Aberdeen, Washington

As noted yesterday, I'm currently going through the site and improving it and that includes adding labels. I wasn't using labels when the site began and I don't really feel like I know what I'm doing with regards to adding tags of that sort.

Currently, most place-based labels, like Africa or Asia, are intended to tag posts I think might be pertinent to people living there. I'm now adding place names to indicate "This post TALKS about that place."

I've talked about Suisun City, California a few times. I actually lived in a nearby city for a while and attended public meetings when that was still a relatively recent and fairly famous case study in redevelopment. I hear less about that now and anytime I suggest it as a case study on Reddit, someone feels compelled to shoot it down.

I added the tag Suisun.City.California, then decided to break that up to two tags: Suisun.City and California. I also at times talk about other places in California because I lived in California a lot of years of my adult life and have lived multiple different places in California.

Rest assured, I'm not trying to tell California how to do anything and I have zero reason to believe anyone there is interested in anything I say and good reason to suspect people there KNOW about my writing and will NEVER act on it. I've given up on promoting the Solano Rail Plan I wrote and in January of this year converted the associated Reddit by the same name to a space for ranting, mostly about the Third World Country of Merika and politics and I don't even like politics in the slightest. 

Adding a tag for Suisun City led me to decide to add a tag for Aberdeen and I have extremely mixed feelings about that. I'm absolutely not trying to recommend, promote or help Aberdeen. It's a lost cause.

I once read on Reddit that the setting for The Simpsons is "inspired by" the general area that Aberdeen, Washington is in. I find that plausible. Homer Simpson works at a nuclear plant and there is a never completed nuclear plant in Grays Harbor County not far from Aberdeen. 

The Simpsons is about a dysfunctional family in a dysfunctional town and my firsthand experience with living in Aberdeen, Washington is that the people in power in town are why the town gets trash talked endlessly online and is going nowhere fast.

I'm not trying to help Aberdeen, Washington nor anyone anywhere in Washington state. I don't think anyone can help Aberdeen, Washington because the people there are the problem, not the fact that lumber isn't as big as it once was or whatever they want to pretend is the issue. (It was once The Lumber Capital of the World.)

I lived there for a few years. I was burned by people living there while making a good faith effort to participate in public meetings related to community development. 

I came up with the name Eclogiselle as a potential business name for an environmentally-focused planning business long before I heard of Aberdeen but this website gelled because of my failed efforts to get involved with community development in Aberdeen. 

I was developing a website full of development ideas initially as kind of a cheap hobby. The site was private. I was the only person who had access to it. 

I had applied for a job as the Executive Director of the local Main Street America program in December 2017 after moving there in September 2017. I didn't get the job but continued to attend public meetings of various local organizations and made a good faith effort to participate. 

I did that because I felt I knew a lot more than most people in town about community development and I LIVED there. I wanted the town I was living in to get better because if I make the place I'm living in better, I get a better life. And I had reason to believe locals weren't qualified to significantly improve it.

I have a Certificate in GIS from the most prestigious GIS program in the world and I'm a few classes short of a BS in Environmental Resource Management. 

I've spent enough time in planning circles to know most Urban Planning degrees are Master's programs and environmental science is an excellent undergrad background and somewhat common for professional planners. I spent several years reading ads for small town planner jobs, so I know those jobs can go unfilled for months.

Rural areas and small towns have trouble finding qualified people to hire because if you are qualified for the job you can apply for a similar position in a bigger city with more amenities -- AKA better quality of life -- and vastly better pay.

On top of my years of experience talking to planners online and reading job listings etc. informing me small towns have trouble finding qualified candidates, LOCALS in Aberdeen were telling me I was vastly more qualified than the guy who did get the job I applied for.

On a lark, after being up all night with insomnia due to my medical situation, I applied for the job 5 days after the listing closed with a decade-old resume and incomplete application. I put like 10 minutes of effort into this application because they had already met me and knew I was newly off the street after years of homelessness and I figured I didn't have a snowball's chance in hell.

Instead of ignoring me or writing back to politely say a nice version of "Give me a fucking break you stupid bitch, this job listing CLOSED 5 days ago. No, we don't want your lame assed, insulting application, you total fucking LOSER." they wrote me back to ASK for the missing part of the application I hadn't bothered to include. 

Three months after Wil Russoul started the job, HE told me in a fit of exasperation "You could totally do this job. I'll recommend you as my replacement if I QUIT." and, right after that, local movers and shakers began stringing me along with "You may yet get another shot at the job."

I don't know what happened, but three months in, he and everyone important in town realized he wasn't really qualified for the job. And important people began trying to groom me as his replacement. 

I certainly needed more income and this was my dream job. To this day, I regret not screenshotting the job description. 

But I didn't really want a full-time job. I really wanted them to help me make a living doing freelance work or give me a part-time job.

But that concept was failing to get through their thick skulls and I was being TOLD repeatedly by at least TWO people that I might yet get this job. 

So I continued to develop a website in hopes of getting the job and eventually removed all the parts talking about having the job and published it as a sample site. 

The sidebar currently says in part:

I believe many of the buildings in the downtown area are not fit for human habitation and should be bulldozed. I have no idea how one might redevelop the town in the face of that significant issue.

I talk a lot about Aberdeen, Washington because I lived there for several years and while living there participated in public meetings and applied for a job and LOCAL movers and shakers TOLD me for over two years I might yet get the job.

Eclogiselle grows out of me trying to figure out HOW to actually address the problems in town and eventually concluding that although the locals are awful people who stole and botched my ideas, the Main Street program itself is deeply broken and it is a large part of why the local Main Street program is so dysfunctional. 

So I'm medically handicapped and don't really want a full-time job of any sort, much less a full-time salaried job that's extremely likely to wind up being sixty hours a week, not forty, and imagining I'm going to be the new Executive Director of the local Main Street program AND somehow run a consulting business "on the side" as a means to solve problems I felt I would be held responsible for solving but which couldn't reasonably be solved by limiting my efforts to "fixing downtown."

I write a lot about Aberdeen because:

1. I lived there. 

2. I was actively involved in public meetings about community development. 

3. It became clear to me early on when I wrote an email to someone in town that I knew a lot more than other people there about community development work.

4. I was strung along by people claiming they might yet give me my dream job while I was dirt poor and in desperate need of more income. 

5. Trying to figure out HOW to do that job and also convince people to hire me led to me writing Eclogiselle as an imagined SIDE BUSINESS as a defacto regional planner helping other towns in Coastal Washington on top of working 60+ hours a week as the Executive Director of Main Street. 

Those experiences convinced me that there is a giant market gap in planning and predominantly rural areas dotted with small towns somehow need regional coordination.  My recent piece about Rural Healthcare is a lightweight emergent regional planning approach that avoids the usual problems with top down approaches that typically fail, as described in the book Seeing Like A State.

Aberdeen, Washington is a giant MESS because the people in power there are screw ups. This has apparently been true for decades.

The result: Now you have a downtown full of buildings full of mold and chemical contamination, many of which probably need to be bulldozed rather than trying to remediate the problems which are a threat to human health. The sorry state of so many old buildings in downtown probably helps keep locals dysfunctional because mold is psychoactive.

People on Reddit talk about hitting the gas and flooring it when passing through Aberdeen "because it's so depressing to look at." They probably do that because it's an actual threat to your health to linger in the downtown area. 

I made a good faith effort to participate in public community development meetings and try to help people in power there improve things. No, I wasn't "after Wil Russoul's job."

If anyone tries to tell you that, that's paranoid lying BS from people who adamantly refused to hear "I'm trying to network and develop a part-time freelance income because I'm medically handicapped and can't really work full time."

I wanted Wil Russoul to pay me for freelance writing, hire me to do website work, credit me with having good ideas and being a good contributor in public meetings and promote me to other locals and tell them "Hire her. She's local. She's affordable. She does good work."

It's a local economic development program. Helping me succeed as a local freelancer would be doing his job.

He's good buddies with Rick Moyer, local radio personality who charges a ton of money for crappy websites. So he didn't WANT to help me get website work. He wanted to pay his buddy for a shitty website because they are cronies. 

I told their webmaster Rick Moyer that I was the highest ranked woman on Hacker News, figuring he would know who I was because of my online activities. He had never heard of Hacker News.

That's like being introduced to a local actor and saying "I'm big in Hollywood." and being asked "What's Hollywood? I've never heard of that."

I wasn't really trying to tell Rick Moyer "I'm hot stuff and you should be impressed." I was really trying to manage the fact that I'm a big fat NOBODY to the max out in the world, yet somehow I'm sort of "somebody" in some online spaces. 

I spent a lot of years worrying about my online life and offline life colliding dramatically and catastrophically and was trying to casually say "Since you're a PROFESSIONAL webmaster making good money, you have probably heard me. I'm that annoying loud-mouthed brassy broad who spends too much time on Hacker News that real tech professionals have zero respect for and wish would STFU and GTFO."

No, worries. I have, in fact, STFU and gotten TFO and no longer waste my time on an old boys club that has absolutely nothing whatsoever but contempt for women (and then wonders why they can't get a date).

But incidentally the fact that Rick Moyer had never heard of Hacker News told me he's an incompetent putz who knows nothing about being a good webmaster and this was borne out momentarily by him being unable to provide me the login credentials which were my entire reason for being at the meeting in question. 

The problems in Aberdeen run too deep for me to possibly fix because too much of the town should really be bulldozed and the local movers and shakers are both incompetent and unethical and intentionally shafted me while I persisted for years in making a good faith effort to inject useful information into the local community development ecosystem. 

I write about it a great deal because that debacle is what birthed this website. I'm neither trying to promote the town nor trying to help it. 

If I had my druthers, it would get washed out to sea by a tsunami and a lot of the people who knowingly and intentionally shafted me and are likely STILL stalking me online would get eaten by sharks in a modern day reenactment of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Nothing I say or do should be misconstrued as vouching for the town or wanting to help it or the people living there. I talk about it as a case study because:

1. I'm familiar with it.

2. I have absolutely no reason whatsoever to pull my punches while critiquing it nor care if I might offend someone or hurt their feelings.

Those two facts make it a useful example to use in my writing. That's the entire reason I speak of it so frequently. 

I don't know how to turn this site into a real business that pays my bills. I got nothing but pissed on and mistreated by people in Aberdeen while trying to do something useful and try to get paid for it while they made it crystal clear I was more knowledgeable than the person they chose to keep paying while he accomplished nothing. 

I persist in writing here in part because they aren't the only people doing things suggesting my ideas are exciting to people interested in small town development while no one -- me included -- quite knows where I fit in.

Someone at Strong Towns emailed me once to tell me they had shared my parenting piece that was on the front page of Hacker News for a couple of days. They sent it to several other people at Strong Towns.

People in the planning world read my writing and think it has value even sometimes when it has nothing to do with planning. No, my writing isn't being posted to r/UrbanPlanning and I'm not being interviewed by the APA.

I appear to be pointlessly howling into the void while actively making plans to try to find some other way to pay my bills, like a webcomic and clothing line. 

I would like to let this go. I've tried for years to walk away from what has been a whole lot of abusive drama that did nothing for me.

It seems to not want to let me go. I write an excessive amount in self defense to protect myself from abusive nutcases stalking me in a manner that is crazy making in part because it's nigh impossible to prove.

I was never a threat to Wil Russoul's job and never did anything to try to harm him nor the Main Street program in Aberdeen, Washington. But they persisted in being obsessed with me and adamantly unwilling to in any way treat me remotely decently. 

They were unwilling to either leave me the hell alone or PAY me and give me credit for my work. And I believe their warped obsession with me continues while they desperately try to only use whatever they feel they can steal from me without paying me or even acknowledging they got it from me.

Because crazy is as crazy does, I guess.