Random Workday Thoughts

NSP Meditations

I look out my workplace window and see a pot shop below. A green cross on a white field flag billows in the breeze. In the distance, clouds hang over the ocean.

The clock strikes three in the afternoon. I kind of wish I was building a driftwood fort in the clouds on the beach.

I’m designing an ad for a one-man carpet cleaning service. If I create a good ad, his business will improve and more dirty carpets in the community will be cleaned. I am mindful of my responsibility to create a good ad and take that responsibility seriously, and utterly without irony. I hope the carpet cleaner cleans carpets with the kind of mindfulness I practice designing his ad.

Are we mindful when we perform tasks? On my construction job, my boss demonstrated excellent mindfulness and it was occasionally punctuated with staccato glorious bursts of profanity, which in his case, improved the performance of the task at hand. Nothing like cursing motherfucker to focus the mind.

After the carpet cleaning ad, I’ll move onto the ad for the senior center lunch and hope I can find an elegant illustration of gravy. Then I’ll work on ads for chicken feed and a pancake breakfast to support a charitable cause.

I look at the pot shop again. Two young blonde women holding their phones in front of their faces walk in.

Out anther window I see a log truck rumble by. I wince on behalf of some murdered watershed.

What an interesting new journey I am on. I keep meeting so many fascinating people along the way, while others from my past continue to fade away.

Fort Kelp

Driftwood Forts, NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches

Early morning. An ocean the gauzy color of green and gray rolled in loud. A bit of fog. Dead kelp in piles and strands laid strewn across the beach. It was almost if they had been invaders from the sea and repulsed by a crack defense team comprised of gulls, otters and bears.

But it wasn’t an invasion, merely an uprooted underwater forest just offshore, torn asunder by the action of the waves.

Kelp had died and their death must be honored.

A man discovered the carnage and began building a fort to honor the dead. He found two pieces of beaverwood tied together with kelp in the shape of a cross. A cross was certainly the wrong imagery for a death of this kind, but nature had provided it and who was he not to top off the fort with the cross when there it was? Everything is fair game in fort building!

He built the fort and wrapped it in kelp. He mounted the cross atop the fort. It might freak out a beachcombing Christian zealot or convert him to the Gods of Kelp on the spot.

The builder would never know.

Dark Morning Walk

NSP Meditations

It was morning and it was dark. A light fog gripped the ground. I walked down the middle of a rural road before work. I wanted to set my mind right and walking as the light comes always does that for me.

Actually I was more limping than walking because of a slight calf strain the result of jogging on the beach. I wanted to get back to running, which used to be a big part of my life, but my body wasn’t quite ready for it—yet.

A bat flew across my path. Then another. I love bats! The ocean roared dull to my left. I stepped over some purple coyote scat full of blackberry seeds. I passed a house with an unkempt yard and a man was smoking a cigarette on the porch. Headlights approached and I moved to the shoulder. A truck zoomed by.

Light began to leak through the sky. I thought about the tasks ahead I would complete later that day. I thought about how I need to slow down and appreciate the haiku moments all around me. I thought about an extraordinary new person in my life who wants me running again.

I kept limping, trying to work out the strain. I picked up some large rocks with both hands and raised them up and down as I moved. A road workout. It must have looked odd, but no one was around to witness the oddity.

More light. The dawn was arriving and with it the promise of a new day in my new life.

Fort T-Shirts!

NSP Meditations

Fans of Driftwood Forts:

Place your order for a custom-made Fort t-shirt. Wear it proudly and answer all the questions that will arise because you are wearing something one-of-a-kind and quintessentially Oregon.

You give me your size and the kind of shirt you want and I’ll find it at a thrift store for a quarter or so and then spray paint the stencil (courtesy of an artist friend) and word or words and then ship it out! Cost? We negotiate. Every cent (minus postage) goes toward animal welfare causes.

Message me and put in your order! It’s fort time!

Secret Coast Radio 8

NSP Meditations, secret coast radio , , ,

Welcome to the Secret Coast Radio podcast broadcasting somewhere on the Secret Coast

Let us begin by saying:

We prefer the first person plural over the singular.

We prefer mystery over journalism.

We prefer crooked roads over interstate highways. That’s where all the better stories reside.

We prefer fey over fanatics, super duper over supercilious, anything over anger.

We prefer bouquets of flowers handpicked from ditches and roadsides over bouquets imported across oceans from lands chiefly harvested by children breathing herbicides.

We prefer newspapers owned by people who live in the communities served by the newspapers.

We prefer a management style that invites, encourages, teaches and inspires over hectoring and debasement.

We prefer people who take calls instead of letting them always go to voice mail and then never responding to voice mail because their voice mail box is full.

We prefer for those people in crisis and despair to ask for help, over disappearing and silence, but we realize how hard it is for many to ask for help, so reach out anyway.

We prefer raking leaves over leaf blowing.

We prefer the equal distribution of wealth over extreme concentrations of wealth, like what’s going on in America today and getting worse.

We really like love and charity toward everyone and malice toward none.

We love drinking coffee in coffee shops where someone has chalked a big giant message…”You will be asked to leave if you’re not nice. Kindness matters.”

Oh yes it does. It’s really the only thing that does.

What is this podcast about? Who are we?

Like we said, mystery over journalism.

Let show number eight begin.

The link to the show is:

http://www.buzzsprout.com/385945

Return to Tennis

NSP Meditations, Sports

After a 15-year hiatus, I returned to tennis. I don’t know why I picked this time, but it was time. I’d talked about it. I’d written about it. You can talk and write about something to inertia, even death. Not so with tennis, which was once one of the most important and joyful activities of my life.

Everything was arranged for my comeback:

I had a racket ready—a thrift store beauty for $1.99, Belgium-made, a wood and boron composite, probably one of the last models made with wood. For my backup racket, I had a Jack Kramer Autograph, in perfect condition, that I really didn’t want to use, for fear of damaging. I mean, it was most likely 50 years old.

I bought a can of balls for $2.99, approximately the same price I paid in 1981! Preposterous! There’s nothing comparable to this lack of increase in American sporting life, or American life in general, excepting of course, the Big Mac and the Whopper.

I had an outfit picked out—loose brown corduroys with pockets large enough to hold balls, a baggy blue and white Western shirt that would give me plenty of room to swing and serve, and some black Puma low-cut sneakers that seemed perfect for tennis.

The outfit was obviously ludicrous, and I relished in its ludicrous nature. I didn’t care. No one would ever see me play anyway. I’ve driven by rural tennis courts the past 22 years and have seen exactly two people play. Two! Most of the rural tennis courts in Oregon were turned into skate parks or abandoned 15 years or so ago, so the tennis player in rural Oregon has gone nearly extinct. I would be the last Rural Tennis Player in Oregon (Cannon Beach and Gearheart don’t count) and get a book out of it!

Yes, I was poised for the return. It was summer!.My fitness was sound. I knew how to play. All in needed was a tennis court. If there was one tennis god or goddess left in America, he or she would reveal one to me, one not yet totally gone to seed. The court might even have a backboard! A glorious backboard where I would fall in love with the game all over again and recall those hundreds and hundreds of hours in my youth of hitting against a backboard in Rivercrest Park in Oregon City, defeating Connors, Borg, and McEnroe in five-set Grand Slam Finals. Tennis reigned supreme in that era. Everyone played. And I would again.

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