Dear Reader: this crazytown publication might be just what you need.
If you're drowning in precious or carefully programmed content, and you just want a laugh or wonder what the heck, you'll love Lone Prairie.
This cute cottage is not where I live, though it is a hand-colored lithograph I made in college to commemorate a cousin's sad death.
See, right there you get how Lone Prairie goes.
Something nice followed up by a punch and split infinitives if you’re lucky. The Lone Prairie blog has been, for the past 26 years, a vast landscape of non-sequiturs, I-didn’t-see-that-coming, has-she-lost-her-mind writing.
And that’s what awaits the reader of this Substack, which doesn’t sound like a selling point but, when you consider that much of the writing content produced today is structured around themes that make it more findable (by search engines) and sellable (to audiences wanting an elevator speech summation as they try to grasp what to spend their precious few moments of time on), and also the lack of long, run-on sentences replaced in favor of shorter paragraphs with periodic titles and bullet points, you get what I mean.
The Lone Prairie blog is about everything and nothing in particular.
Cartoons, think pieces, history, humor, fiction (including children’s fiction), art, comments on faith and culture—it’s the Golden Corral of reading.
This is a tough sell in a culture totally invested in specificity, efficiency, coaching, farmcore girl sourdough boss, maxxing whatever, increase potential, and everything else contradictory in nature but nevertheless packaged together that is necessarily fragmenting the psyche of upcoming generations trying to see it all and do it all while selling a minimalist slow-down. Content should be targeted, like a rifle, not haphazard, like a shotgun, is the going thought, in order to have a simplified, clarified life.
“This is the journey I’ll take you on!”
“This is the place I welcome others interested in this topic!”
“This is how I humble brag about how I’m not like other girls/other people/other modern Americans/other ____.”
I got nuthin’.
After 256 years of blogging, I can’t really sum up what I write, though I do swear that the ideas you’ll get in the shower, on long nature hikes, and in other places inconvenient to preserving those ideas, are usually gold. If you don’t have a mnemonic device (or a recording app) to preserve them until later when you can write them down, you’ll have missed out on great stuff, which I have done many times yet still have managed to clog the internet drains with hundreds of thousands of words. My blog is the detritus, the fallout, of holding onto ideas long enough to get them out before they fade away.
I don’t know how to compete with young writers (anyone under the age of 45, but that’ll change upward at an inverse ratio of my joint cartilage fading) nor grab the attention of a very changed reader than I knew when I first started writing.
I’m a GenXer who would write with a flannel pen and still ponders what teen spirit really does smell like, so I can’t figure out what’s going on today. Here we are now, entertain us, etc. is so different.
The Renaissance man is dying. The generalist is dead. Max Headroom probably still has a chance, considering the love of video. But otherwise, the specifist, the branded, the themed, the contextualized—this rules. Block the rabbit trails, outlaw the tangents, plan an editorial calendar with structure. I miss the days of the columnist, the folks like Mike Royko et. al, who wrote about whatever struck their fancy, whether it be politics or some idiot on the Chicago L. Today, it feels as if writers must have a destination in mind, and can’t go out a roving to see where they might end up.
My goal with the Lone Prairie Blog is to:
Explore ideas. Totally random ones. Stupid ones. Sad ones. Hilarious ones.
Tell stories. Totally random ones. Stupid ones. Sad ones. Hilarious ones.
Go on an occasional ranter and rager because I have a low annoyance tolerance.
Be encouraging somehow in the mix of #1, #2, and #3.
Not embarrass my mom.
What value will the Lone Prairie Blog provide?
I don’t know.
Technically, if you’re a paid subscriber, you’ll have access to all the sections that not only include the main Lone Prairie Blog, but everything else.
I don’t have any advice to give you, really.
I mean, I’m gonna write stuff that comes off as advice. But I don’t think I’ve arrived at any point of understanding in this journey of life where I can tell you where to get off. That happens moments before I die, I’m guessing, that pinnacle of entire life knowledge, and I’ll be too distracted to fire up the computer and whack out one last blog post.
I can’t tell you I’m going to provide a community for you to engage with; I’m an introvert, and community sounds awful. I’m not going to “cultivate a space” for you because I’ve had the chore of putting the tines on a spring tine cultivator, and that’s a brutal machine that rips up the soil real good. Cultivation is painful, not gentle.
Maybe I will cultivate a space for you after all.
I had one reader who did a spit-take after reading a blog post and damaged his computer monitor, so I think that’s something of value.
You can put some stuff in the comments but I’m not going to prompt you to introduce yourself or whatever. Leave some ideas, unless you’re a rude, filthy-mouthed pervert. Then don’t.
Feel free to share the confusing writings with other people like you who might enjoy this kind of thing. I appreciate it. Feel free to contact me directly, too.
Unless you’re a rude, filthy-mouthed pervert. Go to Reddit for that kind of thing.
I'm happy to renew my subscription. Big fan.
This extrovert shares the belief that the Renaissance man is dead and the generalist as well. Maybe for the better, for as it reads:
For with much wisdom is much sorrow;
as knowledge increases, grief increases.
—Ecclesiastes 1:18