Today I Started This

A few weeks ago, I was scrolling Craigslist — not looking for anything in particular — when I saw a post from someone trying to rehome a leopard gecko. They said they were running out of space for herps, and that this lizard was a rescue who’d been rehabilitated and was now ready for a new home.

I’d had one as a kid — a fat-tailed little tank of a lizard with tiny hooked feet and amazingly soft skin. I’m not sure why, but I suddenly had to have him. And now he lives in a terrarium on my desk at work.

He doesn’t do much. Mostly he sits in his cave or hangs out under a leaf, blinking slowly. But I get an inordinate amount of joy from looking at him. There’s something grounding about having a lizard silently judging you while you write grant emails.

Of course, now I have to feed him. Which means bugs. And once I started looking into raising my own feeder insects — mealworms, black soldier fly larvae — I realized it fits right into the kind of small-scale, circular systems I’ve been working on for years. It scratches the same itch as composting, hydroponics, mushroom farming: turning waste into life, and life into something useful.

I’ve had the urge to start writing about these things bouncing around in my head for a while. Having this lizard on my desk finally pushed me to act — to build more, and to start documenting.

So this is the start. Not of a company, and not of some grand initiative. Just the beginning of logging what I’m building in the margins of my life — vermiculture bins, worm trays in old mushroom crates, cracked hydro reservoirs in the shed, and whatever comes next.

Circular Logic New Mexico is the name I’m putting on all of it. It’s where I’ll write about the trials, the ugly prototypes, and the weird joys of trying to make waste productive. I don’t know what it’s going to become, but I know myself — and I know my drive toward expansion. Every hobby eventually turns into a system, and every system becomes something I try to scale — even if just for myself.

So here we go. Me, some mealworms, and a little gecko watching from the corner of the desk.

The man himself.

As yet unnamed Eublepharis macularius

Lurking.