When I began this blog in late 2006, I had no clear idea of what to do with it. I soon realized that my various interests each needed their own rubric.
My music interests were dropped into a different blog I eventually gave away and I kept a sort of arts blog with music as an experimental content template but really, most of my music writing and music work happens at All About Jazz.
I created another to cohere an array of resources for sustainability and eco-technology but that whole world is still in flux and its real impact on our lives is as yet undecided.
Which leaves me with the Bay Circuit, something I began examining in the mid 1980s but then abandoned when I went off to live elsewhere for 15 years.
I was curious about it all upon returning and have settled into a nice easy routine of dreaming up Bay Circuit article ideas and then heading out with gear, still camera, camcorder, and other odds and ends to carry the outside worlds woven into the Bay Circuit over to the inside world of the web.
The aim is to create useful aggregations, and hopefully, trophy pieces for avid fans of the area living worlds to carry back to their gated face book enclaves. It is a content mill churning out layered details about this elaborate lacework of protected parcels and threaded trails that increasingly appear to be revealed as the very binding sinew, the obstinate core of deeply charming land forms that have been increasingly pummeled by human schemes since men went around in perukes.
It is deeply satisfying however it comes to be received. It is data driven. I simply look up Bay Circuit stuff in various corners of Google and just go make whatever isn't there. It's pretty easy.
I'm something of a louche lout from an urban louche lout lineage of boisterous gin mill buffoons and I carry it with me through my Bay Circuit excursions.
I don't drive, barely use bicycles anymore and am mainly avid to see the remnant living world of herons and chipmunks, turtles and dragonflies and the many verdant flowering things that gracefully sit there while I figure out how to get a workable image.
I tend to be skeptical of things that smack of faux heroic fitness narcissism. After all, I'm an out of shape slob. This means I'm more interested in fathoming the living world as it is without a need to suborn it to some clever life style antic.
At the same time I accept some reasonable facsimile of a big tent embrace for the various constituents who must make lists to cross off or make a more endearing treadmill of it all. I look to the parcels with an eye to where something might best work out given the constraints of crowded little New England.
I tend to see what is called 'suburbia' as a transient imposition born of unique circumstances now no longer in play. The post 2007 recession took the wind from many overblown sails and interest grows in the sustainable. All of these august communities pre date powdered wigs.
They've seen a lot of human folly and grandeur oscillate through their days and the sturdy parcels that escaped the worst or saw robust recovery now rise to an occasion made for them.
It has become common knowledge, post recession, that green space amenities have served to stabilize financial disruptions in the way the wetlands stabilize the water supply. The well appointed green space lands took less of a hit when home values went south and now present a less challenging sales prospect.
The enthusiasm of many in breathing life into it all over the decades since I first noticed it is easily one of the most comprehensive applications in my life time of that Taoist truism:
In the best form of leadership,
It seems as if the people did it themselves.
