Everything and everyone is saturated to the gills with political commentary, hot takes, discourse, and pissed-off snark. People and the internet are so filled with all of this they don’t really have time or space for anything else. Longtime followers know that I think this whole culture and drift is toxic and erodes the human spirit and the possibility of culture and life. You also know I am most interested in writing about, talking photos of, and exploring life in our modern world. Trying to make, and document, (honest) life as art in our age of clickbait-algo spectator reactive discourse. For the past six months I have been working on compiling a collection of short essays and vignettes I have written over the years into a single print volume and I am thrilled to share it with you. In curating this collection for print I was adamant about a few things. I wanted a classic, simple, beautiful design inside and out. I wanted a book that you could carry around, toss on your bed, put in your pocket, shove in your bag, manhandle on the beach, write in, write on, and everything else in-between. For me, the point of this collection isn’t to produce an epic hardcover tome. It’s something more informal and approachable. Something simpler and relatable. I’ve always loved those little paperbacks. You know, the ones they say they aren’t going to make anymore. Well, I want to still make them or something similar to them. I wanted this collection to be as close as possible to that rugged, personal, carefree spirit. The book itself is about 5 in. X 7.75 in.. About as small as you can get these days. The design is simple and (hopefully) timeless, the font is warm, the margins are ample, and the pieces honest. There’s a link in my linktree / bio to Amazon where you can Buy Modern Lives. Or of course, just search Amazon as we all so often do and that will work just as well. No politics, no hot-takes, no reaction, no discourse; just life.

Be kind to yourself. Encourage yourself. Yeah I know that it’s crunchy or whatever but I don’t care. Don’t compare yourself to others, compare yourself to prior versions of yourself. Don’t think life is terrible if you have 97% of what you want but miss the 3%. Don’t think you are failing just because you aren’t to where you want to be yet. Our lives are so good compared to what they could be or could’ve been. It’s okay to be fine with who you are.

It's kind of amazing how this kind of obscure performance ripped from a CBS late show more than a decade ago has been going around X every three weeks for the past year now.

Try to do more good than bad. It sounds trite or like a platitude, but it's not. It's really what matters most in life and if we just keep that as our focus we will end up on the right track whatever it may be.

Stomping through town 🧡🖤🧡

The sound of the marching band in the distance first thing in the morning. Fall.

Having one little baby is very easy. Having a few kids who talk and walk and do all that is harder. Add in homeschooling the kids and it is an absolute full time job + some. Some jobs are great, but even the best job in the world - and being a parent is that job - is hard if you have more than one 3 month old. I think more moms should stay home. I think more dads should spend more time at home too - kids need a masculine father figure more than just 90 minutes a night. But I think if you are really raising a family with a bunch of kids and not just outsourcing everything to nannies and all that, the mom at home is *working in the home* and it's the most important work. That's probably how we should talk about it. Home-work or something like that.

Halloween artwork by a child on the kitchen wall

Scroll some more.

Follow @michiganonfilm for a feed of film photography of Michigan. Michigan seen in a way you rarely see today.

The sound of a dry crackly leaf being blown across the road in the middle of the night.

X incentivizes you to talk about the discourse and be as hot take-ish as possible but the kicker is it is totally meaningless and no one just 3 years from now will ever remember the hot takes spilled and there’s no trajectory to anything better, it’s just effervescent spinning wheels. The key to it - if you really want to do something of value - is having the fortitude to not take the (literal) bait and create something distinctly your own or espouse a worldview that is unique to you.

The Halloween houses / lamps from the 1990s my wife puts around the house in October.

"Wow, I can't believe it" said no one ever. This is the most predictable thing in the entire world. Honestly the fact there are even computers with internet connections at all in schools and people actually believe they will be used for work is beyond naive.

Postcards from the past [35mm film]

This is where I post

Little Traverse Bay, in October

Just saw a kid who couldn’t have been older than eight or nine and he was walking down the street texting on an iPhone. Both totally unnecessary and totally detrimental.