Cool is… an elusive essence.
According to this theory, cool is real, but also unknowable; like the Tao, or The Way.
Encinitas is suffused in things ‘too cool’ to have names.
Even, official city business electronic letterhead is cool, here…within our state of being.
I learned this after receiving an e-mail answer from Nicholas Buck, ‘Nick’, a Daimyo at the City of Encinitas’ Parks-and-Recreation Department on electronic letterhead; I saw a ‘cool’ Department Logo or ‘branding’ while I contemplated the ‘meaning’ of Mr. Buck’s response.
The Parks-and-Rec logo, a brush-stroke brand of sorts, with a built-in story or narrative iconography; sort of looks like a silhouette of Clint Eastwood at the Beach, bluff-top, facing West and searching the waves at Sundown, City ‘branding’ that was just sooooo cool; but at the same time…subtle, so months later, again; when I was visited by the visual coolness of the department logo/brand, I wrote Mr. Buck and asked the history of the Parks and Rec logo.
While I waited for his reply, listening to homeboy, Ravi Shankar’s ‘Passages’, composed with Phillip Glass, I remembered a ‘cool’ day at the beach, nearby.

COOL AS AN ELUSIVE ESSENSE
In 1986, when I returned to my bride’s hometown, I was wandering the beach below the bluffs at the near-shore junction where Seaside/Palisades meets the Solana Beach bluffs and caves, lost in my thoughts about ‘how’ I had suddenly come to be carried-away to my dream-town, Encinitas; and while tossing little black stones into the incoming tide became a kind of physical manifestation for the arc of flight of each stone thrown, matching my own flight down the coastline from Pasadena to Encinitas, with only a fortnight’s notice, to become…
Turbulence protecting peace in a circle of wonder…the magnetic waves, wind and water always worked as a tonic to refresh my mind during times of unexpected change, so I meandered south from Seaside parking lot towards Del Mar, whistling into the echo of sea caves under the roar of the Pacific…cosmic questions roiling my mind…
“Hey!”
I didn’t know the man who hailed me from his back patio on the bluff top above me, but he seemed to earnestly want to speak to me and at once he stepped over a low wall and began descending the staircase at Tidal Basin…halfway to the Solana Beach parking lot Ole Ed Fletcher had whittled out of flagstone with a fire hose one morning to create access just north of the Del Mar and the secure bluff-top compound of J. Edgar Hoover.
“Hey, are you lookin’ for something?” The man asked.
“Yeah,’ I answered,
“Is it a surf board? Cuz’ we found a surf board left here over night.”
We both wordlessly looked to the waves and shared an unspoken concern that a night surfer might have drowned last evening after dark and that his riderless board, washed ashore, the last proof of his existence on Mother Earth.
“No, I didn’t lose a surf board,” I answered.
“Then, what are you looking for?”
“God. I was looking for God, or at least a ‘sign’ from him.”
We both burst into laughter.
“Well, he’s down here somewhere. Yer’ lookin’ in the right place.”
“I thought so.”
The Gentleman began to climb back up the bluff stairs to his back patio.
“What’s the lost board look like?” I called up to him.
“Its a Caster.”
“Caster?” I laughed, recognizing the Shaper’s name. “We just moved in next door to his widow, Laura in Village Park.”
“Its a beauty. Sure would be a tragedy if no one came along to claim it.”
Armed now with the knowledge that I had been brought down to Encinitas from Pasadena to somehow help the Casters…somehow…. people I didn’t really know, this ‘sign’ would have to satisfy me for the time being.
The Gentleman reached his patio, up top and as I watched, he held the top of the Caster board by his pointing finger and slowly spun it back to front, so it reflected the sunset color for a moment.
I admired it then waved farewell and began to move quickly back north, up the beach. I had to move on to Glen Park quickly and pick up my daughters at the City’s Daycare.
So many ‘cool’, elusive moments remembered but uncaptured at the beach; sublime, shibumi, silken…shadowed…
BANSAI FROM MR. BUCK
Just as I was looking for God, so too is the seeker on the bluff counting the waves and sets, solo, fleshed out in the Parks-and-Rec’s department logo, even the smallest details about Encinitas can be so…elusively inchoate…
So cool.
Nick Buck answered that when he and Mike Pacheco had been working in concert to raise the identity of all the fantastic Parks-and-Rec Programs that you can read about in the New Recreation and Summer Camp Fun Catalogues right here:
http://www.cityofencinitas.org/Government/CityD/ParksAndRecreation/Recreation+Programs/Recreation+Guide.htm
And that, being from a generation after the Boom, he and Pacheco tried to design something more….’cool’ than the 1986 City of Encinitas logo with the headless horse, so the department took a bunch of photos around the city and then set down with a freelance designer and the photos of the seeker on the bluffs and after some concentrated time and effort; epiphany…and what is more elusive than…
A Brand was born…and it is hard to argue…the Parks-and-Rec logo IS so ‘cool’ and semi-conscious in its approach and meaning.
Eight brush strokes; wave, wave, bluff, bluff, man, board, trunk, foliage…part art, part poetry.

COMING SOON,
Bewitched by the Kitchen Witch, nightly theater on the half-shell in New Encinitas, freshly, baked, buttered, blended, Bordeauxed…night class with night caps!
Kohl’s for New Castle?
Is Kohl’s Moving into the boarded up Albertson’s?
Surf’s-Up!!! July 22nd at Headlines for Hair!!!
The Kids Are ‘Still’ Alright!, or, With $44 million you ‘Should” get egg roll…Green Eggs and Porkbellies…When going ‘Green’ isn’t really ‘Green’, or good for your green.
General Plan Update Workshop 2035 with Council; north county elections round up, first annual BENTLEY”S anniversary party with 2010 nominees for New Encinitas Businesses of the Year, a Steinway for Cornish Avenue, ’35-25’ thirty-five months and twenty-five days, the ‘short’ Life and ‘much-longer’ Death of the Encinitas Visitor Center; Encinitas North Coast Chamber of Commerce’s new home in NEW ENCINITAS; freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose; except financial ties to the city.
