Some Miscellaneous Thoughts in Rain

NSP Meditations, Of Walking in Rain

Hard May rain pummels my domicile. I am cooking up a mushroom and rice soup. Rain and soup always go together.

Quail make their monkey noises in the hedges.

I am reading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man for the first time in 35 years. Naturally it is holding up and searing and relevant. Didn’t a black man just get lynched in Georgia a few months ago?

I took a walk earlier and rain had somewhat stopped and I dreamed up a new story about a couple on a suspension bridge, a true story about something that happened on the Drift Creek Falls bridge just south of Lincoln City. No, not murder. The exact opposite.

I am writing more words per week than I have in a long time.

A new part time job has presented itself. I get to be out in nature and work by myself.

I think a lot about the state of my nation. We seem base and pathetic and almost unworthy of a future. Before the virus hit, we were already weak. Now we are so much weaker. Are we finally dying? One minute of watching the US Senate try to govern on C-SPAN seems to suggest that it really is over. There is no wake up call for America. We had one—the Civil War—and we didn’t listen.

I liken us to the Ottoman Empire. They once stood at the pinnacle of many fields. Then they weren’t and disappeared. They didn’t leave anything behind except mosques and that’s not much.

I almost dread picking up Invisible Man and continuing. I forget how it ends, but of course I know how it ends.

I put the word out the other day that I wanted someone to buy one of my books. Someone did, and I truly appreciated the effort. He found my work in the most unlikeliest of places. I tend to always find the best readers that way. How about someone else reading this buy a book? I’ll throw in some goodies!

A Theft by a Beaver

NSP Meditations

Where to begin with perhaps the greatest and most preposterous beaver and beaverwood story of all time?

I could start with where I heard it, in front of my domicile while drinking a frosty IPA and eating fish and chips with a friend.

I could start with the two men, one chewing tobacco, the other wearing pink, who told me the story, their story, after one of them picked out a new choice cut of beaverwood for a walking staff because a beaver had stolen his beaverwood walking staff while they were fishing for trout in a pond.

Yes, let’s start with them, I already have, and let them keep going.

They had caught a mess of tout and were cleaning the fish at the cleaning station, when they heard a splash behind them. They turned around and saw something that looked like a beaver gliding away with the tobacco man’s beaverwood walking staff in its mouth. He had chosen the staff from my collection weeks ago and prized it very much. He always took it fishing with him and had placed it at the edge of a pond where a beaver lodge was in the process of being built.

In other words, a beaver building a lodge had stolen beaverwood from a human being who had been given a piece of beaverwood as a gift from a human being, me, who has amassed the greatest collection of beaverwood in the history of the world, but never actually removes wood from lodges or dams. Surely this act of theft by the crafty beaver was the first such occurrence in world history.

After the two men narrated this story and walked away, my friend and I turned to one another and laughed uproariously. It was too absurd not to be true.

Corona Virus Thoughts #6

Corona Virus Thoughts, NSP Meditations

Why do some people reach out during a crisis while others do nothing?

Trump supporters will stay loyal to the very end as did many Germans stay loyal to Hitler to the very end as did many Southerners stay loyal to the Confederacy and institution of slavery. Nothing really ever changes for fanatics. They can’t simply wake up from the spell and say, “Wow. I was wrong.” They can’t stop falling when they’ve jumped off a cliff and then fly upward to stand on the cliff again.

I continue to walk into strange stories during the self quarantining.

I recently heard perhaps the most preposterous but utterly believable story about beavers and beaverwood. I will try to write it up later but my storytelling talent may prove inadequate to capture its sheer farcical magic.

I’ve written another country song. This one is based on something I heard on Christian radio on Easter Sunday. It’s called “Jesus Will Rise on the Internet” and it is a sure fire hit. One stanza goes: They couldn’t go to church on Easter Sunday /They couldn’t have a potluck with green bean casserole / They couldn’t wear their wrinkled suits or pretty homespun dresses / They couldn’t drink Christ’s blood in shiny silver cups / But roll away the stone for the returned savior, ’cause Jesus will rise on the internet.

Another line goes: They couldn’t fixate on the crucifixion / They couldn’t sing songs of the devil and superstition…

I am writing this outside enshrouded in fog. I can’t ever recall writing in fog before. I kind of dig it.

My neighbor is letting me walk his dog again. He threw in the towel on social distancing. Joy!

Who would have ever thought that “taking a drive into the country” would return as a major form of recreation. In the early 60s it was the number one rated “outdoor recreation” activity in America. I am not making that up. I came across that fact while researching a story about Highway 101 and the Oregon Coast.

Someone knocked on my door the other day and gave me a bag of fresh trout. It was caught by perhaps the most strangely delightful pair of fishermen in the world.

I wish some people would order some books from me. I would load them up with some extra goodies.

I’ve started wearing windbreakers again. I can’t believe I ever got out of the habit.

Malibu Run and Bombay Gin: A Case in Deduction

NSP Meditations

I have been watching a lot of the classic Sherlock Holmes episodes starring Jeremy Brett (my favorite Holmes by far) and therefore get to see the detective’s process of deduction in action.

Recently, I employed deduction trying to figure out the mystery of what kind of person(s) would litter fifth-size bottles of Bombay Gin and airplane bottles of Malibu Rum (coconut) on both sides of a rural road in an impoverished section of coastal Oregon. During a Sunday walk I counted at least a half dozen of each type, but not exclusively one spirit on the same side of the road. In other words, the brands were mixed.

I was utterly baffled first by the appearance of these bottles, one usually sees cans of Bud Light or malt liquor, and their regular distribution pattern. Why on both sides of the road? Why Bombay and Malibu? One is expensive and prestigious. The other pedestrian and mid range sweet swill. Bombay Gin and Malibu Rum are nearly opposites of each other. The former seems masculine to me, the latter, feminine. Both are typically consumed with mixers of some kind, but it seems highly doubtful these were consumed that way. I mean, you don’t mix a gin and tonic or rum and coke while you’re driving or walking. Or maybe you do! But there were no mixer containers of any kind around. And indeed, were these bottles thrown from vehicles or simply discarded when emptied by a walker or walkers? I’d really like to see someone walking take the last swig from a bottle of Bombay and then just toss it on the ground and keep on walking.

Is all of this related to the Corona Virus?

Later today I will take another walk down this road and see if anything new develops.

Corona Virus Thoughts #5

Corona Virus Thoughts, NSP Meditations

As I was making a sculpture on the beach, my mind drifted to the final scene in Planet of the Apes where Charlton Heston encounters the toppled Statue of Liberty half buried in the sand. “You maniacs! Goddamn you all to hell!” he screams, pounding his fist into the sand. That he is wearing a loincloth while screaming and pounding makes it all the more memorable. Because there I was on the beach remembering it. We really have done this virus thing to ourselves, with the mass domestication and consumption of animals and then conveying disease through modern and largely useless and environmentally-damaging travel. Think of how the world would change if people gave up all but locally sourced meat, pork and poultry, or gave it all up for good. Think of how the world would change if people didn’t travel to Disneyland for the 14th time or Antarctica to run a marathon or to Mexico to swim with whales. (Note to humans: whales don’t want to swim with you.)

All of these thoughts occupied me as I assembled a sculpture from driftwood and kelp on a remote beach. I took a little break and ate my eager breakfast staring at the ocean. A lone fishing boat came into view and I wondered who was on it, fishing. It began to drizzle, but that hardly mattered. So little seems to matter these days, or what used to matter doesn’t matter anymore, to me, and perhaps others. Of course it’s still business as usual for people in power. I guess there is some hope in that the LA Lakers returned their virus small business money after public outcry. Well, maybe there is no hope in that they applied and received the money in the first place.

I wonder what I will think when I look back on my time during the pandemic. I planted trees, wrote strange short stories, cooked fish, drank wine, read novels, read news and commentary, watched Sherlock Holmes, planted peas, helped my neighbors, built forts and reunited with some people I thought I’d never see again. I even laughed here and there.

At some point I finished the sculpture and gathered up my choice cuts of beaverwood and headed for home. In several hours, the incoming tide would destroy the sculpture. I would be the only person who saw it, except for perhaps the fisherman out to sea, if he or she took up some binoculars to see what that person was doing on the beach.

Questions of Truth

NSP Meditations

We live in truth-challenged times. Debate on the very nature of truth rages around us. With the advent of social media and text messaging, truth and truth telling face a unique threat. Truth doesn’t seem to matter to a lot of Americans these days. They relish in their leaders lying. Have we always been like this? That’s just one question about truth. There are many, many more. Answer these in your mind or in your heart, with words or music or art.

Here are some questions of truth:

What’s the one true thing?

Is there such thing as true love?

How does truth reveal itself?

Where or who do you go to for the truth? Could be a place, state of mind, activity, person, pet or book.

Respond to: the truth will set you free.

What truth can’t America handle?

Is science more true than poetry?

What’s your personal relationship to the truth?

Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth said Buddha. Was he right?

Where is truth buried?

The truth is rarely pure and never simple said Oscar Wilde. Was he right?

What are the ingredients of a truth serum?

What gives truth a bad name?

What’s a half truth in your life?

Why don’t some people believe climate change is true?

Why do politicians have such a difficult time telling the truth?

What’s the best way to break up with someone? Tell the truth or lie?

If truth were a landscape, what would it look like?

Truth is so rare that it is delightful to tell it said Emily Dickinson. Was she wrong?

What is something someone is sugarcoating the truth to you? Or did so in the recent past?

Suppose you had Wonder Woman’s lasso of truth at your disposal. What would you do with it?

The bitter truth is…?

Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake said Wallace Stevens. This seems exactly right.

How can you tell if someone isn’t telling the truth?

Is a headline in a newspaper truth?

What don’t I believe is true but seemingly everyone around me does?

What part/place of nature reveals truth?

All the truths in the world add up to one big lie said Bob Dylan. What does that mean Bob?

Truth or dare?

What’s the better story to tell? The lie or the truth?

Can there be multiple versions of the truth of an experience?

Why is the Flat Earth Society gaining so many new members?

Can a male writer reveal the truth of a female experience?

Has social media facilitated/promoted/enabled/encouraged/rewarded more or less truth in our lives? (choose the verb you want)

Can a white writer reveal the truth of a person of color’s experience?

Does the truth change under duress?

What’s the greatest ongoing battle for truth in American culture?

Whoever is careless with the truth in small matters cannot be trusted with important matters said Albert Einstein. Very true. Just look at us now.

Adversity is the first path to truth said Lord Byron. True, but many Americans face no adversity. They are ensconced in luxury and delusion.

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