Suppose I was a dog, but not really a dog, and I was drowning in the ocean after I dove into the waves after a ball. Now suppose my best friend or partner was standing on the shore watching me drown, again not as a dog, and not in water, but in life, and that important person did absolutely nothing to save me. She just stood there while other people dived right in and hauled me out to safety. She didn’t even come up to ask me how I was or thank the people who saved me.

What do I then say to the best friend or partner? Is it over between us right there?

*****

What happens if your obsession with something as a writer is so eccentric, so out there, that writing about it is useless because no one will possibly get it? What happens if you write a 50,000-word novel that centers around an eccentric obsession and there isn’t a single reader who gives a damn? Do you write the book anyway?

*****

I want to get back in the game of making a difference in Oregon after being kicked off the field and banned by the state. If that could happen, and I am doing everything in my power to make that happen, I wouldn’t run out of the tunnel like a collegiate football game. No, just quietly get in the huddle, not as quarterback or receiver, maybe just the center, where it all begins, and make sure I do my job well, a simple job, then block for the skill players and let them shine.

*****

Remember the movie The Candidate starring Robert Redford as the idealistic candidate for the US Senate? Remember how the campaign and his cynical manager stripps away all his idealism? Remember that he actually wins the election? And remember the final scene of the movie, where Redford learns that he’s just won and then he looks across a packed hotel suite to his campaign manager and mouths the words: “What do we do now?”

That’s exactly what happened to me when I became a writer.

And I would also add another question: “So what?”

*****

What is absurd? What is absurd is that the US Mint still makes pennies! Even more absurd is the Andrew Jackson is still on the $20 bill instead of Harriet Tubman. What’s even more absurd is that after the Civil War, the losers were allowed to erect statues of the losers! We’re the only country in the history of the world that’s done that.

It was time to let you go my old corduroy friend. You were torn, frayed and tired.

Made in Yugoslavia in the 1970s! The suede pockets, the leather buttons, the flannel lining. What a coat!

I thought about hanging you on a driftwood fort and walking away, but then an idea sprung into mind that, with the assistance of a friend and seamstress, would allow you a partial afterlife.

We took thousands of beach walks together, many with my long lost great dogs.

I just took my last one with you.

Purchased for 99 cents in an animal thrift store by a special student who said, when presenting to me, “Mr. Love, this is all you.”

And it certainly was. You became my trademark look. Gigs. Walks. Dates. Shows. Field trips. Camping. Movies. Teaching. We did damn well everything together.

I will never forget the time a gorgeous woman using a cane came up to me in a wine shop, put her hands on my shoulders, looked over you, and said. “You really got it going on with this coat.”

Over the decade I wore you, I received dozens of compliments about you.

Yes, this is goodbye. I’m not even going to bother and find a replacement.

A fine group of writers gathered for my Triggering Town writing workshop in Astoria this last weekend. We sat socially-distanced outside on a lawn with a magnificent view of Youngs Bay. Sunshine mixed with clouds and gulls drifted overhead. Rain threatened. The writers wrote well, bared their original brave thoughts and dived into Richard Hugo’s mind on the subject of producing good writing that has something worth saying. Thank you participants! These workshops are so invigorating for my soul.

We’ll meet next spring or whenever the time seems right. Perhaps it was unwise during a pandemic to invite people to travel for the purpose of writing. Or perhaps it was the perfect thing to do because I sensed every one present was craving for a little community of this type.

I heard some priceless lines and also learned that one of the writers attended Vortex I about a year after experiencing combat in Vietnam. At the festival, he told me he saw a younger and doubtless more liberal Lars Larson emerge from one of the tepees blowing pot smoke out of his mouth and generally was flying high as a kite. I believe the story. Why not?

So what happened to Lars since 1970? What happened to so many Vortexers who reveled at the festival and then decades later turned into arch conservatives and repudiated their entire youth and idealism. I suppose they would say they grew up. I would say they simply hardened their hearts and minds and called that maturity and wisdom. And then they got angry at change. And bitter.

Update: The person who told me the Larson story now tells me Larson would have been 10 years old had he attended Vortex, so he knows he got it wrong. Oh well, at least he can admit error.

I am sitting outside with a great friend drinking gin in the drizzle while I play ball with a dog. Damn, that’s a fine sentence to write, but even better to live. Oh to have more drizzle in our Oregon lives right about now. Drizzle might save us all, at least for a month or so.

It occurs to me that Gin Drizzle might be a great name for a band of some kind, but I have no idea what musical genre it might be.

It occurs to me that I just invented a new drink called the Gin Drizzle because I am drinking gin and drizzle is falling into the glass, Tanqueray.

It occurs to me that gin drizzle needed to find its way into a hard boiled detective story. The moll is drinking one, or listening to the band, or the drizzle is falling like gin or she drank gin like a drizzle.