Let's begin with this pair of banners I saw for sale on the internet. I had been considering buying them until the price hit $200, and then final sale ended up being $875. No thanks! But look at these beauties.

Deciding against purchasing those banners, Becky and I started looking for alternatives, other virtues that used to hang in church and club halls. I remembered seeing a big MODESTY in an antique store in Billings, Montana, a few years back.

Then Becky found these on Etsy, which are just spectacular. 

They weren't for sale (you can only buy prints of the scanned images), but ever since, those four phrases have been folded into our conversations, and I love them. You will, after all, miss your mother and daddy when they are gone.

But coming back to where we started, if I had to choose two principles to guide me, I don't think I'd want anything other than those two. The greatest commandments might be to love the Lord your God and also love your neighbor as yourself, so you could argue "love" should be the highest virtue, but how do you show love? Is it not through unselfishness and courage?

Book Report

The book I've been reading most of these last few weeks has been Shop Class As Soulcraft. The author, Matthew B. Crawford, is a motorcycle mechanic who used to run a think tank in DC and has a PhD in political philosophy from the University of Chicago. The idea, which I think is clear from the title, is about how physical, hands-on work is rewarding and meaningful, especially in an age of information work that doesn't produce tangible outcomes or even clear outcomes day to day. The mechanic knows they've done good work if the bike runs. The carpenter knows they've done good work if the line is level. The marketing specialist is less sure if they've done good work when they write an e-mail.

I thought it was...okay. I agree with all those ideas, but maybe the issue is that I've been swimming in that water for a long time. When I was a junior in high school, my history teacher Mr. Champagne had an economics degree and he was already telling us that the good money was in being an electrician or a plumber, because that's where the need is, not in office work that needs college degrees, and the big challenge (for a high school teacher) is that parents want to send their kids to Brown more than they want their kids on the shop floor.

And then that's what we say at my job, too, we have our economists with their advanced degrees saying the workforce is over-educated: "tech is going to be fine, finance and insurance are going to be fine, retail is running out of workers, the trades are running out of workers."

So maybe I would have enjoyed the book more if the ideas were new. But it was also published in 2009, so maybe Crawford was right on time, and I'm the one who's late.

The last chapter—"Concluding Remarks on Solidarity and Self-Reliance"—opens with the sentence "This book grows out of an attempt to get a critical handle on my own work history," and I was like oh alright yeah. That is what you were doing. Crawford was working out his own frustration with the office and using his own impressive academic skills to process it. I like that concept very much, but in practice, I think I would have wanted this specific analysis to be 4,000 words in a blog instead of 50,000 words in a book.

I read Shop Class As Soulcraft on the recommendation of Van Neistat, who makes videos online. Here's what happened: I wanted to reorganize the garage, so I went to Lowe's to just walk around and get inspired, and uh, Lowe's is not good for that. It’s not IKEA. So instead I realized I needed to look for shops or garages that I liked, then emulate those.

Pretty quickly on YouTube I found Van, and I’ve been watching a lot of his videos. He’ll use different tools. I'll watch him organize his shop with different shelves (which require the tools). Sometimes he'll lay out his approach, or his rules, for organizing and completing projects.

Here are two examples of what I’m talking about.

The appeal—I think—is that he seems to have found a system that works. He knows what he’s doing, and his space is very organized and it's all designed and customized and optimized for the life he's trying to live.

It's optimized but it’s not streamlined. The workshop does not look like stainless steel Star Wars, smooth empty surfaces, it's open shelves and wood and things with holes drilled into them so they can be hung on hooks. That space could not belong to anyone else but Van Neistat, and that inspires me to create a space that could not belong to anyone but me (and Becky). Using work and tools and customization is how we can do that.

To that end, let me say something about my wife very quickly: she's great at that. Sewing is her medium of choice, she’s been making her own clothes and she just finished this coat this week and it’s her best yet.

The Clock That Will Keep Time For Ten Thousand Years

I know Alec Nevala-Lee as the author of Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller, which I’ve been reading (listening to) since October and I’m almost done with it. I’ll probably write about that next month. But since writing that, Alec Nevala-Lee also published this article about a clock that will keep time for ten thousand years, ticking once a year. The idea is that humanity cannot conceptualize the future well and therefore cannot plan for it, and so we need something to force us to think long-term.

My favorite part of the article is the lede, which is about how one would hypothetically find the clock, which is located on Jeff Bezos’ Figure 2 Ranch outside Van Horn, TX.

The clock isn’t open to outsiders yet, but an enterprising trespasser could conceivably check it out now, based solely on public information. It’s at 31°26’54”N, 104°54’14”W, about eight miles due west from the Blue Origin landing pad that Bezos once used for a suborbital flight on one of his own rockets…As you proceed into the desert, keep an eye out on your left for a white gate leading to a side road. Pull over when you see a notice reading “Private Property — No Trespassing,” next to a sign with the name and number of a local stone supplier.

Once you manage to bypass the gate — which is illegal but not difficult — keep going west along Marvel Road. Instead of driving directly toward the line of mountains straight ahead, take the first right on a narrow dirt path, bearing north, and then turn left on a road little more than a scratch in the dust. Follow it to a trailhead in the limestone hills of Mine Canyon, where the route becomes impassable by car. You’ll cover the rest on foot. 

It’s a lovely technique, keeping barely but clearly out out of any direct assertion of where Alec Nevala-Lee has and has not been. I liked it even more because the version of him in my head was of an academic in the library studying Buckminster Fuller all day. Turns out he’s (plausibly) tramping around the West Texas brush.

I was also partial to this technique because I attempted it myself once, on a much smaller scale, when I was a student applying to MFA programs.

The Warden

You aren’t allowed to go inside the Warden Plaza Hotel, that’s out of the question. Every entrance is boarded up and displays signs reading “Private Property” and “No Trespassing.” Worse, the abandoned building is less than two blocks from the Webster County Law Enforcement Center, so I can’t fairly recommend that you try.

But if you were to go inside—not that you should, but if you did—you would see at once where the grandeur used to be and where it is now conspicuously absent. In the main entryway, you would see where sunlight used to fall on polished floors. You would see empty indoor storefronts. You would see railings that had probably once been brass on railings and bannisters going up its seven floors. You would see, on its stairs and molding, maroon paint that has faded to a sickly off-pink. If you were to make your way to its top floor (the eighth), you would look out broken windows and find an unparalleled view of Fort Dodge, Iowa, because the Warden Plaza Hotel remains the tallest building in town. It occupies an entire city block.

The hotel’s greatest modern strength stems directly from this hollowness. Because it is empty, it is a perfect canvas upon which to imagine the past glory of the building and the town, unencumbered by a present alternative.

It’s impossible to see what the Plaza is now, a ruin with crumbling plaster underfoot and half-demolished walls. You see, inevitably, what it once was; your imagination fills in the hotel’s gaps and shows you a Prohibition-era cosmopolitan hotspot. This was a place, your imagination tells you, where ladies walked around in pearls holding cigarette holders, where people read the newspaper in the morning and the afternoon. Debutantes dressed up and danced to live music every night. Arguments about minute details of agriculture policy filled smoky back rooms. The Plaza Hotel in this fictional memory is a layered, alluring place, the best the Jazz Age offered.

If that ritziness ever existed, it didn’t last long. The shops and offices that populated the lower levels of the building (including, and this is true, a fur coat store) escaped to the growing commercial districts on the eastern edge of town. The hotel stopped being a hotel in 1972, when Plaza building was designated for low-income housing. The commercial east side of town stopped growing in 1981, when Hormel Foods closed its meatpacking plant in Fort Dodge. This set off a decline in population from which the town has not yet recovered.

The last tenants of the luxury-hotel-turned-housing project left in 2006, at which point a corporation from Oakland named Coralee LLC purchased the building for $37,365 in a tax auction and promptly did nothing with it.

Now vacant, the Warden Plaza building haunted downtown Fort Dodge in a very real sense. It was dead but not gone, lingering downtown as a reminder of past glory and inhibiting any future growth. Kids in middle school told stories about actual ghosts living in its walls, which were probably false, and about homeless people or drug dealers camping out there, which were probably true. Vandals visited often.

Unsightly though it was, one could easily avoid the dilapidated building for eight years after its abandonment. Reasons to pass by were few and far between, and the most effective way of reaching the east side of town from the west was through winding one-way streets and up hills a little ways north, avoiding the hotel and the surrounding area completely. This changed in 2014, when the City of Fort Dodge began construction on a series of roundabouts that would allow an unbroken flow of traffic through downtown. Dennis Plautz, CEO of the newly-formed Fort Dodge Growth Alliance, called the project “the largest single thing the city could have done to expedite the improvement of downtown Fort Dodge.” The new Crosstown Connector passes directly in front of the Warden Plaza’s padlocked doors.

While construction was underway on the road, agriculture giant Cargill opened up a new processing plant on the northwest end of Fort Dodge. Soon afterward, Korean lifestyle conglomerate CJ constructed its own operations center in the new Global Innovation industrial park west of town. The two factories drew hundreds of blue-collar workers into Fort Dodge, creating a small economic boom on a scale not seen since Hormel closed. The country club became a Korean restaurant.

In July 2016, the City of Fort Dodge claimed the Warden Plaza building under a state abandoned buildings law, then gave it over to KDG LLC, out of Columbia, Missouri, under the understanding that the firm would invest $30 million into developing the building into new apartments. Construction was projected to last between eighteen months and two years, and the project’s deadline was in early 2020. Nothing has been done.

So the Warden Plaza Hotel sits empty downtown—elegant, decaying, and expensive. The city of Fort Dodge grows around it.

The Warden, Examined

According to the latest reports, the city of Fort Dodge is trying to get the hotel back. Photos from last summer show it is still abandoned.

I would have written that essay in late fall 2017, and modified it slightly in 2021. Four years since I last looked at this little essay is enough time to find some critical distance. If someone handed me this essay in a writing workshop, what would I think about it? (Besides, like, “Wow, I’m from Fort Dodge! What a coincidence!”)

I’m not embarrassed, reading this back. I like how short it is, and I think it’s well-written.

I think my biggest note would be why? What is this essay trying to accomplish? And I have two answers. First, I wanted to show that I could establish a metaphor. The decay of this hotel is like the decay of the town. But then at the end the author is emphasizing that the town is not decaying, and the growth is even more significant by comparison, it marks a departure from the pattern that was established.

Second answer: I wrote this because I am very fond of my hometown. I was proud of the growth it was experiencing. I am proud of its rich history and 1920s heyday. Part of that, I think, is because our house there was very old (built 1890), and so the history felt very close and important.

So what would I change, if I were writing this now? First I’d want to go in and see the hotel. I used the subjunctive voice instead of asserting “I went there” because I have never gone there.

I regret not doing that. What would happen, a security guard would ask me to leave? I would feel like I’m in trouble for the rest of the afternoon? Who cares. Also, when I was back in Fort Dodge, it was the pandemic, nobody was out doing anything.

Maybe I’d also do a little more research about what was actually there, more fact and less speculation.

My other edit is that I would put more of myself on the page. The hotel isn’t that interesting on its own, and neither is the town, what’s interesting is that someone (me) cares so much about it and wants you to pay attention. I got that note a lot in my classes: “tell us what the narrator is thinking here.” Maybe I thought everyone else was too confessional, but they were probably right to say that I was too reserved. If I’m so proud of Fort Dodge, then say that. I’ll start by writing it here.

Return To Office

We’ve talked about work, we’ve talked about a building, now we’ll talk about buildings where people work.

This week Becky and I drove to Dallas and back, and the last hour of the drive south was through the northern edge of the metro area, suburbs like McKinney and Plano and Frisco. The highway was flanked on either side by enormous office buildings, and I’d be stunned if any of them were more than like a decade old.

I loved them. I loved how clean they looked. I imagined myself walking through soaring air-conditioned atriums. I can’t imagine what they do with all that space. In New York or whatever you have to be efficient and build straight up, but in Plano you can build as wide as you like. I was gawking out the windows like it was Yosemite.

Loving corporate architecture is not my coolest trait, and that’s fine. Told Tucker about my drive and he says it sounds like I’m turning 30 soon. 

The show Severance is back on the TV, so I’ve been thinking about that. Whether or not you’ve watched the show, the relevant part is that it’s set in an intimidating corporate campus that reflects an air of depersonalization and uncanniness.

The Bell Labs building in Holmdel, New Jersey, is the building they show to represent the Lumon building in the show. And that office actually is beautiful, unlike the normie boxes I was excited about this week. Eero Saarinen designed it, same guy who did the Gateway Arch.

And first of all, wow! That’s great. What a space.

Also, thinking about all this reminds me of a book I picked up in 2023 that I love a lot: The Office of Good Intentions. Human(s) Work by Florian Idenburg and LeeAnn Suen, photography by Iwan Baan. It’s an art book, based on photos of unusual offices, but it has these sprawling essays about what spaces for work could look like. There’s a punk attitude running through about how selling out and overwork has ruined working, but also, wow, can you believe these incredible and bizarre designs that the corporations have made? What if everything was this good? Is that within our reach?

If Severance is using the layout of the corporate office to emphasize how isolating it is, The Office of Good Intentions is isolating that layout so we can think about the design itself, to appreciate it and reflect on its purpose. 

Let’s close our time together looking at some photos of offices. I took some low-quality scans because I thought that was in keeping with the zine-like style of the book.

Here’s the are.na channel for this month. I did not cover most of the things I saved in there.

Expect the next edition on March 7, which is a Friday.

Heaven is calling me.