THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 34

I’ve been watching this Azerbaijan Country Life vlog. It’s so relaxing & is such an aesthetically pleasing thing. They work the land, make their traditional foods & are surrounded by flowers & animals that are amazingly not trying to kill each other. A grandma & grandpa just doing their thing. I know it’s a project of controlled reality, highly edited & curated. But! I used to dream of living amongst Punks who would live that way after the nuclear apocalypse. Totally delusional thinking but really nice. No TV, no phones. I’m glad I can watch something similar to that on YouTube & unwind from my day. There is a nugget of grounded culture in the pickles, the passed-down recipes, in working the land, in the folk outfits, living with the limited lives of animals that brings out something really good in people. A decency that exists beyond the squished distortion that comes out of being in the machine. It takes a lot of extra energy to not be distorted by the machine. It probably isn’t possible, I haven’t thought about it for a while but. Last week we did the Mount Hood Fruit Loop. A driving loop that goes around the farmland that exists to the north of Mount Hood. The area is about as idyllic as it gets, with Mount Hood looming over it all, it looks like overly romantic model train scenery. One of the first fruit stands, the Draper Girls Country Farm has some of the most overpriced fruits, jams & pickles & stuff I’ve ever seen. It was the definition of a tourist trap. They had their garden area sequestered off for paying customers only. I know we live in an era of inflation & a broken economy & I wish that prices were more reasonable in general but $14 for a small jar of cucumber pickles is insane & really shows a fundamental disrespect to your customers. I’m absolutely sure that the behavior of tourists added to the transactional feeling of this business, but part of service is being welcoming & accommodating even if people aren’t going to make a purchase. You shouldn’t be anticipating poor behavior & building up a guard for it. It’s rough. I went through decades of living like that because in Oakland it wasn’t “the way” to expect better. You still get that with people just acting like the cost of city living is getting your car’s windows busted out. Or you can go extra into the public arms race culture, but the threat of death isn’t the thing that promotes a sense of decency. It has to be a value, it has to be declared.