WHEN THE TIME’S RIGHT
My chest hurts. Like right now, as I type this. I’m not a doctor, nor do I play one on TV. But I don’t need to be, not to diagnosis this one.
There’s a hole in there.
You can’t see it, not at first. There’s still skin. Bones, muscle. Probably an organ or two, I don’t know. Like I said, I’m not House. But it’s unmistakable. Inside, there’s a hole.
Talk to me long enough and you can diagnosis it too. Skip the decade of school, leave WebMD to the hypochondriacs. This is a no-brainer.
It’s home.
Or where home is supposed to be. The space in my chest that once was filled with pride now has an echo. As I sit down to edit the 700+ photos from my recent visit home, I’m listening to Up in the Air by The Revivalists - a song I stumbled upon on an airplane playlist while I was, well, up in the air - and I can’t help but notice it. It’s not from my headphones, not from any audio settings, I checked. But it’s definitely there.
There is an echo.
When you say home… she started, but left it in the air for me to clarify.
I mean here. This is home to me, I said of a place I’m only around for about one week a year. I was chatting with someone I had just met - a fantastic local artist - and she caught me. I had referred to CR as home, although the word ‘Iowa’ hasn’t been on my mailing address in over five years now.
Home is where you live right? Right? But you don’t live here. Well, my body doesn’t. My heart does though. It didn’t take long for this person to figure that out. And once that is established, you don’t have to ask why I’m in town, ever again, really. It’s what people do. We go home.
And sometimes I just need to go home.
We talked about our art, our hometown pride, leaving town, finding your place out in the world, and ultimately - in her case - returning home. The last part really struck a chord with me. The sentiment - you’ll return when the time is right.
A few days later the topic of hometown pride came up again and I posed a challenge. If you know someone reppin’ for CR harder than me point them out! I said, only half kidding.
She did, and she pointed to herself. She sent me a video of a more-than-respectable collection of CR memorabilia, including some books I had never seen before. Well done, I thought. She’s trumping most Cedar Rapidians.
But she ran into me, the same way the Bills ran into the Cowboys. I hate to have to do this to you, I replied with smirk.
I started snapping pics from all over my apartment. Framed graphic art in the office. Magazine covers on the coffee table. T-shirts in the closet. Stickers on the luggage. That’s just a quick spin, I said. I’ll send you some crazy stuff sometime, referring to a box buried in my closet full of Cedar Rapids relics.
But I couldn’t help myself. I am incapable of modesty when it comes to hometown pride, which I tried to stress as I spilled the boxes’ contents onto my office floor only a few minutes later.
A framed drawing from kindergarten, published in the 93-94 Cedar Rapids Community School District calendar (September to be exact). A ‘Property of McKinley Bears 2000’ hoody. An Economic Alliance ‘Market After Dark’ Event Staff tee. A ‘Community Impact’ Award made out to my deceased Instagram pseudonym WILLIE BUCKETS. Jerseys, media passes tickets, interviews. Covers, mailers and fliers featuring my work. A notebook labeled “Stookid - The Cedar Rapids Tape”. A canvas print of the skyline taken from the Quaker Bridge 10 years ago.
I was running the score up for no reason. This person seems to be a sweetheart and here I am about to 50-point rule them before halftime. What am I doing? Why? Am I making up for something?
Of course I am. The fact that I left.
“In order to survive, you got to learn to live with regrets”
So how does the self-proclaimed #1 representor, the person who seemingly loves CR more than anyone (I got on TV and told Mitch I was never leaving, for Christ’s sake) end up in a tiny beach town 2000 miles away? Good question.
2019 was a year of change, and there were several factors that caused me to make the jump (those will get their own individual blog entries one day) but the decision was quick. Really quick. Because I went with my gut. Opportunity knocked and I let it in immediately. Overthink it and it doesn’t happen. I firmly believe, to this day, that it was my chance to get out there in the world. I had to take it.
And what do you know? Three months later, a global pandemic hit, nearly shuttering the doors of the business I had worked for prior to leaving, and cutting my former position down to eight hours a week for the entirety of the shutdown. No way to live.
So in hindsight, it needed to happen. I needed to spread my wings, and as fate would have it, the world took a break for a while; allowing me to get a feel for the open sky, easing the transition. In a broad sense it was actually a great time to move, because there was less pressure to show that the move was “a success” when life is shut down everywhere immediately after. We were all just trying to survive.
But on a macro level, CR had it worse than a lot of places and I sometimes think about how much more I could have helped had I stayed. The pandemic was a haymaker that took us all to our knees, but the Derecho was the gut-punch while the ref wasn’t looking, one that Cedar Rapids did not deserve. I felt like a tag-team partner with an outstretched arm, fingers wiggling just out of reach. Sure I did my best from long distance, but I can’t help but wonder - what if?
This will sound ridiculous at first (and probably later too!) but I often think of two artists when justifying my decision to leave. Artists that seemingly have only one other thing in common - they both left home ‘in their prime’. Hometown-hero Grant Wood, whose name appeared on the front doors of my elementary school, and D’Wayne Carter, aka Lil’ Wayne, my favorite rapper of all time. Bet you didn’t see that duo coming.
Wood left Cedar Rapids multiple times: first to regionally, to Minneapolis and Chicago for school, then ultimately abroad, with several summer trips to Europe before returning to Iowa. Does he ever paint American Gothic without those experiences? Surely that’s an image that you could create without ever leaving the hilly plains of Eastern IA, but does it ever happen without the knowledge he’d garnered in those travels? Are those experiences part of the journey that leads you to creating one of the most recognizable images of all time? Or does it get made one way or another?
To me, the answer is clearly no, it does not get made without those trips. {Editor’s note: I’m about to compare myself to Grant Wood. Deal with it.} Below is an image of CR that I took this past week. It’s a from a common spot and is a shot that could have been taken by any one that lives there. But this image did not exist until last week. Actually, most people look at me crazy when I tell them there are not one, but two 9/11 memorial style light displays in CR.
So what exactly went into the process of taking the picture? {Editor’s note - people who say ‘making a photograph’ instead of ‘taking a picture’ make my skin crawl. House arrest and ankle monitors, bare minimum. Gotta keep an eye on those guys.} Was it my experiences shooting over the last five years? New equipment, and my knowledge of it and the settings needed to capture the image correctly? Familiarity with the area, angles and which weather would capture the light display best? Continually practicing, crafting, experimenting with techniques over the course of half a decade? Yep. It was all of that. This picture is better than my previous work from this location because I am a better photographer than ever before.
That’s a result of me leaving, and living.
In Wayne’s case {Editor’s note: I’m about to compare myself to Lil’ Wayne. I know, I know - I’m with you guys on this one.} I feel I can relate just as a representative. If you think about New Orleans, you think Wayne, and vice versa. I obviously can’t say the same thing for myself, but I did attempt to embody my city. Truly any event that I could stick a camera on, I was there. Anywhere I thought I could make difference, an impact, an improvement, I was there. Year after year. I was in the mix, living in the heart of the city and repping as hard as I possibly could. An ambassador on the front lines.
I wanted to BE CR.
There are plenty of public figures who embody the place that they come from. So why Wayne? Well, he’s been representing New Orleans on the national stage since -checks notes- age eleven. So fifteen years later when he famously left his beloved hometown for Miami in the late aughts, post-Katrina, some scoffed at it. Some saw it as betrayal, others as a sign he had sold out for good.
Neither was the case, of course. Fast forward to 2025: Wayne, once again a New Orleans resident (although he’s got houses everywhere, I’m sure) is universally adored and upheld as the ambassador for his city. He’s got a music festival. They presented him with a key to the city. They created a ‘Lil Wayne Day’. They recently announced their own Walk of Fame where he will be the first star. And the town was up in arms when he was recently ‘snubbed’ for the Super Bowl. Do you think anyone still holds a grudge while they’re screaming “HOW IT SHOOT IF ITS PLASTIC!?” at LilWeazyAna Fest? Again, for me the answer is no. We do what we have to, and sometimes you have to leave what you love.
“The heart of New Orleans, thumpin’ n beatin’”
Back to Grant Wood - they say that after his return from Europe the trips were 'swept under the rug’ , in an attempt to keep his public image as a personification of the American-Midwest, leaving his experience abroad largely unacknowledged. By the time of his passing in Iowa City he was back to Iowa-hero status, a local boy who lived and died in the place he loved, his travels just a footnote amongst his hometown accolades.
So what does this mean for me? Well, this journey I’m on in South Carolina could be the first stop in an attempt to feel that pride again, a search for somewhere or something to fill the ‘home’ sized hole. The cities that surround me - Charleston, Charlotte, Savannah all intrigue me in different ways, and I feel blessed to be in the proximity to explore and shoot them. It is a major goal to make an impact in one of those markets over the next year. When I left, I said I wanted to make my city proud, and I don’t feel like I’m done out here just yet.
However.
This adventure could end up being just be a blurb on a Wikipedia page, a small paragraph in an obituary of a man who loved the place he came from; one that shows in the grand scope of things, his spirit never really left, and his body returned when the time was right.
“So I keep eye out, for the bright search light. I swear I’ll never let you down again.”
[UPDATE 1/21/25] - Although I recieved little to no pushback on my Grant Wood comparison, I still felt the need to defend myself. So here is our work, four feet apart, permanently on display in downtown CR.
That’s my image in the C, just a cherry away from ol’ American Gothic. The photo is from about 10 years ago, taken on the Quaker bridge, same spot as the pictures featured in this blog post.
[UPDATE #2] 1/21/25 - The artist that I was chatting with about home in the early portion of the blog read the post and told me her dad *currrently* lives in the house depicted in the Grant Wood painting “Stone City”. He lives in a Grant Wood painting. Right now. Holy shit.