Let’s Start a Fight

I’ve bought myself a bit of reprise in doing a blog entry this week by getting my latest nonfiction project into print: an article about my former town and what it’s been doing to stop the wholesale devouring of its woods. It’s certainly nice to get back on that horse — I’d done a bunch of work for the Pittsburgh City Paper back in the late ’90s and early aughts, but not recently.

Seems I’ve been scooped by th’wife — “Professor Chaos” indeed. Let me say this about anything that might be said on that particular blog: I remember the day she talks about, and will admit I purposely avoided the farm for a long time because I knew I’d react the same way she did. As Treebeard said:

“Many of those trees were my friends, creatures I had known from nut and acorn; many had voices of their own that are lost for ever now. And there are wastes of stump and bramble where once there were singing groves. I have been idle. I have let things slip. It must stop!”

The reasons for my unwillingness entirely to condemn the new wave of developers are now a matter of record; I don’t feel it necessary to respond to comments from the Peanut Gallery.