You Can't Ruin Saturdays

 After a half century of studying the intersection of life at 8th and Oak, I can easily make this observation. I even remember a day when it rained 5 inches in 1981 (I think, as it was a very wet year that almost buried us) and there were 9 of us there underneath the overhang on the Butterfly wondering how we were going to pack our things up and get home. Apparently none of us watched the weather reports. And we must have been rather desperate for some income to unpack, if we even did. But we had each other and a bucket of laughs.

Booth fees back then were $3.50 and I remember a zero day when it was painful to pay that. Zero days still happen, but the payment is now $25 which generally becomes debt that can mount to make you ineligible to sell pretty quickly, even if you want to come back after that humbling day. Often you did nothing wrong to fail to sell anything. I don't know anyone who has never had a bad sales day and couldn't explain it. There is luck involved, weather of course, and some kinds of magic it is best not to examine too closely, but just allow to happen. Don't get in the way of the magic.

Early in my crafts career I recognized that money flows and the more you can trust that and relax, the more easily it can flow to you. I sometimes will go out and spend $20 just to get things going. The recipient might buy a cup of coffee or something else and that seller might buy another thing, or at least I have generated a small amount of goodwill to add to the cosmic quotient. This does not always require your cash, maybe just your attention, or the good mood your sales persona donned as you unloaded your booth that morning. I'm not saying it is easy, but I am nearly always smiling the whole day on the Park Blocks, as I am easily amused and people are so weird and mostly lovely.

We still have each other. That is our greatest strength, our ability to uplift the rest of our community in all of the ways we do it. Everything can be enjoyable, watching your neighbors make sales, hearing their little stories, or the times when the sun finally emerges from the fog and overcast of a day like yesterday. It got glorious and we gathered in the sunny spots and turned up our faces.

This will sound odd but yesterday I noticed the giant tree on the corner of the FSP as if for the first time. Yes, I am keeping an eye on my cognition as you would think I would have noticed it many times, and I have, but it is starting to turn colors and the sky was a lovely blue. There is one maple on the Oak Street perimeter of  the East Block that is usually the first to go red and will at some point carpet the sidewalks if we are lucky enough to see that before rains turn it all brown. It is going red.

When the City remodel plans came along, one of my special jobs was to advocate for some of the trees that were in line to be removed, including the giant magnolia on the West Block, near 8th, and others, some of which were indeed removed for "reasons," sometimes sadly because they were annoying for the boothholders and I expect the park maintenance crews. I am sure that before too long the excellent Honey Locust  that often blooms in slime green on the Slug Queen Coronation, and the American Elm on the East Block will have to go, if they are still there. I will have to check. It is harder to see what is gone unless you have treasured it while you did have it.

And there is my metaphor for this week. People in my cohort who have sold over the decades can see what is gone from our market, without getting distracted by the lovely improved farmers side. There was a particularly beautiful Elm on their site too, near the corner, too near the corner when the street went two-way. Turns out not everyone loves trees as much as they pretend to, because cars are dangerous. 

I'm not talking about physical infrastructure being lost, as little happened on the two southern blocks that was highly noticeable when the money was allocated to the northwest block to get something completed there. We got a few things, but kept the walls and most of the trees, and the fountain at least temporarily. We lost the coverings, which are still missed. But mostly, it wasn't physical changes for the last four years.

Now, if you could only see it, you would know that the members have lost our umbrella of rights and member participation that got us to here. Our committees have been stripped of independence and power unless they serve the diabolical aims of the narcissist, and we have a new category of offender, The Danger to the Market. This is any member that the narcissist can't dominate and control to her satisfaction, or use her more subtle techniques upon. Yes this is subjective, and the methods are there to be seen, but fly under the radar. That six month Code of Conduct revision is important in the erosion. So many things are deemed confidential and done in closed meetings that you will never find out the "evidence" or process, even if you ask and find one of the many people who don't actually know what confidentiality involves. Transparency is when you do things where other people can hear them, in open meetings, with the participants, who are told they will be discussed. We used to have even the most difficult conversations in open meetings, with the participants there to speak for themselves. That is gone.

First the false narratives are spread. I, of course, am old and ditzy and not to be believed, as I hate the market and this blog is just complaining and negativity. Many of us are old and ditzy. And yet in our other community roles, highly respected and not ditzy. Sure, quirky, but that quirk is the highly-sought-after-by-the-whole-region quality that brings people downtown on any given week. Ask anyone trying to promote anything in our town. 

A number of members have learned that something was said about them that caused them to lose their credibility, often a recounting of their words or behaviors that looked like some kind of mental illness...and then they are gently pushed out into retirement, or worked against until they are more violently removed. It hasn't always worked, but it has always been secretive. I was told I was an "egregious failure" for my decades of volunteering as an officer, in a post where there was a lot of manipulation of the truth after the manager was fired. You can't check on that, because history is buried by gatekeeping or revised by a barely true recounting by some "historian" who has been seduced into a web of false narratives. A public record exists, but you can't find it. 

One man has been accused of brandishing a gun that could have been used to shoot a crying baby! He denies it and no baby was actually involved...turns out we have a number of members who are licensed to carry. I mean, I don't really like the thought, but we are pretty vulnerable down there protected mainly by truth and magic. But he was accused and tried by the power of a lie and that is now in the public record without an opportunity to deny it. 

These false narratives are impossible to counter, are often put in writing, in the public record even, and with lies about character, if you protest, you look guilty. This is a common and transparent narcissist technique, rarely uncovered. Go read the transcript of that KLCC interview last December. You'll find out a lot of things that are patently untrue, or at minimum, reputation-destroying.

Our reputation in the community is solid about Saturdays being fun. Quirk increases in times of trouble, as people get confused and frightened. Why not be crazy, if they are already saying you are? Why not throw caution to the afternoon breeze? However, most of the targets are serious artisans who just want to make their living as they have been accustomed to do in the market we built together.

I am well aware that people do not want to believe or see these patterns destroying our organization and our community. Our membership is divided in two, for and against, though we are all pretty practiced at selling next to each other all day and avoiding the hard conversations and snarky remarks that come to mind. You wouldn't know from the outside how many people used to be friends and will never be again. You might not know who the targets are, who the enablers are, and who the main actors are. If you don't know much about narcissists, and have been turning off national politics out of your distress, you certainly don't want to believe that what is happening to us is similar. As in the national discourse, people don't feel safe talking about it. People shut down and tire of it all long before they get to the idea of helping to fix it. If you are not a target of a bully, you probably only see the charm they turn your way, and remember the time they pretended to be interested in you while gathering supply for their drama addiction. You have missed the thousand cuts some of us have felt deeply and continue to suffer. She did something nice for you and you failed to see it as favoritism, that was not available to the rest of us. You were just grateful that the rules were bent for you.     

But these false impressions do go out and are repeated and believed by the people who want to believe we have a charming manager who is doing her job, who don't think about whether or not lying and kicking out members and manipulating our community is in her job description. They don't notice if a few people leave or are forced out or stop being able to afford the sweeping fee increases. They won't notice if I am not at the first and last HM weekends this year...except the few who will decide I have finally died. Hey, I'm still healthy enough to last another few years anyway, though they might manage to throw out my craft, as it is also a Danger to Market apparently. 

Has anyone except media professionals noticed our promotions are crap? Yes, they have. An ad on the inside cover of Mom magazine is worth checking out, as a very sad photo of a lone musician turns out to be the narcissist's husband, who is apparently handy as the Fill-in-Guy, so when there is a gap in the entertainment schedule we get to further fund her family with our fees. Most of the posts of individual craft booths on social media fail to include the artisan's name, website link, or even their business name, which is a sad insult to the member who has worked so hard. I told them a few years ago not to promote me, so the guy with the camera doesn't even look at me for one of his dark photos. We are currently paying two people to do our promotions...you can judge for yourself if the rainbow is enuf.

It's a powerful rainbow, but it's cold and nasty under it, and it takes a lot of effort to prevail in any kind of unity and faith that we will survive this punishment era as a community of artists. We might get some of it back, if we get a new, dynamic staff that has imagination and skill and can craft a decent sentence and take an attractive photo. We need people who can carry the heart of empathy (not the performative kind of a drama addict) and keep in mind the values of equality, equity, fairness and justice that our organization was founded to put forth into the world. We can't survive the lies, the favoritism, nepotism, and greed that we are experiencing. We can't thrive in a fake reality that is shiny and like a Saturday looks from the outside. We live in the inside, where it used to be safe and warm.