I’ve seen people reading my books in bars, libraries, cafes, breweries and bookstores and the moment always discharges a blast of literary happiness. Rarely, have I ever said anything to the reader when I see such a thing. No need to ruin the moment with talk.

Today, another such moment occurred, and it easily topped them all. I was pulling my car around the front of a grocery store, where the line of homeless people waiting to deposit cans and bottles into the machines was seven or eight deep. I noticed one homeless man sitting on the sidewalk waiting his turn. He was leaning against the store and reading a book. It was my book chat homeless man! I slowed down. He was reading my book, The Great Birthright! Earlier that morning, I’d stocked it in a half dozen nearby street libraries. And there he was reading my novel about Oregon’s socialist ocean beaches and the evil California developer trying to privatize them. (You can join the homeless bibliophile and purchase your copy from this blog!)

I smiled. I laughed. I said, “Hell yeah!”

Then it hit me. We’d have to chat up the book on our next book chat. It very well could be this afternoon! What if the reader who loved Ivanhoe hated my book? What if he gave me a bad review right there on the sidewalk when he was drinking malt liquor or smoking a cheap cigar?

I relished that possibility, almost more than I relished the possibility he would love the novel.

For the record: there is a very good chance I am the only American author in the history of American literature who witnessed a homeless man reading that author’s novel while sitting on a sidewalk and drinking malt liquor or smoking a cheap cigar, or doing all three at the same time!

Top that Jonathan Franzen or Jennifer Wiener! Yeah, you too, Ernest Hemingway, although you are dead.

A lazy Saturday afternoon in the big city. Urban sounds abound. Here are some thoughts and thanks for reading them. I never really know who is.

I need to find a clean, ill-lighted Oregon Tavern Age joint full of unvaccinated truckers and loggers and drywallers and see them alive before they are dead. Death by conspiracy, what a dumb way to go, although stories of stupidity are unusually interesting to read.

I took a bicycle ride earlier, at seven in the morning, I passed the usual homeless suspects but there is always someone new or someone who never appear again. One of the domiciles I passed is constructed from a conglomeration of wood products: plywood, pallets, boards, doors, etc. A sign out front the domicile read “Good Wood For Sale.” And indeed, neatly stacked in front of this haphazard wooden domicile was a nice selection of lumber for sale.

A homeless person was vending, probably to nearby homeless people. That was a first such encounter to me.

Yesterday, on my walk, I had another pleasant book chat with the one homeless man bibliophile I regularly meet. He was staked out on his usual sidewalk near the convenience store, holding a book, but not drinking malt liquor. This time he was smoking a thin cigar.

I asked him what he was reading, as I always do. He said Frankenstein in Baghdad, a novel. He laughed and then showed me the cover. “I know it’s a novel,” he said. “Why do they have to tell me?”

Good question. They didn’t put “A Novel” on Moby Dick or Catcher in the Rye.

I asked if he liked the novel. He did, a lot. Many colorful characters. I asked if he’d finished Ivanhoe, the last book I saw him reading, about a week ago.

He had finished and loved it. He said he would have let me have it but it was promised to a woman in his encampment.

I said that was fine and it occurred to me that soon there will be two people in the history of modern American homelessness who have read a hundred-year-old edition of Ivanhoe.

Shit, they’re getting damn well close to a book club there! One more reader, and it would surely rate as the only homeless encampment in the history of ALL American homelessness where the residents had an informal book club going and read a shared copy of Ivanhoe!

A couple cases of pate in small tins reared themselves in the storage container of the food pantry.

How they got there was impossible to conceive so I didn’t even try.

I discovered them while foraging for items to give away as a sort of bonus to the regular fare. One day it might be Ding Dongs, another canned roast beef, another kale, yet another pate.

I carried the cases to a table. Skeptics doubted anyone would take a single tin.

So, I bet the food pantry volunteer supervisor one dollar on an over/under of five tins distributed during the four-hour shift. She took the under.

Three hours later, I’d moved 24 tins. You haven’t lived until you’ve moved by virtue of sheer marketing and hustling pizzazz, 24 tins of pate at a food pantry event. It’s sometimes quite enjoyable to shill like a carnival barker or television evangelist in the name of pate.

The supervisor paid up. One buck. Cold hard cash. A smacker. I stuck it my pocket. I would somehow use the dollar later in act of good work.

Hey, I don’t have follow the rules about setting off fireworks during a record heat wave.

I will have my campfire and my kid will roast hot dogs in a real flame even though authorities have banned campfires because they might set off forest fires that will burn down the Western United States.

It’s okay if I take a picture of myself getting vaccinated even though a hundred signs at the vaccination center prohibit it due to privacy concerns.

I don’t have to wear a fucking mask when I enter a private business because I don’t have to!

Hey, we’ll be the first empire ever to conquer Afghanistan.

I know more about public health science than scientists. I just know. Let me send you a link.

God told us to kill Indians and steal their land. It’s our destiny.

I am perfectly in the right double parking on a busy road at rush hour so I can drop off my kind at adventure camp. No, the kid can’t be dropped off a block away on a side street and walk, even though he’s going on a five mile hike later that morning.

My kid has the right to be entertained and be the center of attention wherever adults gather.

I damn well have to travel to Disneyland during a pandemic because I’m so fucking bored and aggravated with my life at home, and that includes being around my family.

Dammit, the government should work, but I don’t want to pay taxes to fund it, or I elect politicians who don’t believe in governing.

I judge everyone via social media but don’t want it to happen to me when I make a public mistake.

I fly to Cancun during an ice storm while all my constituents freeze. But who gives a shit, they’ll vote for me again.

Hey, I’m a zillionaire, I get to fly into space. Meanwhile, Americans die from lack of air conditioning.

Driving around the city provides so much visual stimulation that I often feel I might wreck.

The city can’t govern, although it does seem to be trying.

The affectation of many people wears me out.

Close proximity to the homeless population is oftentimes so demoralizing that I just come home, sit on the couch on the deck, and try to let it ooze away.

People I know in Portland seem to struggle to follow through.

I miss Gold Beach Books and the table upstairs that was a second office.

I miss the Sea Star Lounge. Oregon Tavern Age life still exists in Portland, but it’s different and depleted.

There is no gold to discover in Portland thrift stores.

Street Roots is a great weekly newspaper.

The city has provided the unlikely inspiration for a new series of crime novellas about a socialist private detective.

Street libraries are such a fantastic way of disseminating publications.

I still like riding a bike.

You can still meet interesting people in the course of living in a big city.

KGON, Portland’s home of FM rock for half a century, has no local DJs. It’s all corporate voices from somewhere else. No more Marty Party, The Big BA, Iris Harrison. Oh for the days when the DJ was out smoking dope or getting laid, and the album skipped, and kept skipping for 20 minutes, or the album ended and it was just dead air for half an hour.