Quiet Foggy Days

 First Christmas without Mom and I'm trying not to care...she always said she preferred Thanksgiving anyway, so first Thanksgiving without her. But I don't really celebrate either day too much...just enjoy a day off and sometimes cook something. It's hard to live without pie so it's usually that. I will think of her when I make pies and eat, and watch birds, and read books...I think of her often. I miss her, even the bits of her that kind of fell away over the last couple of years. I might have gotten over actively needing her but there is still an emptiness where she used to be available as a person I could reliably love.

Holiday Market takes up all of the weekend time and the weeks go by fast with little accomplished. Retail is exhausting even with the fun of the dress-up theme days and seeing people I enjoy. Just focusing on selling for two or three days in a row is a pretty hard gig, though I should definitely not complain as at least I have a good way to make money. And then I can actually take the offseason to do other things, which are also work but more on my own terms.

This winter I will try hard to really get the archiving accomplished, at least the Saturday Market part although I will probably not get far on any of the others. It's mission-type work that I feel I have to do and then I have to find places for these archives, or people who will take them in for the next phases in which I may not be available to participate in. No guarantees on living...just keep doing it until you can't, I reckon. Mom set a good example of a relatively graceful way to do that.

I definitely suffer from SAD in these foggy and darker days. Sunshine cheers me up and there is always work to do outside so I can generally navigate it adequately with some effort. I eat a lot of bread and meat in the winter. I wish I did have a fireplace to sit beside. I actually built support into the living room wall so I could open it up and put in a hearth and chimney, but I know I won't. I still have some ants in the walls from the chimney I removed and have absolutely no desire to open up any walls.

I did manage to cut down the holly tree and still feel good about that, as it gives me wood to manage outside too. Holly is good wood so I kept the logs though I have no real use for them. I collect sticks like some people do books (okay, I collect books too, and "good boxes" as well) as I find them beautiful and fascinating and like to use them for supports for plants and things like grape arbors. My yard is messy and so I have a lot of birds and even a regular possum or a few, and probably raccoons. I rake the leaves of two neighbors so I will have lots of messy mulch. Everything is wet today and the fog isn't lifting, but I was out yesterday filling up the stick tote. Today I'm just trying to stay warm and keep getting ready for the HM load-in tomorrow. 

Despite having sold at EVERY Holiday Market I still get anxious about the set-up. I will fill the available hours. It used to be 9 hours, and this year is only 7, so I will be going in early on Saturday too. I will not be bringing t-shirts though, so maybe it will be a little easier. 

There will be an exception to that rule. I will be attempting to sell off the Saturday Market t-shirts I made, as I did last year. They didn't sell, and I had plans to make more in better colors but...they didn't sell. I can't fit them in on Saturdays so this will be my big chance to liquidate them. My plan is to make them $10 each (maybe even $5) and donate the funds to the Kareng Fund. I've been donating 50% to the Market all year for my bags and hats (the SM logo ones) but the Market finances seem good and the KF is a bit short compared to previous years. Plus the need for the KF keeps increasing and the donations seem to have slowed. 

We will probably not have the Art Bingo event this year, although we will discuss it. What we need is a really splashy fundraising campaign event that will draw a lot more people. None of us are really the right kind of promoters to pull off such an event so we may try to find someone who can do it for us, or with us anyway. It's such a small organization with a narrow mission that I find it hard to promote. I know there are people looking for ways to give, though, so I try not to get in the way of that. Anyway I will see if I can drum up some dollars with my merchandise.

Two of the subjects I want to write about are sensitive, and I am sensitive about them, so I'm doing some circling around trying to figure out how to write about them. One is the OCF...I quit my volunteer job of being the scribe and member of the Craft Committee. I've gone to my last meeting though I still have some tasks to complete to pass on my work in hopes that at least some of that work will continue. This is really the first time I have pulled back my support from something I do still care about, so it has been interesting to navigate. There is certainly relief, but at the same time it kind of tarnishes my commitment to the handcrafting life and I have to process that. Crafters need support in many ways and I am still going to be acting in many of those ways, but just not in a formal group discussion way for OCF. I did a lot in my years there to support what was already in progress but it's time for other people to step in and do their parts. I hope they do. I'll be annoyed if they actually get the diversity training I asked for since 2020, but whatever. It's unlikely, since diversity is all fixed now if you ask people still there. Or, you know, not as important.

I hope not a lot happens with their hijacked Board that I feel I have to do something about, as I have no more energy to do any of those possible things. I don't trust people who feel they should manipulate elections and fellow members for their selfish ends and I am not confident that damage won't be permanent from the last iteration of that. A false narrative was spun, disseminated, beat into the culture and is now prevalent. I'm not going to forget what really happened. It was galling to listen to the last meeting and I may not watch another. It was not amusing to hear that OCF is now "walking its talk" in promoting to leadership one person who stepped on, vilified, and drove away a whole, active group of marginalized people whom he could not gaslight and dominate until he spun a fiction and mobilized supporters for it. A lot of us witnessed that and we're not in the mood for some hippie bullshit phrasing to hide the reality that OCF talk is cheap. White supremacy culture encompasses more than just racism and dominant forces I am starting to call Me-supremacy are well in place to push it along. Obviously this is not new culture and it will always try to dominate, but I am not interested in building that selfish reality. 

I don't know what is so hard about working toward a world where war and domination is not the automatic action for different opinions. I suppose the great monetary value of weapons and power and ownership of land and property is the driving force that is seemingly so unstoppable, because the common people rarely want war as they are always the victims of it in one way or another. People want peace. People embrace a multicultural world where everyone can contribute...but obviously not all people, and my own me-supremacy asks these innocent questions as if the answers were not complicated. They get complicated because the real truth is so rarely told. Weapons are made to destroy and control. Control is the problem, forced control and compliance. Dehumanizing control. 

Like many I find these subjects overwhelming and draining. At a time when my emotions are going overboard, I have to try to use my methods of self-control, to maintain what I have committed to. I don't post political things on FB because almost all of my friends there already agree with me, and I don't want to argue about politics if they don't. I'm not big on arguing. I try to stay informed enough to have my opinions and actions more or less clear to me, but I don't want to convince other people. 

There's pressure for healing, however, and I may be interested in helping with that. I like digging down into my own emotional blocks and fissures and maybe I can help others by example. I've ventured a few comments here and there. Mostly I dislike the algorithms too much to want to put my opinions on FB. Mostly I just want to stay home and journal and read and eat bread and listen to my kitty purr. 

Might not get a lot of that in the next few weeks, but I will try.

Horrors

 I've never liked getting scared for fun...can't watch horror movies, hate zombie costumes, don't even like Hallowe'en or Day of the Dead. I used to be able to explore dark subjects, but now I am not even finding that interesting. Real daily life is actually much more horrifying than I have ever noticed in the past, and that is plenty.

I first started to notice how fearful old people were as my Mom aged...not her, but people in her writing group. They seemed to have protected lives, dependable husbands, expensive houses in good neighborhoods...all the constructions white people of means generally put in place early in their lives for their personal safety. But of course no one is exempt from physical breakdowns or accidents or all of the many random things that come to us...and my Mom was brave because she had seen some of the hardest up close. I saw some of those...and I suppose it was the randomness of mental illness and alcoholism that made me fearful from a young age, though I was good at dissociation and forcing myself into situations that were riskier than I was willing to admit.

I used to do a thing of engaging a character named "General Bravado" when I wanted to travel alone or go to a bar or do all the adventurous things I felt compelled to do in my twenties. I'd look in the mirror and gear up and throw my fate to the winds with his imaginary protection. This almost amuses me now, but I was a product of the 1950s suburbs, a house with a deed covenant, a mostly segregated school system, and all the white supremacist system around me to limit any input or empathy I had for people with other life experiences. In my world, women were discriminated against, and of course I observed racism and had racist assumptions, but my life was important over anyone else's and I completely bought into individualism. That still persists. 

Once I got my own house (with the partial dependence I allowed myself with a man) I finally really felt safe (once he was out of the house) and I was able to raise a son and run my business and feel generally self-protected as long as I could hide out in my little safe neighborhood. I could be vulnerable and explore emotional territory but was still a chicken and stayed in my comfort zone. I considered myself traumatized from my life previous to age 40 so was pretty self-protective. I felt vulnerable every week selling at Market but not so much physically, just emotionally. That phase is over.

I had been an activist for peace and justice but found once I had a child I could no longer go to demonstrations, and even after he was grown I found my emotions too obtrusive to engage in protest. The Occupy movement and then the Black Lives Matter movement on top of the pandemic took away my illusion of safety for the most part, as I learned about the real US history of human trafficking and dehumanization and my silent complicity. I watched livestreams and cheered people on and read a ton of books and articles and did as much work as I could to make some small change...within the limits of my lack of real courage. Gradually I accepted that courage could include fear...it wasn't the absence of fear, it was the determination to set it aside to do what was right.

So I rush to the sidelines of marches and encourage and express gratitude. I support and try to amplify others, and I try in a limited way to engage "in person" as we do now in meetings and groups. I get to do it from my safe kitchen. I rely on my privilege and do whatever small things I feel I can handle, and it never feels like enough. I tell myself my priority is just staying alive for a decade or two more and figuring out to sustain what I have built, alone and with others.

It's getting harder. My son visited with the idea of helping me cut down a tree and that was fun. I use hand saws and it makes me feel powerful and strong and he got that. He enjoyed it too. I think a lot of things I should have taught him and I did kind of convey that you can do everything and may not need to jump through all the hoops that seem to be necessary...I remodeled my own house mostly by myself but I also did a lot of things kind of inadequately...so we talk about that as I have to redo them now, fifteen or so years later. I did it mostly before the internet, with library books for research and some help from men, which was pretty problematic but I did get it mostly done. My motivation, as I recall, was to get him a room with a door on it (he slept in a pass-through room to the bathroom) and I did accomplish that in his mid-teens, more or less. It was almost good enough, and better than many single moms did. I worked very hard. Work was always my priority and we didn't travel or do a lot of the things other families did. I passed on some flawed thinking, but he went farther and can now teach me, which works. We love each other. He will be of some help as I really age, though I am trying to set it up so that will be bearable for him. Independence and individuality is still the strongest undercurrent of my life, as it serves me, but I am lucky enough to have a huge community which I sadly mostly take for granted. 

So I have some challenges about giving back, maintaining friendships, being compassionate, and not isolating. I wouldn't say life looks easy going forward. But at least I am not really alone, and have opportunities to engage much more as I shed my self-importance and am more humbled.

Yesterday gave me some new respect for people who keep selling at Market when they don't make much in sales. It was my all-season low and actually lower than several seasons, and yet I made what many others would have thought to be a great day. I was bored and mostly just went over to farmers and bought things for winter as there are only two more weeks for me to shop there. I have stopped collecting crafts as I have to get rid of things now, not get more, so food is all I buy. I used to go around and make sure people who weren't doing well got some of my encouragement, but I just can't bring more things home. 

The end of the day was scary. A Free Palestine march came through, a very passionate group. It was not anti-Israel or anti-US, just anti-genocide and violence and promoting freedom for this oppressed population. To me it is obvious that the Palestinian are the victims of the violence and although the US is making a small effort to help them, the majority of our aid is oppressive death-dealing weaponry. Our world has changed and war with it...targeting citizens is blatantly a tactic while it used to be pretended that ordinary people were just "collateral damage." Now everyone is at risk. I suppose this was always true but our news coverage allowed us the imaginary view that ordinary people are generally safe. Like they are here in the US, right? Not now. 

Cars were backed up behind the march. There were a couple of groups of bike cops on the sidelines watching but they were not escorting at the front or back to protect the marchers. That was done by the courageous group of people we see in all recent marches, who watch and protect and make sure it stays fairly safe. I've benefitted from these guardians several times as angry people tried to engage me in arguments on the sidelines and they silently stood near me, ready to assist. This time I instinctively walked to stand behind the bikes but as I was doing this they yielded and the angry drivers were able to go down 8th for half a block, where some tried to go down Park or Willamette and others just got madder. One truck went on Park the wrong way and others just went around the block to harass some more. Trucks with "patriotic" flags and yelling men at the wheel, cars blasting horns, people convinced that their right to drive on a public street "trumped" (so ironic to say that) a large group of people exercising free speech to defend justice and the right to live in peace. They must have a nuanced and dissonant argument about free speech and liberty, not that I want to hear it. 

For me, my mind went to our recently developed active shooter plan, which I doubt will help me as I just fawn in crisis and will no doubt try to crawl behind a tree and cry. I didn't even get out of the street until a truck came by with two extremely menacing dogs in the back, free to jump on me and tear my throat open. As it turned out, somewhere on the march a truck forced its way through and the driver menaced with a gun of some type. He was arrested about a block from us, with more guns, it is rumored. Needless to say there was no business happening for the last hour of our day. I support the marchers, if that isn't obvious, and deplore the angry people who followed them. I don't know if I will feel safe for awhile. I am not going to feel safe about Hallowe'en next week with all the opportunities for people to display disturbing images and hide themselves behind masks and characters. I hope it is all Barbies and Kens because I may have to stay home.

I don't think it is unrelated to the noose with the black doll in overalls that was hung briefly in Springfield. That is certainly not the only place white supremacy culture is displayed around here. We overlook it all the time. We spread it ourselves in our ignorance and refusal to learn. We deny our complicity and fail to do the scary things to even discuss it in our communities. We close our eyes and hide out. 

I'm not having the pleasant day off I was looking forward to. I'm hypervigilant and in a weird way glad I have some kind of redneck neighbors with guns, because I think they would help me if I needed it. They are actually the most unsafe and least understood people on our street, but they call me hon and I rake their leaves. I'm kind of glad they have barking dogs. My illusions are tarnished, as they well should be. None of us are safe from hate.  

As Things Shift

 More thoughts on making changes in how I use my time in my last couple of decades in this body. She is tired...more aches and pains and I feel the responsibility is all mine to work with her so that I have choices about what I do. Now I totally get why "our health" is the main topic of conversation for old people. 

I'm still having a lot of emotions about making the break with my OCF volunteer position. We had our October meeting and I still did most of my tasks and felt such a sense of loss about the ones I didn't do. I used to email a list of interested members with our agenda and a meeting reminder, and since I stopped doing that, our momentum of involving more crafters in our discussions has essentially been lost. I'm in the process of emailing the people who were and were not awarded permanent booths at that meeting. We awarded four, but had sixteen applications...and I feel all of them deserve personal responses. I feel that anyone with whom I engage doing Craft Committee business deserves a personal response. It's always so entirely frustrating to email any concern to any group and not even get an acknowledgement. 

We announced our Town Hall which will be on Sunday Oct. 29th...and got some emails on the subject...which I answered. Today, on my day off, when I told myself it would not be healthy for me to resume the emailing tasks (I only got five done on Friday and Thursday was a shop day so I got none done.) I know prioritizing my own needs is the right thing to do and the core of my struggle. OCF will eat you up with the endless need for improvement. But I know all those people want to know what decisions were made.

So, after my 12-hour workday on Saturday, I had to skip the light parade downtown, as I knew my body wouldn't take it and by the time I had finished, it had already started anyway. But I did tune into the OCF Annual Meeting despite my visceral disgust and the difficulty of listening to a few people whom I consider to be deceptive and working against my interests. I was interested to find out that the ED had five goals, which turned out to wrap about twelve goals together, but at least there are some plans, however vague. Despite the item that received the most feedback being the absence of the artisan directory in the Peach Pit, that wasn't in the goals, nor was any artisan-specific goal, except that the improvements to the wifi were kind of wrapped into the first goal, a 5-year plan for replacing the water system. It didn't sound like any work in the ground would happen in year one, and although it wasn't explained, my theory is that the reason for wrapping them together is to string some wires underground in the waterpipe trenches for better internet. So nothing in the short term, but something in the next phase, maybe. At least the wifi was mentioned in the ED's speech.

No one else addressed any artisan issues, but I didn't expect it. Diversity was mentioned a few times of course, but increasing diversity in the artisan sector usually translates to getting more "diverse" people to apply and we are not really suffering from lack of diversity in the applicants. Adam made the improvement of giving people a way to identify their ethnicity in their work so at least they wouldn't be rejected for cultural appropriation, which was a small fix and did help. But the big Booth Rep system was not addressed of course, and our gentle and gradual efforts to improve it have not done a lot. It's a big thing to tackle, and involves a lot of education first, and despite a promise to provide DEI training to committees, that has not happened and from my experience when I crashed the coordinator training, it won't help anyway. People have to educate themselves, and there isn't a lot of time in the committee meetings to really do much of it. Our committee itself is not very diverse, except in LGBTQ++ people, and we didn't put in any process for making more diversity happen. Maybe it will when they replace me as a member. Just not picking another old white Booth Rep may help. Hope that happens.

It's really hard for me to grasp that I am walking away and will no longer have any influence on what is said or done by the committee. I doubt I will even have the heart to complain. As an admin of the Neg shit site I don't feel great about posting my complaints in there. Almost all the feedback I have gotten about any of my concerns amounted to "you shouldn't complain, as a leader and as someone who has been treated well by OCF...." and that just rankles. I have not been treated exceptionally well at all. I have learned to not complain...have learned to work on solutions quietly after introspection about what more I could do to solve my own problems. I have learned not to ask for anything. I have learned that what I give does not translate into what I get, which is fine, and I don't think it should. I value equity, not rewarding individuals for their efforts for the common good. I still totally value volunteering and working together for solutions. I have just lost faith that any of that work will have satisfactory results.

So the financial info was also interesting. Since the artisans were all told to attempt to reduce the number of passes we buy to help reduce the internal population, apparently we bought 600 fewer passes, and now we will be rewarded by a price increase (I heard from $100 to $120) for those passes. To me that is a $160 increase (again) for the people who help me do my work out there, as I pay my workers for their expenses, including their vehicle stickers, day passes, teen passes, whatever they need to help me make my sales. I will have to eliminate one worker and go back to doing their job myself, be that selling, loading, driving my inventory in, or booth maintenance or however it plays out. Six hundred booth passes is a lot...saved OCF a bunch in infrastructure costs and I am proud of all the people who did that intentionally. However, I guess it wasn't helpful to ask artisans to pitch in that way. Another mistake I won't be making again.

What I'm observing about myself is that I am not willing to be organization-positive, and absolutely that is a good reason to step aside. I cringe at the salutations of Fair Family, "peaches" or the horrid "yes yes yes." I feel like anyone who thinks they are cared for like family is delusional and I won't engage in that. My family members don't lie to me or try to manipulate me. They don't just keep assigning more work to me when clearly I am working hard. They support me and honor my work and help me do that when possible. I don't have those same feelings about the org. I do have them about some of the individuals I have worked with, and I feel terrible about pulling away from our mutually supportive efforts to make lasting and helpful change. 

So yeah, I'm still in enough to care but out enough to not care quite as much. Fuck it. If my work was as important as I think, someone will pick it up from where I left off. If not, it will fall by the wayside like the work of so many others. Maybe the truth is that there were 600 booth people who stopped wanting to participate. Maybe there was no one who wanted to replace them. Raising the price on everyone else isn't going to fix that.

Okay, day off.

 

 

The Truth Does Matter

 Letting go is proving so much harder than I anticipated. I thought there would be relief...and there have been some moments of it, but for every piece I am glad to be rid of, there comes the realization that I no longer have any power to work on it. I can try, but clearly I let go. The bullies rejoice.

I try to be inspired by how it has been for oppressed people, for instance, and how they have never felt able to let go, and have proven to be right in that you have to stay and fight. You just have to take that stance for your lifetime and try to keep getting better at it. My issues are of course not life and death issues and nothing like the experience of watching murders and injustice and not being able to look away. Mine are much smaller concerns and there is little at stake in the real world. But they stand and fight.

I do have a lot of moments of knowing I am giving up the fight as well as giving up the stress. I may not be giving up the stress at all.

Case in point, it is clear to me that our current problem of losing spaces at the Park Blocks (it seems to be about 10 8x8s and 8 4x4s at this point) is a failure of our own organization to keep out ahead of the design process and prevent the losses to be this extreme. We only have less than 250 spaces, so it's a significant loss...and much more so to those members who held those spaces and didn't have any warning. I took a good look back at our history of handling downtown developments and I do feel like it is all on me. 

All during the past probably 10 years I stayed vigilant and attended every single City Council meeting when downtown was the subject. I participated and documented all of the phases, from the Town Square concept with all the many City Hall options, through the Public Market concept (actually that came first) when they wanted to make an indoor, year-round Market for the farmers. We inserted ourselves into the process but soon realized that it would not be big enough for us and didn't suit any of our organizational tenets...outdoors, with an important offseason to refresh, easy entry with equality for all members, and more. It helped that I was researching our history so I could pull the founding documents out and remind everyone why we decided on them, and how they have been successful for us. 

I inserted myself into a meeting with the top staff from the City and County and threw down on the table some of our promotional items, and copies of our history where all of that was explained. Needless to say, none of them had ever gone to our website to read that history and it's a fact that few city or county workers come to the market on Saturdays...they don't want to come to their workplace on the weekends. I told them that we would not buy into the development scheme that was a common solution for cities to replace their farmers markets in the Pike Place model, where space could be made for the governments to generate income for themselves. You see that model in the Farmers Pavilion, which the farmers got behind as a solution for their space issues, and which is pretty successful, but doesn't put the lie to what I said. It isn't big enough for all of the farmers, and most prefer the outdoor spaces, which the customers also prefer. It basically created new problems and I am guessing that the costs to the city are much greater than they were before. But progress had to be made and it was.

Meanwhile, all of the millions they had to remodel the southern blocks were shifted to complete that and we didn't even get any repairs to the broken concrete on our side. I spent two years with my small team negotiating through the design process, which had many excruciating turns and twists and some of you will remember all of that. It was hard, and it was hard to let go of a vision of improvement, but we were mostly relieved that it did not happen. It probably won't. But it was a burnout, and then the pandemic happened, and our management went to shit, and all of our energy went to survival of our organization.

When I say our management went to shit, I am not sugar coating it. The three people left (when our GM went to OCF) hid their incompetence and gaslit the Board and officers while they basically threw away most of what we held dear. Our trust in our staff, our cooperative relationships between volunteers and staff, and our financial oversight were destroyed. Our equality was thrown out as special deals were made on booth spaces out of point order to those who would join the cult. Key people were sidelined and passed over in the selection process. AJ told the Board that they should assign me, an officer, some help as the Secretary job had a lot of duties. He tried to take away my agency, my elected position, and my power in a public meeting, and tried to make it look as if he cared about me. The person who was GM at the time did nothing about my complaint. Looking back it is even more shocking than it was then.

When it became clear that we didn't have financial accountability, the officers tried to intervene but were told to stay out of it. We didn't, of course, but it took quite a bit of time and eventually we regained power over our organization, which belongs to the members, not the staff. When that happened, we were closed out of access to our database, our members were ginned up to revolt against the Board in defense of the staff, and we were almost prevented from operating. There's more. Money was involved. There were crimes. Because we had no clue what level of assets we had, we had to use our volunteers to catch us up and many of us put in long hours to right the ship. We were reviled and some people will still not speak to me over it. Since most of it was confidential, it was not widely known just how bad it was. Many people do not believe me, but I have the proof.

The facts are the facts, and one person divided us up and made us fight, and absconded with some spoils. That person is in power at OCF, and has divided their membership and created a cult over there. It's similar. As an officer, he has a lot of power. People may or may not be figuring it out. He continues to obstruct and divide. He says "the Board is a divided Board," instead of just saying there is disagreement. He uses DARVO and other bullying techniques to get his way, though not always successfully. But he has been successful in creating chaos which is what he did to us. That's a good way for bullies to hid their machinations.

Market has recovered, but this latest wrinkle is part of the issue in that I was so involved in managing the chaos, as well as being marginalized in what I was doing, that I totally missed being on top of this 8th Avenue Streetscape project which included these stormwater planters on our corners that took our spaces. I had always been on top of the maps, asking all the questions, getting clarification during the early stages of the projects, working with our staff to articulate our needs. If I had known that we would lose this many spaces, with their income going forward for members and the organization, I would have tried to dial it back, and I think we could have. But if there were meetings with the planners, I wasn't invited, and none of the public engagement opportunities clearly spelled out the details. I expect if I looked back I would find at least some of them. Of course now it is way too late and the deal is almost done.

I don't fault the city for doing what it wanted to do with the Park. I will always defend their right to do that. We are not the only park users and we are just a small part of the big picture of what goes on downtown. We are not always the most forward-looking org around. We just mostly want to keep doing what we are doing like we're doing it and that is sometimes to our detriment. I  personally am not a visionary. And I'm old, and I want to step back and not be the super volunteer that gives all my time away. So there was a lack of oversight, from myself and our crappy managers, and there was a pandemic, and mistakes were made, and some crimes went down. Looking back doesn't help a lot.

I mostly am resigning from my OCF volunteer position because of the time it takes to do the tasks, but also I just do not want to be at meetings with some of the people in power at OCF. I disagree with their stances, I don't like to be gaslit by them, and I find that their support and trust in people I know to be dishonest and calculating is wrong and very hard to watch. I just can't do it. It's so very micro/macro with the political situation in the US. I hope people see it and vote accordingly, but as we know corrupt people in power don't just give up. They count on being able to drive out their opposition and make them give up.

So I am letting the bullies win over there, and I am sad about that. I am not keeping in the fight. I am not feeling that I am a warrior at present. I feel selfish. But I'm not good at self-care. I'm always putting myself last and giving the one more thing past when I said I wouldn't. I'm not good at loss and I'm not good at transitions either. 

So I'm having grief. I'm grieving about so much Covid still around...feeling that fear and isolating like I was during the shutdown. I know that is when the crimes happened, when the oversight was not in place, and I am still letting up on my vigilance. I'm using my age as an excuse, I'm making up lots of excuses. It's depressing. It's making me irrational, even at the same time as I am feeling clear that it has to happen.

I do still trust, and right now I am trusting in our younger members that they will step up and pick up the slack I leave behind. In the case of Market, I think they will. When people came for the older members and removed a couple of them from power, I knew it would happen to me and my strategy has been to try to get out before that happens. It will come. I will be removed if I don't step out of the way. Change is happening and the old values become irrelevant, to some degree, and it doesn't help to lament. One of the reasons it happens is that the older people are convinced that their ways are better and deserve to be preserved. While this may be true, it doesn't matter. The old ways are old, and they stand in the way of improvement as well as just change for the sake of change. I keep saying that new is not better, but sometimes it is what has to happen. The conditions change. People like new. It is only later that they realize it is not better. We've all seen this and we all know it, and we are all incapable of making it not be true.

But I will still stand on principle for a lot of things. I may not be listened to, and I may be proven wrong or just pushed aside to mutter in the twilight, but I'll still try to stand up as much as I can. The truth matters. I will fight for the truth.

Follow Through One Thing at a Time

 Just a short post to let people know I told OCF Craft Committee I will resign after the November meeting. I committed to finishing the Permanent Placement and Guideline Change processes and we have one more Town Hall. The relief is real.

My reasons are not that I got tired of being bullied by one member of the committee after ten years of it, or that I am tired of advocating for crafters and trying to make our experience work better. I hope the committee continues to deal with the bullying and of course the work will continue to advocate for crafters.

My main reason is that over the twelve years I have been taking on and doing too many tasks. I started out just thinking I would take minutes, but the number of tasks now fills two pages. I hope other members pick up those tasks, as I still think they are all important.

A bonus is that now I will not be spending my volunteer time supporting people I do not want to support. There are a lot more bullies in the org than the one I have been dealing with...it's a whole political party of them. Two are up for election, and one, in particular should not be in power in any organization. I have the receipts of his actual criminal actions. He lies, and denies, and uses all the bullying tactics as well as taking credit for whatever remains of the diversity efforts he ransacked and destroyed, driving many fine people out of the organization. He has created a little  cult of bullies who go around the internet telling his false narratives over and over until they become the stories. That in itself is criminal.

I am grateful that Jon Silvermoon, Ann Rodgers, (who are both up for re-election) and Lisa Parker, sue theolass, and Paxton Hoag and George Braddock continue to try to do the right thing in the face of these continual assaults against the truth, right action, and progress. I still watch the Board meetings and still support change in the organization, I just no longer believe much change will happen until the bullies are out of power. 

Even if that happens, and it might, with Saskia Whitson and Cassie Esposito running, I can't support the rest of the misrepresentation of the truth that I've witnessed over the last year and a half. There's little accountability and there was a subtle shift from the responsibilities of paid staff onto the committee I served on...all of a sudden we were going to have to fix the internet, the artisan directory database, and do all the communication necessary to assist the boothpeople in this cultural shift from a personal approach to a more efficient, online interface for registration and problem-solving. Sorry, but volunteering is supposed to be voluntary. Staff is supposed to support, not shift paid work to unpaid.

I went to Charlie Ruff many years ago when Square first appeared on the stage and advised him that crafters were going to come with the expectation that they'd use the internet to process their credit card sales. He knew nothing about it at the time and didn't even believe me I don't think, but the lack of action on prioritizing artisan access to the internet is a big problem still. I am not going to help work on that anymore. I know how negotiations work...if the COWS didn't happen it was because the priority wasn't in place yet. 

And I saw all the promotional material, interviews with newspapers, local TV and online. I saw how many times the crafts were promoted. It was missing, or a few times, included in the single word ART. I'm still offended that no accountability was taken, and our committee was guilted at our meeting. I prefer honesty and accepting feedback with humility and not defensiveness and deflection. 

So for my own peace, I will step down from my responsibility for working on any of those problems. I am grateful to my committee members and hope that they are not feeling deserted as they continue to wrestle with those things. I did a lot of good work but can't continue.

There's a lot more going on in my thoughts, but that's really it for now. It might be the last day of sunshine and I have been loving being outdoors getting the houses and yard ready for rain and colder temps. I love summer. I will miss it. But I have a lot to do indoors, too, including boxing up a lot of papers. It's going to feel good to clear away some duties. 

 

Continuing to Refine

I've been struggling with how to limit the overwhelming amount of time I spend volunteering as I look at the gradual end of my productive life...I'm only 73 but now that my Mom died I am feeling the deadlines coming up for my body and cognitive ability. It's a harsh reality but the list of things I can get finished to my satisfaction in the time remaining to do them is compromised. I have to prioritize.

My position with all of my groups is that I have made myself super useful. It's somewhat intimidating to take on the tasks I do...I have well-developed skills and I have set a high bar. Even I know I am attached to seeing the progress I have enabled continue after I leave. I can set things up for the next people and I think I will learn to let go, but my problem is how to document the jobs while at the same time making them look like jobs people can easily take on. Unknown people...I do not know anyone currently who will take on these tasks, for any of these positions. Time has shown, though, that someone will, or no one will, and things will survive.

So I'm making lists for each group and will present them with a plea to lighten my load. If that doesn't happen rather quickly, I will have to just quit. It's not a threat, just a way. If I don't walk, everyone will likely sigh with relief and let me continue to give away all of my time for the benefit of others, and of course, the mutual benefit of our organizations. 

At the same time, OCF Best Practices keeps working hard to increase the number of tasks. When this stuff was voluntary, I was willing to step up my participation in the interest of better practices and communication, but at this point, it is no longer going to be voluntary. At least that language is not in the motions. Now it says "must" and "shall" and although on the face of them they seem to clarify expectations, they subtly go from "best practices" to requirements. I get the usefulness to the Board and organization, but what went out the window is that we are volunteers giving our time and that comes out of our desire to apply our skills, as we choose, when we choose. If we choose.

My list of tasks for the committee I'm on, Craft Committee, is giant. Some monthly, some annually, some ongoing whenever changes happen, and some I have just taken on as I saw the need. I'm Scribe, so some tasks just seemed to be in my realm...I am a good writer and they were writing tasks. Increasing information dissemination and helping the crew coordinators do their many-more-than-mine tasks served a lot of people, so I felt good about it. I like being supportive when I like the people. That is in fact the thing I will miss. I see needs I can fill and it feels good to fill them. Makes the work easier for everyone, and usually better quality as well. 

I like solving knotty problems. This morning I had a dream that seems to be directly about this: I volunteered to take on this task of assembling a wooden award for The Best Volunteer of OCF. It was a new award and The Best Award ever given. There was a table of wooden pieces that needed painting and assembly, and I stepped up as it looked like pure fun. As I tried to sort the pieces I saw that there was no design or model to follow, just a vague picture in my mind of some peach-like thing, and the pieces did not seem likely to make a recognizable object. Plus, they were made of fake wood like floor laminate that I knew would break easily so only one attempt at assembly would be possible. 

So I started asking around for plans, or someone who knew the plan, and I found this one guy who said he would bring me drawings. He brought me an assembled but not glued up model which immediately fell apart, plus he told me his wife had designed the award by looking intensely at a fern frond for 20 minutes so I knew it was a complex work of genius and I wanted to do it justice. But I could not, and he brought me another model, metal this time, and suggested I put the wooden one together in Saran wrap so I could see both sides. I set about trying but it was already not possible and the pieces I was supposed to use were indeed, as I was saying, not the right pieces. Putting some varnish on them would not be useful. I found myself kneeling on a sidewalk on Pearl Street trying, while some people came by from one of the many volunteer groups, all excited about the idea of winning that award. They had lots of enthusiasm, but about winning The Award. Best Volunteer for Best Event In The World.

No need to delineate the irony for the event that has the most white supremacy, ableism and cultural appropriation and denial of such of any event with which I am associated. You know who We are.

Which is when I woke up. I took a look at my position in this dream, kneeling on a hot city sidewalk in the sun, making something other people were going to compete to win, and knowing that there was no way I was going to succeed in making this thing. I never once considered that I would be The Best Volunteer. It was just a fun job in my view that turned into a super frustrating nightmare at which I was certain to fail. I had gotten a little help from the one guy, but it came with emotional strings (couldn't complain about his wife's genius idea) and whomever had cut the wood pieces was long gone and gave me crap components to work with without any additional resources. And this was not during the event, but now, so even though I finally know people on Quartermaster Crew, I couldn't go ask them for help. There was no available help, just the expectation that I would accomplish the impossible all by myself. For free.

For an award that I was not even eligible for. I mean, in thousands of volunteers, there is no Best Volunteer. It's not even a concept to entertain. Competition is counter-intuitive. We're all working together for mutual benefit, right? We all wanted to do all the things because we all got fed and had the camaraderie of knowing we were creating something really special, that would endure and be incredible and worth the effort. Life-changing, in a good way.

I do not want any awards. A couple of weeks ago I wanted a thank you, an acknowledgement that I had given from outside own needs to serve others, but today I don't even want that. I just want to stop being of service. I just want to hand over my task lists (another task I took on, making the lists...) and walk away. 

I don't know if I will like my life, or myself without my service, so I'm not doing it all at once. I'm taking some time to figure out which ones are likely to be able to replace me, so the work won't just end when I go. I also have to walk far enough away so I don't have to watch these people I have loved working with and learned to love as people, struggle. I don't want to be missed. I want the tasks to be manageable, not intimidating, and easy to take on for people who have more youth and slack in their lives to give more. I am feeling depleted, and I like the possibility that the next people will do even better than I have. They will be able to build upon what we have built so far, and make the things that are beautiful and functional and inspired like a fern frond: fractals of complexity that people will marvel over. Things of beauty and elegant solutions.

So it is probably obvious now that OCF is the first to go. I can't make the thing. I don't have the resources to support me, there isn't anyone to ask for help, and the task is impossible. Committee volunteers are not supposed to have a page-long task list. I probably shouldn't have developed that list to begin with. A more successful volunteer would have hung back, said no, and somehow managed to watch while things remained undone and dysfunctional.

When I came on the committee, there was outright bullying behavior at every meeting. No one was allowed to do anything that would improve the reputation of our committee or our sector of Fair (which is a pretty important sector) or actually to take any positive actions to move things forward. I said fuck that in so many ways. Now we have productive meetings with some actual progress to increase communication and respect Fair-wide. Now we have a group that enjoys meeting and gradually gets things done for all of the mutual benefit. It's actually going well. The bullying stopped (not that it can't start right back up any minute...always a threat.) We wrote a lot of things and have been of actual service.

Now the dysfunction is more external to our committee. We got gaslighted and guilted for things that happened this year and told that we are going to fix them. We look like a strong group that will move things forward despite the fact that people are getting paid big bucks to do those jobs. I'm not gonna. I'm not willing to sit there and get lied to at meetings. I'm not taking on responsibility for crafters who were dissatisfied enough to make petitions and speak up at Board meetings about the things that went very wrong this event. I'm ready to just be a person who shows up and makes my living and doesn't have to field people telling me I shouldn't complain or shouldn't even admit that things are wrong and people could have done better. I had two leaders contact me and tell me I was being ungrateful and unhelpful and disloyal and should not be speaking up. Yeah, no.

I don't have time for it. I'm not even in the running for Best Volunteer. The award is going to look like crap anyway. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I would rather just stare at a fern frond for 20 minutes and call it good. That's my goal: staring at ferns. Unbothered. Not guilty. Finished being helpful.

Might take awhile, but we'll see. Might be easier than I think.

Carving out a Moment

 Sunday morning has always been my favorite time for writing here, and it has been many months since I have felt like I was having a real day off with enough mental space to do that. It seems today is the day. I doubt I can corral all of my many topics into something coherent, since so much has happened and continues. It's the last day of the Lane County Fair, so I'm looking forward to getting my neighborhood back although the impacts have not been intolerable for the last few years...except the shootings. There was one Friday night, on the other side of the Fairgrounds from me, but still, so concerning. That and the clearbag policy probably has something to do with the lessened popularity of the event. I don't care to go anymore.

At Market our staff recently went through an Active Shooter training and our emergency plans are being updated, but being vulnerable on the Park Blocks is nothing new...I remember the end of one Tuesday Market when a young woman was threatening to shoot us. I have a tendency to dismiss these things over which I have no control, to the point of dissociating and just working to get to safety while pretending everything is normal. Obviously normal has changed, and as I age the vulnerability just increases in every way. On Friday I was walking home and someone across the street was giving CPR, with the EMTs a couple of blocks away still. I started crying and was reminded of how useless I can be in emergencies. I'm probably a great candidate for training as it would increase my skills and confidence in being helpful. I knew crossing the street to repeat the questions of others would not be useful but if I had CPR capabilities or Narcan I might have been able to support the other helpers. It pains me to not be helpful as my normal mode is trying to make myself responsible for every solution to every problem and I have to actively counsel myself about the many things that are just not my job.

I have a lot of jobs, and people tend to come to me for help, but I am also in a phase where I am not being consulted and included in solution-making processes, both as a result of my age and my edge of burnout which I've been experiencing for some time. My Mom dying made me instantly older and I recognized the quite short time I have left in this lifespan. I don't want to shelve all of my ambitions to creative work that uses my skills in more important ways than taking minutes at meetings but I am still attached to being useful and keeping a valuable public record is important work to me. But I have books to write that aren't getting easier to write. I vividly remember trying to help Mom finish her book when her capability to do that was greatly diminished. She tried very hard and did well but we had to abandon the finished ending we had planned and when I tried to get her to write an acknowledgement of my role as editor for clarity, she couldn't do it. I had to let a lot of things go to get it published, which I am most certainly glad I did, but the letting go was painful for us both I think. By the end of her life she had mostly forgotten she had written the book, although she reread it when she could still read and pronounced it pretty good. And then it was history and then she became history too. As will I.

So I need to get cracking. Getting the archives out of my living room would be so freeing and I am moving that much higher on my priority list. Sadly I am still doing catch-up from May and June as I was so busy with OCF work and still have a lot of it to do. My efforts to be efficient to carve out a trip back east were successful. I had enough time to get organized to move out to the OCF site and solve all the attendant difficulties with that, and I actually enjoyed the trip east as well which was always up in the air. It was very valuable to be with my family and the only part I really regret was not taking my son which I would have done if I hadn't been too stressed to communicate better with him. I'm pained that he was not there. Next time we'll do better.

OCF...so many things. There was truly a breakdown of the communication systems for the craft sector and I feel some responsibility for that. My goal in volunteering on Craft Committee and on monitoring the Board has always been to increase mutual understanding of the needs and perspectives of all of the interest groups and I feel like petitions and comments at the Board meeting show that artisans, even members of the committee, do not know what the channels are to get their needs met in the system. Granted, the disappointing nature of the main problems we had was extreme and much more affecting than in the past. We had zero promotion as artisans, we had the worst internet service since I told Charlie Ruff what Square was and how retailing had changed and was the first to bring admin attention to the issue. There were some simple solutions that could have been communicated, like creating a hotspot in your own booth for your own access. I could even have borrowed one from the library if I had known to do that. I personally can do fine with the cash economy and doubt I lost very many sales as my most expensive product is $30, but others were heartbroken as the petition showed. It didn't have to be that bad. And some simple information-sharing would have greatly helped, but we lost big parts of our communication systems with the electronic interfaces. 

It's ironic that putting everything online and posting things on the .net site would be worse than sending paper packets of multiple sheets to each booth rep but the transition was just not communicated early enough and well enough, and it wasn't the fault of any volunteers, all of who were working so damn hard to get it all done. Mostly it did get done, but with a maximum of frustration instead of greater ease as it could have been experienced. To go from people registering us for multiple weeks in person at Saturday Market to everyone doing everything themselves online, even with multiple reminders and email links, has just not been a successful transition yet. Maybe next year. And the lack of promotions and visible appreciation and presence of the 800 fine artisans was connected in many ways to this transition, which is cultural and organizational and just very difficult for our particular in-person and vulnerable culture.

Really what we are undergoing is a shift from being taken care of to taking care of ourselves and as we're (many of us) shifting in the opposite direction personally as we age, it's a generational clash and a complicated dance where needs are just not being communicated and met. I am not the kind of person who wants a lot of help, but the systems before were set up to be easy for artists who are maybe not managers and now artists must also be good managers of the myriad aspects of small businesses. Lots of extra phone calls and efforts were made to bring people along who didn't get things and the lower numbers of volunteers willing to overwork has made this impossible. So anyone who doesn't self-manage is just not succeeding. And people in management and volunteer positions don't necessarily understand how hard artisans work to make Fair happen. Not only do we need to bring a viable retail shop with all of those fixtures and requirements, but we have to bring our survival systems and our teams of helpers and the time frame is very tight. I have to be there on Tuesday to get it all set up, and this year required three trips to site before that. I now think I will need to lobby for and begin shifting load-out to Tuesday from Monday which is of course prohibited and not supported. Bathroom access, water, garbage service, and food is all stopped earlier on Monday than I can even exit.

A big part of that is getting a vehicle into my space on Monday. This has been hard for many years and previous strategies have evolved into moving my car closer while trying to avoid the long lines of people with their air-conditioning on, waiting in lines for literally hours. I am not willing to wait in those lines. I couldn't get in until after 4 pm and my car overheated on the way home so I had to stop three times. The truck that had my stock and fixtures had similar issues so it was evening by the time I even had my stock stowed indoors. The upside was that I had time on site to really break down my camp and was able to put off my clean-up trip until my car is ready for it. Staying over Monday night would be so much less stressful and safe. We're all so tired on Monday. It's really dangerous.

And cuturally, as crafters at OCF, we have to make an adjustment toward more participation in the systems that support us, which is of course another primary goal for me. The year that we had all the mud (2009?) I sat there with my pile of packed, wet shirts until Tuesday, as they would not let my driver come in, and he was angry and had other plans that didn't include another two-hour delay on Tuesday morning as Charlie and Steve surveyed the roads in their golf cart while we digested the promises we'd heard on Monday. My operation is big out there...almost equivalent to a food booth, but I was not recognized as a bigger business and after some reflection post-Fair, I realized that even after 40 or so quite visible years, I wasn't known, and that was my fault. So I became a volunteer, taking minutes for a few different committees until I landed on Craft Committee and made myself truly useful. 

I'm still not all that known, but now at least I understand a lot more about the structure of the bureaucracy and the convoluted ways things work in the organization. This is of course a blessing and a curse, as I often know whom to ask and also whom to "blame." I try not to throw blame and definitely not shame but some things are being inadequately done by people who are getting paid well to do better. I need them to do better. I'm wanting to hold people more accountable and make fewer excuses for them. 

Knowing as much as I do about the Board and staff, I suffer from horror at what has developed. A person whom I have witnessed committing crimes is still in power and perhaps increasingly so, and I don't see this playing out well. It has already destroyed so much, and caused so many good people to walk away. I do know how hard it is to take toxic people out of power, but having done so more than once, I know it has to be done. It requires a lot of personal sacrifice and days and weeks of agonizing and strategy and a steadfast conviction of the facts and one's own values. I'm still there for it, but with such a large organization as OCF it is very damaging and hard to maintain. The part I am willing and able to take in it is small. I would much prefer to work on some of the issues that I have hope of easing, such as the communicating with crafters part as we try to shift the culture into a more giving one from an entitled one. 

Fortunately I find the crafter population mostly receptive and intelligent about the solutions and we are making slow but significant progress. The  resistance to change is built into the systems more than it is the people, I'm finding. Hardly any of us is ready for fast change, but most of us are ready to work on the incremental change that seems to be the most viable path. Education can be gratifying and it's just a big, tough challenge when so many thousands of people are involved. The backsliding and loss of progress is just part of being an activist and I try to remind myself that everything I do is a lifetime task...I will do my part and that is what I can do. Or...I can retire and leave it to others...but that doesn't seem to be my style.

So OCF the event is almost put away, and OCF the lifework resumes. Saturday Market is in pretty good shape in contrast, after the many crises of the past couple of years. We are in construction hell with the tearing up of 8th Street, but that will have an end in a month or so and we'll get the benefits of it. I think we can hang on for the duration. There is a cost...but my sales are still good and I still manage to motivate myself to show up. Having the Wellsprings X-tians show up yesterday again was a shock and chaotic despair moment, but we survived it and will again. The city and county really mismanaged the FSP thing once more so that got worse, but I long ago resigned myself to just enduring it without hope of solutions. I'm pretty high on endurance points. This will be important for the next couple of decades, as it becomes more challenging on so many fronts.

I hope I can endure. I feel resilient, and almost rested, as long as I get my Sundays off and can recharge in silence. I love summer so am just happy to be here, even though I can't get my house below 78 degrees. It could be worse. True, a lot of my happiness today is because I went to the library on Friday and got four books I really want to read, and today is reading day. I got food yesterday, I watched a youtube about how to fix my car. I have money. I have people who care about me. 

I just remembered that one of the traditions of my youth was eating popcorn on Sunday mornings, so I think I might make some. I can do anything I want today. I don't have to do anything I don't want to today. I'm so lucky to have carved that out in this world. One day can be very precious, and all the more so when it is summer.