My 18 week attempt to profit by my artistic labours came to an end yesterday, without ceremony or closure, when I played hooky from the Farmer's Market for the first time this year. I didn't call the market people to let them know because I couldn't find the cell numbers for any of them except for the girl that insulted me during Week 16, and I wasn't about to call that little pig (she behaved swinishly, I don't mean to imply she looks like a pig...I actually think pigs are cute). In any case, it had been raining on and off all morning, and the forecast actually mentioned snow...Snow!
People don't go shopping in snow until mid-December, and by that time if they have a list to get through they'll shop in any condition; rain, snow, tornados, glaciation, heavy machine-gun fire...
There was no point in my going - my people, my beloved customers, do not shop in rain and snow.
A part of me felt guilty for not going, and not letting anyone know, and that was the part that kept me awake for a few minutes early Saturday morning, made me think I might regret not going in, even produced phantom images of myself at the market, enjoying a deluge of magnet purchases. I disregarded those images as absurd fabrications, of course, and went back to sleep. I enjoy the guilt conjured up by the responsible, conscientious part of me much as a spicy food aficionado savors the burn of a particularly hot pepper. It made sleeping in Saturday all the sweeter, knowing that now I was one of those "irresponsible vendors" the market people had been talking about all this time, the ones who never called to let them know when they weren't coming, leaving a hole in the line of booths that had to be filled by god-knows-what kind of last minute crazy pottery vendor they had to drag in from the Waiting List of artisans that actually managed to be so bad that not even the Downtown Alliance jury would accept them.
I'd shake my head sadly when they talked about it, raging inside against the kind of vendor who would do that. That wasn't me, of course. I'd called both times before, giving them plenty of notice and time to find a good, solid vendor to man the line. But deep down inside I wondered, what what it be like, to skip out and not to call? Just thinking about it gave me a hinky thrill...Maybe I'd do it sometime, just try it out. Maybe next time they'd regret the way they'd treated my complaints about the insanely unreliable metal planks they'd been using as curb ramps for vendor vehicles to enter and exit the park, or maybe they'd wished they had charged me only half-price on my rent, since I was a serious artist and added to the stature of the market without really selling a lot and come on, they should be paying me to show up at that hour of the day and giving their crummy market a little cred!
The Twilight Market folks didn't give me the half-price rent either, although they did waive the application samples last year. An artist notices the little things like that.
And now, this last Saturday, I went to the other side; I didn't show up and it felt great, and I slept well and enjoyed the rain from inside the house, snug and warm, and thought about any vendors who'd actually shown up that morning in those temperatures with tender pity.
That's the way the market ended for me this year, with a no-show, I didn't make the playoffs and didn't bother with the exhibition games and now I'm free and I never have to do that again because I've failed as an artist and as a human being and it feels great!
I'm free to do what I've always wanted to do, which involves psychic powers and secret missions and free travel and government expense accounts. Art is a Fraud, perpetrated on both the artist and the artee, and nobody's done it right since the Italians, hundreds of years ago, and they had to lose an entire empire to do it, and I'm sure they'd give up the entire high renaissance and take the Mediterranean back if they could.
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