Corona Virus Thoughts #14

Corona Virus Thoughts, NSP Meditations

More unraveling in America, almost 190k deaths, but at least the NFL starts next week so everyone can forget about the ongoing catastrophe.

I just read the news that some kind of firecracker device at a gender reveal party ignited a California wild fire. I just wrote that sentence and I can’t believe I did.

School,or what used to be known as school, starts in Oregon soon. I am glad I am not a classroom teacher anymore. I wouldn’t have been able to hack it with Zoom and all that.

I need an adventure to snap me out of my fixation to find another writing project. I think I will take a long drive up a remote river canyon and seek out a story. Surely there is one lurking there.

I’ve been writing letters to my cousin in rehab for alcohol abuse. I wonder if they are helping in any way or is that just my conceit that a receiving a handwritten letter might make a difference to someone’s mental health. I know it would mine if I ever received one.

This morning, I built the 11th fort in a complex of forts. I’m almost out of wood in this area. I found an empty can of Smirnoff Ice Smash in one of my forts. I wonder what that concoction tastes like.

The election is two months away. A lot could happen between now and then, like more people dying, more fires, more shootings, more conspiracy theories, more dumb and dumber all around.

Can we become more dumb and dumber in America? Oh sure. Just listen to another press conference from a Pac 12 or Big Ten football coach about the virus and necessity of playing football during a pandemic and we’ll hit a new low of stupidity every time.

My new best friend in nature is a crow with a broken wing that hangs out in the parking lot of my grocery store. He knows my car and always trots up looking for some snacks. I always have some ready.

Another young man violated the mask mandate in the grocery story not too long ago. He wore the attire of tree faller or construction worker. I walked by him and looked at his face. Pure smugness. Grade A American dumbshit. You just want this type to contract corona, maybe die, or kill some family members (poor, unnecessary grandma) and then have him say it never happened. It was all a hoax.

Country Music Morning Fog

NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches

I walked north along the beach in a thick morning fog. I expected to come to a creek that flowed into the ocean and thus, would have to turn around.

But the creek wasn’t there. A wall of sand blocked the entrance to the sea and the creek’s low summer flow couldn’t break through.

So I kept walking into a new beach I’d never walked before.

Oh the magic of a new Oregon beach! I live for this sort of thing and whenever I think I’ve hit them all, I find a new undiscovered stretch and fall in love with Oregon’s socialist beaches all over again. When some day I’ve fallen off the cliffs at Hart’s Cove, I want to know that I am the greatest beach walker in Oregon history. Hubris? Why the hell not? Certainly I’ve written more words about Oregon’s beaches than anyone in Oregon history. Double hubris? Why not?

To my astonishment I found a fort on this beach. I inspected it. A perfect little nap, drop-out-of-America fort. I kept moving. Lots of kelp in piles that suggested an invading army had been wiped out coming ashore.

As I headed back, an idea for a country song popped into mind. What?! I titled it “Cowboy Conservative.”

I was inventing the lyrics right there, and singing them in the fog, probing for a melody.

I’m a cowboy conservative sonofabith / Get my news from Fox News tits

Wish the Confederacy wasn’t one and done / we’d be a righteous country if they had won

This is clearly a hit. I’ve really got to record the country album I’ve had in my head for years. I only need my lead singer to come forward. She knows who she is.

In Line at the Post Office Blues

NSP Meditations

I stood in line at the post office to mail two packages of my books. Still some readers out there, which is heartening.

At the counter, a woman was losing it over a lost Amazon order. Ahead of me, and old man complained about the shoddy service, backstabbing with glee when the clerk left to attend to something. Then he cracked unfunny jokes, one of them about setting up a McDonald’s in the lobby because the wait time was so long. A real comedian. Utterly disgusting in his condescending of a front line worker.

And also this:

Behind me, a rotund man, the only person in line or behind the counter NOT wearing a mask, kept joking about the slow service. He was not funny, either.

I said nothing. The maskless man looked stupid. He had stupidity etched in his stupid face. He fancied himself a real tough guy by breaking the mask law for freedom’s sake. He probably thought that up all by himself. But in reality, it came out of the cleavage of a Fox News foxy babe. Real truth in there.

I haven’t heard a single original thought uttered by an American in months. Everything is derivative. Everything is poached. Spoon fed. Pablum. Cliche. Pudding.

I know it was exactly the same during the anti-communist, Red Menace era, but aren’t we supposed to be smarter today?

The line wasn’t moving.

I checked my phone for deliverance, just like everyone else who wants to check out—and watch endless covid conspiracy videos and brainwash themselves into thinking they are original thinkers…BECAUSE THEY JUST KNOW.

No messages. I looked at some of my forts to calm down.

My mind drifted away from the imbecile behind me to the previous night’s conversation I had with my 82-year old neighbor who has a great dog he loves very much.

The conversation did not go well. He lost me when he said Obama and Hillary would be running the country if Biden was elected. He had no basic understanding of the electoral college (99 percent of Americans don’t, including most secondary teachers of American history and government). When I pressed him on it, he didn’t believe a majority vote should decide the outcome of the presidential election.

But of course he would agree to it if Trump won the popular vote and lost the electoral count.

That’s how dumb and ideologically brainwashed it is in America these days. Never forget this Americans: there were millions of Germans who supported Hitler to the end and never admitted error. Millions. And many of those still believed clearing away the rubble and burying bodies.

Same with the losers in the Civil War. They simply weren’t beat down enough by the winners. If they had been, and I’ve saying that for months and months and years and years, this would be an entirely, more just nation.

But it is too late on that front.

To paraphrase Pete Townsend, who is now pushing 75: “Hope I die before I can’t think.”

The One-word Trucker Outreach Writing Project (part 2)

NSP Meditations

I chose the word “think” for the project.

I received many interesting suggestions for the one word that only truckers can read as they drive by a certain stretch of sand. Thanks for that.

Why “think?”

Because everywhere around me I see people (and this is not online, I am talking in person) not thinking clearly, rationally, with courtesy and kindness in mind. I see so much utterly unoriginal, obvious, crude, uninformed, ideologically driven, lockstep thinking that isn’t thinking at all. I see this on both sides of the political aisle. I see it in that pernicious statement, “Let me send you a link…” which is beginning to sound like “it’s in the Bible” so that proves Jonah was swallowed by whale and spit out a few days later to do what the Lord asked him to do.

I mean the membership of the Flat Earth Society is increasing! And no, Tupac is not alive pumping gas in Toledo, Oregon, recording a 400-track album.

I am off to the beach to write “think” again, but perhaps I will change my mind. I will be thinking about that.

The One-word Trucker Outreach Writing Project

NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches

Friends:

I seek your assistance in implementing a unique writing project. The idea came to me this morning as I walked along the beach in a pea soup fog. It goes like this:

A stretch of beach I walk daily is situated some 90 feet below Highway 101. The view of the beach from the highway is about a quarter mile long and only visible by truckers, including log truck drivers, sitting high enough in their cabs that they can see over the guard rail and down to the beach.

My idea is to leave regular messages in the sand at the proper low tides that any trucker driving by who happened to look toward the ocean will easily see. The messages will be constructed with kelp, driftwood and a stick in the sand. The messages will change daily or remain the same. I don’t know about that yet.

But what to write? The idea of something overtly political as the election nears is repugnant to me for some reason. I don’t want to profane the beach with that content, but then again, Oregon’s publicly-owned (socialist) beaches are the way they are because of hard core political action.

I thought of haiku but that was too wordy and too pretentious. A big rule of writing: who is your audience?

The answer is one word. I need one word, THE WORD, that truckers will read. I get only that one word to reach this demographic. I make no assumptions as to their politics, although that’s easy to do and yet wrong to do.

What would you suggest that one word be? I have one in mind but want to solicit other notions. Quite possibly, one of them will be great.

Excerpt from a Letter that I Hope Will Change the Course of My Life

Lost and Found, NSP Meditations

Someone out in the ether found me. my writing and personal story and thought I would be a perfect fit to work with incarcerated men. I followed up his suggestion to contact a faith-based organization that might employ me to do exactly that. It is a long shot, but then so am I. All I can do is keep pitching, keep creating, keep doing good work without expectation of reward.

Here’s an excerpt from the letter:

I would never compare my short-lived experience of being adjudicated, incarcerated and serving probation (the latter easily the worst of all, a total racket creating a new debtors’ prison enriching private contractors) to the men serving long sentences in OSP. But I understand all too well the stigmatization, marginalization and brutal trauma associated with entering and exiting Oregon’s criminal justice system. I survived. I want to help others survive, too, and prosper. I’ve learned so much. I want to share that knowledge.

A little about my relationship to Christianity. I grew up in the church as the son of a preacher and missionary and spent several years with my family in Brazil in service. As an adult I drifted away from this background, but have continued to draw upon the sermons Jesus preached and the parables he taught. There is nothing like engaging others with the parable of the lost sheep to teach what it means to help people who desperately need it. In fact, I developed a writing workshop based on that parable.

Wish me luck readers.

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