Spring...er...Summer in Minnesota

AKA "Where you been the last nine months, Jon?"

“Where you been?”

“How’s things going?”

How you holding up in Minnesota?”

“Are you busy?”

“How’s the book doing?”

“Why haven’t you posted anything in a while?”

Okay, I made up the last one. No one has expressed any concern that I haven’t posted here since last August other than a brief rage post about the shooting of Renee Good in January.

I, however, have felt quite guilty on that point so even though no one has asked me, I have been asking myself the question enough times that it felt reasonable to include it.

The short answer to the unasked question is “stuff.” Totally acceptable to skip the rest of this post if you’re satisfied with that answer. Thanks for reading.

And, while I promise to be a better correspondent in the back half of 2026, I think we’re all a little too road-weary of my yo-yo approach to managing this page to take that declaration as definitive.

If, however, you want the LP version of the answer, read on because - to me at least - the details of the stuff matter and it touches on answers to the other questions. In a sentence, though, it’s life, work and the book.

Life

I’ll start here because, on this front, the news is almost entirely good.

In March - when I first started writing this post - my daughter got married in a beautiful ceremony and celebration held amid a late-winter snowstorm. Her last name is now 21 letters long, and I found out two weeks ago that I’ve been mispronouncing it for the last six years. Apparently, no one wanted to hurt my feelings by correcting me. They are such a wonderful couple it makes me smile just writing this.

This milestone put my oldest daughter “on the clock” as they say when one Super Bowl city hands off to the next, as she and her husband are expecting their first - and our first grandchild - in June.

Like today. Today is the due date.

They seem incredibly calm and relaxed about this life-changing event but when I stop and think about it, it’s easy to understand why: they are two of the most capable and caring people on the planet, the kind of parents you hope children are raised by.

The jury is still out on me but I know my wife will be an amazing grandparent just as she is an amazing parent.

Then, in September, my son is set to marry his wonderful fiancée. They are two amazing people who are - if possible - even better together. That has been one of the greatest blessings of my life, that all three of my children found partners who are perfect for them, who make them better versions of themselves. My children, in turn, make their partners better.

So, 2026 is a pretty big year in the Austin family calendar.

The other big life report is my health. As some of you know, the back half of 2024 and last year was when my body decided it had had enough of my lifelong multi-step approach to health care - take a lot of Advil and Aleve, take an obscene amount of it, take even more and try to sleep it off, go to urgent care as a last resort - and decided it was time I got an insider’s view of America’s health care system. I wrote about the heart stuff back at the end of 2024 but 2025 was the year of the lungs. It’s been an education.

- For example, I have learned that when a specialist calls you “an interesting case,” this is not a positive.

- I have learned that when there is one, then two, then five people looking at an image of some interior part of your body, it’s not because they’ve never seen something so beautiful.

- I have learned that the people who create the marketing names for drugs like the letters “X”, “Z,” and “Y” a lot and use them way more than the rest of us in multi-syllabic words that almost sound like real words but aren’t, they’re just trademarkable.

And, thankfully, I also learned what’s going on. After my first stay in the hospital and…I don’t know…maybe a bazillion tests, they figured out that I have a special form of rheumatoid arthritis that attacks the lungs as well as the joints.

Fortunately, there are treatments for this condition and my amazing medical team - led by my pulmonologist and my rheumatologist - really dug in and found a treatment that has given me back a lot of my lung function. Not going to run any marathons - ever - or even sprints but perfectly fine for most everything else.

I am enormously grateful to them and everyone else I’ve gotten to know over the last 18 months of tests, treatments, scans, probes, being wheeled, pushed, prodded, stuck, therapied and measured. This has been almost exclusively through the HealthPartners/Methodist Hospital network - not sure what their relationship is but it seems pretty intimate from a patient perspective - and I have felt well-served at every turn. There are massive problems with our healthcare system but over the last couple of years it has worked for me.

And while it seems like a less-sharp memory today - mid-June - than it did in the first three months of the year, the other big life thing for me was the invasion of my community by my own government. From December to March, it honestly felt like the Twin Cities - and greater Minnesota - was under seige by thousands of DHS personnel who killed at least two Minnesotans - both clearly unnecessary, unjustified and illegal to my eye - and destroyed the lives of thousands more, most for either the flimsiest of pretenses or for no reason at all other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

For several months, I - and I think a lot of Minnesotans - felt unable to focus on much else. I would get up in the morning, check the ICEout map, read the Signal chats, scan the news and share information within my circle. We got involved in driving circles and protests and supporting neighbors who couldn’t pay rent or take their kids to the doctor because they were afraid to leave their homes.

And then, when the regime realized just how poorly their actions were playing here and elsewhere, it slowly eased. It wasn’t sudden but by mid-April it felt normal-ish again and now - for those of us who are lucky enough to be able to do so - it feels like an awful memory leavened by the reminders - so many reminders - of the basic decency of people.

This community has received a lot of attention and praise for its resistance and in my observation it is justified. Wherever I looked I saw people coming together for one another. That, too, is something that happened this spring amid all the awfulness and it was inspiring.

So…life. Please read it as it was intended: as a brief summary of why I am indeed far luckier than I deserve.

Work

I continue to actively and enthusiastically work in the PR niche of “special circumstances,” and here, too, things have been busy. I ended up spending April on site with a client and am working now on three mergers/acquisitions, a leadership transition, a series of thought-leadership pieces and an ongoing protest campaign.

And, yes, spending a lot of time figuring out how to use AI in my work. This is interesting and important on many fronts for me - work, the book, general interest, etc. It should be important to you as well.

There are about a billion thought pieces out there about what AI means for us as individuals and on a societal level so I won’t try to add much to any of that but here’s my one-sentence advice to everyone reading this piece:

If you’re not actively using AI on a regular basis and learning how to incorporate it into your work as something more than just “smart Google” you’re behind and losing ground.

I say that for anyone who is a “knowledge worker” without any regard for what your subject-matter expertise is. Doctor, attorney, financial analyst, advertising executive, PR person, geologist, paleontologist. If you’re not figuring out how to use AI responsibly and effectively to make you better at your job I guarantee that the person in the next cube or the corner office or window in your Teams meeting is. I guarantee the “native AI” generation that is growing up with this technology is doing it. There’s a fair chance that the AIs themselves are already doing it.

So…work.

The Book

Which brings us to The Book. Sadly, the fact that the book is third on the list is not an accident; it’s the reality. After life - the mostly good and the other stuff - and work, whatever time I have left should be spent on marketing and promoting the book.

Which means I market and promote the book about as often as I make a post here.

Which is a shame. The book isn’t perfect - I am reminded of that every time I have reason to open it and am confronted with an inartful sentence or a typo - but it is a good book - I am in fact unseemingly proud of it - and it definitely deserves a better effort on my part.

And to go back to my point about AI, here too there are tons of AI-driven apps, web sites, etc. out there that will help an independent author like me create social media, marketing copy, etc. Some of it is AI slop but some of it is very good. Maybe the next generation of agentic AI will make the ads and place them too.

But, despite my best efforts - or lack thereof - the book is still selling. Right now, as we speak, someone somewhere in the United States is reading it. Maybe more than one person as all I know for sure is that yesterday somebody read 157 pages of it.

As an aside, if you want a goood working definition of an insecure author, it’s got to be the image of me hitting “refresh” on my Kindle Direct dashboard every few minutes.

Maybe…maybe, maybe, maybe… this summer will give me a chance to be better at this.

If you have any suggestions or ideas on this front, I’m all ears. The obvious idea - hire someone like the amazing Leslie and Aarron who helped me with the launch - is probably the right one but it doesn’t work from a budget perspective.

The Summing Up

Well, here we are again. A couple thousand words of apology and explanation for my absence. Which, again, no one other than me was probably terribly worried about.

I would love to know what everyone else is up to, how you’re feeling, how you’re using - or not using - AI. Plans for the summer. Life and work updates. Maybe you’re writing a book too! Love to hear from you. I started this page to be a community and that’s still what I think that would be the most interesting use of this space.

So, if you’ve made it this far, go a little further and leave a comment. Start a conversation. Point out a typo or a sentence that doesn’t make sense. God knows they’re there. Share a high and a low. Share joy is increased and shared pain is lessened. I believe that. I also believe in the power of shared gossip, shared recipes, jokes, memes, etc. so cast your net wide. What do you want to talk about?

The Header Image

For the last couple of years I’ve been relying on Midjourney for the header image but this one comes to us courtesy of Anthropic’s Claude. I dumped a draft of this post into Claude and asked it to generate an image it felt appropriate and that’s what it came up with. Points for going in a different direction than one I might have thought of but points off for not being terribly interesting IMHO.