greening the city of baltimore, sustainably...

featured as this week's expert essayist with an audacious idea, www.audaciousideas.org, to create a true model of green industry creation and sustainability in baltimore, maryland.

baltimore has a ripe opportunity to foster green industry growth that will not only be environmentally beneficial, but will also elevate the financial and physical health of the community through green job-creation and generating substantial profit.  this triple-bottom line approach, i call green3.

sean has moved his blog

fellow vegan, cyclist, and life-enthusiast sean has relocated his blog at http://porchbound.blogspot.com/. always an interesting and thought provoking (or laughter provoking) read from sean. i've reflected this location change in my blog roll sidebar for those of you who access from there.

patchouliland

after a 4-day reprieve back in ol' b'more, we're back on the bus to mork & mindy-ville. we headed back east for a wedding, of which we enjoyed last night. spent some good quality time with the fam and caught up with a battery of old friends via vegan eats, coffee, & a wee bit of booze.

it perplexes me, the mental playground of revisiting shadows of your past.

stepping in the footsteps of your yesterday, reflecting on your own evolutionary path. in several respects, it is fascinating to feel the brunt of this confounding time-space derailment.

it had been well over a calendar year since returning to md. after a few hours, the synapses began to fire in the correct order, yet i stood beside myself in awe of how we are so easily swayed by life experiences to dictate our reality.

in this trip, i heard echoes of remembrances--so-and-so were robbed yesterday, such-and-such burnt down, this-and-that closed down...yet, these understandings of a reality, not necessarily my own in the current, are what have my mind skipping on the poorly articulated confounding plerplexion leading this post. it is concerning, yet fascinating how we adapt to different situations and accept them as reality--which can be drastic extremes of good and bad. i stumble on a memory of our old neighborhood in b'more occasionally--we were out for a stroll two blocks from our house one friday night. across the street was a cop talking to a guy slumped on a bus stop bench clutching his bleeding left shoulder. turns out he had been stabbed and they were getting a report as the minutes ticked closer to an ambulance arriving. we were curious, yet shrugged the man's injuries off and kept walking to our destination.

sure, what can you really do, you may ask. same city, two of our friends were inside their house watching a dvd. a series of gun shots punctuates their evening from outside of their home, followed by desperate cries for help. after a peek out the window, they go back to watching the movie.

how is it possible we can do this? it is survival, in many ways. evolution and acceptance, with a sprig of apathy and dash of nonchalant desensitization. in the same way I observed and associated spent junkies in my back yard as simply factors of my mundanity, i now see countless strips of bicycle lanes, soy lattes, and wafts of patchouli mildly interrupting my focused thoughts.

oh, jeebus...

baltimore, i hang my head in shame. you'll never get your act together, will you? this random beating on the no.27 mta bus through our beloved hampden scars my view of the city that i adore and have faith in. take responsibility of your actions, educate yourselves, and get your shit together, b-more.

explosion down the street in hampden

amongst "the urban pirate" (who removes his t-shirt once the temp hits 52degrees) and "toby, the goth wind-whipper" (who wears a long black trench coat and paints his face in scary devilish designs), a tragic explosion back in the olde hood. it appears there were only injuries and no fatalities. the thick skin of the hampdenites keeps us going and going.

kinetic jumping machine

this was the most fantastic thing that we saw at artscape last weekend.

without question, artscape (the u.s.'s largest free public arts festival) is high on the list of reasons why baltimore is cool.

i used to have dreams about jumping 15 feet in the air much like this guy. i hope to have a go on such an apparatus someday.

wait, johnny!

this is completely messed up.

this "kid's corner" came in this month's baltimore general electric (bge) bill. the message is frighteningly clear. yet connect the dots are supposed to be fun, not horrifying.

way to go baltimore.