Hail to Ace Hardware

NSP Meditations

I push open a wooden and glass door and enter a mom and pop Ace Hardware on a weekday morning. There are no giant monitors blaring advertisements. There is no garish lighting. There are no computers to look up stock. I need safe drain cleaner. Two hardware pros wearing vests and headsets are helping customers. I am greeted by another pro, an older man, and he asks how he can help me. I tell him. He leads the way down a a tiny aisle. We stop. We discuss various products. It is quite possible he knows something about every single item in this store. I ask him for a recommendation and he gives one. I purchase the product and leave the store. It all took less than five minutes. I had no trouble locating my car in the parking lot because there is no parking lot. I walked there.

Oh joy with my time in Ace! I talked to a knowledgeable employee within seconds of my entry. I suspect he was paid a living wage. I wonder how people come to possess so much knowledge of hardware. I have virtually no knowledge outside of the best tools to tear shit down or hack blackberries. I would love to be a hardware man like the Ace pros and put people at ease while buying hardware. But it’s too late for that. You can’t really acquire this knowledge unless you do hardware type tasks.

Damn, I hope something in the house needs a hardware fix soon. I love being around professional hardware people of an independently owned hardware store.

Sunday Morning

NSP Meditations

It was an early Sunday morning and I was buying groceries from the sleepy checker. I looked up at the self checkout line. A woman of indeterminate age with long black hair and wearing large black glasses was buying a four pack of mini bottles of wine and some Robitussin cough medicine.

She turned toward me, staring, then up to the ceiling. Her face was vacant. She just stood there. She couldn’t get the self check out to work. I think she pushed a help button but no help was ever coming in this store. She just stood there and didn’t move.

For a moment it looked like she was going to pop open the wine and cough syrup and get it going right there.

I paid my bill. I looked up and she was gone. The check out was still trying to process her purchase but she hadn’t waited. She had walked out of the store with her goods and onto the streets of Portland to begin her Sunday.

Oregon Tavern Age: Vampire Pat

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age ,

It was opening week of the NCL, National Concussion League, and I sat at a table in a corner drinking a craft malt liquor and polishing a manuscript.

A wild and bald OTA man sat at the bar and held court on all matters football. I couldn’t tell if he was drunk or insane, but clearly his life now had dynamic purpose because football season was finally here and we could stop talking about abortion and the Pandemic.

Another OTA man sat at the bar and listened to the performance.

Football Man was a Steelers fan and had a Steelers tattoo. He also had the Portland Trail Blazers logo tattooed on his skull.

The female OTA bartender was giving him the business about everything. Apparently, so the story went, she had freaked him out not too long ago when he went out to the patio to smoke and she switched the patio monitor to the 700 Club and he beheld the image of a 340-year old Pat Robertson talking about the end of the world because of liberals.

Football Man was aghast at Robertson’s appearance. The man looked like a “vampire, Dracula from Bram Stoker’s novel, a black eyed soulless son-of-a-bitch.”

I was laughing aloud at my table. The bartender said Football Man needed a little Christianity, but then she also said Robertson was most likely inhabited by an alien and secretly preparing for an invasion.

You know what sucks, really sucks? That Prince and Tom Petty are dead and Pat Robertson is alive and that his evangelical and totalitarian vision for women may win out in the end, considering the current makeup of the Supreme Court.

And he hates the Taliban? He and his ilk are the Taliban in this country! They’ve got a lot of women on their side, including many Republican politicians, some, if not all, who undoubtedly have had abortions in their youth.

Someone scored a touched down and the conversation shifted back to football and gambling and Oregon beating Ohio State and other crap.

I made a few edits, drank my beer, and knew this OTA crew would get me through the football season.

Of Not Walking in Rain

NSP Meditations, Of Walking in Rain

Four months is enough. I loathe walking in sunshine. There is no nuance, little digressive thought, only heat and sweat and more and more people striving for fitness and talking on their phones.

Rain drives people from the streets and trails. That’s what I crave—nobody around. The sun makes me a misanthrope. Rain makes me a minstrel. The sun bakes, rain soaks. I want more sogginess in my life, except for soggy thinking, which is what the sun produces.

Perhaps rain, hard rain, will end some of of the heated madness of the Pandemic. But maybe not.

I am tired of all my sun clothes. I want to wear rain attire. I want to stand under a towering Douglass fir in a deluge of rain and talk about it with the homeless man who will be camped out there.

Speaking of a homeless man, I talked to one under a shade tree and he said he was sick of the sun, too, even though rain meant hardship for him.

I want to sit under and awning or canopy when rain is crushing down and hold out my glass of fine gin and catch some of the liquid. A gin and rainwater, just like what the crazy general drinks in Dr. Strangelove.

All my rain books are gone. Everyone connected to that book is gone. My great rain dogs are all gone. Rain seems gone from Oregon. Will I ever live another great Oregon rain story? It’s been over two years since I’ve had one.

My New Literary Endeavor: The New American Diaspora

NSP Meditations, Writing , , , , , , , , ,

Friends of the Meditations Blog:

I invite you to subscribe to my latest literary endeavor, a newsletter called the New American Diaspora. In this newsletter, I write about observing and interacting with the homeless people in Oregon and also those people who have checked out on conventional American life.

Should you subscribe, the newsletter is emailed to your in-box two or three times a week via Substack, a newsletter platform that is helping writers find a wider audience and generate revenue from their writing.

It works like this: you click on this web site (or cut and paste into your browser)

https://mattlove.substack.com/

and it will direct you to the newsletter, where there are several options to subscribe. If you subscribe, each one of the pieces would be emailed to you when I post it. You can also access the archives of previous writings by subscribing. There is no blog or web site or social media outlet to visit. The content comes directly to you. Mine are mostly short reads, but not always.

At some point, I will put up a pay wall for certain content available only to paid subscribers. For the time being, however, the content is free to read in hope that my words will engage your heart and mind and perhaps lead to great notions of understanding and solutions.

Four years ago, I started Meditations. Many of you have read it and became regular readers. I will continue to post there on subjects unrelated to the newsletter, but the blog format has grown outdated, certainly as a model to get paid for writing, and I needed to adapt to the changing market and try generating additional income for my writing on this momentous crisis in our nation.

Thank you for your consideration and I hope you can support this endeavor. Please feel free to share this communication to other potential subscribers.

Matt Love

Animal Stories

NSP Meditations

I was sitting in OTA country and I overheard a drunken conversation between three OTAs about their encounters with bats, as in the flying mammals, and not the experience of being beat senseless with a baseball bat in a drunken brawl of some kind.

One story was about hitting a bat with a bus. Another was about camping and a bat in a tent. The final one was about a bat in a boat. All three stories also involved alcohol.

It occurred to me that I had bat story, too. One time a bat flew into my house and I captured it with a sheet and set it free. Alcohol was involved in that story as well.

As I listened to the bat conversation, it also occurred to me that I have a lot of stories involving animals in the wild.

I have a lot of deer and elk stories.

I have a lot of coyote stories, including a supernatural one.

I have four bear stories, including one where I hit one in the head with a broom.

I have one cougar story.

I have a bobcat story.

I have several raccoon stories.

I have two porcupine stories.

I have a dolphin story.

I have a (dead) whale story.

I have loads of seal and sea lion stories.

I have three otter stories.

I have three owl stories.

I have plenty of blue heron, crow, hummingbird, gull, raptor and barn swallow stories.

I have innumerable chipmunk and squirrel stories.

I have multiple beaver stories.

I have two salmon stories.

I have a great bumble bee story.

I went looking for a Bigfoot story but didn’t find one.

I want a fox story.

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