Don't tempt me with a good time | The good time in contradictions

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A poorly exposed photo of Saddle Rock with a piece of machinery often referred to as a "cherry picker" in the foreground as seen from reporter Josey Meats' backyard Saturday, April 11, in Wenatchee.

Dear reader,

I've come to a realization: with the shift in our publication schedule and the impending folding of Go! into the main section of The Wenatchee World, rather than as an insert, our regular one-way correspondence is coming to an end. Do not panic. I will still chronicle the good times of the Wenatchee Valley and its neighboring outposts, just not with the punctuality of a church bell.

When I first set out on this venture (cosplaying, more or less, as Truman Capote by way of Hunter S. Thompson in the Apple Capital), I meant to write about the absurdity all around us. To make you laugh, think, maybe bristle a little. Maybe even declare, "To hell with that Josey Meats. I'll never read him again," only to find yourself, the next Thursday, paper in hand, checking what fresh indignity I've documented.

It has been a pleasure, truly, hearing from you in the wild, those furtive grocery store confessions, the conspiratorial nods. I take a certain pride in knowing that, for some of you, I am your guilty pleasure; that somewhere, in some modern confessional (or its secular equivalent), you've muttered, "Forgive me, Josh, for I was tempted by a good time."

And yet, I am disappointed. Somewhere along the line, the column dulled. The edge softened. What began as a gleeful act of observation became, at times, just another item on the newsroom checklist. I became the very thing I feared most: a hack. There it is. No euphemism will save me.

But perhaps there's a corrective in scarcity. Perhaps writing about good times less often will make them sharper, stranger, more worth the telling. For the final three issues of Go! as an insert, I intend to will that original absurdity back into existence. All bets are off. No one is safe. Gird your loins.

Wenatchee is an absurd place. It clings to its roots while dressing itself up in something flashier, trying earnestly and awkwardly to become what it is not (or not yet). Look around: growth, expansion, innovation. Look closer: the same familiar faces at the grocery store, the same small-town circuitry of recognition. It wants to be a city - until it makes national news, at which point it recoils from the spotlight. We want prime time, but we behave like it's a sting operation.

This contradiction seeps into everything. Take housing: apartments rise like monuments to a future population boom, their crown jewel being the Majestic-looming over the river like a bet placed with someone else's money. And yet, the apartment my roommate and I vacated last September still sits empty. Which raises the obvious question: where, exactly, are the multitudes meant to fill these spaces? Or is this less about people and more about portfolios - hedge funds acquiring property, inflating rents, and writing the whole experiment off for tax purposes over the next decade?

Meanwhile, next door to my humble plot (where, I'll note, the irises are magnificent) a property owner has elected to Frankenstein a three-unit condo into the backyard. In their haste, they neglected to orient the structure toward Saddle Rock, depriving future tenants of the one view that might justify the rent. But fear not: there will be a rooftop hot tub, to which I fully intend to request visitation rights. Life, as they say, is a bowl of cherries… provided you don't ask too many questions about the orchard.

But let's zoom out. Suppose the great westward shuffle reverses itself and Wenatchee fills to the brim with industrious newcomers and their respectable salaries. Are we ready? Our roads, for the better part of a decade, have been treated like cosmetic injuries rather than structural failures; a Band-Aid on a severed artery. King Street alone stands as a kind of civic endurance test. And even now, we hear murmurs of an overburdened emergency room, straining under present realities, let alone hypothetical ones.

Now, I'll admit: I am more humorist than philosopher, more philosopher than politician, and small-town politics, in all its granular maneuvering, rarely holds my attention for long. It often feels like a series of carefully justified survival tactics: programs preserved, budgets stretched, futures deferred. Besides, aren't the only universally beloved politicians the ones safely embalmed by history?

Still, there is one aspect of small-town political life that fascinates me: the currency of knowing.

In Wenatchee, to be "in the know" is to possess a subtle but undeniable power. To glimpse the festival sweatshirt before its public debut is to gain a small but meaningful advantage. Try reading yesterday's headline aloud to a coworker and watch them respond, reflexively, "I knew that," with just enough disdain to suggest you've violated an unspoken code. Conversely, if they didn't know, notice the quiet satisfaction, the almost illicit pleasure, you feel in telling them.

In larger places, no one cares. Here, we care deeply, sometimes to our detriment. And perhaps that is the beating heart of Wenatchee's contradiction: we care enough to be invested, but also enough to be insular, self-righteous, occasionally absurd.

It's contradiction stacked upon contradiction. To mention a few: events designed for tourists are attended mostly by locals. A 553-seat auditorium regularly shrinks itself into a makeshift black box. The Washington State Apple Blossom Festival contracted under stricter policing, only to re-expand around a beer garden. Artist groups proclaim the possibility of connection but are cagey and elitist in reality. And I sit in a newsroom that produces a bimonthly, two monthlies, a daily newscast, and a soon-to-be twice-weekly legacy paper.

It is all absurd. But the same care that produces these contradictions has also, over the past year and a half, produced something else: good times. Material. Moments worth noticing. None of this is bad. It's just… ours. And I love Wenatchee for it. As Camus wrote, "One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

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Josey Meats

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This story was originally published April 14, 2026 at 8:38 PM.