Parrot Poker

NSP Meditations, Poetry

A tall woman with flowing white hair walked into the Bayhaven.

It was a Saturday afternoon in January on the Oregon Coast.

It was darker outside than inside the joint.

I sat at the bar writing a love letter in longhand with a beer chaser.

Five of us sat on stools.

Everyone but me was eating caramel corn.

I glanced up when the woman entered.

I was the only one.

She was OTA and wearing a see-through linen halter dress that barely contained her ample bosom.

Foxy?

I looked at her again.

A blue parrot rested on her left shoulder.

She sidled over to the video poker machine, slid in some bills, punched up a game—jacks or better— maxed the bet.

The parrot hopped off her shoulder, onto the console.

He started tapping buttons with his beak.

She left the parrot on the machine, came over to the bar and ordered a gin and tonic.

She greeted the bartender like an old friend.

She pounded the drink in one gulp.

I never stopped watching her.

The woman returned to the machine.

She said something to the parrot I couldn’t make out.

The parrot hopped on her shoulder.

She cashed out and walked back to the bar to collect her winnings.

The parrot had won ten bucks.

The woman and parrot exited the Bayhaven.

No one said a word about the parrot after they left.

My Life in Driftwood Forts

Driftwood Forts, NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches, Poetry

I once had a first date building a driftwood fort.

I once sat in a driftwood fort with a meth addict, a siren, watched her drink beer, smoke cigarettes, and scratch scars on her face.

I once thought I would marry inside a driftwood fort constructed by the wedding party. Then we’d burn it down after the ceremony.

I once had a tarot reading by a naked soothsayer inside a driftwood fort.

I once built a driftwood fort at the same time an incoming tide simultaneously destroyed it.

I once built a driftwood fort that permanently dissuaded me from committing suicide in the immediate aftermath of personal catastrophe and extinction of self.

I once led students on a field trip to build driftwood forts. Afterward, I ordered pizza and had it delivered to the forts.

I once discovered a dildo inside a driftwood fort.

I once met a man named Danny living in a driftwood fort on Coos Bay.

I once built a driftwood fort at midnight drinking champagne near a bonfire with a pair of mesmerizing nurses.

I once built a driftwood fort in honor of my dead dog and then spread her ashes inside.

I build driftwood forts using only what exists on the beach. I use only my hands. No tools. Tools clutter the mind. I never steal wood from another fort to create my own. I decorate driftwood forts with kelp, shotgun shells, clam shells, skeletons, feathers, dead crabs, beer cans, bottles, rope, cigarette lighters, kid toys, whatever washes ashore and strikes my fancy. I once wrapped a driftwood fort with the tape of a Paula Abdul cassette.

Relish the labor of building driftwood forts. Build alone or with someone. My husky helps me build. Erect spars, stanchions. Hoist, maneuver, brace, frame, fasten, interlock crooked wood into shelter, art, studios, secret passages and portals. Turn detritus into delight, flotsam into fun. Add a cairn here and there for mythological measure.

Forage for wood! Fling wood far! Fetch branches, finagle logs. Drag them like dead bodies. Rig a travois for the dog. Fortify an unfortunate life and find the fort within. Freestyle to foist fitness. Forswear fake fiendish foes that finagle frantic fatigue from fragile souls. Fight the fastidious factory factotum fog with a forte of fulminations of facetiousness enabling a mind to forget the cold furnace of furor. Find fortuitous words in the fort lexicon and fly like a falcon, float on forever. Fort fairies will frolic and fort consorts will faun.

No driftwood fort is ever completed. None will ever last.

I want to build driftwood forts with Henry David Thoreau, Jack Keroauc, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Julie Newmar in her Catwoman heyday.

I once built a driftwood fort and left behind a waterproof notebook and pen encased inside a freezer bag. I titled this notebook Fort Registry. The first page contained these directions: “Please leave your name and story in enjoying this fort.”

Over the next few weeks, I checked the registry for comments. Many were written. My favorite: Help me! I’m on the worst date of my life! My second favorite: I’m here to see the ocean one last time before I die.

Adults initiate virtually all driftwood forts. Why? They still long to play.

I build in collaboration with my friends, beavers, Oregon’s official state animal, who feast upon willows and alders in the watersheds and free wood downstream into creeks, rivers, bays, where the wood drifts to the ocean and then comes to rest on a beach, gnarled, chewed, stripped. Clearcuts help furnish the construction materials, too, the absolutely sole beautiful benefit of clearcuts.

Let me lead the Oregon legislature in a driftwood fort building session and it would change the trajectory of this state. I always wanted one of my principals to hold a faculty meeting at the beach where teachers would build forts instead of looking at screens, papers, listening to agendas, jargon, nostrums, or participating in preposterous training sessions. My requests were never taken seriously.

In all likelihood, I have built the most driftwood forts in Oregon history, quite possibly American history. I’ve written more words on the subject of driftwood forts than any other writer in the history of world literature.

Thus,

I was once worried my vast accumulation of practical and metaphysical knowledge of building driftwood forts would vanish with my death. Then one day building a fort I felt embarrassed for the hubris: driftwood forts were built long before me and they’ll be built long after me.

The Taylor Swift Seminar

NSP Meditations, Poetry

A female voice cooed through vintage JBL speakers in the last record store left on the Oregon Coast. I heard:

He said that if the sex was half as good as the conversation was
soon they’d be pushing strollers but soon it was over

The lyrics arrested me. I stopped browsing used country CDs hunting for Shania Twain’s greatest hits. I walked up to the clerk sitting behind the counter.

She wore ripped jeans and a rocker t-shirt. She looked like a lead singer for a Coos Bay rock band. Toyz? Dammit Jim? Phat Cheetah? Blue Tide? Timber Wolf?

It was a Taylor Swift song she told me. I’d never heard a Taylor Swift song. I told the clerk that and her face exploded with bliss.

She launched into a Taylor Swift seminar. She quoted the damn discography!

When passion presents itself from five feet away in the last record store left on the Oregon Coast, you best engage.

The same goes when meeting a homeless man on a Coos Bay beach at 6:15 in the morning and he offers you a leg of red rock crab he caught at midnight with a milk crate during a bout of insomnia, cooked an hour ago, and just cracked open leg with needle nose pliers in front of you from five feet away. Delicious!

The clerk and I introduced ourselves—her name an interesting derivation of a body of water that rhymed with a mediocre glam metal band from the 80s.

We discussed music. She told me she was a groupie for a national country act and traveled all over the country. She didn’t think groupie was a bad word. I agreed.

I recommended Liz Phair’s debut album. She wrote it down. I knew she’d investigate because I promised clever wordplay:

They make rude remarks about me
They wonder just how wild I would be
As they egg me on and keep me mad
They play me like a pit bull in a basement

A Box of 7-11 Pizza

Coos Bay, NSP Meditations

A homeless man dressed like Vanilla Ice in his heyday stands outside my house holding a box of 7-11 pizza on a windy weekday afternoon, waiting for his girlfriend who lives next door with her wizard grandparents, pizza for a lunch date in his tent pitched in the woods a half mile from my house. I say wizard because the grandparents are wizards and host their own wizard show on YouTube. The granddaughter, an ex junkie, wrecked her car not long ago, drunk, DUI, got a job cleaning elderly incontinence in a care home, got fired three days later, so her grandmother told me across a fence the other day as we weeded wild onions. They wanted to kick the granddaughter out but she had nowhere else to go except the tent, even though her mother lived in town.

Vanilla fondles his Bowie knife sheathed in a scabbard somehow strapped to his baggy Michael Jordan Chicago Bulls shorts. I frequently detest him because he litters my front yard with cigarette butts, Doritos bags and Monster cans while waiting for his girlfriend. Worse, he often plays air guitar. Even worse, his presence displaces crows, finches, blackbirds and morning doves roosting in a majestic cedar tree and the occasional deer. Anyone who takes birds and deer away from me deserves my poetic detestation. Vanilla stands at the curb, carrying the pizza box with one hand like Walter Payton carried a football when he broke into the open field. Who holds a pizza box like that? The girlfriend emerges wearing a tight purple and black outfit. An argument immediately ensues. FUCK YOU! yells Vanilla nonstop to the girlfriend who screams FUCK YOU right back while I’m rocking in my recliner in the living room, staring out the window, trying to read a Jim Harrison novella, wishing Jim had written a novella about this couple, but he’s dead, as is Raymond Carver, who might have penned something placid about them in a short story with his signature detached style. Yes, Ray writing a story about a half homeless couple ripping apart a 7-11 pizza box (pizza still inside) during an argument that had nothing to with pizza in front of my house. A lot better than the streaming shows I bootleg and never finish.

The crows loved the pizza squished on the street. They fly so well with slices of pepperoni in their beaks.

The Skylight

NSP Meditations, Poetry

What a summer noir afternoon it had been! A hick hustler offered her services as consort and literary inspiration for $50, a six pack of Bud Light, and a carton of Marlboro Light 100s for each coupling. She peeled down her yoga pants in the dunes, bent over, showed me the goods.

The offer was under consideration. How could it not with a woman whose favorite phrase was much obliged, spoke bad French, blackmailed for a partial living, and who rapped filthy lines about scoring free meth from the Newport fishermen she fucked and threw away. She was a novel I had to write!

I turned the pickup into the gravel driveway of my cabin that stood 872 feet from the Pacific Ocean.

Her pickup was there. She was three days early for a weekend job of window washing paying $500 because she was broke and on break from nursing school.

The cabin was empty. I called out to the back yard. Nothing. Maybe she was meandering the beach. The sound of knocking overhead made me look up. She was scrubbing the 4′ by 4′ bubble skylight wearing a purple bikini. She waved, went back to work. I watched. She stopped working, unfastened her top. She draped her body over the skylight and wriggled. Grime had no chance.

Watching her whisked my mind to the time we stood in the opposite ends of a culvert under a logging road that led to a recovering watershed. Water from a salmon-bearing stream trickled beneath our shoes. She told me she loved me. I told her I loved her. When you say something like that to each other at opposite ends of a culvert conveying salmon to the ocean and back, the words should mean something eternal. (They did.)

She motioned for me to join her on the roof. I went outside, climbed the ladder, and stood upon the flat roof for the first time. The ocean was in view. I could hear its dull roar. Why had I never been up there before? She was now naked, scrubbing the skylight with a brush. She turned around to face me. I took off all my clothes. The skylight held.

Eight years later, I wrote and published the novel about the consort. She never read it.

Fire Pit Meditations

Coos Bay, NSP Meditations

I’ve got a fire going in the new fire pit I built. So long burn barrel!

The pit is a new addition to a back yard I have totally overhauled since moving into the house last May. It really feels like my home in a way I never felt about the Sellwood house in Portland.

It’s a weekday afternoon. Classic rock playing on the locally-owned radio station with all their cornball jingles.

Elmer is snoozed out in the grass after two long beach romps in the morning.

Later I’m whipping up a scallop pasta dish with scallops from Coos Bay.

I’ve started reading Shakespeare by the fire pit. There is always something new in reading the plays and sonnets.

I hear the ice cream truck in the neighborhood. It’s call song is “Dixie.” Yeah, I live in a neighborhood whose ice cream truck plays the anthem of the Confederacy while driven by a Latino man. How do you work that into a novel?

I’m polishing two of my manuscripts at the moment: the poetry volume and collection of essays about homelessness. Both are going to be thick.

The garden is doing great. I ate my first peas not too long ago.

One of the joys of this new house is getting my old art and memorabilia out of plastic totes and in sight again. I miss some of my old art, given away in panic a decade ago. I sure would love my Henk Pender and Rick Bartow pieces back.

I’m reading four books at the moment: a history of Marxism in America, a guide to geology in Oregon, Exodus by Leon Uris, and a history of the Baltic Crusades.

I don’t really think about American current political events. I want a deeper plunge into vulgarity, incompetence and graft. We have a lot farther to go to destroy the Constitution and I want it destroyed. I am in favor of the PNW becoming its own country once there is a provision for states to leave the Union. Lincoln said states can’t leave. We need legal language so they can. I have very little allegiance to the United States of America. I have a lot for my region.

«‹ 13 14 15 16›»