I'm quiet because I'm working

I know my small readership is shrinking, dwindling by the day with my silence. I'm still getting the occasional google hit ("phonetic highland cow" the mind boggles. "Toronto wonderboy huge cock" must, unfortunately, have been a disappointment. In so many ways.) but the rest of you are quietly tiptoeing out of my quiet little salon. Can't say I blame you. All I can say is that the reason I'm so quiet here is because I'm being very noisy elsewhere. To give a hint -- I have a colleague who helped start a very large and very successful research centre somewhere not far from here. By way of advice, he told me that the way to do these things is to find somebody somewhere who is willing to give you a few bucks (even if those bucks aren't even 'real' bucks so much as manufacturer's discounts -- we call them 'in-kind' contributions in the research biz) and then take the story somewhere else and ask them to match those bucks. Then go brag to your university about how much money you've raised and then they'll give you more bucks. Then go to the government and give them the figure and suggest they match it. By the time this fellow was done, he had a new building, a new set of colleagues, and a grand opening attended by a score of international luminaries. Something like that (though on a much smaller scale) seems to be happening to me. Buzz is like resonance. There's a little boy sitting on a swing, and I'm trying give him a precisely timed little push every time he passes by to make him swing higher. Not much of this is my idea, so I suppose I'm being pushed a bit as well. It's exciting, time-consuming, and, much as with my little frisson of excitement in the publishing world, my health is being affected by fears of what could come to pass from all of this. So there. I've kind of explained my silence. I'm being dragged, kicking and screaming, into another little pool of limelight not of my own making. I want it to work out, but I know that if it does it will mean more unpleasantness for me. I'll have the pleasure of seeing positive change flow from my efforts, but I'll be forced to amplify those efforts in ways that will pull me out of my comfortable shell.

Something like that, anyway.

So I'm here, working away, feeling slightly ill most of the time, vertiginous, barfy, belly full of jello, excited, frightened. Still thinking much about mixing of spatial and temporal scales. It's the origin of politics (not my idea, that, but one that keeps jumping into my head because it's so apt), the origin of much urban chaos, the origin of much metaphysical angst. It's behind every collision between pedestrian and car, and it's behind most bad planning decisions. But the interesting part of it all for me is not that we do it but that we can do it.