Update

And on Labor Day, autumn falls like a wet blanket over the joyous bonfire of summer.

It is delightful to have the windows open to cool breezes and to listen to the outside noises, ironically evocative of summer:  busy birds, neighbors' A/C units, windchimes, cicadas, and distant traffic.  But it's difficult for me to get enough of summer.  A country drive south of the Mason Dixon Line, I'm safely in the blue territory of the BoNYWash megalopolis, but I think I'll always miss the token winters of Florida.

Marc Weidenbaum, whose creative output I follow at disquiet.com and through his newsletters, has recently been advocating for blogging (indeed, he claims to have been doing so uninterruptedly since before the word was born) and posted a link to a fellow blogger's shared argument that I found especially compelling:  that blogging did and does a better job of what social media has usurped, namely, sharing your life with friends and family.  That point clicked into my thoughts about social media like a critical missing tetromino.  Too, while I've understood for a long time the value of writing as a means for organizing one's thoughts, both Weidenbaum and Donaldson praise regular blogging as an ideal arena for that process.  These ideas and others have led me recently to determine that I need to spend more time writing here (and for my professional blog).

I briefly had a few blogs back in the late 90s and early 00's, including the original version of circlingcrows, but my motivation for posting was unsorted, so my use of it (and, consequently, my output, to the degree that that was a goal) was even more inconsistent than that of my current sites.  Of course, in the context suggested by Weidenbaum and Donaldson, consistency isn't a goal in and of itself, but an ancillary outcome, one way of scoring the time and effort I put into thinking.  And consistency arises out of my willingness to say yes, in any given moment, to sitting and writing when I have a thought that seems worth investigating.  One of the things I appreciate about Weidenbaum particularly is that he seems not to have a minimum length for his posts; sometimes they are a few sentences, but sentences worth engaging in (at least for him, but more often than not for the reader, too).  Take this in the context of social media's practical microblogging format and, to my mind, you've got no reason not to blog.

So, my plans are to take the occasional thoughts that I have specifically not posted on Facebook and explore them here.  In its most recent iteration (since 2011), my intention was that this blog be primarily about music, but, while I intend that it continues to be a place for my musical efforts, I'll be expanding the rubric to include pretty much anything that isn't better placed at DNLPS.

And now, time for breakfast.