Appearances

I showed up in Aberdeen, Washington in September 2017. In October, I tried to attend a meeting of a local nonprofit community development organization called Our Aberdeen. 

The information on their website was out of date. The meeting was now being held elsewhere. I attended for the first time in November. 

My recollection is that the couple who owned it, Michael and Sylvia Dickerson, weren't there. They were retirees living in a big house on the hill and taking cruises twice a year. They were away on a cruise when I attended that meeting. 

I ended up working very part time in a paid capacity for Our Aberdeen and also doing volunteer work for them. They never really appreciated me and getting my money out of them was like pulling teeth. 

I learned a lot from Michael. After I cleaned up the hot mess that their websites were, he asked me for a print out with all the important login information and other details he needed. 

And the quote below is about Sylvia:

I showed up at the house of a couple employing me very part-time for their community development nonprofit and the husband came in and asked if we had covered X yet. No, us two ninnies were talking about irrelevant shit like clothes and knitting.

I don't even knit. She was my boss. I let the conversation go where she took it.

I would talk to Michael and he had researched what makes for a good URL and wanted a .com for the planned creative arts district website and wanted it to start with the town name. He had clear reasons for things he did based on goals informed by research.

She was the driving force behind the effort to put up signs pointing people to the historic homes in town. I've written elsewhere about my opinion that not only is this not remotely some kind of local economic development, it may amount to being signs suggesting "Rob these homes first. They got the most stuff to steal. The owners have money and here is a convenient map of all of our currently wealthiest residents with the biggest houses."

She had been a legal secretary and had to give up her paid career when they moved to Aberdeen. The nearest town with legal secretary jobs was the state capital, Olympia. 

Olympia is about an hour away by car and 90 minutes by bus. There was something like four buses a day back and forth between the two cities but it wasn't a situation conducive to her either driving herself as an elderly woman nor taking the bus for a job.

Everyone in town seemed to think they were rich. They weren't poor but they were retirees living alone who had moved there from California. 

Housing in California is insanely expensive. They probably sold a house in California and turned around and put that money into a house locally. So they may have put, say, fifty percent down and had relatively modest carrying costs.

Two people living in a four bedroom house with no pets and no children can do things like turn the heat off on one of the two floors to keep expenses down. 

I know from my sister that if you travel regularly and get frequent flyer miles and pay attention to what's going on in the travel space, a cruise doesn't have to be that expensive. I know from Michael that on at least one occasion, the cruise line called him and said they were over booked and asked to bump him from the cruise in question and upgraded their accommodations for the next cruise.

My kids went through a period where they regularly bought new games for the Wii, played through them and traded them in for store credit while their trade-in value was still high. They regularly got deals on "Spend x amount, get 10 percent off." plus store credit avoided sales tax. They usually were getting like three different discounts on every purchase. 

People who do X regularly end up with insider information and tricks and opportunities not available to people who go on one cruise in their lifetime or once every decade. Retirees with nothing but time on their hands going on two cruises a year were probably paying bargain basement prices while looking like big shots to locals. 

Every single year, the Dickersons announced "We're done. This is our last year. We are closing down Our Aberdeen at the end of this year." I knew from someone else in town Sylvia had serious respiratory problems of some unspecified type. 

Michael had been president of some company. I inferred that she married him for his money and they moved to Aberdeen because he wanted it and she didn't really have much say in that decision. 

Sylvia attended other meetings in town, like those at the Main Street program. Michael mostly didn't. 

I came to believe that Michael was the power behind Our Aberdeen but he created it as a consolation prize to give Sylvia something to do and make her feel important after defacto forcing her to give up her career to move where he wanted to live.  

They talked about shutting it down every single year because Sylvia was expected to die any day now and he had no plans to run Our Aberdeen after her demise. It was her hobby and he participated in it but it was busy work for her to shut her up about wanting a life and not having it.

No, no one mentioned in writing anywhere when the owner of the charity gifted me some cheap trinket he brought back from the Taj Mahal in front of everyone at the public monthly meeting, including his sick and elderly wife whose death he was waiting for. The Taj Mahal is only the literal biggest monument of a man's love for a woman anywhere on planet Earth, a detail I shared with my sons while we cynically discussed all the reasons I wasn't going to keep the damn thing.

Michael lived in Japan for a few years and spoke fluent Japanese. I've written a piece elsewhere called Tsundere to explain that the American perception of this Japanese trope is in error.

Americans think it's a negative character you eventually warm to. I think it is rooted in a known practice for two people pursuing a personal relationship in a very densely populated country where meaningful privacy is hard to come by.

Michael Dickerson was not looking to have an affair with me but was openly in front of everyone laying the groundwork for marrying me the nanosecond Sylvia was buried. 

He was the primary person pushing to get the town to accept me, fire Wil Russoul and hire me. 

And it was creating a lot of friction because unlike Sylvia, I had real power -- knowledge is power -- and Michael didn't really know how to do to me what he did to Sylvia and make me a figurehead with no real power. 

I think he wanted to give me the job I wanted as a means to further his goal of marrying me and this was inherently a source of friction because he had no idea how to either make me palatable as a do nothing figurehead -- like Sylvia was -- or get with the program and actually help me establish myself as someone holding and exercising real power which requires real buy in I didn't have and wasn't going to get via a horny old man trying to say nice things about me behind my back in meetings I took no part in.

Our Aberdeen had a list of local grant resources and Sylvia was the person finding empty walls in town to pay local artists to put murals on them in the name of beautification. I've written elsewhere about how there's a correlation between beauty and economic vitality but zero substantiating evidence that simply making the town pretty leads to economic vitality. 

Women often have no real power even if they have a seemingly lavish life and seem to have money and seem to live high on the hog. Behind closed doors, Sylvia did the cooking and cleaning like a traditional housewife. In public meetings, she liked talking as if she was an important mover and shaker in town.

Sylvia was the epitome of some joke about a woman getting three wishes from a genie and wishing to live in a big house and poof! wish granted, you're the live-in maid.

I think Aberdeen was going nowhere fast because 98 percent of the "community development work" of both local economic development nonprofit organizations -- Our Aberdeen and Main Street -- was window dressing designed to con local fools into paying the salary of Wil Russoul and paying for local projects like murals without really accomplishing anything.

Michael Dickerson went there to escape the limelight and reporters interviewing him and such. He went there to retire and have a quiet life.

Economic development and growing the town was the opposite of his personal goals and pretending to be a wealthy big shot trying to foster development was the fox guarding the hen house because he was intentionally strangling economic development to keep Aberdeen a sleepy little retirement community. 

Power doesn't come from money or titles. I'm quite confident a lot of the seeming progress for women celebrated by feminists is a facade and a shockingly high percentage of women who seem to have power got it by sleeping with some guy and she's too clueless to realize that she's been given some minimal amount of power and authority and it's mostly a hollow facade.