The ideal writing place is wherever I am

There are times when I stare at my computer screen full of words and wonder what I find rewarding about this pursuit. I mean, I love to write, or rather, I love it when something in my writing works out, captures something, or conveys an idea or image that matters to me, or someone. Unfortunately it is often a fruitless pursuit because no matter how hard I toil over these lines, they seem to have ideas of their own, wanting to line up in their own formations and march in a different pattern than I’m commanding. Words are rambunctious self indulgent assholes, temperamental, and often oppose my demands. On the other hand, they are my escape, my freedom, my rebellion.

The act of writing is both physical and emotional, and involves flow, the uninterrupted stream of consciousness and ideas that coalesce around words, language. When it works it’s a pathway out of hell, or rather, a way of describing hell that brings others in with you. When it doesn’t work, when the flow is broken, it becomes a different version of hell, where the expression either surrenders to cliche and hyperbole, or worse, inchoate vibes that simulate meaning and story but are really just bullshit. It’s like AI writing, a hallucination designed to make me feel good about myself.

Trial archives. Writing about the law

All of that is about being a writer and the battles we all have with the imperfect and often clunky creative process that tumbles words from our brains, through the funnel of a pen to page. If you read about my arrest, you’ll know the basics of what happened to me, but if I expose my fear, anxiety, and the textured experience of being accused and jailed, you'll experience something intimate and personal that sticks. Then, when I read it aloud, you’ll hear all of those troubled realities in my voice.

One thing I’ve not written much about is an ugly impulse I have to be petty about the people that orchestrated this mess. Friends have asked me why I haven’t been more forceful, loud and aggressive in calling them out. After all, they continue living without any repercussions, enjoying a life in which they rarely think about me at all. I, on the other hand, churn daily, forever writing and rewriting about this, because to not write is to let the noxious fumes load, like being locked in a garage with the car running, eventually it will fucking kill me. Anger can be motivating, but without constraint, it can turn a person brittle and numb.

Read more

As I walked, I felt a peculiar sadness descend, not the sadness of envy, I long ago reconciled with not being able to have a family with children, but the sadness of temporal dislocation, of finding myself much older than I ever imagined being. Does anyone in their fidgety twenties imagine the uncomfortable rigidity of age, seeing themselves as old? I had never envisioned a life beyond my career, never conceived of any other than constantly working, nor imagined that my life would be rendered into tatters by grotesques who sought, and succeeded, in dismantling everything I had built, to be exiled. I live now in a kind of no man’s land, suspended in the territory between the end of my career and the end of my life.

I am animated, still, by relentless and often torturous creative impulses, and yet I am burdened, too, by the anxiety of oblivion, by the knowledge that the life I knew, the life I built, effectively ended on June 13th, 2018, and whatever this is, is merely an afterlife, a postscript to a story already concluded. I’m alive, but everything I did has died.

There is a thing I am loath to speak of, even to my closest friends: how difficult it has been since the acquittal. One would think I should be rejoicing that I am not confined to the Minnesota Correctional Facility in St. Cloud, that I walk free under the winter sky. And it is true, I am relieved, profoundly grateful even, but the struggle against invisibility and oblivion is of a different order than relief. I know we are all rendered into particles and dust barely remembered after we’re gone, it’s the stories that remain, but for those of us wrongfully accused, the ugly stories will be the only memory.

This is not like losing employment, where one might secure another position, or losing a partner, where we might, in time, meet another. I have lost the accumulated work of nearly half my life, forty-some years of building and creating and collaborating, and there will be no other. That chapter is closed, the book sealed.

In this version of death there are no memorials, no elegies composed, no kind words inscribed in some lovely obituary, no gatherings where people speak warmly of what was. The hardest truth of all: there is nothing to show for my decades of effort except these brutal false accusations. My life has become a haunted house, populated by ghosts of my own making, specters that rattle my confidence like chains in the night. I wonder, sometimes, if I will ever be free of the fear that stalks me.

But I am not dead, not yet, and I remain resolved, or try to, to battle against the demons that hunt me in the small hours. Just last week I dreamed I was hiking across a prairie landscape, that great openness I love, when a wolf attacked and nearly severed my leg. It was a dream of being caught between two states: freedom and spaciousness and peace on one side, being hunted and attacked and wounded on the other. In another dream I was consumed alive by a pack of wild dogs. In yet another I was led to the gallows to be hanged. Each time I wake, gasping in the dark, I am grateful simply to be breathing, to have survived another night’s assault.

As an autodidact I am never short of interests, project ideas, but I have few people with whom to collaborate, few companions for the work. In this afterlife, communication with the living has become nearly impossible. I am no Patrick Swayze, able to animate a penny through sheer force of will. The friends and collaborators who once sought my professional counsel, who valued my insight, who worked alongside me and compensated me for my experience, all of them have receded beyond my reach, as if I exist now on some other plane of being, visible but untouchable.

I do not know if my pen is a shovel with which I might dig myself free. I do not know if what I write will reach anyone, or change anything, or matter at all in the great turning of the world. But I know this: when I am writing, I am not in the grave. I am not walking circles feeling exiled from my own species. I am making something, call it art if you must, though sometimes I do not know what it is, I know only that if I do not do this work, if I stop writing, I will drown in anxiety and sadness the way a moth drowns in summer oil.

But it is not enough merely to have a daily practice, to move words around a page, as if a sentence alone can argue with this reality. I have become a kind of poltergeist, restless and agitated, wanting to move things, to throw things, to be obstinate and intrusive and loud and discomfiting. I want to rattle the chains not only for myself and my family but for all the others who are trapped in this same liminal space, this territory between one death and the next, including those who have truly been violated, truly harmed.

In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, John Proctor is arrested for witchcraft. The court offers him a choice: confess to consorting with the devil and live, or refuse and die. When he agrees to confess, knowing it to be a lie, but wanting desperately to live, the court demands more. They want to post his signed confession on the church door, to display it as proof that the condemned are guilty and the court is righteous. But at this final humiliation, Proctor rebels, pleading to keep the only thing he has left, his name. This is from a production at the Globe Theater, in London.

He cries out: “Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!”

Proctor understood what I’ve learned: once your name is stained with an accusation like this, you face a stark choice, disappear quietly into the shadows, grateful you’re not in prison or refuse to let them have the final word. Of all the losses I have endured, of all the things that once seemed trivial, it is this stain upon my name that makes the afterlife so unendurable.

Once you are dead in this way, the stain remains. Words alone cannot rewrite the ending that has already been written, cannot restore what has been taken. But what else do I have? What else is left to me but words? In the end, we’re all the dust and particles of history, but while I’m still here I write. I must write. Not because it will restore my name, not because it will resurrect my reputation or rebuild what was destroyed, but because refusing to be silent is the fight that remains. The poltergeist does not haunt in hope of forgiveness or redemption. It haunts because it is still here, refusing to dissolve into the darkness. And so I write, and walk, and breathe, and rattle.

© Richard Avedon - In The American West

Over the course of a couple of years, I shot and edited hundreds of images that revealed the humor, humility, and humanity of these walk-about performers, many of whom are paid a stipend to spend their days working in the hot, dusty, sometimes rainy tumult of the lanes during a show day.

Most of the images were shot at the festival, either during a show day or a preseason media event. I also photographed performers at my suburban home if they were unable to schedule a time at the festival.

As the work began to take shape, I started writing the text that would accompany these images. I wanted to include some of the festival’s history, performer anecdotes, and photographs from behind the scenes. I captured private spaces, craft booths, and other corners of the festival grounds that most of the public, and even many participants, have never seen. This book was to be my valentine to a place I loved, and to the performers themselves.

In 2015, I began discussions with an agent about representing a tabletop monograph that would combine large color plates with lyrical writing. My goal was to secure a publisher and ultimately stage a gallery showcase featuring a curated selection of matted and framed prints. It was the most exciting and creatively rewarding project of my life, and that I got to do it with and for walk-about street characters, as I once was, was thrilling. However, the attack of 2018 killed the project, just one of many creative pursuits lost in the immediate aftermath.

At the time, I was also studying and deeply immersed in fine art photography. It was a new form of photographic work for me. I collaborated with other talented photographers in town and partnered with nearly two dozen men and women, many of them professional models. My approach reflected the traditions of photographers I deeply admire: Edward Steichen, Richard Avedon, Peter Lindbergh, Irving Penn, and Patrick Demarchelier, among others, whose monographs line my studio shelves. I never came close to the kind of work those artists achieved, because, like everything else, my photography became a target of ire from the agitated, and all of my clients disappeared and never returned.

It is hard for most people to understand what happens when you are accused of such things, particularly when it is in the press. It is not just that you get dinged for something bad; everything in your life becomes saturated. It is not only that you cannot be successful again, all your past successes are corrupted. It is as if all you have ever been known for is this accusation. And that is the point, because everything you have achieved is deliberately tainted by the energumen and their legal shakari.

So here is what I know: if you are hit hard and beaten up, do something good. Make something with the energy that rises out of frustration, anger, and bone-deep pain. From my experience, sitting in the squalor of self-doubt, fear, disappointment, and heartbreak did nothing, accomplished nothing, meant nothing. I had succumbed to numbness and ugly nihilism because I thought nothing mattered, everything was ruined.

What made things worse at the time was that I had to stay underground until the case was completed. My attorney had to speak for me, and with respect, she was an amazing attorney, but she was insufficient to the cause of my personal expression and to the deep animus I held toward the petty liars, thieves, cowards, and crooks who did this to me.

But through the hundreds of hours I spent walking and reflecting, and the long years of waiting, I came to understand that the best answer to the jejune dullards and their small cruelties was not vengeance, but creation. To make again. To speak again. To give shape to something living out of what was broken. To write, to photograph, to record, to call forward a circle of readers and listeners who might find, in the wreckage, a faint pattern of beauty. Because that is what art often does, it can restore order to the disordered, shape meaning to the meaningless. Each sentence, each image, is an act of recovery, a small defiance against erasure. The more I write, the more I create, the more I insist upon my own presence. And that, I have learned, is a kind of salvation no court, no coward, no lie can take away.

But that was then, and this is now. My photography studio is undergoing a remodel, and when it is finished, I will return to the performer series, not at the same scale but with the same devotion. If all goes well, by next summer I will finally have a book to offer. I do not expect it to be the same book I once imagined. Too much has changed. I have changed. And that is okay. I am still here, and I’ll be here again, and again, until I’m not.

*This was the working title of the table top book I began working on in 2014

Gray Squirrel, struck by a car — June 2025

I approached the poor thing expecting to see blood spilled onto the pavement, the crushed body, but there was no blood anywhere—its eyes open and clear, ears rigid as if still listening. I picked it up by the tail and set it in some brush just off the edge of the street. I would come back later to bury it.

This is a thing I do: the animal undertaker, the guy who picks up dead animals and carries them away. A neighbor, who saw me scooping up a dead blackbird, assumed I put them in the garbage. I explained that I do just the opposite: I bury them, many in my backyard. If it’s winter, I’ll take the remains to a wooded area and place them off the path. I estimate I’ve picked up and buried dozens of animals over the past few years. Besides squirrels, I’ve picked up chipmunks, hawks, rabbits, opossums, a raccoon, blue jays, ducks and ducklings, blackbirds, robins, and finches, a Canadian goose, and more. Sometimes their bodies were mangled from being run over, entrails spilled across the pavement; others seemed to have died from unknown causes, intact but inanimate.

Eastern Cottontail, struck by a utility truck — July 2025

I began this ritual in the wake of being called a monster, arrested, and dragged through the press. It was my answer to the casualness of cruelty, the poisonous indifference to suffering. As a photographer, I began to photo capture some of the creatures I found, not out of some misplaced macabre fascination, but as a study of what is both beautiful and tragic, and as a way of remembering.

In 2018, with no career left to pursue, I started walking—often ten miles a day. The fresh air steadied me against despair. But it was on these walks that I noticed the dead more than the living: sparrows on sidewalks, rabbits on the shoulder, squirrels twisted on the curb. I realized I had always looked away from these small deaths. Now I chose to stop, to see, and to respond with care. In the case of my neighborhood, I took more direct action: I picked up, moved, and buried the creatures with my highest regard, acknowledging their existence and recognizing their contribution to the ecosystem

House Sparrow — found in a planter, May 2025

There was one more thread I couldn’t ignore. Recognizing the ugly and often violent deaths of so many small creatures forced me to question my own commitment to non-violence. In the aftermath of my arrest, I was furious — consumed by how radically unfair it all was. How could this have happened, and how could those who spread lies walk away untouched? But death doesn’t care about fairness; it just is. Things die, they get run over, their offspring are eaten, drowned, poisoned, bludgeoned, or shot. Brutality is not an accident but a feature of the world. Learning to see it plainly helped me cope with the coil of anxieties and, in time, to place myself back in context.

Every day I am surrounded by countless deaths, most of which I never really paid attention to — not because they were hidden, but because they didn’t seem to matter. I’m sure I’m not alone. We can all see the obvious roadkill in our periphery, casualties of cars, boats, lawn mowers, poisons. Sometimes we even feel bad for a brief moment. After all, we don’t mean to hit deer, run over rabbits, turtles, or frogs. They’re accidents. And then there are those that die by causes unknown. But in all of these instances, it seems to me, we are running a kind of calculation about the value of a particular life. The squirrel that scurried in front of the car was just trying to cross the street and was killed. The driver, as well as all of the people walking nearby, didn’t give much thought to that small life, and everyone went on their way. But I didn’t. I stopped and looked, quietly measured the moment, and felt a true sadness. This small body was in the midst of taking care of its life, its place and needs, not fully aware of the dangers between the curbs.

Red-bellied Woodpecker — roadkill, September 2025

These winged, finned, and furry neighbors live in trees, brush, rivers, and lakes. Some fly, some burrow, some hide under porches. They are abundant, ordinary, easy to dismiss. My uncle once said of field mice, “Even if you killed them all, that’s not all of them!” But as Barry Lopez wrote, “To consider that the honey bee and the wild horse have their own integrity and perhaps even their own aspirations, and can no longer be viewed as subjects, willing to participate in the construction of a world built to serve the needs and desires of human beings alone.”

At the time I was also enduring my own disappearance. Relieved of a career, undone by falsities and lies, I knew what it meant to be treated as disposable. As Lopez observed, “Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend.” By paying attention to the overlooked, I was saving myself from oblivion. But, death is coming for all of us, and this little circus of temporary amusements will fade and all of us will decease.

Blue Jay — killed by a Cooper’s Hawk, 2024

Each burial feels like a correction to a larger miscalculation. We keep the wrong ledger. A squirrel has no price tag, so its death means nothing. A field mouse is common, so it is expendable. A robin is ordinary, so it slips past notice. But a world in which sparrows and chipmunks count for nothing is a world in which our own lives are cheapened too. By pausing, being cautious, patient and kind to every living creature, or noticing and paying respect to their dead I try, so hard I try, to balance the ledger, if only for a moment, to see with clarity the beautiful tragedy of this lift.

Easter Gray Squirrel Burial - Run over by a speeding car - September 2025

Acknowledging the death of something small drew me out of myself, beyond ego or injury. To respond with gentleness kept me from turning bitter, and taught me that the truest refusal is not hardness but compassion and kindness — a way of honoring every life that longs to flourish, including my own.

*Listeners note, in this article I share some insights I recovered in the wake of Charlie Kirks murder. I’m not staking out positions on his views, nor dismissing the views of those who found some of his words troubling. Please listen for more.

After the murder of Charlie Kirk, and the rhetorical shitstorm that followed, I took a break from posting. The world surely doesn’t need me to say anything. But writing is cathartic, a way to work out what’s happening, and this event hit me harder than I expected.

The evening of Kirk’s murder, after I had inadvertently watched a video of his death, I started putting some thoughts together, but nothing felt right. Everything I wrote began with throat-clearing disclaimers like, “I wasn’t a follower of Mr. Kirk,” or “I didn’t share his opinions…” These weak waivers were just attempts to immunize myself from blowback. So stupid.

But here’s where I come in, because there is something jarringly familiar between what I—and countless others—have endured and what happened to Mr. Kirk. While he was staggeringly successful and famous, I’m obscure, a pauper by comparison. His videos garnered billions of views; my podcast episodes got thousands of listens. The similarity isn’t in scale, it’s in the response to rhetoric.

My podcast, Out Of The Blue, isn’t just the story of being wrongfully accused—it’s also about the environment in which it happened. The #MeToo movement, once rooted in legitimate grievances, mutated into a moral panic. The reaction to Kirk’s death carried the same shape. A moral panic is when a community becomes so consumed by fear or outrage that it exaggerates threats, abandons nuance, and punishes not only the guilty but often the innocent. It’s a dirty bomb: a few targets are hit, but the blast radius takes out bystanders as well. Worse still, those wounded—and anyone who dares defend them—are silenced and shamed. To speak up is to risk being branded a bigot, a racist, or, in my case, a rape apologist.

Once I was seen through the distortions of a moral panic, people I had once trusted chose to believe a fiction. They didn’t weigh evidence; they surrendered to the comfort of outrage. In the vacuum of falsehoods and feelings, a villain feels like an answer, the devil they needed. That kind of thinking isn’t principled; it’s foolish. Stupidity in the service of cruelty is still cruelty, and it is wickedly dangerous. Because, once you dehumanize another, you create a permission structure for violence.

In the days after Kirk’s murder, I watched people clip, quote, and circulate his words as if each fragment were the whole story. Stripped of context, every remark became a weapon, proof that he was the monster they already believed he was. Look, I didn’t follow him, but when I went back to the source, the actual videos, I saw how much had been misquoted, flattened, or simply invented. What circulated was not Kirk, but a caricature. I recognize that move. I lived it. The point is exactly the opposite of liking him or not: truth isn’t a courtesy we extend to friends; it’s the bare minimum of honesty in public life.

Once I was reduced to a distortion, I no longer had a voice in my own story. The accusation spoke louder than I ever could. People didn’t ask whether the evidence matched the charges; the charges became the evidence. In Kirk’s case, too, I saw friends posting with caustic certainty—not because they knew what he had said, but because misrepresentation had done its work. That’s another feature of moral panic: the cascade of distortion, spreading like a swarm. Once the swarm has its version of you, pushing back is nearly impossible.

To be certain of someone’s guilt without evidence is not simply a judgment, it’s a sentence, a severing. People who once laughed with me, trusted me, knew me, now looked as though I had crossed into another species. I wasn’t Carr anymore. I was “the accused.” A cautionary tale. And once you become that, you’re contagious, a virus. People scatter. Conversation ends.

Living with that rupture has meant learning how to carry absence. I don’t mean forgiving in some saintly sense, or forgetting as if nothing happened. I mean accepting that some doors stay closed, and life has to keep moving without waiting for them to reopen. Certainty hardens people; it doesn’t just freeze their judgment, it freezes time. To them, I will always be who they believed I was in that moment.

What I’ve come to see is that distortion feeds cruelty. Conviction—certainty without evidence—is the malware of our time. Once it installs itself, it rewrites everything: friendships, reputations, even whole communities. And the damage spreads faster than truth can catch it.

To find joy in murder, or to have conviction that he deserved it a bullet in his neck, is sick and heartbreaking, whether we agreed on anything at all.

The only real counterweight, as I see it, is kindness. Not as a strategy, not sentimental niceness, but kindness as a discipline, a verb. Asking: who are you being while you’re doing whatever you’re doing? Does this word, this gesture, this act, leave more harm or more care in its wake? Kindness doesn’t need agreement, and it doesn’t mean silence in the face of wrong. It’s treating others with familiarity, refusing to let certainty turn them into abstractions.

I think of cruelty as malware, and kindness as the recovery program. It doesn’t mean the malware disappears; it means choosing to act rightly despite it. Being kind requires something from us.

Finally, I think back to a short story I wrote years ago, before I was ever wrongfully accused. The Windmiller’s Tale, it follows a young man in middle management, unsettled about his future, who meets an older farmer by chance on the edge of town. He returns often, sensing the farm has lessons in resilience and cultivation. He learns the gentle care of livestock, the strength coaxed from crops, and the maintenance of tools that weather storms and yield abundance. But the deepest lesson comes when he and the farmer rebuild an old windmill.

In the late 1800s, American windmills changed forever with one innovation: the blades and tail could pivot to follow the wind. No matter which way the weather turned, the mill would catch it, drawing water from the ground, sustaining life even in the middle of nowhere.

In that mechanism, he saw a way of living. You cannot stop the winds of change, but you can pivot to meet them. You can convert what comes at you—fear, distortion, cruelty—into something that sustains. That windmill became an icon of resilience and conversion. Energy into water. Cruelty into kindness. Life into life, again and again.

The winds will always come; the work is in how we turn them.

*I use an AI editor to fix sentence structures, grammar and clarity. These are my words and ideas.

Looking back, I’m not sure why I believed a travel trailer could resolve my inner turmoil or chart a journey back from the personal hell I’d been thrust into. The idea first came to me in 2021, as a way to redirect my mind when I lay in bed each night. Instead of replaying scenes from the case—images of incarceration, legal purgatory—I tried to swap in visions of the Airstream. I’d imagine the model I wanted, the roads I’d travel, the feeling of freedom on the open highway. To be a wandering flaneur.

Of course, buying an Airstream was financially foolish. Recovering what was lost in the landslide that followed the accusation has been nearly impossible. Few places will hire me, and those that might are too labor-intensive. I applied to be a dog sitter through an online platform for pet care. But I was declined. While I have no criminal record, I have a public one—manufactured by media. A quick search of my name pulls up a mugshot, the allegations, the headlines. Not surprising, I got a note saying “After reviewing your application, we have declined...” You know.

So I drove across Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York along Interstate highways—the service corridors of America. Nothing of interest happens along them. Aside from the rolling hills in Pennsylvania and New York, every state looked like every other.

Why, then, would I find this sort of inefficient travel—the long hours of going nowhere-not-so-fast—worthwhile? Because it’s boring, dull, and perfect. As the miles passed, my mind stopped thinking about much. Just the rumble, the hypnotic boom-ba boom-ba-boom of the tires over concrete seams. The slow unfurling of silence.

It’s liberating to do nothing but drive, stopping occasionally to walk the dogs or take a piss. It’s just road, exit signs, and cruise control.

It felt good not to be productive, to feel out of touch and disconnected. Out there, I’m more of a nobody than usual—just an old guy and a couple of dogs, pulling along toward some friends.

I spent a couple nights at interstate truck stops, sandwiched between the rattle and thunder of big rigs. These truck stops look nothing like the ones that dotted the highways back when I was doing Renaissance festivals in the 1970s. Now they’re closer to mini-marts or micro-malls, with clean showers, well-lit parking, 24-hour fast food, and staffed by jovial attendants.

At night, under the red glow of the semis’ clearance lights, weary drivers shuffled in and out—some ordering fast food by pointing at overhead pictures, their voices thick with fatigue and broken English. A tall Sikh man in a crisp black turban brushed his teeth in the restroom, while others shaved, shit, and scrubbed the road off their faces.

Wrapped in the soft white noise of the Airstream’s air conditioning, the dogs and I slept in our aluminum cocoon, parked on an asphalt lot and surrounded by the strange comfort of rolling commerce—the endless hum of goods in motion, flowing from somewhere to somewhere else. Whatever din of discord plagues our politics and culture, on the road there’s a steadying indifference to the stupid show playing on the main stage of the moment. These trucks are the tail end of a long chain of makers, shakers, buyers, and sellers—their existence is proof that life goes on. When they stop, that’s when you should worry.

One morning, I opened the door to take the dogs out and found a rig parked so close there was barely two feet of clearance. Outside, the lot was overflowing—trucks lined up side by side, dwarfing a smattering of camper trailers. Along the edges, more trucks idled nose to tail, engines rumbling, cabins chilled, their masters sleeping inside the hum

The daily drives were numbingly dull and mindlessly predictable. The pace was neither here nor there—fast, slow, and who cares. To drive across the country is to surrender to the what is of traffic, construction delays, and long stretches of silence. You’ll get there, wherever there is, eventually.

For the first time in years, I felt anonymous—just another traveler in places that owed me nothing. Indifference felt good. It was freeing. The people I met along the way were kind in small, ordinary ways that gave me hope. Things are hard everywhere, but out there, in the middle of here and there, things keep moving. And they will, as long as we have wants and needs.

When you spend enough time driving forward—just staying in motion—the past begins to loosen its grip. Maybe that’s all this trip was ever about: finding a little space in front of me, that I have somewhere to go.

Whatever happens, I know the road will always be there—open, waiting—for me and my tiny tin dreams.