Ode to a CD Jukebox

NSP Meditations

There you were,

in the parking lot of a dive bar,

strapped down in the bed of a beater pickup,

alongside Ms. Pac Man

and a toy retriever game,

all dead, all going

to the scrapyard.

Oh, CD jukebox, Oh noble Encore,

with the beautiful faux wood finish,

and a bitchin’ speaker system under the hood,

when were you last operational?

What was the song you last played?

I went up to you

and inspected the CD covers.

Steve Miller and Tina Turner.

New releases from 30 years ago.

Some crap. Some gold.

Were the CDs still inside you?

Had no one emptied the belly

of this rock beast?

Oh, the great times we had in the dive bars together in the halcyon days before digital, cashless abominations and their boring clouds of algorithms.

I loathe these internet machines.

No, I don’t want to download an app.

No, I don’t want a suggestion to accompany my choice.

No, I don’t want ads.

No. I don’t want the hive to know where I am when I pay with my Apple Watch.

It was always so great on a date

to give her a sawbuck

and ask her to choose

and watch her saunter over to the jukebox.

You can tell a lot about someone by how they choose songs on a jukebox.

I would wait, wait, wait for that first choice

and see if there was any hope for us.

Bad Company hell yes.

Red Hot Chili Peppers hell no.

Dusty Springfield—I’d propose right then and there.

I wonder if the Sportsman Tavern in Pacific City will ever forget the time I played “Gimme Shelter” by the Stones seven times in a row at the stroke of midnight and then walked out the door.

Doubtless, not one got out of there alive.

So long old friend. Rest in peace in recycle or the landfill.

Corona Virus Thoughts #16

Corona Virus Thoughts, NSP Meditations

I did not watch the debate. I caught lowlights online. I saw an interview with undecided voters who were still undecided after the debate. It is clear that these people have a a grossly out-sized and deluded sense of their political independence. No rational American citizen of voting age could be undecided at this point. The self annotated self importance of these undecided voters is actually quite disgusting to observe and the interviewers should question their sanity to their faces.

So we approach 210k deaths and I really don’t know why I’m writing these virus thoughts anymore. They certainly aren’t cathartic.

The obvious psychosis of a vast number of (white) Americans when it comes to racial matters is of the same sort demonstrated by the segregationist in the 50s and 60s. It was all so naked and blatant without nuance or apology back then.

Wait, it’s the same today! We’ve barely advanced in many ways. And now these new segregationists have their own television network. If they’d had Fox News at their disposal in the 50s and 60s, we’d still be segregated.

I continue to struggle with what to write. Let me reiterate: this is not writer’s block. I am not blocked. I simply don’t have a project.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that professional and collegiate football will in likelihood not finish their respective seasons. I simply can’t understand why collegiate players are exposing themselves to such risk. At least the pros are getting paid.

Not too long ago I read a very long and very complex essay in The Economist about the virus and I have to admit that so much of the deep science of the issue flew over my head. I could not retain what I was reading.

The election nears. I have no idea what will happen. I have no gut feeling.

I believe that no novelist currently alive and publishing will ever write a great novel about these times because they are too dispiriting to novelize.

But many will try.

Kelp Consciousness

NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches

I walked down the beach, piercing a thick morning fog. I walked to unfog myself in a time of a great American fogginess.

The amount of kelp washed ashore astonished me. I’d never seen so many coiled clumps and a foamy tide kept delivering more. It was almost if they represented an invading army repelled by the heroes stationed in an array of driftwood forts built by the true Oregon militia, not the deluded and phony one that needed long guns to protect their right to kill people by their stupidity and ignorance of basic public health precautions.

Kelp. Kelp. Kelp! It was everywhere I walked. I had kelp on the mind and my drifted with the fibrous tentacles of this incredible plant as it stretched itself across the land.

I was thankful for a text message from a friend and former teaching college. She said my writing still mattered to her, that it was opening her mind to consider this and that. I miss our unique personal connection and working beside each other on behalf of the ocean. She is easily one of the greatest teachers I have ever seen teach. The passion is beyond measure, as is the skill.

I read ten copies of the New Yorker back to back . The memoir, reportage, analysis and commentary of Trump, the protests, and the Pandemic were brilliant, the poetry and fiction that appeared alongside it, with one exception, utterly dull, opaque and irrelevant. Why the disconnect? Poetry and fiction should matter just as much as memoir, reportage, analysis and commentary during these terrible times. But in the pages of the New Yorker, they do not, at least for me.

Both my cousins graduated from rehab for alcohol. We’ve had long talks and the one I wrote letters and sent books to said the words helped. He even loved the Westerns!

There is still a role for Westerns in American culture. Let’s just move them away from cowboys, the US Army and the genocide of native Americans.

My Christmas book is at the printer. Launch coming soon. I hope my readers here will support it. It’s quite unlike any collection of Christmas stories I’ve ever read.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

Semi Naked Novelist?

NSP Meditations

I have seen a great many strange things during the Pandemic, but nothing more strange than what I saw today.

I was in town running errands and kept seeing a young woman wearing practically nothing wandering around clutching a sheaf of papers. No backpack, water bottle, energy drink or cigarette. Just the papers. Odd indeed.

She wore a spaghetti strap black top that barely covered her breasts. She had on faded jeans that barely covered half her ass and revealed pink panties. There was a wide expanse of bleached skin about her chest and stomach that she occasionally rubbed as she walked. Her hair was black and short.

But those papers! What were they about?

I ducked into the bookstore to work. I emerged 45 minutes later and she was across the road moving at a rapid pace. I went to my favorite Oregon Tavern Age joint for my customary noon beer and to work on a short story.

A few minutes later, the woman appeared right outside the window of the bar. I was sitting at my usual table and got a closeup look at her face. There and not there.

But I also got a look at the sheaf of papers. They were printed out and annotated here and there with editing marks and arrows going everywhere.

I’ve written enough books and read enough manuscripts to know those markings were scrawled on a manuscript. Jesus! Was she a writer? Had she written a shot story or begun a novel or composed a 50-page stream of consciousness?

I was shocked and puzzled. I didn’t know what to think. I shouldn’t have been thinking. I should have ran out of the bar and asked her about the papers, but I didn’t because a brain lock seized my humanity.

Ten minutes later I unlocked and knew I had blown a great story and interaction during the Pandemic. I just know I’ll never see her again and get to read her words.

An Essay on America (Part 2)

Corona Virus Thoughts, NSP Meditations

WE the diseased body politic of America became sick (fatally?) after 40 years of policies and behaviors and non policies and non behaviors that brought us to our current reckoning, or most likely, non reckoning.

We ate poorly. We larded up. We stopped making sack lunches. We drank bottled water at meetings when a water faucet was right there.

We watched too much fantasy and spent too many hours on the internet. Adults began dressing up for Halloween and started calling for Halloween to be a national holiday.

We didn’t enact any substantial initiatives to combat climate change. It’s probably too late to start now.

We allowed higher education to become a lucrative racket. We allowed therapists to become the snake oil salesmen of our time.

We stood by and watched certain white politicians (including Clarence Thomas) suppress the vote.

We never held the police or prosecutors accountable.

We didn’t cut the defense budget by 80 percent after the Soviet Union collapsed.

We didn’t rewrite the Second Amendment, the most poorly worded paragraph in the history of the English language. We didn’t come up with a better trite phrase than “our thoughts and prayers are with you” after mass shootings.

We created a bankrupt culture that opened the door to an invasion of meth and opioids.

We pretended Southern Evangelicals actually believed in the teachings of Jesus.

We didn’t legalize cannabis a half century earlier.

We didn’t scoff at politicians or preachers who claimed America was exceptional.

We didn’t transform our public school system so it became something else that didn’t teach rote learning that produced mindless consumers ruining the planet by purchasing useless crap.

We embraced conspiracy theories that grade school children would have rejected a generation ago.

We didn’t finish Reconstruction.

We let bridges rot and corrode.

We went without a national health care plan. We still do.

We worshiped mass prosecution, incarceration and probation. It enriched the soulless and made corporations rich. It made our nation more unsafe. It created a new debtor’s prison.

We’re still fighting two undeclared wars (can you name them?).

We didn’t turn out to vote above 50 percent of the eligible voters during a presidential election.

We didn’t abolish the electoral college.

We didn’t create a viable path to citizenship for undocumented aliens and get them on the tax rolls.

We didn’t reject television shows that debased human beings and called it entertainment.

We ended common sense banking, investing and mortgage regulations that worked pretty well since they were established in the New Deal.

We disdained rational strategies to keep people dying from the corona virus and called it patriotism.

We continue to ravage the natural world and not understand basic lessons of ecology.

We thought (think) someone like Elon Musk is a visionary.

We went to church instead of the ocean or mountains or deserts.

We didn’t blow up Mt. Rushmore.

We kept guzzling gas when the sun was right there all the time.

We became inured to the millions of homeless in our midst and hated them because they’d checked out on a system that wanted them to work minimum wage 40 hours a week with no benefits and enjoy living in their cars.

We decided the best way to advocate for social change was by having a hot celebrity (never an ugly one) tell us how to think and what to do.

We saw the nation’s wealth become more unevenly distributed than any other period in history.

We thought attending a rock concert was an important cultural experience. (It once was but that died long ago.)

We played football while people died from a virus.

We named military bases after military losers and we erected statues to losers and slavers.

We bought into the lie that high tech would improve our lives because we could meet people (naked or wearing chain mail armor) online in Finland and play chess with them.

I could go on forever but this essay is over. It wasn’t even an essay. I sure hope Gore Vidal would have liked it, but he is dead and his strutting style as an essayist is dead, too.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

An Essay on America (Part 1)

Corona Virus Thoughts, NSP Meditations ,

I sat down to write in longhand a Gore Vidal-style essay about the current state of America’s decline because my mind was preoccupied with our imminent collapse and I didn’t have anything else to write. I hadn’t written anything like this kind of polemic in years, but I had been rereading Vidal’s political essays, easily the best I’ve ever read written by an American and absolutely formative in my American political education, and felt inspired to attack like Vidal. Attack. Attack. Attack! I used to like writing polemics and connected to a lot of Oregon readers with that genre.

If I was lucky, 50 people would read it. But a writer must start somewhere. One reader of this essay could be changed for the better, or reach out to me and change me for the better. It only takes one.

Before I started, I knew I was going to rework one of Vidal’s choicest lines about Ronald Reagan: “Proof of the failure of the American public education system is that Ronald Reagan was elected twice by landslides. “

Vidal was wrong on that, but not by much. It wasn’t the elementary teachers’ fault. All secondary’s and I would know because I was one of them for 30 years and saw the deadwood for myself. Most didn’t teach because they had nothing in their minds to teach. It was all rote and Pledge of Allegiance to our greatness and please regurgitate for the test, please. Teaching American history and government through worksheets, on paper and online.

My Vidalivians were going to be something like: “Proof of the failure of the American public secondary social studies teachers is that Donald Trump lost the popular vote by only 3,000,000.” And: “Proof of the failure of America’s public secondary science and health teachers is that so many Americans refuse to wear a mask and believe—just know—the virus is a hoax.” And: “Proof of the failure of America’s public secondary PE teachers is . . . well, just look at the average unhealthy American.” And: “Proof of the success of America’s greatest propaganda machine (ever) is that it dispensed its “news” through big tits of angry blonde women on television.” And: “Proof of the utter failure of the American public education system is that rendered its graduates and non-graduates so utterly bored by mostly rote instruction and regurgitation, that they easily fell into the honey trap of tech and gadgets and never questioned anything again except when is the next new hot toy coming? Of course, many people took to the streets to protest police brutality, but they sure had to showcase themselves doing it! Imagine John Lewis stopping during the March on Selma to Instagram it!

Oh yeah, I was going full Vidal attack mode!

The essay began. It sucked one sentence in. I was thinking too much about sting and structure and not writing from the heart and what I merely observe.

I stopped. I thought about something Sartre wrote: “New problems demand new writing styles.”

It was useless to write a political essay assaying new problems in America (well, not really new, just the same ones but ratcheted up exponentially by the internet and the President) with an old and stale writing style. I mean, a sonnet wouldn’t have cut it either!

So. . . I emptied my brain of the old and stale and let rip whatever came to mind about my nation. I didn’t know where it was going, but I knew it was going to be hot, hotter than hell (A great overlooked Kiss song by the way.)

First I decided to write in the first person plural WE, because that’s how we began on paper as a people, in a document we worship for its ideals but never seem to uphold in practice. I also wanted to use WE as my narrator because I didn’t want to exclude myself or any other American on how we got to this terrible place as a nation.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

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