In recent weeks, I’ve received several messages from readers of the blog either complaining about the dark tone of my writing or worried about a state of mind that produced the so-called dark tone.

What is dark? What is a tone? Why write? Why not bicycle to only benign and bucolic places? Why not just check out?

I can’t answer any of these questions, but I do cogitate on them, pretty much every waking moment of my creative life.

Where do you go as a writer when you’ve see such things as I have the last six months in Portland? What do you do with the four deaths in my life? I’m not building driftwood forts for the time being. My mind is not meandering with the ocean and contemplating matters of our antediluvian beginnings. I’m through employing dogs as a metaphor for how to live. No more meditations on Jello or ospreys dropping eels from the sky. No more chronicling of preposterous and poignant tavern stories from rural Oregon. No more Christmas tales.

That’s all for now on this subject. But keep reading readers. I appreciate your attention. Let’s see where this all goes. Even I don’t where it’s going.

A bedraggled man bicycling and towing a baby carrier full of cans and bottles. Two fishing poles were stuffed inside the load as well. I really wanted to talk fishing with him.

A elderly man and his dog were sound asleep in a plush chair of a furniture display in the middle of Fred Meyer. His possessions were next to him. No one seemed to mind.

A large sunburned man was unloading a huge box of loose Christmas lights from a battered truck. The truck was near the man’s bombed-out RV. Presumably the lights were meant for decorating the RV.

A pulley-like contraption atop a two storey plywood, pallet shanty that was roped around a branch of a tree. It was a dumb waiter of some kind.

An elderly, vacant and bearded man rolling up a tattered green sleeping bag on a sidewalk. It was the only possession on his person.

A young man passed out in a flower bed.

A couple of undetermined age backpacking through a food pantry line. He had a type of sword strapped to his side.

An older man taking a two-hour nap in the sun on a grassy median between two banks.

I watched the original Footloose on Amazon Prime the other night. I suppose two decades had passed since I’d last seen it, mostly likely on VHS.

The movie help up pretty well. Kevin Bacon fantastic as the city boy fish out of water rebel. Lori Singer sizzling as the wild child preacher’s daughter. John Lithgow riveting as the uptight Preacher. Pure American golden camp where rock and roll triumphs over Puritanism.

The scene that most intrigued me was when the townspeople wanted to ban the teaching of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five in the high school. When Kevin Bacon overhears some hicks saying that, he tells them he’s read it, “it’s a classic.”

The movie was released in 1984. Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969, to huge acclaim, was just about ending its run as one of the most widely taught books in high school English classes. It was the anti-war, trippy, edgy novel to teach for years. I read it high school in the early 80s, but on my own. I also read a lot of other Vonnegut checked out of the Oregon City High School library. My creative writing teacher insisted I had to dive into Vonnegut and I did. I bet there isn’t a single copy of any of Vonnegut’s novels in the OCHS library today. I distinctly recall reading Breakfast of Champions and having it reorient my entire belief about American history and infiltrate the writing style I was developing at the time. (It still does.) That novel provided the antithesis (meaning the truth) to the mythology being shoveled to me in the social studies education of my youth. It’s a funny thing when your US history class in high school stops at WW II and it’s 1981.

When I taught high school English and creative writing, I encountered multiple class sets of Slaughterhouse-Five in every building where I worked. They were all gathering dust in the tombs where old class sets went to die. (Siddhartha was another novel like Slaughterhouse-Five.) I never did teach Slaughterhouse-Five and I sort of regret it now. Oh well. I like to to think I taught some good books over the years and they stayed with some of my students.

I’m not really sure where I’m going with this piece. It’s just that I was so struck by the idea of high school student singing the praises of a novel like Slaughterhouse-Five. I guess I’m sounding wistful here. Books go in and out of vogue as far as making the lists of books to teach to high school students. This list has always been political and always will be. Some books still get censored, from the Left and Right, more the Left these days. Some classics remain timeless. New vital books replace stale irrelevant ones.

Final thought: I wish I could see a movie about contemporary high school students who just want to dance, and somehow, the mention of a classic novel makes its way into the dialogue. What might that book be?

I drove Marine Drive to a golf and country club. The club was hosting a memorial celebration for my recently deceased uncle. Earlier that day, I read my poem about him at a graveside service. It was 107 degrees when I read.

My mind felt fatigued as I drove. I was also in a somber mood. There has been so much death in my life the past six months. I’ve learned a lot about how different people react differently to death. Some are simply ill equipped emotionally or intellectually.

I didn’t stay long at the event. I got in my car and began driving out of the parking lot. Where I should have turned right toward home, I turned left, to head north up Marine Drive, toward a homeless encampment that I knew existed there. The encampment had made big news in recent days because the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) had decided to move the Portland Classic from a golf course near the encampment to a golf course in West Linn. LPGA officials claimed the move was made for player and fan safety.

Yes, safety from reality. As if golfers and their entourages wouldn’t see such unsettling, unseemly and dirty things driving in limousines from the airport, along Highway 205, 84, over central east side, and of course around downtown, where undoubtedly the golfers and their entourages will be staying in luxury hotels. Seeing homeless encampments surely isn’t good for your golf game and spoils the view from high above.

A prominent Portland sports columnist and sports radio host ripped Portland city officials for not sweeping the encampment around Marine Drive and other sports venues where fans and visitors have to see such places before they attend professional sporting events and downtown Portland tourist attractions. It was the columnist’s contention that these such important places should be prioritized for clean-up, because, well, it’s bad for business, and really bad for the tourism business.

Sports are conducted by humans and this column was easily the most inhumane piece about sports I’ve ever read. Had the columnist even visited the encampment he was writing about? Talked with the residents about their alleged role in the cancellation of the tournament? Now that possibly could have made for the column of the year.

As I said, it was hot, almost 109 when I approached the encampment on Marine Drive. I had to see it.

I saw it, some 50-70 battered and beaten and bombed-out, RVs, trailers and other assorted vehicles, parked single file on both sides of the road for a mile. Mountains of trash. There was no access to water there that I could see, nor any portable toilets. I saw very few people milling around the domiciles.

I passed through the encampment and rolled past some wetlands. I approached Marine Drive’s terminus. The Columbia River came into view.

I had just witnessed the most disturbing scene I’d ever witnessed in my country and I wanted to see it again.

I whipped the car around and saw the encampment again.

It was three times worse with the second viewing.

Thoughts filled my mind. I wanted professional golfers to see this encampment while playing in a tournament with a purse of $1.4 million. How would such a sight affect their swings and putts? Would playing professional golf in such intimate proximity to an American moral and public policy disaster induce grave doubts and deliberations inside the minds of any of the golfers?

I thought about writing a novel about that one golfer who did experience such a dilemma. The golfer would be on the verge of winning her first tournament but she just couldn’t swallow the privilege with so much squalor right off the fairways. Maybe she’d been homeless, once, and lived out of a van, trying to make the tour. Yeah, that was good! So, she quits right then and there…

That wasn’t the novel. The novel is about how the tournament is played on the golf course near the homeless encampment along Marine Drive and not a single golfer pays it one second of attention. No announcer mentions it. Not one rig or homeless person gets shown on TV. Everyone shoots great rounds. No one shanks or hooks a drive into the squalor. And when they do, a tour official runs over, picks up the ball, and tosses it in the fairway. No penalty stroke.

Yeah, that’s the novel all right. I’m still working on a title.

I took a walk. It was 85 degrees. I saw a homeless man sitting on the sidewalk near a convenience store. How do I know he was homeless? I know.

He was a regular at this spot and we’d engaged in book chat several times. Virtually every time I encountered him, he was reading novels and drinking malt liquor. Sometimes he harangued crows that harangued him back. He always has a friendly disposition and keeps his space clean.

The book was hardback, big and blue. Old. Very old. No title. It was frayed around the edges. It had spots. I stopped near the man. I asked him what he was reading.

“Ivanhoe,” he said, “Sir Walter Scott.”

I said I’d never read it.

“It’s a little slow,” he said. “But great.”

“Writing was so different then,” I said. “More ornate. There was nothing else to do. Why not describe everything.”

He ran me through the list of characters, Ivanhoe, King Richard, Robert of Locksley, Prince John, and others.

I asked him where he found such an old book.

He told me he dug it out of the recycle barrel of a nearby bookstore. He’d saved it from death. In his hands, Ivanhoe still lived. He said when he was finished, it was going into a street library.

Note to self: carry a classic novel in your pocket on all your works. You’ve got an extra copy of Sometimes a Great Notion, the greatest rain novel ever written. It’s perfect for 100 degree days.

I dropped into OTA country for a draft of craft malt liquor on the Fourth of July. Stock car racing was on television. A statue of a loser Confederate general disgraced a corner. OTA men and women were gambling. Shots of tequila and vodka. Vodka and tequila on the rocks. Cheap beer chasers. A watercolor of a sad owl decorated a wall. One OTA man said he’d just got off work pumping gas. The OTA female bartender said she didn’t want to work today.

Wimbledon was going on another channel. What if I asked to watch all the European socialist players kick American capitalist ass? No, I didn’t really care. My interest in professional tennis ended with the death of Arthur Ashe, easily the greatest professional athlete in American history when it came to advocating for social justice. They didn’t call it that in his protesting heyday. It was called civil rights, and for some unknown reason, I prefer that name.

I looked up at the television and saw the stock cars go round and round and round, making useless noise, generating planet-killing pollution. I also saw stands filled with fans hoping for a crash, fire and blood. I thought the whole scene a good metaphor for the current state of America.

An Andy Jackson burned a hole in my pocket. Why not ditch that racist and genocidal son of a bitch into the bowels of a state gambling machine? The Harriet Tubman $20 bill is thankfully coming soon. I’ll never defile that unit of currency by gambling it away.

You just know there are going to be many white Americans who will refuse to use it or accept it as legal tender in their businesses. Imagine that on the Fourth of July. When in the course of human events, is this country not going to suck so bad on matters pertaining to race? I’d really love to see that day. If only Reconstruction had been allowed to run another 50 years. You wouldn’t recognize this nation today. The Fourth of July would be a whole lot different. Better. I might even celebrate.

No, I wouldn’t disappear Old Hickory into the machine. It could go a lot farther, to, say, the homeless person splayed outside the sidewalk of the OTA joint. It’s a funny thing to see a man frying like an egg on a sidewalk and you walk right past him. I’m almost getting used to it.

Yeah, give that Andy Jackson to the homeless man. It might end up being the only decent thing Andy Jackson ever did for America.