There Are Two Kinds of Farmers' Market

The first kind:

• Sells fruits and vegetables
• Nicely cordoned off from traffic
• Clear beginning, middle, and end
• Occupies a single block for a few hours
• Nice produce
• Nobody playing music
• Special stand for apples
• You can find turnips here
• Virtue is its own reward!
• Maybe there's a folding table for a guy selling bread
• But it's mostly just fresh fruits and vegetables here
• A place for everything, and everything in its place!
• They're selling fruits and vegetables from farms
• In the summer they have a lot of tomatoes
• Hey, strawberries!
• Early to bed and early to rise!
• In the winter they have less produce but you're always gonna find onions, potatoes, a squash, your cellar basics
• "By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that which is needed to plan and beautify cities." That's from Socrates!
• Buy some vegetables and then go home, you're all done with your quick, nice errand

The second kind:

• Someone's playing music but it's never just one guy playing one song
• There's a little bluegrass band at one end playing their absolute honky-tonkiest on like three instruments and seventeen "fun noise-producing non-instruments." one guy is playing Ball canning jars somehow. You better believe there's another guy with spoons and a washboard, maybe one of those wearable change-dispensing machines you can strap over your belt, tossing out syncopated pennies
• There's a jazz singer in the middle doing her best to bend the most tin-foil sounds you ever heard in your life
• She is objectively a great singer and it feels churlish not to at least smile tightly but jesus Christ it is eight in the morning and she is belting and she's got one of those hats with a veil on it and you can still hear the spoon guy
• They failed to put enough space between the spoons guy and the lady who sings in italics so you can hear them both at the same time!!!
• She's fine, she's probably a completely lovely person and in the right context you would find her commitment to the bit charming, even admirable, but the right context involves being indoors and sitting down and some beautifully insulated walls with velvet hangings to really catch and hold the sound. not like this
• I'm not even supposed to be here today
• If you get lost and try to reorient yourself by going back to the table that sells lavender and lavender products? Good fucking luck pal! That is a different table from a separate lavender farm!!! You have been dealt zero aces! They will try to sell you a $40 microwavable aromatherapy neck pillow that does not handle being microwaved very well!
• Everything you can possibly imagine is for sale here! "Fruits" and "vegetables" are so limiting – here is a truck that sells only shin bones from mighty upstate cows!! Bee pollen, bee pollen, glass jars of bee pollen, my fine friend! Tickets to Pleasure Island in Honest John's fine coach! Who will buy my sweet red roses? Two blooms for a penny! Hot lunch! Hot lunch! Big plastic quart full of hot lunch from us! Half a duck – half a duck here! Why not buy half a duck from Hillcourt Half-Duck Farms! Goat's cheese bracelets from Two Guys and a Goat! Raise your own maple syrup, start your own snail farm, grow mushrooms on an egg carton! LAVENDER SOAP LAVENDER SOAP LAVENDER ROOM SPRAY LAVENDER TOOTHPASTE LAVENDER SYRUP LAVENDER CREAM! Don't listen to him! Don't buy their lavender cream! Buy this lavender cream! It comes with lavender soup! Your name on a grain of rice! SIGN UP TO VOTE. SIGN UP HERE TO VOTE. Do you have time to talk about the plight of the Ronnybrook trout today, sir or madam? PASTEURIZED MILK WILL KILL YOU. WHY NOT BUY MILK THAT HAS BEEN SITTING OUT ALL DAY INSTEAD.
• Here the fortunate ones through money, or influence, or luck, obtain exit visas and so on to Lisbon, and from Lisbon to the Americas. But the others wait in Casablanca – and wait – and wait...
• You've gone too far! You're at the band for children now! This is the band that plays music for loose children! All children that get lost at this farmers' market make their way here!
• Oho and you had better believe there is a guy making balloon animals nearby! He is so old it hurts to look at him! Someday will you be this old? What is the alternative?
• Three of the children in the audience are openly and unrestrainedly weeping, like Cher at the opera in Moonstruck
• The rest are either nearly asleep or losing their minds with Recreation and Discord
• 1. Familiar and free interaction between people, 2. Eccentricity, 3. Carnivalistic mésalliances, 4. Profanation
• WELCOME TO SELENA'S LAVENDER FARM. PLEASE DO NOT ENGAGE WITH ANY OF THE OTHER LAVENDER FARMS YOU SEE HERE TODAY. THEY ARE FALSE AS HELL AND TELL ONLY LIES. IF YOU BUY THEIR LAVENDER IT WILL GIVE YOU BIG PAIN ALL OVER THE BODY
• "You can check out any time you like but you can never leave" is both literally true and also a lyric you will hear many many times while you search for the end to this farmers' market, because there is a cover band playing "Hotel California" next every exit! Are there several bands playing "Hotel California" at multiple intersections? Or is it one band playing "Hotel California," and you are more lost than even you realize?
• Somewhere in this crowd there is a man who looks exactly like you, only his eyes are spring green
• For every degree over 85, the band plays a little bit louder!!
• They presently saw a town before them – the name of that town is Vanity – at the town there is a fair kept, called Vanity Fair. It is kept all the year long. It beareth the name of Vanity Fair because the town where it is kept is lighter than vanity and also because all that is there sold, or that cometh thither, is vanity; as is the saying of the wise, "All that cometh is vanity"; a fair wherein should be sold all sorts of vanity, and that it should last all the year long. Therefore, at this fair are all such merchandise sold as houses, lands, trades, places, honors, preferments, titles, countries, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures; and delights of all sorts, as harlots, wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones, and what not.
• And moreover, at this fair there is at all times to be seen jugglings, cheats, games, plays, fools, apes, knaves, and rogues, and that of every kind.
• Here are to be seen, too, and that for nothing, thefts, murders, adulteries, false-swearers, and that of a blood-red color!
• There is a slow, tense, on-foot chase sequence going on in the background, a guy running away hiding from his pursuers under floats, pretending to play instruments in one of the bands, ducking into the vendor stalls, et cetera
• The next lavender farm has its own singer!!!! Her stage name is Minerva!!! Do you want to come up and dance with her?? She's beckoning at you to join her for some reason and she will not take no for an answer! You don't know this yet but her thin scarf has lavender sewn into it!! She will playfully wrap it around you while you are "dancing" with her and ask you to smell it!!!
• "Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people. While carnival lasts, there is no other life outside it. During carnival time life is subject only to its laws, that is, the laws of its own freedom...Carnival travesties: it crowns and uncrowns, inverts rank, exchanges roles, makes sense from nonsense and nonsense of sense."
• EVERYTHING IS HERE! EVERYTHING IS HERE! IT'S LIKE A RENAISSANCE FAIRE IN NORMAL CLOTHES! TOO MUCH OF EVERYTHING IS ALL HERE AND YOU BELONG TO EVERYTHING! THE PATH THAT LEADS HERE IS SO, SO WIDE! OUR HOURS ARE FOREVER AND NO ONE BELONGS HERE MORE THAN YOU!

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