NSP Meditations

Thoughts on a Story

NSP Meditations

I heard a story from my construction crew buddy and it went something like this: a few days ago it was a stormy winter midnight on the Oregon Coast. A fishermen and his girlfriend got into a fight. He bolted out the door and began walking down Highway 101. A short time later, or perhaps it was hours an miles later, he was struck by a vehicle driven by a woman who had gone to pick up a pizza and had a couple drinks at the parlor while waiting for the order.

Upon hearing the impact, she thought she’d hit a deer. She got out of her car to investigate and found nothing. She drove home. She told a neighbor the story, and in the morning he went to the stretch of road where the collision occurred. He found the fisherman, dead. He hurried back to his neighbor’s house and told her to call the police. She did. She was later arrested and the outcome of her case is pending.

I have one question: what was the argument between the fishermen and his girlfriend that would drive him into the storm? I try to imagine the conversation. They were probably loaded.

I suppose the other question I have is: what is the girlfriend’s current state of mind after her boyfriend’s lonely death in a ditch alongside Highway 101. He had two kids. He was 44 years old.

This is the difference between fiction and journalism and I am a journalist at heart and want to know what they said to each other. I don’t want to make it up. In fiction these incidents and moments are always so elevated and purposeful. In journalism, the reporter might uncover what might be utterly banal. For most writers, it might be hard or uninteresting to write about something utterly banal, but perhaps it is more important to write about the banality of life than the higher purpose of life since so many people seemed trapped by banality and not engaged in higher purpose.

Food for creative thought. Wrestle with this: there is banality in beauty and beauty in banality.

Secret Coast Radio #14

NSP Meditations, secret coast radio

Welcome to the Secret Coast Radio podcast broadcasting somewhere on the Secret Coast

Let us begin by saying:

We prefer the first person plural over the singular.

We prefer mystery over journalism.

We prefer dogs over dilettantes, cannabis over Cossacks.

We prefer fidelity over fickleness, faith over fecklessness.

We prefer paper posters over targeted ads.

We prefer beaver dams over hydroelectric ones.

We prefer librarians over lackeys, love over loathing.

We prefer movement over listnessless, listening over mouthing off.

We love the image of a woman throwing a wedding ring in the ocean over the one of a woman crying in the sand.

We prefer people who take risks for love over those who stand pat for nothing.

What is this podcast about? Who are we?

Like we said, mystery over journalism.

Let show number 14 begin.

The link to the show is:

http://www.buzzsprout.com/385945

Oregon Tavern Age: Pig Farmer

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age

I wasn’t going to write on Oregon Tavern Age life anymore. After tens of thousands of words and over two decades, it was time to retire the subject. Sure, the stories kept coming, but I had put my foot down. No more imbibing!

But today, I fall off the wagon because…well…

I was sitting at a bar in OTA country watching a golf tournament, drinking a free beer because I had answered the trivia question correctly (William Henry Harrison), and alternately talking to an Elvis impersonator I had recently met here, about his 2400-piece collection of Elvis memorabilia he has stashed in a cabin up in the woods, when an OTA woman walked inside. She was large and had pink streaks in her short blonde hair. She wore a 12-inch Bowie knife in a rhinestone encrusted scabbard. The joint’s house service dog ran up to her and gave her a weird sniffing and circling. The woman, as she petted the dog, said, “Must be my pigs. I’m a pig farmer.”

She played with the dog a bit, then went up to the bar, to my left, a few feet away. She ordered a whiskey and coke in a pint glass, waited for it, paid, then moseyed over to the video slots.

I smelled pig as she left.

Dogs Reigning in My Mind (Part 19)

Bonnie and Clyde Files, NSP Meditations

Rocky trained with Butkus, his bulldog, a gift from Adrian, and that was his secret weapon against Apollo Creed. I once knew an old dog who lumbered himself down to the ocean every morning at dawn. I would pass him on the trail and my dogs always left him alone. One day the old dog wasn’t on the trail and I later found out from his owner that he died on the beach. In the Terminator, only dogs can detect the terminators. That’s true in true life as well, once you identify the terminators in your life. A dairy farmer once threatened to kill Sonny because she would occasionally meander over to his property because of her crush on his cattle dog. Had he done so, I would have spent a considerable amount of time fucking his life up, all non violently of course. He would have never known what hit him. In the movie John Wick, Keanu Reeves plays a hitman who begins his reformation into a decent human being when a Russian thug murders his puppy and then he kills everyone evil in site.

In the course of writing this book about dogs, I often pick up Dog Years by German novelist Gunter Grass, continue reading, and try to make sense of it as a novel and dog book. So far, and I am nearing the end, I have failed, but intuit in these pages of dense and elliptical prose, that something profound about dogs lingers there. I find it impossible to summarize the contents of Dog Years, so this riff from the inside jacket will have to suffice: “The Vistula, with its cargo of history, runs through their exploits. So does the dog Senta, who will whelp Harras, who in turn will sire the black shepherd Prinz, the Fuhrer’s favorite dog…the Dog Years are now in full swing; they lead right into the war, up to the moment when Prinz deserts his master because even a dog can have enough…” Hitler was so awful his favorite dog deserted him. But that’s not what happened in real life.

Finally, what about the song “Dog Years” by Rush? It is both a preposterous and poignant rock song about dogs, but really more about humans. The lyrics go:

In a dog’s life
A year is really more like seven
And all too soon a canine
Will be chasing cars in doggie heaven

It seems to me
As we make our own few circles ’round the sun
We get it backwards
And our seven years go by like one

Dog years—It’s the season of the itch
Dog years—With every scratch it reappears

In the dog days
People look to Sirius
Dogs cry for the moon
But those connections are mysterious

It seems to me
While it’s true that every dog will have his day
When all the bones are buried
There is barely time to go outside and play

Dog years—It’s the season of the itch
Dog years—With every scratch it reappears
Dog years—For every sad son of a bitch
Dog years—With his tail between his ears

I’d rather be a tortoise from Galapagos
Or a span of geological time
Than be living in these dog years

In a dog’s brain
A constant buzz of low-level static
One sniff at the hydrant
And the answer is automatic

It seems to me
As we make our own few circles ’round the block
We’ve lost our senses
For the higher-level static of talk

Notice the mention of Sirius. Rush got dogs. Rush worshiped Sirius. God is Dog. Dog is God.

Dogs Reigning in My Mind (Part 18)

Bonnie and Clyde Files, NSP Meditations

In John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, The Joad family takes only one of their three dogs (all nameless) on their journey of America diaspora west. They leave the other two behind with a neighbor who hadn’t lost his farm to the rapacious banks. Not long after the the Joads depart, their dog gets hit by a vehicle and dies. They don’t grieve. They move on. They don’t even bury it. They should have taken all three dogs. The story might have turned out better. Interestingly enough, members of the new American diaspora unfolding have dogs, a lot of dogs, and would never leave them behind. What changed there? There’s a novel in that question.

Who wouldn’t have wanted to be Jennifer Beals’ dog in Flashdance and get to watch her work out every day? Jesus Christ.

Sometime in the mid 1970s Steve Martin performed a stand-up routine on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show for an audience of four dogs that were on stage with him. Before the performance, Martin asked television viewers to bring their dogs over to the television so they could watch. He waited a bit, then said, “If you’re a human being you won’t get the jokes.” He then began his routine, and within seconds, three of the dogs trotted away, but Martin kept on going. It’s a very funny thing to see a human comedian bomb in front of dogs.

In the third grade, I fell off a shed and broke my left wrist. As some sort of therapy, my parents surprised me with a beagle. I named him Tex and he became my best friend, boon companion. Until we finally confined him to the yard, he would often follow me to school as I walked, wait outside the classroom door, and then I played with him at the recesses until we walked home together. My most indelible memory of Tex involves leaves and football. I would spend hours raking leaves into giant piles that I arranged to resemble an offensive line in football. Tex would stand on the opposite side of the piles. I would toss him a hamburger chew toy, he would snag it with his teeth, then bolt through the piles like the fat fullback he was. I would play middle linebacker, meet him in the hole, tackle him, and boy and dog would roll and roll on the grass, and the leaves would fly and fly. He never fumbled. After the game, I’d rerake the piles and then we’d go at it again. I suppose this wasn’t the most efficient use of the time spent raking, but in reflection, maybe it was because I am writing about it now and crying. We played this game this for years. He knew it was coming when I started raking and waited with the hamburger in his mouth. When he died my freshmen year in college, he was buried in the yard with that hamburger. Raking alone the next fall produced some of the saddest moments of my young adulthood. Raking hasn’t been the same since. I once told a woman I was dating that I grieved more over the death of Tex than the death of my grandfather. She later cited that as the moment she knew she was going to dump me. Another woman I was sort of dating once suggested that my three dogs sleep in my truck outside her home. It was over right there. Another woman I dated once told me it would never work between us because I had three big dogs. Perhaps the truest rock song about dogs is “Gonna Buy Me a Dog” by the Monkees. A man gets dumped by his girlfriend over the phone. She shreds him with invective. What does he do?

I’m gonna buy me a dog [A dog, a dog! Why?]
‘Cause I need a friend now. [Say, you need all the friends you can get]
I’m gonna buy me a dog,
My girl, my girl, don’t love me no how.

Haven’t so many of us been there in one way or another? “Hey Bulldog” by the Beatles is a curious member in the temple of rock songs about dogs. I have listened to it dozens and dozens of times and don’t even think it’s really a song about a bulldog, but rather the bulldog is the narrator of the song and making observations of human beings. Who knows? This interpretation could change if I ever listen to the song on magic mushrooms.

Dogs Reigning in My Mind (Part 17)

Bonnie and Clyde Files, NSP Meditations ,

There is nothing more dispiriting in life to live next to a dog chained up outside. It happened to me once, years ago, and it became so depressing that I finally did something about it because I was losing my heart. Here is the story: I moved to a town and began walking my dogs past a neighbor’s home on our way to the beach. I observed the neighbor’s big red dog chained up outside, day and night. The dog had roughly 30 feet to run on a one-acre lot and a little ramshackle wood fort for shelter. Sometimes the dog would stand up as we passed, but usually she just slept on a mat in the dirt, rain or shine, her head buried in a curl. This went on for three months. During that time, I’d never met my neighbor or seen him walk his dog, let alone interact with it. It was possible that the dog hadn’t been off the chain in the all the time I’d been living here. One morning I passed the dog and called out to her, “Hey, Brownie! How’s it going?” which was odd because the dog was red. She looked up, let out a mean bark, then resumed her curl. From that moment on, I started calling out to Brownie every time I walked the dogs to the beach. A couple of days after I started this, she stopped barking, stood up, and wagged her tail at our coming and going. As I said, I’d never met my neighbor, but, of course, being a writer predisposed with a keen insight into the human condition who loved dogs, I knew him. Therefore, it was safe to get pissed off. Why couldn’t the neighbor get up fifteen minutes early and walk his dog once or twice or week? And how about his wife? Wasn’t it her dog too? The beach was ten minutes away. Why wouldn’t everyone with a dog want to take his best friend to the beach every morning or evening? By chance, one late afternoon, I was walking the Sonny and Ray home after visiting the beach when I came upon another neighbor, Ed, working in his yard. We’d chatted a few times before and he came over and petted the dogs.

“Hey, what’s the deal with that dog chained up over there?” I said.

“Her name’s Maddie. I feed her when Mike’s away, when they go on trips.”

“Have you ever tried to walk her?”

“No, she seems sort of aggressive when I get close and she probably weighs a hundred and twenty pounds.”

“It just kills me to see her chained up all the time. I don’t understand how people can do that to a dog. You think Mike would let me walk her?”

“Sure. Who wouldn’t? Let’s go ask him.”

“You mean right now?”

“Why not? I just saw him drive in.”

I walked my dogs back to the house and then jogged over to Mike’s house. Ed was waiting by the front door. He knocked and a few seconds later Mike appeared and came down few steps to greet us. He looked tired. I introduced myself and we shook hands.

“Hey, I was wondering, would you mind if I walked your dog sometimes? I’ve got a lot of free time and would love to help out.”

“Yeah, that’s a great idea. I hear Maddie bark in the morning at 6:00 or so, and I always say, ‘There goes Matt with his dogs.’”

He knew my name and I had no idea how.

As we approached Maddie, she stood up, wagged her tail, and let out a series of grunts and cries. Mike petted her head and we discussed her various traits. “I’ve been meaning to get up and walk her,” he said.

“Why don’t we meet tomorrow morning and have all the dogs meet. At about 6:30,” I said.

“Okay, see you then.” We shook hands and I said goodbye to Mike and Ed and jogged home. It was on. It was on with a dog!

The next morning, Mike was ready to go and we walked all the dogs together on leashes as a sort of introduction. A little hostility between Maddie and my dogs flared briefly, but it was nothing serious. Most humans holding different religious beliefs act a lot worse when then they meet one another.

At first we walked in silence. I gathered Mike wasn’t much of a talker. “Mike, where do you work at?” I asked.

“I’m a Ranger down at South Beach State Park. Been there for twenty-two years.”

“That’s impressive. I love that park. You guys do a great job.”

We made small park talk for a few more minutes, and then it was time to take the path to the beach, Mike didn’t follow me.

“Don’t you want to take Maddie down to the beach?”

“I have to get to work.”

“Okay, so I’ll go over later and see how it goes with Maddie.”

Later that day, with Mike and his wife at work, I approached Maddie and she stood up, jumped in little circles, and wagged her tail. I leashed her up and we headed for the beach. When we reached the sand, I took a look around and didn’t see another human being. I released Maddie and she ran to the ocean in a goofy lumbering manner that made me laugh aloud. She found the wrack line and began gobbling every dead crustacean in sight. We spent thirty minutes on the beach running and roughhousing, playing stick and tug. The next morning, after I took my dogs to the beach, Maddie and I hit the sand again. We did this for the next five years I lived in this town and Maddie became my de facto dog.

Perhaps it is worth adding that not long after I began walking Maddie, I anonymously paid though a nonprofit organization called Fences For Fido to have a fence constructed for Maddie. Fences for Fido’s motto is, “Unchained, one dog at a time.” (Please donate to them.)

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