I pulled into my favorite filling station on a bright Saturday morning. And when I mean filling station, I mean it: no nachos, chicken strips, energy drinks. Paper maps and windshield wiper blades only.
My filling station’s attendants always clean my windshield. Every time. That’s why this is the only place I buy gas.
A kid was on his first day on the job. All they would let him do (he told me) was clean windows. And he was pumped up beyond belief to being so! He smiled as he worked and we chatted about the people he’d met earlier that morning. He’d met five new folks! He was pumped about that too! He was generally pumped about everything in his life from what I could tell.
The kid had pumped me up with his eagerness! I was feeling it in the car. He finished the window. A little streaky. Okay, he needed practice but he’d be an exert with the squeegee at the end of his shift.
I called him over to the window and handed him a dollar. His first tip! He smiled even wider and thanked me with gusto. I cranked on the classic rock and drove away, well, pumped.
I want to update you on NSP’s latest creative projects and invite your support to assist an independent Oregon publisher during these challenging times for small businesses. Some of these are free to enjoy while others can be purchased directly through the website. Thanks for supporting Nestucca Spit Press.
Matt Love
Pioneer Pride
Pioneer Pride: An Oregon City Memoir is a 20,000-word book published in 500-800-word installments on my Nestucca Spit Press Meditations blog. It chronicles my growing up in Oregon City in the 70s and early 80s and features stories about hackey sack, calligraphy, football, tennis, the Promenade, the mill, journalism, teachers, coaches, text from my journals of in high school, and a personal account of observing and interacting with a unique Christian sect, the Oregon City Followers of Christ Church, or the Kissers.
The book is free to read but I hope readers will consider “purchasing” it through the web site and support a writer at work. To read Pioneer Pride go to:
Published in 2004, The Far Out Story of Vortex I, sold out its 2000-copy press run a couple years later. To commemorate Vortex I’s 50th anniversary in 2020, Nestucca Spit Press has produced an E-book version of the book. This E-book version does not include the hundreds of photographs from the original because of their incompatibility with reading on devices and securing permission from the photographers to reprint them in digital form. The book cost $3.99 and the link to it is here:
A limited edition, handcrafted children’s book for adults about a magic mushroom-eating chipmunk named Jimmy who teaches a would-be writer how to help struggling people all around him and find a voice and purpose for his writing. (Based on a true story.) Cost is $10
Oregon Tavern Age (OTA) is a 64-page tabloid size book-with-in-a-magazine featuring original illustrations that culminates 22 years of writing about the crazy and poignant life that unfolds in Oregon Coast’s dive taverns and bars. Cost varies by number of issues purchased.
Enjoy 20 episodes featuring my observations, stories, poems, musings and original music from the show’s producer. Each show is around 20 minutes long and offers a welcome dose of humor, idealism, wordplay and meditation for these trying times. Totally free! And ad free! To listen to the show go to:
The Nestucca Spit Press Writing Curriculum features 30 lessons that I developed over the course of my long teaching career and used with great success. They are primarily in nonfiction writing, but also in fiction. Most are thematic in nature. They can be used by secondary classroom teachers, aspiring writers and online writing educators. The subjects are:
Zen Buddhism
Walking
Rain
Oceans
Food
Music
Stars
Kindness and Gratitude
Sartre Writing (for beginning or experienced writers)
You can feel the resistance gaining strength. You can feel many Americans getting dumber by the minute. You can feel that the pandemic probably won’t make a difference. Americans simply have no attention span anymore. I think they used to. I mean, they could sit on the grass and listen to Lincoln and Douglas debate for three hours! Of course Lincoln lost that election.
I am reading Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan for the first time. It has a great peyote induced scene with a dog that I need to integrate in the dog book. I’m still writing about dogs and I don’t have one. I think next year I will.
I keep thinking about the recent space shot. There I was in OTA country when it happened, the fascist President was in Florida cheering it on, there were racial protests tearing up cities, we had TWO undeclared wars still going on………and I thought it was 1969. Then I head the announcer say the new rocket “flies like a smart phone” and I knew we had progressed, except for music.
The Christmas book is going to happen. I want to get these tales out. But is there a market for a Christmas book this coming Christmas? What will the holiday season look like?
Rain is falling on my domicile as I write this. I hope my chipmunk friend shows up for his lunch. He damn near knocks on the door these days for his grub.
We passed 108k virus deaths in the country. Sports are coming back, though!
A morning email from Linda arrived with the subject line: THE MOTHER OF ALL PUDDINGS. It asked me if I wanted some super fancy banana cream pudding her son in New York City had mailed her. He’d sent two buckets and she and Gary couldn’t possibly eat it all. We could meet in OTA country for the delivery.
What the hell?
Of course I wanted banana cream pudding mailed from New York City. Of course I wanted to pick it up in OTA country! When I did, it would be the first and last delivery of its kind on the history of OTA!
We met later that day. Linda had the pudding in a paper sack and included a card about the pudding. Facts about bananas! Absurd! I was tempted to eat the pudding right there, but held off. I wanted to relish the mere prospect of eating it, yes, relish indeed. That evening, I would eat the pudding around a camp fire and quite possibly be the only person in the world at that time—or ever—to eat banana cream pudding around a camp fire.
I am sitting by a crackling camp fire on a Friday afternoon. The wood burning is cherry and it emits a beautiful smelling smoke. Not far from me a Hipster and his dog Lumpy are goofing around their camp site. In a few minutes I will barbecue some fresh ling cod on the fire for fish tacos. Later, I might pull out the guitar and work on my country album. Track list so far:
Had to Put My Dog Down (wish it had been my ex-girlfriend)
Going to Winston
The Construction Worker Song
Jesus Will Rise on the Internet
Elk River
I’ve always wanted to cut a country album. Now is the time.
It occurs to me that the greatest modern country song of all time is The Rolling Stones’ “Far Away Eyes,” released in 1978 off Some Girls. I don’ think it can be topped. It was and was not a joke.
Why are my thoughts around a camp fire so different than my thoughts while walking on the beach? Fire is good. Fire is primal. Fire is conversational. Fire burns things to the ground. We need real and metaphorical fire in this country to burn a few things down. It’s the only way we can regenerate.
Consider this: If Sherman had burned all of the South during the Civil War, not just the path to Atlanta and Atlanta, and the North annihilated the slave-holding class altogether and the traitors like Robert E. Lee, and stuck with Reconstruction, America would be a far different and better nation today. We had that one shot. We blew it.
