Got my work done today

Just a quick post to show that I printed the t-shirts, and as soon as I fold them and deliver them, I will have achieved my major goal for the week. I also ordered a ton of stuff to dye and print for my own line and a couple of customers, so the busy season has really started.

So now that I started this, I might not post much. But yay, today I got the shirts done, and it isn't even May yet!

Now, if you want a nice "ladies-style" neckline, this is how you do it. Just cut right next to the stitching. Not much you can do about the sleeves except roll them up.

Oh yeah, here are those new hats. Geezer Gone Wild was apparently a stroke of genius, and my friend was so thrilled to get an Ordinary Hero hat I am considering awarding one every week.


Editing to add a story of something cool that happened today. I was in the Kiva and a young woman approached me holding a crumpled $20 bill. She found it next to my basket which was on the floor in the produce section, but I was pretty sure I hadn't had any loose money in my pockets, so I told her she found it, so it was hers. She was pretty thrilled.

Many many years ago I woke up one morning thinking "I'm going to find $20 today." I walked into the Kiva and there it was, right on the front rug, nobody around. It became an important story in my life, since I was really poor at the time, and it seemed proof that money flowed in benevolent and mysterious ways. Which I have found that it does.

While shopping today I kept seeing this woman whose bad boyfriend ripped me off for a $300 order of t-shirts for his crappy band. In my karmic fantasy it was her $20 that got lost today, and I passed it up, didn't need it. So maybe I will finally be able to forgive her for that debt and stop thinking about it every time I see her. Benevolent, mysterious ways.

Just Keep Working

My shop opens to the east so in the morning the sun pours in and I put my tomato starts on the front steps. In the afternoon I am looking out on the lovely day but I'm in the relative dark. It was hard to work today and I didn't get nearly as much done as I expected to.

Two years ago I was working in constant pain as I learned all about disk injuries (ignoring them is a really bad idea) and now I really have to pay attention. You might be able to see in the picture that the disk between L4 and L5 just completely split open and spilled out its Jell-O and they had to pick it out like crabmeat (that's how they described it). My sciatic nerve was being compressed bigtime and I was losing function in my left leg. All my disks are compromised, of course, because: gravity. And slumping. And working too hard for too long and thinking I am strong enough to carry sheets of 5/8" plywood and such like.

I can work for a couple of hours, depending on the tasks, and then I have to do some McKenzies and sit down for awhile. I've adjusted, and enjoy the breaks, but I used to work 14 hour days during the months of May and June and in early July I would barely sleep.

Guess that was the pattern that did me in. I would still do it if I could. I kind of do...on the breaks I'm usually just switching to some kind of work I can do sitting down. I do manage to get most of the things done on my list each day, week, and by the deadlines. Not without some anxiety of course. I love those nights when I work all night in my dreams.

But it isn't like it was that year, thank goodness. I really was stupid about it, just didn't know what was going on inside my body and didn't have time to find out. As it was when I finally had to have surgery, I squeezed it in 3 weeks before Holiday Market and then did the recovery in January. Dangerous stuff. So many of us in the crafting world have worn our bodies out. Farmers too.

My mom's side of the family homesteaded in Nebraska and I have always thought of myself as a farmer. I'm more passionate about blueberries and eggplants and birds than I am about many things. I watch weather constantly and know the name of just about every plant I have ever seen here, in Delaware where I grew up, in Colorado where I worked in the botany lab of Colorado College, and everywhere I go. I have to identify the plants, though I try to refrain from collecting them now, unless I need them to do some art. Lately most of the products I make are decorated with drawings of plants, too. Birds are harder, but plants are fun to draw.

But today I made hats, new hats for Market and the Fair. I did one that says "bike everywhere" with a picture of my bike on it, and a version with my trailer too. I did one that says "Geezer Gone Wild" for my collection of hats for old men. I made one that says "Ordinary Hero" which kinda chokes me up a little. I hope it brings me some great stories when people buy it as a gift for someone. I'll edit in some pictures after tomorrow, because I already packed everything up and my back says I can't lift any more things today. Except a spoon for some frozen blueberries I got at the Farmers Market last week. I'm getting more tomorrow, they are really good.

This week my family wanted to know what to give me for my birthday. I had a really hard time thinking of anything, and said a card would be fine, etc., etc., but my brother challenged me to think harder. Finally I realized I have always wanted to take a hot-air balloon ride, a real one off the tether. I hope I can talk someone into coming with me. It seems like a perfect choice: a rich life experience, something that is on my list of 100 things to do (made way before that got called a bucket list) and something adventurous but not adrenaline-producing.

I still might hang-glide someday, but maybe not. Maybe I will just dream of flying as I have since I was little. I really don't enjoy rousing up my adrenals and never have. Probably that is one reason I like work so much. I can use it for an excuse for a gazillion things I don't really want to be challenged to do. Sorry, gotta work.

I guess it is a good thing I am not a farmer, because I would now have to be more of a manager and tell people what to do and where to do it. I still climb my trees to prune them and can keep up with the weeds and flowers in my yard, and every year I expand my gardens to take up some more of the grass. I need to give up mowing the lawn by giving up the lawn.

I don't think I will go out tonight to pick off slugs and weevils and cutworms though. I have to take a hot bath and go to bed early. Tomorrow the plan is to spend some time on the east block so I can scope out how the weather works over there. Tuesday Market is moving over to that block and I want to find a good spot with shade, but not too much of it. It starts on the 4th, coming right up. Not quite sure how I am going to fit that in, but I suppose I will somehow.

See you tomorrow. Come and tell me something amazing and maybe I will mention you in here. (That's for you, Rich). Just sayin... (actually that was another hat I made today, as per Jan's request).

Full Load

Another day packed with stimulus, sometimes confusing, quickly moving to exhaustion. I tried yesterday to take photos and make contact with some of the other human-powered market-goers for an article I hope to write. Adding that to my forays for food and produce filled my day to bursting, and this morning I'm moving slow. Luckily it is a perfectly gentle, quiet day and I even have open windows.

I weighed my trailer load as I took things off last night: 407 pounds. I had been thinking it was about 300. It's far too much, though the displays looked great and variety is one of the keys to my success. The weight didn't even include the groceries I brought home and the ten pounds or so of stuff I sold. Time to leave something home, the longsleeve shirts or the hoodies or the extra color choices or the camera.

I've been thinking about Bob Walden, one of the vendors who used to haul his crudely-finished kids furniture to the Market from Springfield, on a bike cart. He's featured in what I think was local writer William L. Sullivan's first book, called The Cart Book, published in 1983. I have a copy because I am in it too, and it's a cool slice-of-Eugene from that time. Lots of young Market people and Eugene people are featured in it, as well as many of the carts that led to the ones familiar to our town now.

Bob was 72 in that interview, and Bill tells about the little scrap-material xylophones Bob used to spread out on his little tables for kids to play during the day, which he said was his real pay. I'm looking at one of the little rocking chairs I bought for my son, paying less than $10 as I recall. Since my son was born in 1990, I guess Bob must have still been there then, which means he was still hauling that trailer in his 80's. I wonder now how much that inspired me.

I remember my ex- coming home with a car for me when I was pregnant, a car I didn't want and grudgingly adapted to. I still have the same car, and hope to keep it for those loads I really can't do without it. There are many places it is just too inconvenient to bike to, and after my surgery I appreciated it a lot once I could drive. Bob had a car too, and I'm thinking he just kept it in case he ever got old. He said "If I'm as old as I act, I'm 25."

His cart was a homemade affair of steel or aluminum plate and tubing, longer than mine and with what looks like a bike-tube hitch. The hitch I have on my hauler, one of the most handy features, is a superior piece of gear, one thing that makes the price worth it. Plus the powdercoat frame and diamond plate deck of my trailer are just so slick that I don't have to hide it in my setup. I'm so proud of my deal, but Bob hauled 260 pounds, he said, and to be realistic, I need to develop a process for getting my load down to less than 200 if I really want to be doing this in my 80's. Raven and I agreed yesterday that was our goal, as we admired his new popup. I might get one, but I don't know about adding 35 pounds to my load for something that won't even do that well in the rain, and technically requires weights to hold it down.

Plus, everybody has those, and one thing I am attached to in my life is what I would call my maverick tendencies if McPalin hadn't ruined the term. I like resourcefulness and doing more with less and being flexible and unique. My DIY is a huge part of my self-image. I'm a throwback. I haven't gotten the full use out of my white fire-resistant tarp yet, and I do like the way those drain off the back, and the way the old-style booths can be lifted one piece at a time.

I'm not sure I can handle the effort of the pop-up popping up. Lots of people get a person at each corner to help them, but I don't like to ask people to help me set up. I suppose if I were next to Raven every week we could help each other, but I think I'll stick with my classic booth. I know how it works, and I only need it on rainy days. It fits on my cart, sort of. I can put it up myself, though it worked better with two, and I think of my ex- when I use it. A two-person team can do a really efficient market set-up. I'm tempted to ask someone to be a team with me for the booth setting-up Olympic event at the Big Birthday Party (May 9 at the Park Blocks), but actually, I only have so many set-ups left in this old back, so I am trying to sensibly pass. I'll be a cheerleader instead. Not that I will be recreating the leaps of my cheerleader past.

Bob said, "The culture has made it compulsory to work for the other guy. It's a new kind of serfdom--to a materialistic society. Sure, people say they've got to make money so they can eat, but they even eat too much. I don't think we're as happy as we would be..." He thought a money-less world would work, and some parts of it might, but I don't think we can throw that far back. Still, he found his place at Market like so many of us who wanted something different. We made it so, despite the compromises we have to make to do it now (liability insurance, fire extinguishers in every booth, security, credit cards, inspectors, rules and more rules as we come up with new ways to get around the old rules.) You can't do it with a blanket now, though I guess you can still do it with a wagon and a sign, and people still try every kind of minimal setup you could imagine. Not that I'm against minimal. I've tried lots of ways to get out of stepping up to what looks like hard work, but usually found that it ended up being harder to do it simple than it was to do it conventional. Not always.

He was a shy guy and an oddity and I do try for a little less of that eccentricity in my own life, but I remember my affinity for Bob and my grief at the memorial set up at his favorite spot back in those niches in the stone walls on the west block. I guess he and another octogenarian, Carol Jacobs, the mathematician who sold triangles of cloth made into a multipurpose tool for carrying everything (The Burden Cloth) are two of my Market Heroes.

More than 10% of Saturday Market vendors have been members for more than 20 years. We're there for as long as we can be. We work to make it simpler, lighter, and easier each year, and we get more help from our family and neighbors and maybe new neighbors as we move to the 4x4s as Carol did. There are lots of ways to do it, and I have faith that the Market Board and staff will continue to work toward sheltering us and assisting us when they can. I think Bob got a free booth space in those last years. I probably won't get that, and I have a long way to go until I hit my 80's, but I don't object to free booth spaces for people who bring so much history with them. It might add up to way too many of us though.

Sixty isn't old! I have changed a bit since the days shown in the book. So has the Market (we were on the butterfly lot then) and so has the technology. My old cart was made by someone who runs a very successful company that now focuses on accessibility in construction, and has changed the world for the disabled and elderly. My first cart then erected into a triangular booth made of two-by-twos (didn't hold up, though it was an elegant concept) and I did it with a car for lots of years in the middle when I had a child and a playpen and a big crop of t-shirts. My folding table of last year has morphed into my present boothless setup that depends on zipties (even bungies have been replaced). Each piece of that rack weighs 26 pounds, I discovered last night, so maybe I have to go further. I talked with Elise after market about figuring out a way for her to turn her shelves into a ramp so she can get up the steps, because there is always an elegant solution if you keep looking for it.

Bob's gone, but his little chair hasn't aged a bit. I search it now for remnants of his personality, the familiar signature, the way he didn't varnish the center of the underside of the seat (waste not, want not), and the way he carefully carved the spokes and rails, stopping short of removing the pin-holes from the lathe, and every splinter. The marks of his tools and hands are all over the chair. He said in the article he spent five hours on a chair he sold for $5. I wonder how many people will work for $1 an hour today.

I know I will, if it means I can still stand in the sun on the Park Blocks and watch little kids smile. It's a really, really good life. Thank you, Saturday Market, for providing so many with a home and family.

Appreciation to Tyler, my fabricator from Human Powered Machines, who stopped by yesterday, and for all the others who make it all work, protect it, or just watch and approve.

And thanks, Bob, for doing it your own way.

It was Pluto

Pluto in Capricorn, that is the one causing all the secrets to come out. I think the effect it is having on me is that I expect things to be exposed, so I help it along. At last night's meeting, I just silently willed someone to ask a particular question, and they did! I'm not really supposed to contribute, when I'm taking minutes, so I try to keep my opinions to myself and reserve input for procedural things, like whether or not I should keep minutes during executive sessions. (The answer is no, though I would love to. Not that anything juicy might be going on, but it could be, and I definitely want to listen.)

Sometimes that is very difficult, and sometimes I do speak, but I have found that if I wait, there are almost always others who are having the same concerns. As with volunteering, many times if you step aside, others will come forward who might have seemed to be willing to let you do it all. Things work better if people who might hang back are given the space to step forward. They won't do it if the over-enthusiastic are always jumping to the front, dominating. It takes practice to let the silence settle when no one volunteers, and not be the first to fill it.

I had thought about some behind the scenes collusion to make the discussion happen last night, but vetoed that as dangerous. That tangled web again. Funny to think I am guided by something I heard at age seven but that does seem to be the case. I'm sure it was the reinforcement of that over the years that cemented it in place. I'm grateful for a moral compass of some kind, though, even if it did come with some shaming, because obviously she was letting me know that I was a little liar back then when I was her daughter's best friend. Survival trumps morality, with us humans.

In my work world, I printed something yesterday that came out kind of bad. The separations hadn't been made properly because I forgot to give the client, who was also the artist, strict instructions on how to make them, and the deadline was very tight so I didn't do all the pre-press checking I usually do when it is my art. By the time I remembered all the ways I make sure my results are the best possible, the stuff was almost finished and I knew she wasn't going to be happy with it. It wasn't a lot of shirts, so I took a tiny little brush and fixed most of the places where the two colors hadn't quite met perfectly.

I have often resorted to the tiny brush. One time I missed a section of a color completely and had to go back and paint in a lot of shirts, and I always have to repair hat prints because it is very hard to print those pesky things with that seam down the middle. It's embarrassing to admit to the client that I made bad products. Even though I have a fairly cavalier attitude about it ("It's just a t-shirt!"), the clients and the retail customers really do expect perfection. Here's one I had to do over, because I got the kerning a bit wrong, and it seemed to say "JUST ICE". That one bit hard, because I did them for free. Twice.

My favorite story about that is when I made some shirts a long time ago, for Nice Rice the original, which said "Fresh Squeeze" for their orange juice. When I was crafting the hand drawn letters, I left out the U in squeeze (Freudian, I know). I printed the 50 shirts, all handsigned because he wanted that, and it took a couple of weeks before a little kid said "Mommy, what is sqeeze?" No one had noticed. I had to redo the art, the screens, and print 50 more for free.

Here's the second version, almost worn out. I have one of the originals, probably buried in a deep hole. On Pluto. We call those kinds of things "collector's items."

Perfection is an unrealistic expectation, but not to most customers. They're paying 'good money' and they have no idea of all the variables which have to be aligned to create consistency and high quality. It's not that I'm lazy, but things happen. Sometimes it is really not my fault. Sometimes it is.

I didn't tell my customer yesterday about the little brush, though I skated around it. I told her I use one all the time, and I told her that I am not a perfectionist and my feelings wouldn't be hurt if she found another printer who is. You couldn't tell from the shirts that I had fixed them, and I told her about the art preparation problem so we could do better next time. So, not full disclosure, unless she reads this or gets out a magnifying glass. Or unless Pluto conspires with some other planet and the things wash funny or something. Or unless I am fooling myself, which is likely.

In any case, I will have to re-do the art and screen for next time because she loves the design and will want more, and I am enough of a people-pleaser to want her to be satisfied. I suspect she is a perfectionist. I should find out her birthday. Maybe I ought to ask clients about it first thing, and not take on any Virgos.

Really I want a more forgiving world. One thing that was so perfect about the Jell-O art is that it wasn't controllable, and perfection wasn't even an issue. I have tried over the years to build in some slop so I wouldn't have these kinds of problems with my own shirt designs, and I don't do the kind of precision work I used to. As my vision has changed, I appreciate a more fuzzy outlook. It's wearing to constantly strive for perfection. I'm not convinced it even exists.

But perfectionists are still out there. Some of my clients haven't given up on it like I have. I posted a sign on my wall that says: Price, Quality, Speed: Pick two.

You can't have it all. You do get to choose which parts have to ease so you can keep the stress level down. At some point I am going to retire from custom work and just do my own, so I can eliminate the pressure of trying to meet someone else's expectations. I will try to retire my own inner critic when I do that, and find ways to only do work that can be fuzzy and flawed and still just right. I might have to change media though. Ever since we got these newfangled computer things, everyone expects life to look just like it does on the monitor screen: brilliant sharp color, infinite detail, precise alignment, a gazillion colors in the palette.

I'm going in the other direction. See me for your funky, crooked, uneven prints. I'll lend you a tiny brush and some gold and silver paint if you want to fix 'em up. We need to prize the variation that comes with hand-cut separations and ink mixing without a formula and a scale and a brand new color matching system swatchbook.

I'll just tell people I'm from Pluto, the not-even-a-planet, where we don't care about perfection, but always tell the truth. Somewhat imperfectly.

NRE

I have total New Relationship Energy for my new blog. It's cracking me up. Someone I know from another site called it the Narcissistic Souffle.

I just have so many things I want to write about. Quite a few people have remarked positively on my writing, which I love and can admit, crave a little. Though I do not so much crave criticism. Don't deflate my egg whites.

I journal on another site, which shall remain unnamed, as it is a "dating site" where I discuss more intimate topics. They have comment systems which work really well, and over the couple of years I have been there, a super journal community has developed, and many people have met, and even married through those connections.

We had a small meetup this week when someone from England came on a PNW tour and drove all the way down from Vancouver to meet me! It was pretty thrilling. Last summer I had a weekend party with a whole crew of folks I had never met. It squicked out my son (internet people are weird, you know) but it turned out really well for me and for those who came from all over the US. Meeting in person makes you real and heightens the intimacy we have developed there from reading each other's journals for all this time. It can be a middle-distance experience, like this one is, when you don't get to talk about it through the comments or in person. But that sets up expectations, too, like the expectation of some anonymity, which is a false one, these days.

I haven't really "dated" on that site, because I am such an isolationist, but I have certainly learned more than I would ever have in a lifetime of relationships about how to be an adult, and a person in connection with others. I think a lot of internet people are more isolated than they might wish to be, and the changes places like (okay, I'll tell, okcupid) Facebook have brought are mostly positive. You have to laugh about people Twittering to each other around the Market during the day, but it just adds to the fun. I used to complain about people being on phones at OCF ("I AM at the chicken booth, what chicken booth are you at?") but that is almost out-of-date now. I am out-of-date, in more ways than one. I don't really want to be in constant communication with a bunch of people. But I do check my FB news feed all the time.

I have learned that middle-distance is way more comfortable for me, and very often I choose not to engage, when engagement is exactly what is called for. I like that I am forced to, at Market, I see that I tend to bring some kind of job to most of my social situations. Even with this week's meetup, I thought it was my job to show this visitor something life-changing about Eugene. Turns out what he wanted was to find out something possibly life-changing from me. About me. Talk about your souffle.

I do have things to tell, like we all do. That's why I write. Most of my short stories are really just thinly veiled nonfiction. I process through writing, and I journal every day. I have different types of journals, for different subjects, but the closest I have gotten to publishing is this right here. On the dating site I have a screen name, but because FB uses real names so often, something I like about it a lot, here I can be identified as me. It's scary and also really great. It takes away one of my major excuses regarding publication, that I won't like the exposure.
Fiction is another way of limiting the exposure, though lots of readers project autobiography on authors, and my style would definitely foster that. So what, I guess. I don't really need to hide my past at this point. And I don't really need to hide who I am, for the most part.

I'm trying to face the fact that at the end of my life, most of this one little person's life will go to the dump. No one is going to read my dozens of journals, and probably I wouldn't really want them to. My golden words may already be concretions and goodness knows my Jell-O Art Museum will not be able to pay the utilities to keep itself open (though you never know, do you?) Even this blog, as it grows, will fade away. I have a couple of hundred entries at my other site, and no one is ever going to read all the way to number one. Even my biggest fan.

However, if I don't explain Fishhead Barbie, she will be buried in plastic crap like so much expired mayonnaise. If I do explain her, somewhere on the intertubes, someone will chuckle. Whether or not their life will change is not really important. What is the coolest thing about this rapidly devolving or expanding universe we find ourselves in, is that I can throw my stuff out there right now, and feel meaning in that. It will please me. And that is the best reason to get up and do that I can come up with.

I know I'm an extraordinary snowflake just as important as all of the other billions of us in this blizzard. I can see that I am so much more important to myself than to anyone else. Since I didn't manage the 30-year marriage as I expected and I am at middle-distance with pretty much everyone, this is my best avenue to expansion, journaling to myself and throwing it out into the tubes to whatever end it finds. It's exhilarating. I will look stupid, I guarantee.

So I will talk more about my Jell-O, and might end up writing a thinly-veiled fiction about the Radar Angels too. I have some people coming over tomorrow to view the Jell-O, which I haven't been able to put away yet, and I hope I will hear some of the stories again, the ones that are the same stories I tell but with completely different facts. Because it really is all fiction, when you come right down to it. We take our dreams and our viewpoints and our memories and whip them all up into our versions of the standard recipes, and that makes the banquet that we get to taste before it becomes garbage.

That's one of the things I love about the Jell-O show, the end, when people toss their art into a black plastic bag and drag it to the can. I don't do that, of course, because of my lofty self-importance, but I know it will be inevitable. I watched Sunshine Cleaning last night in my exhaustion. I just hope there isn't too much blood in my recliner, or Jell-O stuck to my floor, at the end.

Oh, and Fishhead Barbie? Barbie as an icon for the feminine needs no explanation, and she was often present in Jell-O art until she was largely replaced by marshmallow peeps. Putting the fish head on her was a stroke of genius, because I was making so many big-world Fish things at the time, and it took her from beauty to something vaguely slimy and dirty. Connotation is everything in Jell-O. She became my alter ego in my displays, representing what I was doing in each particular year. She can be found in lots of my old Jell-Os on mcwho_photos on photobucket (I will go there now and organize my albums, promise). She finally fell apart after being immersed in a soapdish bathtub of Jell-O which rotted (the smell of rotten Jell-O is just like cow manure, if you were wondering) but I thought it would be good to bring her back for one last appearance.

Of course, she will live forever now, on the internet. At least until the big Sun Spot.

Old Habits Die Hard

I was raised Catholic in a family of seven and although our religious life wasn't conventional, I still feel differently about Sundays. I love reading the funnies, though it has been many decades since I shared a dishpan full of popcorn while watching Bertie the Bunyip with my sisters and brother. I don't go to church, and worship plants, if anything, and it may have been those braided palm fronds that were my first craft project. I let Easter slip by, but here is one of my favorite Easter pictures. My Grandmother always sent us fabulous, fashionable Easter dresses which I vividly remember, but in this pic I had changed into my egg-hiding clothes already.

I do revere truth. It was no doubt my early childhood experiences with lying that convinced me that there was nothing really to be gained, though I did retain a fascination with secrecy and peeking into the darker recesses just to see what is there and how it could have survived in such a deprived and depraved condition. I'm still a bit of a snoop, and I will read your journal if you leave it lying around. You can read mine, if you are willing to find out things you might rather not know.

Someone told me that something astrological is happening now that will bring all secrets to light; no one will be able to get away with anything. The outer planets move through the signs so slowly that entire generations are formed within their influences, and really if I had the energy I would google it some more and get some specifics, but Sunday is also the day of recovery for the Market people, and I don't even want to make popcorn or any noise. Saturday is an overload of sensation in every way.
I had a great day yesterday at Market. I was the first one to pick from the few open spaces and got a lovely corner in my favorite area, with views of lawn for spontaneous music, new neighbors to get involved with, and lots of space to organize. I brought a new display and it took me forever to get set up, but once I had it dialed down I was quite happy with it. The crowds weren't huge but lots of old friends and acquaintances came by and I had many satisfying encounters. One of the reasons I like to move around is to connect with new neighbors, since it is difficult to stray far from one's booth, as we are there to work and make money and have to watch our stuff in case of tornadoes. A new vendor (first day, and they will have to wait for rain to set up, maybe) told me they will never try to sell in Austin again, after taking shelter under a car and seeing people's booths completely wiped away.

I stuck to my resolve to pay more attention to other Market members and noticed their new(-ish) work, too. At least I let them know that I was interested, in those quick trips past on the way to get food or water. Damascus steel is amazing and showed up in my dreams last night. I thought a lot about an artist I saw on Oregon Art Beat, whose work I always buy at OCF if I make it around the upper river loop. She said she had been doing monoprints for 22 years and I immediately thought, there but for Jell-O, and t-shirts. I suppose it isn't too late. She made some right there on the show and I know I will be at least incorporating some of her perspective in my future work, if not quite getting to the big studio and expensive press.

I paint and print on silk, though it isn't something I bring to Market usually. Maybe I will for Mother's Day, since my branching out to bring Jell-O was so expansionary for me.

I sent this 21x90 scarf to my Mom this week. I got approved, grandfathered even, for my items for that corporate logo I use, and satirize, but love, that sort of sister organization of ours. I have a complicated relationship with SM, FM, and OCF, and I'm not alone in that. I can't even really sort it out.

I'm pretty firm and careful about my ethics, though, whether there is astrological pressure or not. I just feel more comfortable with the truth than with deception. Maybe I can thank the mother of my childhood friend, Mrs. Fries, who wrote in my autograph book "Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive."

How right she was. When I was having some trouble with my teenager a few years back, I proposed that we have one rule: To be honest with each other. It was a surprise to me how often I used little lies of omission or commission with my various justifications of protections and politeness and rationalization. I'm always impressed when people step up and really speak truth, especially when all their alarms are ringing and they are sweating and full of trepidation. It's more of a goal than an accomplishment, this living of the truly honest life.

People lied to me yesterday, from the Be-Backs who pretended they wanted to buy, but were really crafting an exit line, to the buskers who insisted they had been told it was okay to sell their "band t-shirts". They showed me the flyer Market gave them, and I hadn't known that buskers are encouraged to donate 10% of their tips, something lovely and well-thought out (yay staff and volunteers, once again). I pointed out that I didn't see anything about merchandise on there. They said "Well, maybe it isn't written, but they told us..." Um, no. CD's, maybe. I'm pretty sure you can't sell t-shirts from your wagon, particularly when your "band" consists of a drummer and a juggler, not that I didn't appreciate their energy and willingness to add to the diversity that is so enjoyable on any given day. But I am not the police and I can't confront and eradicate every lie like a rhinoceros stamping out sparks. I am more of a witness. I'm not all that good at the confrontations, often resorting to a skeptical tilt of an eyebrow and a turning away. Sometimes I will tattle. Okay, often.That passive-aggressive stuff started early.

I did find the time to google "divine tension", the phrase which jumped into my head when I decided to start this blog the other day. I saw everything from food to underfloor electric heating (tension straps), though most of the references were religious. As I had suspected, it refers to the push and pull between opposing forces, be they deities or just dualities. To my thinking, we are actually limiting ourselves quite radically if we think there are only two opposing forces in any situation. Often, there are many, which is why we are so easily overwhelmed and shut down. You don't usually just get to choose between right and wrong, or a lie and the truth.

Everything you think and do ripples outward in unexpected or predictable ways. I saw someone this week proclaim his integrity, while immersed in something about as unethical as it gets in our fairly safe little realm. As uncomfortable as it was to witness, it was gratifying that the situation came to be so clear. It strengthened my resolve to be ever more careful to choose the clear running stream over the murky pool of maybe. Short-term gain is not a worthy goal. You have to live here, you have to be able to go back next year and in ten years and stand behind who you are.

You're allowed to make mistakes, and you might not get a chance to rectify them, and you are often forgiven. Sunday will roll around again, you will get a chance to reflect, and then get ready for another Saturday. Just keep working.

"Life is short, but it is wide." You get lots of chances, but stuff does stick to you. Take every chance you get to step up to what you know is the higher ground. Not because there is some heavenly reward, but because you would rather get a smile and a dollar than my skeptical eyebrow and that slimy feeling in the pit of your stomach, and because the little things matter. Sometimes even more than the big things.

This is not the blog I intended to write, since I try so hard not to lecture and moralize, but it was a tough week, and one of my jobs today is to listen to the recording of some of it, and type it up for public viewing. I get to frame it with my words. Tough task, and my slime pit is churning. I shall tiptoe carefully. I may be an Angel, but I'm no saint.

Sun's Out

Must do laundry. I gave up my clothes dryer, mostly because it is too expensive, so now I watch the weather and hustle out to hang things up whenever it is sunny or windy. This actually works very well even throughout the winter.

I've always loved hanging up and taking down the clothes. It's the best birdwatching time, since the birds aren't concerned with people who are doing some routine activity. I saw three woodpeckers working out their breeding arrangements one day. It seemed that the female would encourage one male, and then the other, maybe forcing them to compete so she could see who was mas macho. They made little friendly cooing clucks and cuddled up. I assume they worked things out in the proper time frame and found their hollow tree to bludgeon.

I watched three crows this winter too, and now I see that two of them have settled in the fir tree in my front yard. This displaces the jays and bushtits who have taken their turns there in the past. Bushtits build an amazing pendulous nest out of lichen, moss, spiderwebs, and saliva, and I have found nests and parts of nests on the ground. They build in the lower limbs so squirrels and heavy birds can't bother them. Jays are pretty resilient and will maybe colonize an empty nest in the top of a maple tree in the neighbor's yard, though I saw the red-shafted flickers touring it. Guess I'll see, maybe today when I hang out the sheets.

The crows make a great range of noises and at present are doing some low-pitched gurgles which I think are kind of like the sounds I might make if I were laying eggs. One of them keeps working breaking off branch tips and bringing them to the nest. When I was giving birth I thought I sounded like an elephant, but as far as courting behavior, I'm not too practiced. I tend to stammer and flippantly say things to drive people away, but as far as I know, birds might do that too. Who knows how thoughtful they are about their social relationships? The bird world is probably just as brutal as the human one.

I miss my son, but after so many many years of single parenting, I'm more than ready to not think about the needs of another person. For the last few years I've been simply trying to get my eyes off my internal processes and notice other people. I find that most people rather transparently display their needs if you give them a little bit of attention. I must, too. Maybe everyone else can tell what they are. I'm not feeling very needy, actually.

There are things I need to talk about, and I'm trying to be careful about blog etiquette and won't mention most of them here. I feel the weight of my eldership and want to avoid gossip and anything that might hurt someone else or judge them unfairly. I'm getting rather good at keeping my mouth shut if I haven't had too much coffee but it is awfully easy to type things out and publish them without thinking about who might suffer. I'm not responsible for all of your suffering, but I can help with some.

Today my only job is to get ready for Market tomorrow, for what will be the real Opening Day for me, since I took only Jell-O Art last week. I packed that stuff up in January and now I have to figure out what to take tomorrow, not forgetting a single thing and not taking way too much, which is my usual style. It will be cold, so clothing might not sell that well, and I don't have anything new. People will probably need hats, since it might be sunny and even possibly hot. That's what happened last year on the second week: it turned into summer for a day.

Really I had better take a bike ride too. I was going almost every other day in the early winter, for two hours at a time. I haven't been doing that as the pressure mounted to get ready for the Jell-O show, so I am out of shape. Pulling two or three hundred pounds of gear on that marvelous big trailer is not all that easy. My anxiety dreams get me there late and missing my chance to get that prime spot, but of course that doesn't happen.

I read somewhere to turn anxiety into curiosity. I wonder how long it will take me to organize and pack up my stuff? I wonder how many interesting birds I will see out in the wetlands when I go?

I wonder how much fun it will be to allude to and non-specifically discuss the subjects of my contemplation as I craft this journal? I wonder if my writing will really ever bring me the love I wonder if I want and I wonder if I will be able to navigate it without getting all loony and birdbrained?

Laundry's done.

Another important thing

I've been a member of Saturday Market for 33 years, since way before they had memberships. It has formed me as I have contributed to it.

We're a subculture, craftspeople. Whether we make things out of wood, wool, food or words, we have a lifestyle in common and a way of looking at the world that feeds us and keeps us tied into making things. I don't expect to retire.

I started out painting signs, in the fantasy of being a traveling signpainter inspired by Woody Guthrie. (On the back of the sign, it didn't say nothin'). I had a Willys panel jeep with "Signs" painted on the side, and drove around the four corners area of Colorado. I landed here in 1976 and made lovely wooden open/closed signs to sell at the market, thinking I would use the opportunity to find customers for my real work. My first customer was Humble Bagel, and I did go on to paint lots of signs around Eugene.

I also made handpainted greeting cards, and then taught myself to silkscreen, so I could make more of them, and the calendars which developed in subsequent years. At some point this morphed into t-shirt printing, which is mostly what I do there now. I didn't always sell at the market, but at times I was very involved, and I've been that way again for the last several years. I took about 12 years off from Saturdays to build my house and raise my son, but I helped start the Holiday Market and have sold every day that it has ever been open. And I've taken minutes at a lot of meetings.

So it isn't possible to separate the Market from who I am, and in the contemplative years I'm in now, I have been paying a lot of attention to the emotional aspects of this life. I enjoy observing my fellows and how we see things and do things. It's amusing and revealing and perplexing and gratifying and I like the way Saturdays feed me and exhaust me.

To connect with my previous post, last week I took my Jell-O Art to Opening Day. It felt very adventurous for me to expose this passionate ridiculousness, but like many things during the Market day, it went, for the most part, unnoticed. I was frustrated that I had invited quite a few people to come see this aspect of my true self, and most of them were too busy to do that.

I had to laugh at my disappointment. I forgot how hard we are all working on Saturdays, and how self-involved we all are. I would venture to say that every person who set up a booth, came for a shift, had a shopping list, or brought a marimba, felt that they were on an essential mission, had an almost overwhelming number of things to complete, and took very little time to appreciate the wondrous offerings of everybody else.

There were moments, of course, and I did explain my deep passion to a couple of people. I had a few appreciative viewers who really got it. One or two people saw into my heart and soul, and one or two people is a lot for a day in an ordinary life. I didn't do a lot of specific appreciation myself. I noticed some lovely baby kale, talked philosophy with one farmer, and commiserated with some of the other people waiting for spaces in our loose group in the morning. I was comfortable in my usual neighborhood and stuck close to my stuff, and was businesslike most of the time. Plus I confess I had to leave early to get to the Jell-O Show, so I missed some of the best parts of the day.

It's almost too big to grasp all at once, our Market. I'm too far from the stage to hear the performers, though I love and give dollars to the random buskers who come close. I catch a phrase or chord in passing on my important errands. I check on the farmers I'm connected with and I get my crepe or pad thai when the lines are short. I wait and engage with my friends when they wander into my zone. I'm often brought to tears, and I do try to thank the people who have that affect on me. But it all goes by fast and there are so many wonderful artists I don't know and don't see. I know there are many who go home feeling unnoticed and unappreciated and I'm unable to do much about that.

There are also so many things they don't know about what I did notice, what I thought deeply about the next day or vowed to see or buy the following week. I've written short stories about quite a few of the people I watched during the moments between sales. I've modeled my own display or products after ways they've inspired me with their unique creative genius. There are people I think I would love to be, and things I wish I could even attempt to make. They can't know this, just like I can't know how many people saw my Jell-O art and were touched or amazed.

There are layers and layers of color and texture in the precious living gel of our Market. All of us have intensity and fathomless complexity that lies underneath what we bring to sell or just to show, or to sing about or to serve. I'm really working hard to see underneath the surface of my Saturdays at this point in my life. I eat it up. I look around at the beautiful trees and the light coming through them and the weather to the west and the flow of the people and the way we all move through the hours and the weeks.

I'm so lucky to be there. I'm so lucky to have this life, and to have had this time. May I never take it for granted. May my expectations never get in the way of what is actually happening.

First Full Stop

The Jell-O Show was last Saturday, and while I was washing the dishes today I realized this is the first time I have felt finished with my work for months. Of course my work is never finished, and the round of my work year has just begun, but I have a moment to breathe. Right now.
And of course I want to talk about it. I did something big this year, with my Jell-O Art, and it marked a shift for me. It may have something to do with the associated facts that my son just moved out at age 20, or that I am turning 60 in a month (less...). It may not really be a shift, but just a ripple in the stream that is my life, but I feel like I'm on the landing of a new staircase.

Jell-O Art is a metaphor, I suppose, for my life as an artist. I've written a lot in the past of how I discovered that I was a capital A Artist when I tried to explain my creative process with my Jell-O to a student I was mentoring years ago. Suddenly realizing that I approached all my projects with the same creative process, I was struck with the fact that if I had a creative process, I was indeed an Artist. And showing my Art in a real gallery, regardless of the juxtaposition of the show with April Fools Day, means I am a Real Artist. Looking back at my life from the threshold of sixty, I wonder why I ever had any doubt.

Well, I know why, of course. Because I never formally studied and have no credentials, my lifetime of creating art has been on the margins of the "real" art world. The problem of my legitimacy, however, seemed to be within me, and it was when I was creating my Jell-O in the isolation of each winter that I began to take myself seriously.

Last year I began what I call an artist's book,
which included a sort of tutorial on dried Jell-O and a compendium of all of the t-shirt designs I have created in the 22 years of the Jell-O Art Show. I see it as a museum piece, and a work in progress, and I planned to add to it this year but I got distracted. I took out all of the boxes in which I store my molds and odd pieces of dried Jell-O from previous years (the stuff is a durable plastic) and somewhere from the blue the idea came to render the Radar Angels in Jell-O.

I may write more about the Radar Angels, but in brief, there is a group of mostly women artists who gathered decades ago now for tea and support, and one of the things they birthed was the annual Jell-O Art Show. It became the purest vehicle for my self-expression beginning with the first year, and I continue to take it far more seriously than any other part of my artistic life. In 22 years I have explored many techniques, but every year has been a process of figuring out where I am, what I am doing and thinking, and how I can communicate that through what is surely one of the most uncooperative art mediums there is to work with.

Drying it has freed me from the perishable aspect, and given me the luxury of planning and experimenting at leisure, and has also stretched out the project from a hurried week or two to a long few months. When the Holiday Market ends at Christmas, my work year comes to a close, and after I organize my t-shirt and hat inventory and read a novel or two, I start my Jell-O.

This is becoming a novel, I see. So this is the introduction: I made the Radar Angels in Jell-O. I can explain. Although the show is over, it isn't left behind just yet. I haven't started anything new.
Except this.