Don't tempt me with a good time | Communal pollination

There are moments when a town reveals itself accidentally, not in the polished slogans printed on tourism brochures or in the sanctimonious throat-clearing of city council meetings, but in the strange simultaneity of ordinary life. A groundbreaking ceremony. A bike race. A street festival. A mariachi band echoing off museum brick while sunburnt cyclists slice through downtown like packets of caffeine with calves attached. Civilization, at least in Wenatchee, arrives less like a manifesto and more like three unrelated Facebook events accidentally scheduled on the same Saturday.

Dear reader, it has been a hot minute since I last wrote, mostly because I was waiting for something worthy of language. And because, frankly, the local discourse lately has felt like being trapped inside a group text moderated by a substitute teacher and fueled entirely by grievance, vague nostalgia and Canva graphics.

But then May 16 happened.

Downtown Wenatchee hosted not one, not two, but three major community events simultaneously: La Terraza, Tour de Bloom and the groundbreaking celebration for the Wenatchee Valley Museum & Cultural Center. Three entirely different crowds. Three distinct energies. And somehow, instead of collapsing into chaos, the whole thing cross-pollinated into something oddly beautiful, like if civic engagement accidentally took mushrooms.

And I'll say this plainly: there is no better rebuttal to the current climate of performative outrage and political melodrama than the sight of thousands of people simply existing together in public without spontaneously combusting into ideological warfare.

Which, if you listen to enough modern political rhetoric, feels almost miraculous.

Hannah Arendt once wrote that in periods of social confusion people become willing to "believe everything and nothing," a condition in which cynicism replaces truth entirely. That line has haunted me lately while watching our own local political theater unfold, especially the endless pearl-clutching over pride banners, which has somehow been elevated into a constitutional crisis by people who can barely parallel park, let alone govern a city.

Because the banner discourse was never really about banners. It was about symbolism as substitute for substance. About governance becoming theater. About small-town officials performing ideology the way community theater actors perform Tennessee Williams: loudly, earnestly and often without understanding the subtext.

And yet, just blocks away from all this noise, actual life was happening.

At the museum groundbreaking, I saw Matthew Pippin standing on the loading dock watching Mariachi Huenachi perform. The image struck me immediately: the museum, a repository of memory, conquest, nostalgia, curated identity, being serenaded by the future. Young musicians. Brown kids with brass instruments and ambition. History listening to what comes next.

It felt, briefly, like Wenatchee telling the truth about itself.

Growing up gay here was a strange experience because it was neither catastrophe nor idyll. It was survivable largely because people like Matthew existed. Long before rainbow banners became municipal litigation topics, Matthew was already a banner himself: visible, kind, stubbornly present. I would argue he has probably done more for queer visibility in this valley simply by existing openly than a thousand vinyl signs zip-tied to light posts ever could.

Which is why I find the current banner hysteria so exhausting. I'm queer. I could give a flying fart about the banners. Honestly, I suspect the people most emotionally invested in them are straight allies trying to retroactively atone for calling someone a slur in seventh grade.

The irony (this is where Slavoj Žižek enters my brain, kicking down the door covered in cigarette ash and dialectics) is that identity politics often becomes its own strange form of commodification. Žižek argues that both reactionary traditionalism and hyper-performative liberal identity culture can become trapped within the same capitalist machinery: one side selling nostalgia, the other selling moral branding.

And you could see both impulses colliding all over downtown that day.

The Christian conservatives warning civilization was collapsing because of banners.

The progressives treating banners as though salvation itself depended on municipal flag policy.

Meanwhile, ordinary people were just… living.

Drinking beer in the Tour de Bloom gardens. Dancing at La Terraza. Buying tacos. Cheering cyclists. Sweating through T-shirts. Existing inside community rather than merely posting about it.

Which brings me, regrettably, to the "Future Furniture Store."

A few weeks ago at Blossoms & Brews Beer Garden, some old classmates tried setting me up with a cute twinkish guy we'd apparently gone to school with, though I felt terrible that I didn't remember him. The flirtation was cut short because the entire group had to leave early for Sunday service at what I'll delicately call the Future Furniture Megachurch Experience™ - all fog machines and spiritual warfare against pronouns.

And I remember thinking: wait. Why would these people enthusiastically support two queer men flirting if their church leadership projects the vibe of a Chick-fil-A manager preparing for the Crusades?

Then it hit me. Most people are not ideological absolutists. They are lonely.

They go to the Future Furniture Store for the same reason people go to Pride festivals or beer gardens or bike races or museum groundbreakings: they want to belong somewhere. They want someone to say their name when they walk in the door. They want the unbearable weight of modern isolation briefly lifted.

That longing, not doctrine, is the real engine underneath most communal life.

Which is why contemporary politics feels so spiritually dead. Everything becomes branding. Tribes. Market-tested outrage. As Arendt warned, cynicism eventually replaces conviction altogether; people stop believing in truth and begin admiring tactical manipulation instead. Politics becomes less about building a society and more about scoring points in an endless online middle-school cafeteria fight.

But downtown Wenatchee, for one afternoon, escaped that logic.

From the American Shoe Shop patio, the avenue looked almost utopian: colorful vendor tents stretching down the street, families eating street corn, tequila cocktails sweating in plastic cups, music ricocheting across storefronts while cyclists tore through downtown at speeds suggesting either elite athleticism or unresolved childhood trauma.

And behind it all sat the old museum building, preparing for demolition and rebirth. It would be the last time many of us saw it as it was.

Josh Tarr probably summarized the day best when he wrote online:

"Downtown Wenatchee is where we turn hatred and division into culture and community. It's where we gather for parades, celebrate the arts, entertain one another, and support our friends and neighbors by truly ‘keeping it local.' … This is where and when we come together. Downtown Wenatchee is where we love and what we love."

And maybe that's the real story. Not banners. Not outrage. Not whatever culture war hallucination people imported this week from national cable news and awkwardly stapled onto local government.

The real story is that community still stubbornly exists despite all of it. Messy. Contradictory. Sweaty. Slightly drunk. Dancing to mariachi music while bicycle racers scream past taco stands beneath museum walls built on complicated history.

Maybe one day the valley as a whole will learn what downtown briefly remembered that Saturday: people do not actually want ideological purity nearly as much as they want one another.

And maybe, someday, that truth will hang in the museum too.

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This story was originally published May 18, 2026 at 8:38 PM.