Art on the Right Side of the Tracks
As I was wondering around Fresno on a Saturday evening looking for [anything] I walked around the deserted downtown area, saw Fulton Mall under construction and ended up running into Chris Sorensen’s Art Studio.
Most people around Fresno are more interested anything but art and adventure so this is for the one’s who are very un-Fresno-like in their approach to life. If that is you then please continue and post a comment while your at it.
I remember watching channel 53 one late night to find a recorded broadcast of a Fresno City Counsel meeting where they were talking about renovating the downtown area. The renovation was suppose to be kicked off with the building of a baseball stadium. About 10 years after I watched that meeting a stadium was built and ~20 years later downtown is no better off. Some people understood the stadium wouldn’t do much to help the downtown area and some just liked the idea of having sporting events to attend. The downtown area of Fresno has bigger problems then a couple new or refurbished buildings.
Fresno’s downtown area is a ghost town on the weekends primarily because only the government rents buildings/offices down there. Starbucks and other chains aren’t even open on the weekends. Even though there are conventions and theater productions going on most of the time there isn’t any other reason to leave the north side of town. I would like to be able to recommend something downtown but there really isn’t anything to do besides visit 2 or 3 restaurants between all the vacancies and close government offices.
Here are some sites that don’t do a very good job of promoting things to do in Fresno/Clovis. There used to be something called fresnofamous.com but it seems to have been gutted by the Fresno Bee.
A good list that isn’t easy to find on the fresno.gov site is – tripadvisor.com/Attractions-g32414-Activities-Fresno_California.html
Where is left of fresnofamous – fresnobee.com/entertainment/ent-columns-blogs/fresno-famous/
Downtown Fresno – downtownfresno.org
Here is the City’s s#!t job of promoting businesses. You would think businesses don’t pay taxes for doing business in Fresno the way Fresno.gov supports them – fresno.gov/Visitors/ThingsToDo/Default.htm
Interesting list of things to do in Fresno/Clovis in the form of a warning – movoto.com/guide/fresno-ca/moving-to-fresno/
6th down on the second page of a Google search will show you a housing welfare program just before the Fresno Grizzlies website. Will not be providing the welfare link and whoever is responsible for online presence for the Grizzlies should be fired.
If there is any ideas post them or keep of keep the good things around Fresno to yourself, like you usually do. WTF Fresno!
No Ragrets
If you don’t get the tagline of this blog post, go ahead and move on. If you do – this story’s for you.
Last night I was sitting in a reputable tattoo shop in the Tower District getting some fairly extensive ink done to my back. This was my second in-person appointment, and my fourth contact with the artist. My first appointment involved showing my existing piece, providing ideas as to what I wanted done, and putting down a deposit. The artist had emailed me sketches of ideas, I responded back, and then I committed to the artwork that would be forever on my body. You know, something a rational person would do before any type of permanent body modification.
As I’m laying there mid-tattoo, the phone rings. One of the other artists had stepped out, so the owner (my tattooist) answered the phone. He was close enough to me that I could hear the entire conversation. The girl calling asked how much he would charge for nipple piercings. He quoted a price and explained his procedures in-depth to her. She then told him another shop quoted her $20 less than his price. He again explained his procedures and explained he did them in this particular way to ensure she would get a result she was happy with. He also explained that he used quality jewelry for all his piercings. She then reiterated the cheaper price, as if she thought he might decide to price match the cheaper shop. He told the girl, “Cheaper isn’t always better,” and the call ended shortly thereafter.
I asked him how often something like that occurred. He told me that people in Fresno were mostly interested in getting cheap tattoos and piercings and joked that some guys would only charge $30 bucks and some meth and half the meth was consumed before the tattoo ever got started, which is why so many people in Fresno have crappy tattoos. I told him I sure as hell wouldn’t be shopping around for discounts on having my nipples pierced (if I was ever in the market for that kind of body modification) and the owner laughed. He told me I’d be surprised at what people were willing to do just to save $10 bucks in Fresno. He said he did a lot of repair work from these cheaper jobs and wished people would wise up and go somewhere good the first time around to save everyone the hassle.
Is his story true? Are most Fresnans really so cheap that we’d go someplace “cheaper” but not “better” to get something like our nipples pierced or to put permanent ink into our skin? Are we really so stupid just to save a few bucks? No ragrets, right? WTF, Fresno.
How Smartphones Make Pedestrians Stupid
Who knew that a smartphone could make you, well, stupid? 
Last week I was witness to something that seems to be commonplace around Fresno and Clovis. A woman and her young child stepped out into traffic without looking. The woman was busy on her smartphone and her child didn’t know any better. My attention was caught when I heard the sound of squealing rubber as a car had to come to a shuddering halt inches away from her. Unluckily for her, the irate driver was a police officer. I overheard him offer her two choices – to charge her with child endangerment or with jaywalking. He reamed her good for endangering her child and for paying no attention to the 2,000 pound vehicles coming and going around her.
I’d like to say this incident is rare, but it isn’t. If you live in Fresno or Clovis, chances are you’ve had to slam on your brakes a time or two because of a pedestrian who seems to materialize out of nowhere or who is too busy on their smartphone to pay attention to their surroundings. I’ve not seen this kind of pedestrian behavior elsewhere – it seems to be localized here to the Valley and it makes me wonder how we’ve gotten so stupid. What’s even more disconcerting is the fact that we’re teaching our children that it’s okay to not pay attention to vehicles.
I wasn’t going to write on this, but I witnessed a blatant example of smartphone-caused pedestrian stupidity again yesterday. I went to the Clovis Rodeo and enjoyed a day full of horses, bulls, sheep, and motorcycles. As I was leaving, I carefully edged my car out of the surrounding side streets. I was a little behind the bulk of the crowd, so there wasn’t as much foot traffic as others might experience. As I pulled up to a stoplight on the corner of 5th and Sunnyside, a man in his 20’s stood typing away on his smartphone. The light turned green and he stepped off the curb after glancing up. He never once looked around to see if there were any other dangers lurking. I watched as a car flew through the red light, missing him by only a couple of feet. Although he had the right-away, had the other car not been vigilant and swerved to avoid him, he would have been dead right. I was left with a sick feeling in my stomach, wondering why our phones have become more important to us than our own lives.
I looked up some statistics on this. According to the Wall Street Journal article published this past February, emergency room visits treating injuries from “distracted” pedestrians are up 124%. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), pedestrians are more often at fault in vehicle-pedestrian accidents. This data is alarming – and if statistics are this bad in other cities, and I have experienced the difference between driving in Fresno versus driving in San Francisco, Sacramento, San Diego, and Las Vegas, the statistics for Fresno must be double what they are everywhere else. The next time you exit your car and begin to walk anywhere, ask yourself this – is what’s going on in your life as documented through your smartphone really so important that you’re willing to risk your life for it?
Can’t Pay Fresno
Growing up in Fresno, I have heard people say in passing conversation things like “There is something about the people in Fresno,” as if to say they have a problem dealing with the people in Fresno. I knew what they meant, but I didn’t realize how to articulate what that “something” was until now.
The explanation of my discovery came at two different times. The first time, I was selling environmental products in the mid ‘90s and the second time occurred over the past couple of months.
I recently ran a few ads in Fresno, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The ads were for models, photographers, marketers and graphic designers. All of the responses in Fresno were for modeling. In San Francisco, the responses were split between models and photographers/videographers. In Los Angeles, it was mostly models responding to the ads, with one photographer. I mentioned in my ad responses needed to include phone numbers. None of the people in Fresno offered their phone numbers right away. Everyone in the other areas gave me contact details as the ad suggested, and it seemed, without hesitation. Why the hesitation in Fresno to provide something so basic?
When dealing with responses to the ad, I had what I would consider normal interactions with the people in Los Angeles and San Francisco. I messaged or emailed them and arranged to call them. After we talked, they were satisfied enough to make arrangement for an appointment when I was ready. When dealing with ad responses in Fresno, the models usually flaked out after the first couple messages and only one of them ultimately gave me their phone number. This was odd to me. Doesn’t Fresno have high unemployment? Aren’t people always complaining here about lack of jobs?
What I found even more odd was this lone model in Fresno who seemed outgoing and interested enough to recommend her sister-in-law as a photographer, and even her sister if I was interested in them being a part of my project. I said I was, and the Fresno model said she would reach out to her sister photographer to find out about her hourly or project rates. I didn’t hear anything back for a few days and had to follow up today (Friday, 15th April) to get the answer. The only communication I received back was a message asking a question but it definitely wasn’t expressing interest in my project. The problem is, the question she posed didn’t need to be asked. Instead, she could have responded with interest in participating in the project and the rates for this and the rates for that. I answered the question anyway and never got a definitive answer. I am not sure where the breakdown in communication was, but I don’t have the answer and I asked the Fresno model to give all who were interested my number in order that she not have to be the intermediary.
I have even told people I have run into in Fresno that I would like to pay them to do some work and, of course while I was talking to them in person, I explained the work. The other day I was finishing dinner at a restaurant. I liked the waitress’s voice so I asked her where she was from and if she would like to do some voice work recording for voice automated systems for telephone systems. She seemed very excited about my proposal and said she was definitely interested in voice acting. I gave her my number and she never called me. No inquiry about what the pay was or anything along those lines. No message about not being interested after all.
As I was talking to a friend of mine today about all this frustration, I felt like I was able to narrow the problem down to the fact that people in Fresno are skeptical of just about any offer you have for them. They don’t want what you have and don’t care how much money is involved. They are hypocrites of the highest order and don’t care much about the honor of dealing with people in an upfront and personal way. How did Fresno get this way? Is it passed down by the older generations to the young, generation after generation? We can’t blame the Internet, as Fresno was like this before Facebook and the Internet. It has been like this for as long as I have been trying to offer people things. They don’t want your money and they definitely don’t want to give you theirs. I know, as I have tried to give plenty of people money by hiring them for doing menial tasks. Most people in other areas (i.e., not from Fresno) can’t comprehend how people turn down such opportunities to earn this money unless they make $50/hour or more already.
Some people identify the problem with people in Fresno as being unfriendly. I don’t see it that way. Strangers I talk to on the street are quite friendly. They are friendly even if they aren’t sincere. I think it is either an authenticity (sincerity) problem or a skepticism problem when they are approached by someone trying to give (i.e., pay) or take (i.e., time/work) something from them. It is like people in Fresno have a balance sheet running in their daily interactions and that balance can’t have a credit or deduction unless they have some sort of premeditated, carefully crafted plan to a guarantee they won’t regret the interaction.
No other place is like Fresno that I have been to. The first time I experienced how other communities are was when visiting Sacramento as a teenager. I noticed how friendly the girls were specifically, and thought that Sacramento must be the easiest place to pick up girls because my experience in Fresno was the opposite.
Fresno, THINK about why you wouldn’t take my money. What makes you interested when we talk in person but causes you to not follow through with me? Why would you not respond to a job offer for which you are qualified to do? What else do you have to do, and if you have something else to do, let us all know what that thing is since all I hear about in Fresno is how it is lacking in jobs and activities.
I have the money and you have the time. For 2014 ENTIRE COUNTRY unemployment from a USA Today article:
Fresno #9 with 11.2%, Hanford #7 with 11.7%, Madera #12 with 10.7%, Visalia #4 with 12.3 and Merced #5 with 12.2%
WTF Fresno!
Peanut Butter Jelly Time
Okay, total mom rant here.
I have three kids in a Clovis Unified elementary school. Today, I got a note sent home in my second grader’s backpack that states we can no longer bring peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to school. What the hell?!?!!?!?
This ban on the most tried-and-true staple of childhood lunchtime is the result of one child’s allergy to nuts. According to this parent’s logic, every child in our school is banned from eating peanuts rather than teaching this ONE child what foods to avoid to stay safe. This parent avidly lobbied at the school meeting for this ban and refused to listen to advice and concerns raised by parents whose children have other allergies and disabilities (i.e., to bees, dairy, diabetes). Truly, I’m all for educating those around us about food allergies, but at what point are you going to realize how little control you actually have over your child’s environment? Middle School? High School? Will you hand out notes in his college dorm? Where does his accountability begin and mine ends?
How about this – instead of penalizing every peanut eater at my kid’s school (and every parent who is slapping together a cold lunch in the morning because we’re not on the hot lunch program), you teach your child how to COPE with having a nut allergy. Teach him to move through life in spite of the challenges he might face. Teach him to OVERCOME any obstacles he faces and not SUCCUMB to the hype surrounding them. Instead of using his nut allergy as a way to empower your kid, you’ve made him the reason why every other child at school can’t bring their favorite lunchtime meal. And you think that’s going to turn out well for him? You think you’re protecting and helping him? Wake the hell up.