a strange place lately and I find I’m having trouble sorting through the barrage of fleeting thoughts on a constant sprint through the empty space between my ears.

So I write.

We’ll see what comes of it. This frazzled energy might effectively spill onto the page in some semblance of enjoyable cohesiveness. Then again, it might splatter and smear in abstraction. I could call it art, say something artsy sounding like “It’s not for me as the artist to push my intent into my art and tell others what it’s about and how they should feel about it. I believe everyone that engages with my art will have their own experiences and it is only for them to decide what they take away from each piece.” Sounds pretty good, huh? Too bad it’s a statement straight out of full of crap town. Sometimes we just have to play it by ear, fly be the seat of our pants, ride the wave, and see what comes of it.

So I write.

What are your favorite changes as summer fades to fall?

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It’s been a couple weeks since I’ve been out on the water as this last weekend was busy with my youngest earning both his ATV and Firearms Safety certifications, but during our last trip chasing walleye’s the leaves were starting to fall and while the woods were only maybe 25% of the way towards peak fall color, the water was dotted with golden leaves blowing off the birches. I happened to look down and noticed this cluster seen above, in which one leaf resembled a heart and the small cluster appeared in the shape of the Orion constellation, well the lower half at least.

Small, fairly insignificant, but it was a moment I noticed and appreciated and I’m glad I took the time to grab the camera and just make note that I had seen it, that I had noticed it. The transition from summer to fall is such a magical time, so many changes happening so quickly, and it’s easy to let it slide by unnoticed and worse…unappreciated. I have been thinking about noticing things lately. About taking the time to really stop and appreciate things unfolding quietly all around us.

Thinking about how, whether we pay attention or not, the seasons continue to change and we are ultimately left with nothing but the memories of last summer, five summers ago, even decades ago if we are fortunate to have lived that long. It reminds me of one of my all time favorite book series and the opening paragraph that kicks off every book, which I’ll leave down below at the end of this letter. I’m talking about The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan and his premise that we all exist on a wheel. A wheel that continues to turn and memories turn to legends, which turn to myths, which are themselves forgotten until the wheel comes back around.

I don’t know about the real scientific ramifications of this, as it would require a belief in the system of fate and a lack of free will to some degree, but I think in some areas it certainly holds true. The seasons of our lives roll ever forward regardless of what we do, and next thing we know our memories of fantastic summers as a kid fade to legendary status through the lens of nostalgia until ultimately they are forgotten when we pass. But the leaves fall to the water every year as fall sets in and it’s only up to us to take notice so we can help them live on in our own myths and legends as we march forward with the turning of the wheel. Think about how many wondrous moments that unfolded as the backdrop to your favorite childhood memories, your own transition from teens to early adulthood, into finding yourself middle aged with your own kids nearing the days of leaving home and heading out on their own, that have passed completely from memory already.

These are the moments that make me regret not keeping detailed journals from as early as I could write, though without hindsight would I have bothered to take note of such happenings?

I remember vividly the first deer I harvested at just 13 years old. I remember what gun I used. I remember all the details about how multiple deer seemed to have appeared out of thin air, what stand I was in, what time of day it was, and the excitement that forced me to climb down out of my stand and rush over to my deer as it was still expiring. I know it was an afternoon/evening hunt. I think it was cloudy. I know there was a little snow on the ground. But I can’t recall how cold it was, what the air smelled like, how late in the afternoon it was, or even what I was actually wearing (outside of the required red or orange jacket needed for hunting season in those years).

I know I was sitting on a board between a few branches of a squat, full-branched, pine so I can almost remember the smell of the pine sap from the cut branches where we made the stand. Those branches would later smell of buck scent spilled on them by my Uncle, but I don’t think that pungent scent was there the evening I shot my first deer. I vaguely remember the smell of gunpowder from the multiple rounds fired from my Winchester 30-30, that makes me think it was probably fairly calm with little to no wind. I can still hear the sound the small deer made when I hit it, it was a spine shot and unfortunately the deer did not perish immediately. That was almost enough to deter my future hunting plans as I felt bad knowing it was suffering because of a less than ideally placed shot from my 13 year old hands. My excitement won out as I’m still hunting more than thirty, hell, nearly forty years later.

It’s what I don’t remember about the days and weeks leading up to that moment, the scouting and building of the stand, the time spent that fall in the woods with my Dad, my Grandpa, and my Uncles as we put together this spot that would be perfect for my first solo hunt. Sure, I’ve smelled those woods in the fall more times than I can count, so I’m reasonably sure I know what those trips smelled like. I grew up in those woods and know them intimately, so certainly recall a general sense of that tree and how it sat alone off a point of pines just at the edge of the hill before it dropped down slightly and transitioned to an old clearcut full of large windrows of branches and discarded cuttings made some years before.

All this, the remembered and the unnoticed, from just one single event nearly forty years ago. What sort of treasure would I have on my hands had I somehow been told or encouraged or convinced to keep a detailed journal?

My notebooks have suffered from a lack of attention over the last week, it’s not the end of the world. But this is what gives me the feeling of shame for letting it slip. This knowledge that maybe the things I didn’t take the time to write down and notice over the last six or seven days will be lost forever as the wheel grinds forward.

Speaking of The Wheel of Time, I finally have gotten around to watching season three of the now cancelled tv adaptation and damn it bothers me. It’s so incredibly good. Yes, it’s very different than the books in many ways, yet there are so many pitch perfect nods to the book that keep this lifelong Wheel of Time fan pumping my fist in joy every time they sneak on the screen. But it bothers me so much that a show like this, one focused on characters and amazing storytelling with incredible source material, is cancelled after just a third season. A third season out of eight planned. A third season that proved it was only getting better and better when you compare an enjoyable season one to the kick assery of season three. Yet mindless drivel like Survivor or Big Brother churn out 20 and 30 seasons with multiple episodes airing each week and multiple seasons airing each year with no fear of cancellation or getting dropped.

Is it a budgetary thing for studios due to the nature of higher budgets needed to produce a satisfying fantasy or sci-fi series? Is it a nightmare where the shocking majority of tv viewers are so addicted to the formulaic manufactured drama of a reality show that they won’t tolerate anything else on their screens? Probably a little of both, but it’s such a bummer because this season has been incredible right from the cold open of episode one.

Oh well, I still have the books to enjoy on re-read after re-read.

Things this week have certainly meandered here and there, much like my brain lately. Sometimes it’s hard to sit down and focus, to think of something worth sharing, something maybe you’ll find interesting and something that won’t waste your time. It’s hard to figured out the tangled mess of thoughts inside my own head, let alone put something semi-coherent down on the page. Sometimes I feel like I can’t make heads or tails of anything…

So I write.

I’ll leave you with this for the week, the opening paragraph from The Eye of the World:

“The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.
-The Eye of the World (The Wheel of Time #1) by Robert Jordan

— Dave

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Welcome to Noted Nonsense
Perfectly imperfect notes from the pages of my well-loved notebook. Field notes from a curious mind. Thoughts with no plan. Stories with no rules.

“Did you hear about Charlie Kirk?”

“No” I replied

“Just look it up”

I opened up X/Twitter to find Charlie Kirk trending. The first result was a video, no text, so I just hit play. That was a big mistake. I wasn’t prepared to see the horrible and graphic scene that unfolded in seconds on that screen. It’s a video I wish I could unsee. I’m just really not even sure what to say about any of it. It’s a horrible event. A senseless loss of life. Worse, it brought out the vilest of the vile as person after person began sharing videos not only celebrating someone losing their life, but actively calling for more. I spent a large portion of the time since wondering where we go from here. How do we have any hope of moving forward and coming together when so many are so divided that they actively wish death upon those that don’t agree with their opinions?

I thought about writing more in detail about all of this, but honestly I am at a loss for words right now. However, I read a fantastic piece that I highly recommend from called The Red Leaves of the Fall…. In it he works through his thoughts as he processes all of the horrible information we’ve been watching unfold during this tragic event and frankly I think he’s said so much of what I’ve been thinking in this piece (and he’s said it far better than I could) that I honestly just want to point out his letter and suggest you give it a read. It’s long and requires a little time from you, it’s discussing a heavy topic, but it’s so worthwhile. Especially the message of optimism and hope that he delivers in light of a world that seems to be utterly crumbling right in front of our eyes.

So if I’m not going to dive deep into my thoughts about the heavy state of things in the news, why bring it up? Why say anything at all? What am I going to talk about today?

All good questions.

When this all happened last week it was a system shock to a system that has already felt overwhelmed and completely stressed out. It’s been a very difficult year for us in our household and while this news was horrible and the reactions seen online were equally disgusting, it was unfortunately just added to the overload stack. We had another death in the family to end last week as well and on top of it all I seem to have picked up some “back to school” germs from the kids and currently am miserable from a nasty sinus/head cold. I feel numb, my head is at once spinning with an overwhelming variety of thoughts yet nothing will slow down enough that I can actually grab hold and begin to work through them so it’s also feeling like it’s stuffed with wool and devoid of anything worthwhile.

To answer the questions, I bring this up because I want you to know where I’m at in this moment and to let you know that if you’re finding yourself someplace similar that you are not alone. I’m telling you this because as I sit down to write this, I still have no idea what to share with you this week. On one hand I feel like I NEED to put my thoughts down in full regarding everything. To do anything else, to share something more lighthearted or off topic somehow feels, well… off.

A little of the old familiar “nothing I have to say is worthy of anyone else’s time in a moment like this” mixed with “is it tone-deaf of me to NOT bring this up”? In the end I don’t want to just add more noise around it so I’m just acknowledging things, admitting that right now my brain feels like I’m in a fog, and being gracious enough with myself to allow myself to work through things in the time it takes to clear that fog.

I’m not a newsletter factory after all. I’m just me, writing to you as a Minnesotan with small stories, reflections, and everyday nonsense—pulled from life and shared like a good chat over coffee. I just wanted to reach out to you and see how you’re doing, you know? A little time for some small talk between friends that isn’t about anything specifically epic or profound, yet is so very much needed for our own sanity.

How are you doing?

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At the start of 2025 I began a new daily notebook practice. I made it a point to write small updates throughout my day inside my notebooks. The intent was that this bullet point style collecting of ideas would serve as a living document that would coincide with my “proper” longer form journaling. I know many use the Field Notes sized notebooks for this type of daily recording but I opted for a larger size notebook because I felt I couldn’t capture enough in the pocket sized book.

I haven’t missed a day recording at least a few thoughts in my notebook all year. Well, until the last two weekends. We’ve been very busy and I neglected to find time to jot any thoughts or notes on Saturday or Sunday either week. At least in my main notebook as I did keep up with my rudimentary fishing log field notes which are transcribed in more detail within my dedicated fishing log I started this year.

At first I was kind of bummed about breaking my streak. Irritated that I “failed” at my daily practice. Though I’m realizing that it really doesn’t matter and there’s no need to beat myself up about it. The world won’t end if I miss a day or two over busy weekends here and there. It’s not a job, it’s something I do for me, and no one else cares about it — if they even know about it.

Thinking about it, I’m starting to notice a trend in the daily notebook keeping. Maybe I could use a real click-bait style headline to introduce this? Something like “Are daily observation notebook practices killing my writing?” or “How bullet point notebooking caused a writing collapse.”.

My larger size book is with me every day, it rides safely in my camera bag. But it is NOT something I’m pulling out to make a quick note if I’m on the go. Instead it comes out a few times a day, morning when I record the weather, maybe on lunch break if something comes to mind, and then again in the evening for a few minutes as I record anything I feel stood out to me throughout the day. The book I make most of my small notes in, including that rough fishing log that I use while out on the lake, is just a small pocket notebook. The other somewhat upsetting thing I’ve come to realize is that since starting this daily notebook practice I have not sat down to write in my regular journal at all. The longform writing I do happens here on this newsletter but other than that it’s been just the short updates in my daily notebook.

I love the daily notebooks as a day to day documentation of some basic thoughts and rough observations or ideas, but I hate that they’ve turned my journaling into nothing more than a few random bullet points each day. What started off as a wonderful tool to help me slow down and REALLY observe the world around me has turned into a string of mostly bland, completely stripped down and unfinished dear-diary style thoughts. Things like “lazy day today”, “I’m in a funk today”, or “long day at work followed by enjoying a volleyball game this evening, they won big again”.

Maybe it’s the current headspace I’m in, but I can’t help but wonder if I’ve basically trained myself OUT of a valuable journal keeping practice. I, like many that enjoy putting pen to paper, find that I write to help me understand how I feel about something. I write to help me learn and grow. I write for enjoyment. I’m not really enjoying the empty calories feeling bullet point thoughts I’ve fallen into the habit of filling my notebook pages with. Instead I’m finding myself really thinking a lot, working through things while talking to myself internally (or even out loud if I’m someplace like alone in my car ), and then moving on without making a single note or sitting down to put pen to paper.

I think I’m going to make a change to try out the pocket notebook approach while also carving out time everyday to sit down and do a little more long-form journaling. I envy those that share their photos of boxes of the same kind of notebooks that they’ve been keeping for decades. Shoeboxes and shelves full of filled Field Notes books serving as an ultra-aesthetic historical document. I love the idea but I’m not sure I could ever stick with just one system for that long without feeling the need to keep adjusting, tweaking, and making changes to adapt to my changing needs and (hopefully) growth.

It’s possible it could be a change, a thought I’m chewing on, simply because it’s a small thing that I can manage to wrap my head around right now instead of having to face the heavier and more serious things that have been hitting us all summer in our household. Sometimes we just need something, anything, that we can feel is in our control. Who knows?

Recently I’ve been putting in some time in Lightroom with my photos. There’s a strange thing I’ve been noticing, which is that I love a certain look when viewing photos of others yet when I process my own work I feel like I’m leaving my photos somehow unfinished. What I’ve realized is that my “normal” go to is towards something that has to look very punchy, high contrast, vivid color saturation. But I also am finding that I look at my work and find it feels very over-processed or heavy handed, I feel like it screams amateur hour. So using ChatGPT(yes, I know, AI is evil and to be despised. I’m just using it to help me convert my verbal visual thoughts about what I’m looking for into “Lightroom settings language” so that I can shave off hours of experimentation in mad scientist mode. Admin not artist tasks), I’ve been working to create some base preset settings that give me a base I can work on tweaking and adjusting to my own tastes. My goal is to have a few options that feel calm, clean, yet not overly polished in the “whoa this looks like AI trash” kind of way. Something that feels at once like “art” and like the well known “documentary” looks.

I think I’m almost where I want to be and I’ve been able to put together a little “toolkit” of looks that will work for almost any situation while still feeling cohesive. ChatGPT picked a name for this little project of mine based on the descriptions of the look and the photographers I wanted to have my work feel like. That name was the American Documentary Toolkit and I kind of dig that.

Not that the “behind the scenes nuts and bolts” are important at all as it’s the final image that is important, but this process has been nagging at me lately and I think I might have to put together some thoughts about photography more here on the newsletter. The realization that I feel so uncomfortable sharing work that I haven’t processed a certain way just because that is the way I’ve always done it was a bit eye-opening. It’s a moment of clarity in which I found I wasn’t totally happy with this thing, even though it’s been done that way for a long long time, yet I felt so uncomfortable making a change to something that I was more happy with, and I still don’t know that I understand why it’s even worth the time spent to think about it. It should be a no-brainer. Not happy with the thing anymore, even though I’ve been doing it that way forever, so making some changes so that I’m happy with the thing again. Identify a problem making me unhappy, make changes, be happy. But my dumb brain tricks me into thinking that I’m doing something wrong by making a big change away from the original way the thing was being done, even though I wasn’t happy with it and I am happier with the new way. In short, identify a problem making me unhappy, spend time making changes, be happy with changes, but feel like I did something wrong for not being happy with the initial situation that was the problem making me unhappy in the first place.

For being the thing the kind of runs the show for us humans, brains are freaking dumb sometimes.

I’ll leave you with this for the week.

“Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are our own fears.”
― Rudyard Kipling, The Collected Works

— Dave

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