Imagine this American contrast: you are driving along a commercial boulevard. A stop light turns red. You stop. You look right and observe an encampment: tents, cars, trucks, RVs and hovels made of plywood and pallets. Every domicile is duct taped or tarped in some manner. The duct tape and tarps resemble all the colors of the rainbow. You observe trash strewn everywhere in and around the encampment. You see trash piled badly here and there and wonder if trash were piled neatly it would make a difference. You decide, yes, it would.

You see people dressed in bizarre attire milling in and around the encampment. Some kind of fashion? (You stole that line from Mick Jaggar.)

In a way, the scene is much like an art installation depicting a mangled slice of the new American dystopia, an installation conceived and constructed by the Master of Disaster Art—America the unbeautiful. There are even unpaid performance artists playing their part.

But you reconsider this art installation notion. It is a bad one. This is an installation of indifferent and debased human mayhem constructed—not perpetrated—by a monster.

You see a plush recliner sitting atop a pallet atop a hill of trash. It looks like a throne up there. Below is a man blow torching something for breakfast on a barbecue.

Then you look away. The light is still red. It’s a long light.

You look left and observe a brand new three storey building of gleaming glass and metal. It is landscaped. It has a parking lot. The parking lot is landscaped. The building appears as a medical care facility healing the sick for profit. It is not. It is a storage complex. What a masquerade! You read a sign advertising heated units, a free month’s rent on a yearlong lease, security, and a staffer on duty in a lobby. You didn’t know storage units had lobbies. You look at the complex. It has water, electricity, restrooms and a wireless connection.

The light turns green, but you hesitate for a second. You are trying to formulate an equation that somehow satisfies the rule of American social and political math that presents such a contrast.

I drove down a busy boulevard. It was an overcast Sunday afternoon. I came to an intersection. I saw a young Black man holding with his left hand a leash to a white pit bull. With his right hand he was hawking a newspaper, Street Roots, the fabulous weekly paper covering the homeless issue in the Portland area and elsewhere from a unique street level perspective.

Vendors sell the publication on the street for a dollar. They buy a copy for a quarter and keep the profit on each issue sold.

It’s probably my favorite print publication and contains some remarkable news, feature and commentary related to the homeless issue. It also publishes poetry by poets who are homeless or have experienced homelessness. Those poems move me. Most contemporary poetry I read does not. It has no blood.

This is a newspaper that I always support. I buy it whenever I see it. I wish I could write for it—for nothing.

I passed the vendor and pulled a quick right into a parking lot of a grocery store. I cruised toward him and let out a little honk. I yelled out the window that I wanted a copy. He sprinted over with the dog. I loved seeing that! The dog had happy eyes.

I gave the vendor five bucks. He was grateful. He ran back to his spot near the intersection. I saw him sell another paper from a car idling at the stoplight. He was close to selling out his bundle. The dog was the hook.

You can’t buy a subscription to Street Roots. You have to buy from a vendor, one of 400 or so working every week. Face to face. Go out and buy a copy. Meet a vendor. Meet a person who is homeless or was homeless and who is working standing on his feet outside to improve his lot and help educate others about a deeply disturbing social problem. So many of us want to help. Buying Street Roots or making a donation to support the publication and the organization that publishes it, is a start.

https://www.streetroots.org/

I was reading a collection of Friedrich Nietzsche‘s writing the other day and came across this statement from a preface to one of his books:

“From this moment forward, all my writings are fish hooks: perhaps I know how to fish as well as anyone?–If nothing was caught, I am not to blame. There were no fish.”

There is much to consider in this statement, and I plan on using it in my next writing workshop as a discussion prompt.

A couple of questions enter my mind: what if there were fish, and nothing was caught? Are readers to be considered something to hook? How does a writer even know he has caught a reader? Does it matter to the reader who the fisherman is?

It is an interesting notion to think of a piece of writing as a fish hook. It is an easy metaphor to apply and sometimes having a metaphor as a writer can inspire. Think archaeologist or chef.

I think with my next writing project, I might employ this fish hook metaphor.

Another one of my uncles died yesterday. This is the third uncle to die in three months.

It was a hard medical ending for this uncle. It was quite possibly a harder one spiritually for him. I don’t know for sure, but I have my suspicions and they are founded upon an unexpected and extraordinary letter he wrote to me several months ago after the death of his younger brother, my uncle, from cancer.

It was only the second letter he had ever written me; the first one was 29 years ago when I was living in Turkey and teaching English. I had written him, then a Professor of Theology at a Catholic university, about my visiting various Christian holy sites in a Muslim country, and how seeing them on the ground confirmed my atheism. My atheism had begun about the time I was baptized at ten years of age and was only interrupted once for a brief time in high school.

He wrote me back that I was “naive” in my belief. I got a kick out of that. A Christian calling an atheist “naive.” I left it at that and we never discussed the matter again. I still think I’m probably the only member of his family besides his wife, my aunt, who read his PHD dissertation. It was about the intellectual and theological beliefs and practices of the Puritans in Holland, the sect kicked out of England. I recall us talking about it decades ago and me offering a critique that after reading it, I knew everything about what the Puritans believed in exile, but nothing about how they lived. He said my critique was “Marxist” and dismissed it. I chuckled and left it alone. We stuck to sports after that.

This second and final letter was written by an obviously failing hand, meaning the mangled cursive and strange strays of the pen. But the content was totally coherent and direct.

The letter was a half page long.

My uncle told me I should use my ability as a writer to help him and others understand death. It was clear from his statements he made about death that he did not. He certainly was not going gently into that good night. He was doing exactly what Dylan Thomas commanded, in perhaps the most misguided poem ever written.

It was the first letter I had ever received asking me to write about a particular subject. I was honored by the request. My uncle wrote that I had a gift. It was never clear to me he ever read any of my books including the one he’s in, about the Portland Trail Blazers’ 1977 NBA championship run.

I have written about death many times, including chronicling my own personal extinction five years ago and stating in various pieces that I want to end my sentient life by jumping into Hart’s Cove on Cascade Head to expedite my return as rain and complete the true eternal cycle of all life on Earth—water. No hierarchy there except clouds.

Since receiving that letter, I have considered taking up my uncle’s specific request, but that raises an interesting issue: just who, exactly is my audience for such a piece of writing? We’re all going to die so perhaps, everyone? Or just those whose lifelong hierarchical beliefs about death and the hereafter may weaken near the end and sometimes collapse altogether? Or just an audience of one, me? And what of the death of other things besides human beings? Such as species, kindness, hopes, dreams and ideals? Or what about the dead faces of the homeless people I see and interact with every day? What about trying to write a poem in response to my uncle’s letter that attempted to redress the stupidity of Dylan Thomas’ poem about death? Or about how and why the subject of death enraged and mystified my uncle? Or something about how he donated his body to science, which truly surprised me when my mother, his sister, told me that?

There’s a lot to cover with death.

Or perhaps there is not. Perhaps I could start by examining the death of one person and what that person did with her life or did not do because of something in her life that inspired or killed her. I would not want to know that person well, or very much at all. I believe I would write better that way.