If you've looked at this website before, albeit perhaps with the liberal love and relentless fomenting excitement of the greater Troy, NY community, you might be wondering exactly what the deal is. I seem to be rustling around poeticizing about rocks that look like flowers, the shapes of snowflakes, and the finer points of post-apocalyptic temporary tattooing. This is true.
But I'm also trying to start a business, one committed to a few core ideas, namely the following:
1. Beauty, like everything else, is impermanent.
2. The communities we want to live in, and which I'm committed to participating in, flourish when we encourage and engage in the creation of participatory things-of-beauty.
3. These things should not tax our health or the health of our planet.
4. I really like getting dirty.
With these core principles in mind, I'm creating an official thing-of-sorts, as recently documented by the NYS Department of Taxation and Finance.
This horrible pink-colored document is my CERTIFICATE OF AUTHORITY. It lets me charge sales tax. It also makes me feel serious.
And this is the FEDCO catalog. The FEDCO catalog! This is a page of sweet peas, into which I pour all my wintry thoughts about sweet peas, and Tithonia (every punctuation mark here is a deleted exclamation point): Tithonia, the Mexican sunflower, with gray velvet leaves.
This catalog, the stack of catalogs underneath it, and the various notes, question marks, and to-do lists filling my space are the antithesis of a CERTIFICATE OF AUTHORITY. They point to everything I don't know, the future that I can't predict, and the locus of all the real excitement.
