15_the_circle | topic drift explained

[OT from cottage renovations]

szap commented about topic drift (she was kind enough to call it "expansion") in this space.
some context for it can be found in the following excerpt from an email to a Grover-in-exile.

...
the past few years have brought disappointment and sorrow and how I have come to react to much of it has been to merely set it aside. there's the madcap Bush administration with its horrible war, devastation of the environment, wrecking of the economy and of international institutions and its gleeful triumph of a mean-spirited ignorance over science accompanied by the solidification of its grip on the political process. yet there was and is no viable alternative, and it is as if the time and effort put into the last campaign were completely wasted.
closer to home we are facing the crushingly expensive and destructive highway that is being pushed by our state and county officials, and a regional planning process whose corruption has been publicly revealed but which seems immune to any sort of reform or even the smallest piece of accountability. developers don't seem to have become less greedy, and between them and the road builders what will happen to the Town will be nothing short of catastrophic. and there's no viable course for peaceful opposition on that front either.
at close range the effects of bereavement and other loss are perhaps smaller in absolute scope but loom larger in a personal way that one has no way to escape.

the only course open to me has been to limit my own exposure to that which has proven to be beyond my ability to change. it just doesn't engage any of my attention any more.
so I have dropped out of GWB's America. I seldom leave the Grove other than for going to work or errands nearby -- my personal transport is 100% bicycle and transit these days. I am sure others see a car-free life as eccentric and limiting of options, but circumstance has made it possible and by having let go of the automotive aspect of our modern society I have become free of it, just as I did years ago with the TV.

as I leave more and more of it behind, the world becomes in some ways a smaller and smaller place, allowing an intensity of focus in this particular spot -- wherever I look there is a beauty that is often taken for granted or not even noticed. for either to happen is tragic given its ephemeral nature. so I stop and look, and what I see I try to share with others that they might regard it (in all senses of the word) while that can still be done.

I do not wish to abide anywhere else and have put time and effort into making the cottage comfortable and attractive, into doing what little I can for the Town and its people, and into trying to understand as best I can what this place is really about. it is a continual source of astonishment and sorrow that I have never found anybody with whom to share this, and there is no moment worse than Valentine's Day to be reminded of one's condition of involuntary solitude. but one must deal with things as they are and that lack need not be a hindrance: it just means that whatever I see and find, while it cannot be shared intimately with one person, can at least be received by some few who might be within its range and who might care to pick the message out from the many that constantly vie for attention. if in doing so I can communicate to anybody, even in this seldom-viewed journal (though perhaps at some time also in some other mode of expression) the sense of wonder and delight to be found here, then I can feel that good has come of it.

topic drift explained

hope ...