A much-needed recovery period from knee surgery, coupled with the holiday season, left little time for working anywhere but on the computer these past two weeks. No interviews, few e-mails, mostly surfing government Web pages. And the effort produced an alarming deja vu.

While researching a story for NUVO readers in Indianapolis on the connection between autism and toxic chemicals, I returned to territory familiar from my stint as an environmental writer at the Indiana Department of Environmental Management (IDEM) from 1996-2000. I spent hours analyzing Indiana's Toxic Release Inventory (TRI), a gauge for how polluted Indiana or any other state is.

This Community-Right-to-Know tool is a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) database through which polluters quantify their annual releases of "nearly" 650 chemicals into the nation's air, water and land, according to the TRI Program Fact Sheet.

In reality, this introduction to a new Bloomington Alternative feature called "On the Trail" was written after-the-fact, as I've been on this path the past few weeks now. My last two pieces, for example, included first-person accounts of my recent forays in health-care and environmental reporting. And that's mostly what I will be doing here in the near future -- writing more about the journey than the destination.

This new focus reflects a shift in my priorities. Changes are at hand here that demand expanded horizons and time commitments. So what writing time I will have for the Alternative in the near future, anyway, will be used to share the experiences I have researching and writing stories for other publications. There aren't enough hours in the day.

My last two columns and this one, for example, chronicle the sources and information I have found researching a 2,000-word story for a national political newsletter on the role industrial pollution may play in the development of autism.

In many ways, the journalistic journey I am taking into the world of autism reminds me of a mushroom experience I had deep in the Martin County woods in the late 1980s.

As some tree-hugger friends and I led a Washington Times columnist through a valley en route to a particularly egregious U.S. Forest Service clearcut, I noticed what, to someone who had never found a morel before, a specimen that seemed like a giant. Once I discovered the first one, they suddenly appeared everywhere, and I left the woods with a couple dozen in my backpack.

So it has been with autism. Since I started paying attention a month ago, I've realized it is everywhere.

Considering the Roman philosopher Cicero’s contention that a man never really puts his mind to a subject until he writes on it, I haven’t really thought much about health care since the Clinton years.

From 1992 to 1996, I wrote about it at The Herald-Times, capping my career there with a 13-part series in 1996 called Healthcare at the Crossroads, which explored the “driving forces behind health-care reforms” in Bloomington and the nation.

Until lately, about the only thought I’ve given the subject, aside from its role in society and politics, is when I enter the amount my health insurance company deducts each month into my checkbook. I’ve gone years between doctor visits and have not submitted a claim in the eight years I've been buying my own insurance.

Well, a never-ending yen for new professional challenges, combined with an up-close-and-personal encounter with mortality (nothing serious, just expensive), have convinced me it’s time to revisit the subject of health care.

As one who has spent his entire journalistic career standing up to or railing against the God-Guns-and-Greed coalition that has dominated American life and politics since the late 1970s, I must say that observing politics this year has been gratifying, to say the least.

Regardless of what happens Tuesday, watching the likes of Sarah Palin, "Joe the Plumber" and George W. Bush exposed as liars, thugs and thieves has been a blast, not to mention supremely confirming.

Good God. Palin didn't say "No!" to the Bridge to Nowhere, she abused her power as governor, and she pals around with hate-filled secessionists. Joe isn't his name, he doesn't have a license to plumb, and he doesn't pay his taxes. (But he does have an agent.)

Palin and Samuel Wurzelbacher are indeed the poster kids for those who have spent the last three decades aiding and abetting the James Dobsons, Timothy McVeighs and Ken Lays of our society. They represent the ugliest Americans, and the American people appear to be telling them to screw off.

It's almost enough to inspire hope. But then, as a lifelong Hoosier, I can attest that there is no cure for this strain of American Ugly. If Barack Obama is elected on Tuesday, the virus will mutate, and it will only get uglier. You can count on that.

When Monroe County Jail inmate Trevor Richardson formally complained about conditions in the county "correctional center" the day after Christmas last year, he made the place sound like a third-world prison.

"I have been in jail the past 129 days and have been consistently subject to inhumane, unsanitary and harsh conditions," he wrote in a Dec. 26, 2007, grievance filed with county corrections officials. "I don't understand why on a 24 man block we probably average a constant 70 inmates with just two showers and bathrooms available to us."

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In a federal lawsuit filed a month-and-a-half later against the Monroe County sheriff and the county commissioners, Richardson added "dangerous" to his list of descriptors. He asked U.S. District Judge Richard L. Young to determine whether "conditions in the Monroe County Jail violate the United States Constitution and Indiana law."

Hal Taylor couldn’t be any more direct when asked if Monroe County should build a new jail. “No,” the 89-year-old prison-reform advocate answered during an interview in his jailhouse office.

In his duties with New Leaf, New Life, a nonprofit organization that injects a dose of therapeutic justice into the county’s reluctant criminal justice system, Taylor and colleagues like Tania Karnofsky speak face-to-face with 40 to 50 nonviolent inmates each week.

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The jail, designed for 126 prisoners but which housed 334 on Sept. 21, is full of people who do not belong there, they say. Building a new jail would simply perpetuate a broken system.

“If we have a new jail,” Taylor said, “all the problems that are causing this jail to be overflowing would cause the next jail to be overflowing in another month after they got the new jail in. We’ve got to have real reform.”

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Related story: Stoops, Thomas offer alternatives to new jail

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The first stop on a Jim Kennedy-led tour of the county jail is a tiny segregation cell holding a wild-eyed, drawn-faced man who looks to be in his 50s. As the inmate spoke through the inches-thick slit of a window, Sheriff Kennedy told him he couldn’t hear and to speak through the door jam.

A couple seconds after the sheriff moved his ear to the door’s edge, the man started shouting. Most of it was unintelligible from my vantage point about 5 feet from the secured steel door, but I did clearly discern: “I’m a veteran. … Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”

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Just a few minutes earlier in his office, Kennedy had explained that the Monroe County Correctional Facility, which occupies the top two floors of the Justice Building at Seventh Street and College Avenue, was designed and built to house 126 inmates.

After touring two “recycleries” and interviewing at least a dozen public and private officials with responsibility for recycling in Monroe County, the best answer I can give those who asked is:

“Your glass bottles probably are being recycled. But you have to take the word of a $4.5-billion Florida-based waste-hauling corporation on it, an industrial giant that also owns and operates landfills across the country, including one about 50 miles east-northeast of here.

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Ninety-three percent.

That's the proportion of recyclables collected in Monroe County that actually get remanufactured into something useful, according to the No. 2 man at the Republic Waste Services recyclery in Indianapolis.

"Ninety-three percent of what comes in this plant is recovered and turned into some product that is recycled," said Assistant General Manager Mike Laverty.

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Of that portion, roughly 20 percent is glass, he said. It's by far the costliest recyclable material to process and has no commercial value, at least not for an operation the size of his.

"It costs me money to ship my glass out," Laverty said. "I don't get paid for glass. It costs me money."