Some Fort Meditations

Driftwood Forts, NSP Meditations

I have 17 forts going in four different spots. I feel myself improving as a builder. The forts are lasting much longer in the summer winds.

About half have received additional decoration or support. Several have hosted malt liquor and campfire parties.

Yes, I sometimes wonder what I am doing at 6:30 in the mornings building these ephemeral structures. I never plan to go to the beach and build one. I just meander, see some, wood, and if the mood is right, I start. Of course I never finish. Almost no one is ever around except for the stray jogger.

Many years from now, I will recall that one of the ways I made it through the Pandemic was by building driftwood forts. The activity keeps me fit in mind and body and many great notions emerge.

Off I go to build another one.

Drugged by Oregon

NSP Meditations, Poetry

At the jetty,

on the beach,

high noon,

sunshine splintering fog.

Ospreys fishing,

humans fishing,

fishermen drinking,

rock hounds hounding,

surfers surfing,

a seal joins them,

turning in the teal.

I build a fort.

It frames the surfers.

A surfer girl walks into the frame.

I miss the magazine cover.

Back at the car,

a tourist puffs a doobie,

A CB man talks rockfish,

then talks about a cabin boat

bustin’ for the bar.

Waves rip into the jetties at weird angles.

I hear CB man say, “Jesus, what an idiot. He’s not going to make it.”

I watch the show. I’ve never seen a boat flip at a bar.

They’d be dead in 30 seconds. Not wearing life jackets,

although they’re right there in the boat as required by law,

but not to wear them.

The precedent for refusing to wear masks has always been around.

Look at ignoring seat belts. (Dead)

Look at not wearing a helmet when riding a motorcycle. (Dead)

Look at no chaps chainsawing down a tree. (Dead)

CB man is doing the play by play.

An osprey flies toward me—right at me, head level. It’s got an eel wriggling in its talons. He’s going to drop the creature on the hood of my car. I’ll fry it up for supper!

The boat made it.

The Osprey held on.

Oregon!

I’m high.

The Return of Nurse Ratched

NSP Meditations

I was talking today on the phone with a great friend. He knew of my passion for all things Ken Kesey. He asked if I’d heard of a new streaming show slated for a September release. It’s called Ratched. It’s about Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the story begins in the state hospital some 20 years before she meets McMurphy and has him lobotomized. Apparently this Nurse Ratched likes to drink and fuck and torture the mental patients.

I thought my friend was joking. He was not. He sent me a link. I read. You can too.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7423538/reference

I am still in shock. I don’t know what to think. From what I can tell from the trailer and promo stills, they’ve gone for the movie look, not the novel. Most readers probably don’t recall that in the book, Nurse Ratched has flowing red hair, huge breasts and long red fingernails. I bet the creator of the new show has never read the novel, just seen the movie.

I read that Michael Douglas is one of the producers. He was one of the original producers of the 1975 movie. I surmise he retained the rights to the book and perhaps the characters or maybe negotiated a new deal with the Kesey family. Who knows, but I sure would like to know.

Will I watch the show? I don’t know. It will probably be another bloated streaming extravaganza with 200 back stories for phony depth. A blurb on the link says the creator envisions an episode where Ratched meets up with McMurphy in a replay of that epic literary and cinematic battle. Like I said, I don’t know what to think. Your thoughts? I welcome them.

On the Hieroglyphics of Gull Tracks

NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches

I borrow the wondrous phrase “hieroglyphics of gull tracks” from the great David Schetzline. I came across it a year ago in an obscure manuscript and it has never left my mind.

And it was on my mind this morning on the beach, on an extreme low tide, and there were hieroglyphics galore in the sand and gulls scratching them here and there as they cracked open mussels and clams and packed away at kelp. I followed their tracks for an hour, meandering among their messages and trying to decipher their mysterious meanings.

What if there was secret and important communications contained withing those scrawlings?

Gulls have the looks of writers more so than any other bird I routinely see near the ocean. Herons are more like painters and sanderlings like dancers and eagles like scientists and ospreys like long distance runners. As for crows, sheer ruffians. As for murres, hired guns.

I wished I had used the hieroglyphics of gulls prompt with students back in the long lost days when I was an English teacher, but I hadn’t yet come across the phrase or considered the images. I think we could have based an entire literary review on it. I sometimes miss employing that kind of inspiration with young writers. It was very much a part of my life for so many years. I’ve had to learn how to share these creative inspirations with others and have invented new ways of doing so.

Caves, Cliffs, Erosion and Shit Going Down

Corona Virus Thoughts, NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches

I don’t want to sound another alarm, but in the last two weeks I’ve encountered more caves dug into the cliffs on Oregon Coast than in my previous 23 years of living on the Oregon Coast and observing such oddities. Yes, caves. People are hacking them out with sticks, rocks and their bare hands and just sitting in them or spending the night or whatever the new cave dwellers do.

The writing carved into the cliffs has also subtly began to change, although, fortunately, the equations of love still abound, as are, unfortunately, declarations in praise of meth that occasionally still appear.

Love and meth. What a people we are.

In the writing, there are weird formulas that don’t seem to add up: M + M ± 69

There are pro Trump and anti Trump statements. There are people editing each other’s Trump statements.

There are some lines that make no sense whatsoever and aren’t even written in a language I am familiar with.

One simply reads erosion. Was it speaking to the cliff or the country as a whole? If it’s the latter, then it’s the most plain and devastatingly accurate one-word metaphor of graffiti I’ve ever read. In fact, it’s not even a metaphor. It’s our reality.

What is happening? Why are so many people driving around in vehicles with missing windows? In the last month, I have seen more of this strange phenomenon along 101 than ever before.

We’re going somewhere as a nation.

Meanwhile, I’m writing a Western that I like to believe has a shot at helping turn us around, or just pumping some decency into some of the corroded hearts out there who might read it. Do people with corroded hearts even read books?

Some Thoughts on My Writing Process

NSP Meditations, Writing

Someone emailed me the other day, an aspiring writer stuck in the mud. He wanted to know about my process. What was it? How did it develop? Do you think it might work for me?

During the Pandemic, I have written something like 70,000 words for publication and polished another 65,000 words previously written for publication that I hope to bring out this fall in the form of two books. I’ve also written another 10,000 or so words for the blog and podcast. I’ve had some prolific bursts in my time, but nothing like this. The only thing comparable was when I got dumped, got insomnia, started walking in rain, getting to school at four in the morning to write and wrote the rain book and a teaching novel that’s never been published.

I wrote back to the writer. I told him that lately the process for me is this:

  1. Ass to chair
  2. Long morning walks on the beach thinking about pieces.
  3. Blasting out riffs and then cleaning them up later. Not laboring for perfection in the moment.
  4. Absolutely no social life.
  5. Reading everything in sight and marveling how it works its way into the prose.
  6. Writing up whatever idea comes my way but realizing the idea may go nowhere useful at the time, but might become useful later. Sometimes writing on something that feels eccentric, such as wondering about the weird new names for RVs, pays off later.
  7. Writing letters to warm up for other writing.
  8. Ass to chair.

That was about it, I wrote to him, but I added I certainly don’t offer it as a guide. Every writer finds his own way or they probably don’t write.

I also told him that sometimes you are writing a book and an idea for a new book blows into your mind and the new idea excites you way more than the one you are writing. That’s happened to me several times and recently happened again.

I always write the book that blows into my mind from out of nowhere, finish that one, then go back to the halted project with fresh spirit, and finish that one as well. So far I have finished every book I have started.

He wrote back and thanked me and said he was definitely going to give that walking idea a chance.

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