First Vaccine Shot

Corona Virus Thoughts, NSP Meditations

Oregon Convention Center. Noonish. I am struck by the suffusing camaraderie all around me. It is like the air in the room. I am also struck by the utter stupidity and callousness of those people who don’t believe in what all of us are doing here and other places around America: getting a shot to halt a pandemic. Practicing good public health, not ideology.

I have 15 minutes to wait in this chair to see if I develop any side effects. I look around the cavernous space and see I am the only one writing in longhand. A few stare straight ahead. Lots of fiddling on phones. One elderly woman reads a fat novel. I’d give her 50 bucks to know the title.

Not a single knitter!

It occurs to me that I did a couple Wordstock literary gigs here 13,14 or 15 years ago. They all uniformly sucked because of the terrible sound and cold industrial ambiance. I ran several Nestucca Spit Press booths at Wordstock as well. I was hawking my various Oregon books and once got to hang out at the table with one of the great lost loves of my life. She sold more of my books than I did with her aggressive marketing pitch. I sure could use that energy to sell books these days.

Shit, I just remembered I also brought my students from Taft High School to Wordstock one year and paid their way in!

I was here a week ago helping Dad get his first shot and we were both impressed by how smoothly the process ran. Everyone here working or volunteering or on duty is incredibly friendly and efficient.

I see an old doctor giving shots. He must have come out of retirement to assist.

It occurs to me as I write this that it’s not often we get to participate in a large-scale historical event in a positive, pro-active. Why can’t 30-percent of the population grasp the obvious significance of this? How come they have no concept of the larger community good? This isn’t like not wearing your seat belt as a protest against totalitarian government. (Remember those days?)

Four minutes to go. I don’t feel any different, meaning physically from the shot. But I do feel a sense of elation and pride for being a responsible citizen. How often do you get to feel that in America anymore? The thrill of voting left me a long, long time ago. Tree planting does it for me, but that’s been about it in recent years. Volunteering at animal shelters, too.

I think I’ll celebrate my act of simple citizenship with a beer in a dive joint. Doubtless inside the joint, someone will be bitching about the virus and the vaccine, the great liberal hoax of it all. Maybe I’ll send them a drink over compliments of an American citizen. The good shit, too. Not swill.

They’d never get it.

It occurs to me that my arm doesn’t even hurt after the shot. I see a metaphor in that.

What’s Happening to Me?

NSP Meditations

What’s happening to me? I drink city slicker IPAs. I bought new sneakers made from recycled materials that are adorned with an affirmation of positive living. I eat at food carts. I ride my retro, Rastafarian-colored bicycle around my neighborhood and breathe the pot smoke wafting through the leafy trees planted to combat global warming. I rail against the ineptitude of city government. I went antique shopping and bought a vintage plush chair to read the New York Times Sunday edition in print while drinking fair trade coffee. I bought a bottle of Oregon wine that benefited the owners of vineyards damaged by forest fires. I’ve started using phrases like “existential threat” and words like “entitlement.” I’ve considered buying a boutique doughnut. I’ve considered writing earnest fiction. I looked at someone using an umbrella in a squall and didn’t object. I had my car window smashed in and repaired without notifying the police or insurance company. I am thinking about buying a face mask with the Rainier logo. I listen to OPB. What is happening to me?

Nicknames for Dad

NSP Meditations

During the course of living with my dad, I have invented some nicknames for him. They are:

Vinegar Joe (after the American general in WW II)

The Old General (after Douglas MacArthur, “old soldiers don’t die, they just fart away)

The WC Fields of Sellwood

The Sargent Schultz of Sellwood

The FDR of Sellwood

The Henny Youngman of Sellwood

The Robert Frost of Sellwood

The Robert Burns of Sellwood

The Bob Cousy of Sellwood.

The Woody Hayes of Sellwood

The Charles Bronson (Deathwish version) of Sellwood

The Archie Bunker of Sellwood (when he launches into a faux conservative rant)

The Jimmy Carter of Sellwood (when he keeps the thermostat at a meat locker temperature and says to sacrifice and put on a sweater!)

Idea for a Story: Elvis’ Dump Saves Rock and Roll

NSP Meditations

In 1977, Elvis died eating a ham sandwich while taking a dump on his upholstered toilet in Graceland. That barbiturate-riddled dump was flushed into the Memphis sewer system and to a treatment plant. In time, its sanitized liquid remnants were released to a river that flowed to the ocean. Decades later, the dump returned to Earth in the form of rain and fell on a gender-neutral teenage named Rowan who was addicted to gaming and social media and living in Portland, Oregon with his/her/them struggling single mom who kicked him/her/them outside on a nice day to soak up some sun after three weeks of not leaving the house.

Elvis’ dump infiltrated Rowan’s being while he/she/them tried to rake leaves but didn’t have the slightest idea how.

A short time later Rowan began to definitively identify herself as a woman, started to grease her hair back, wearing vintage pant suits, and humming Elvis’ hits even though she had never heard the songs before and didn’t know who Elvis Presley was.

One day Rowan was outside walking in her new weird way when she spotted an acoustic guitar leaning against a tree with a sign that read FREE. She picked the guitar up, strapped it on, held it correctly, (she’d seen a character in a video game playing guitar), fingered a chord, and strummed the strings with her thumb. It was the beginning to “Heartbreak Hotel.” Rowan kept strumming, changing chords and then started singing the lyrics and knocking her knees together like hillbilly Elvis, not Vegas Elvis. She suddenly had a craving for a ham sandwich even though she was a vegan.

And thus a rock and roller was born and the spirit of The King resurrected within Rowan and the future of rock was updated and saved.

Possible Writing Workshop in Portland this Summer

NSP Meditations, Writing

I am thinking of holding an outdoor (non Zoom)writing workshop in Portland this summer in a back yard. I am posting this to see if any writers in the nearby area might be interested in participating. The title of the workshop would be “Firing Up Your Writing Project” and I have taught this class to great success in recent years. The intent is to get you going on a new or stalled project you’ve had in mind. The workshop also works well for musicians or visual artists. The cost would be $20 for a three-hour session. I plan on offering a free slot(s) to a homeless writer or poet. The workshop would cap at 12 persons. The writing is important, of course, but my main goal is bringing together disparate people in a creative setting and letting them interact. I think many of us need that sort of thing right now. If interested, message me through the blog or my email. I think some time in late August might be the date.

Ruminations From a Deck

NSP Meditations

I am alternately writing what comes to mind as I toss peanuts to squirrels.

Did you know that an assistant football coach at the University of Oregon will make $500,000 for the upcoming irrelevant season. His job? He coaches the safeties in the secondary. The secondary coach makes about a million a year. This is cheap in comparison to other Big Time College Programs. How did we ever come to this?

I just commissioned an artist to produce a hundred mini portraits of squirrels for an interior decorating upgrade of my new office. The squirrels will cover golf-themed wallpaper.

I was reading a review of yet another Abraham Lincoln biography, this one 1100 pages long! According to the reviewer, over 16,000 books about the Civil War have been published. That’s approximately two a week since the war ended. Consider that. And the damn war is still going on in a low-grade way and not all the statues to the losers and traitors have been pulled down yet.

I was reading a book about Neanderthals and learned that were once 20 types of human and the one ruining the planet today is the one that made it through the evolutionary process. How might the planet be today if another line had ascended?

An article in the New Yorker reported that the Catholic church owns 200 million acres of land worldwide. That is a staggering number. Why haven’t they sold most of the undeveloped land or land gone to seed and helped the poor, unhoused and sick with the proceeds? Why haven’t they managed their holdings in such a way to fight climate change? (This was the point of the article.) What would Jesus have done with 200 millions acres of land?

I am considering teaching a writing workshop on this deck once people get vaccinated. It would feel good to teach again. This would be an excellent place to hear words from interesting writers.

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