I've simmered down about downtown issues, of course, having the luxury of not being able to speak for anyone but myself, and being unwilling to do that right now, at the council level anyway. I watch the live-streams of the public forums, as I can't handle the crowds, and I realize I should be speaking up.
The dogs and smoking thing seems ill-advised but likely to happen...the businesses have a powerful lobby effect and as a downtown business, I don't feel a part of that, yet I do tend to benefit or fall as they do. In the Park Blocks both dogs and smoking are already banned, by our own rules and by the city rules, but we still get plenty of both. Our own members who smoke have tended to comply by stepping into the streets surrounding, and that will be slightly less convenient, but the zone ends at 8th St., so they can go across it. The Farmers and the FSP are both on county land, outside the zone, so it remains to be seen how that will affect them, but possibly unless they do something, the traffic of people with dogs will shift to their sidewalks, if the ordinance isn't widely ignored. Mostly the dog traffic we do get comes on the street, sometimes in dangerous opposition to traffic on 8th, sometimes in the fire lanes along Oak. FSP is a complicated issue and I am actually tending to see how it is useful to have that venue, although I want it to be safer and prettier and more like me. It's not the threat to me it once seemed to be, but more like the part of my yard that needs a little sprucing up and some new plantings perhaps. The drummers need a place, and that is it, and the tourists kind of like to see what the wild side looks like. So we have to work together to get it to be what it can be at its best. I do have a plan for that, personally, but it involves a public-private partnership and process of getting buy-in from the FSP community, and I recognize how difficult that will be to put in place and sustain. Buy-in from the disenfranchised might be too far to expect to go. They have nothing to buy in with, and no motivation to do it. But we'll see. There are plenty of visionaries and do-ers out there thinking about it.
I'm on the side of human rights to survive, and most of the people who own dogs or smoke do feel that it is a survival issue for them. Thus most dogs will indeed be service dogs and I don't see the ban as being effective as a control measure, so that makes it kind of a propaganda measure. I can't help being cynical in these times when that tactic is so over the top. Sure, people shouldn't smoke, but tobacco is legal, and so is alcohol, and discrimination by appearance is not, so these laws feel mean. Anyone who has lived in an urban area, and for me that has included NYC (the Lower East Side in the 70's even) and Washington,, DC, one of the most diverse places in our country, as well as Wilmington DE, corporate world headquarters, in a heavily populated area, anyone who is used to seeing people who look different from themselves, recognizes that we don't get to own everything about our town. "We" includes all of us. Some of us are always in survival mode, and others of us are going to have to adjust to this world reality. We have to come up with these new ideas and work for more humane solutions. Time's a-wasting!
I'm going through all the numbing and normalizing that one might expect in my politics. I have a real love-hate internet relationship, and that doesn't seem likely to get any easier. I read the articles about the analysis techniques that we so willingly allow ourselves to be victims of...it's not like we had much of a choice, except for staying offline and out of Facebook. Without Facebook I would feel awfully isolated, but of course now we pay the price for our alliances in unknown and essential ways. I don't feel much privacy. My spam numbers have ballooned, so I know my server is being targeted, and I myself have not hidden anything much so unless I want to delete my internet presence, I don't have many tools to protect myself.
At the same time as I want to protect myself, I'm liking and hating things all over the net. I'm even using those emoticons I swore I wouldn't. I'm signing up for groups and websites and petitions and opinion polls and considering several subscriptions even though I can't afford it. I have many writers to follow, some of them new to me, some dependably there after many decades. It's wonderful how they have increased access to so many through the same internet interfaces that are so frightening. I'm bonding with people I wouldn't even recognize on the street...that might be embarrassing more than once when the Market opens. It's like there is yet another me, the Facebook me, who is not the real me but is doing quite a bit with my photos and my name. That persona interacts with all the rest of the Facebook people. We know we're real inside, but the edges are blurry...
But we've been in this soup for a long time so it feels fairly like the soup we ordered and have relished. And those of us who lived through and took down Nixon are on the one hand not surprised to be here now, but on the other, doubly shocked that this time it is so blatant and soul-less. I know we are supposed to be fearful, and the tools are brutal, and we are afraid. And this is somehow good for us, to finally feel really disenfranchised like so many gazillions of people have all along. To still have any feelings of privilege at all is strange, though of course I have all kinds of it. So I fight for moments without fear. I do find them (in that denial I'm so good at.)
Still trying to read about slavery, still trying to keep up with all the important nonfiction on the political scene, and it feels good to be using all of those muscles, but other parts of my life have been severely compromised. I have not been able to promote the Jell-O Art Show although that is next on my list today. I don't have the focus for my piece that I need. I haven't been able to write my lines for the script. I look at my costume plans but haven't gotten out the sewing machine. I made myself a pussyhat. I made some flowers. I bought myself a daphne though I didn't plant it yet. It might snow this weekend and I don't want anything to die on me. I planted peas and tomato seeds to haul in and out each day as the weather warms.
I'm doing a lot in my small worlds, and can see that some of it is solely about keeping things under control on the detail level. I have been re-reading all of the bylaws and board materials for my several nonprofit organizations so that, as Secretary, I am sure I am doing my duty of care and educating others so that they can as well. This seems so small but it's part of pinning down the edges of a spectrum where an attorney general can lie under oath and then lie again and again. No administration has ever lied like this...or have they? They used to be less blatant at least. Perhaps this is better.
I feel younger somehow, which is preferable to feeling wrung out and hung out to dry. I'm old, but not all that old. Yet, there's no recapturing any innocence, and joy is thin. I can find it (the daphne, the Jell-O) but it is fleeting. The birds are dependable, with sightings of the Townsend's warbler and an owl in a tree across the street, but several neighbors in my view zone cut down four or five big trees and now there's no skyline and the squirrel habitat is over at my house again. I found a dead possum and I miss it. I expect it ate poison. People don't love possums, and I didn't until I found out how cool they are.
Can't stop to grieve a possum, can only hope there are others that will find my yard. Can't worry too much about this Park Blocks redesign. I can't stop it and will probably like parts of it, at least, if and when it happens, which I hope will be slowly and thoughtfully. I hear lots of people embracing the possibilities and will fake it for awhile as things settle down. I don't always want to have this instant negative reaction to change.
I want to accept myself as I change myself. Life is tricky and I want to be clear with myself, at the very least, but of course human brains aren't really constructed that way. Fooling ourselves is the easiest thing we learn to do. Every time we try to go deep into our emotions, it's painful or confusing and the easiest thing to do is divert and distract. I'm getting fatter and exercising less and April First is coming ever closer, ever faster.
But there's no sense dragging my heels, so I will try to step more quickly. I got my expensive orthotics that are not covered by insurance and my feet have adjusted to them. I will calculate my taxes although I don't see why anyone should pay any this year. I'll eat more veggies and exercise more, and the weather will get nice and I'll have a Market and a birthday, and a huge workload that will keep me busy. So today, I had better try to focus in on getting this world of Jell-O launched and see if I can get my email to work again...I got fooled. I'm going to be fooled...I'm the main fool. Being a fool is human. Fools have rights!
See you in the funny papers.
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