Sunday Forts!

Driftwood Forts, NSP Meditations

The Fort Destroyer is no match for the fort fun army. The sheer joy of sweat and making art and shelter at the ocean’s edge! More forts go up in his lair, forts built by people passing through who build on their own and know nothing of the Destroyer’s misguided anarchism toward forts. Oh how he must feel when he sees more forts built the next day after his nocturnal destructions! I built two this Sunday morning as pelicans and gulls flew overhead. I even added some feathers and charcoal inscriptions.

Elk for Lunch

NSP Meditations

The construction crew ate lunch together in the house they were building and discussed the state of the world. There were differences of opinion, but perhaps some listening was going on,, some digestion of new facts or insights. Someone might have even changed his mind.

I worked my way through my typical vegetation fare. The boss gnawed away the bratwurst he’d prepared from an elk shot by a neighbor. Another crew member wolfed down an elk burrito. He offered me a taste but I politely declined. The other member of the crew, the burrito eater’s 16-year old nephew, sat next to me. He’d shot the elk his uncle was now devouring.

That was a lot of elk at that moment. I said aloud we must be the only construction crew in Oregon where half the crew was eating elk for lunch on the site. The kid said he doubted that. He was probably right. This was Oregon after all.

I decided not to tell the crew I was working on a erotic story where an elk rutting in the rain turns on a sexless hipster couple from Portland and they get it on in the back of a Kia at an elk viewing area. They wouldn’t get it. I’m not sure I do either. But I was going where elk led me, and it wasn’t bratwurst or a burrito.

Psychedelic Chipmunk 2

NSP Meditations

Tom arose at the crack of dawn. He bolted outside to see if Jimmy had left a message. Yes! And the saucer of Hamm’s was bone dry.

Tom:

Respond to the phrase: Soul Kitchen

Jimmy

P.S. Leave out an ink pad and more Hamm’s please.

Soul Kitchen? Tom had heard it before…somewhere…

He thought. He waited. He typed: The cupboard’s bare in America.

Jimmy read Tom’s message at sunset while chomping a magic mushroom like Bugs Bunny fisting a carrot.

He nodded his striped head in agreement with Tom’s response. Indeed, the cupboard of America’s Soul Kitchen was bare. So was the pantry. Not a single expired can of pork and beans or tin of Spam.

Oregon City Coffee Shop

NSP Meditations, Pioneer Pride , , , , , , , ,

Early morning in my hometown. This building was boarded up in my youth, but has since been put to distinguished use as a great coffee shop. Across the street, Oregon City’s theater once stood. I can’t believe I’ve forgotten its name.

Also across the street, the Oregon City Library stands, a Carnegie gem, lovingly restored and expanded a few years ago, a project financed by the voters when the government asked them to finance it. Who votes no on libraries?

I spent long, long, hours in this library, reading books and magazines and checking out records. I think I still owe a fine for a lost Stevie Wonder album. I always went to the library alone, on foot or bicycle. My mother never once dropped me off or picked me up.

Oregon City sure has changed a lot in recent years. The downtown finally resurrected itself. I like the changes. The Grand Ronde Tribe wants to buy the old mill site on Oregon City’s side of the Willamette River. I hope they get it. It was theirs once. But please film a war movie there and blow up some of the machinery. But, please leave a few traces standing to remind people that OC was once a three whistle mill union town and supported a vibrant middle class.

I’ve got about 20,000 words on a memoir about growing up in OC in the 70s and 80s, tentatively titled Pioneer Pride. I hope to release it in 2020 if the zeitgeist is right, perhaps release it only in Oregon City, in bars, libraries and street libraries, thrift stores, the Elevator, one old news rack. Who knows? That’s the way I publish these days. I hope my old Oregon City friends will support it. It’s not going anywhere without them.

I stash a few of my books in the lending library here. They always manage to disappear by the time I return.

Someone very special to me still lives in Oregon City. I so wish we could reunite, preferably in Howell’s or Coney Island or the Fall’s View. OC still has three great Oregon Tavern Age joints left!

LA Woman plays. The Doors just don’t seem to garner the attention from current media and listeners other bands from that classic era do. Today, I find myself much more interested in their music.

Yard work for my Old Man later this morning. Also, a possible meeting with important people about the most far out cultural event in Oregon history—Vortex I. Naturally it has a far out Oregon City connection and his name was Dr. Cameron Bangs. He used to practice medicine not too far away from where I am writing this.

Oregon Tavern Age: Acid

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age

I sat at a table in the Wet Lizard Lounge in Charleston. It was a lazy, hazy April afternoon. The fish weren’t running and the port appeared dead. A kid fisherman wearing black sweats, a black hoodie and brown rubber boots sipped a Bud Light and Rockstar and stared into his phone for deliverance. Doubtless, the phone would deliver.

The only sound in the lounge emanated from a blinking machine that dispensed Jagermeister.

My associate was in the restroom changing out of her green shorts into pink yoga pants. She was simmering on acid and starving for fish and chips. Soon, she would eat fish and chips on acid, wearing pink yoga pants, and guzzling a local IPA. It was surely the first acid trip of its kind in OTA country and probably the last.

I looked at a framed faded photograph on the wall of a man and presumably his three small sons. An inscription read: “All Lost at Sea. Aug. 28, 1986.”

No names. Shouldn’t they have written the names of the dead? It seemed like an inexcusable omission and why was the photograph still hanging in the Wet Lizard Lounge 33 years later after the capsizing? Where was the wife today? I wondered. I imagined. I had questions. When the acid queen emerged from the bathroom and taken a bite of fish and chips, and slugged half the beer, I would seek her insights. They would open doors of perception for me that I couldn’t begin to fathom.

Oregon Tavern Age: Wedding

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age

A young couple blew into OTA country on a Saturday afternoon. They sprinted to the bar and sat down on stools. The man announced loudly, “She’s off the market boys!”

She was wearing a white wedding dress and black cat eye glasses. He wore jeans and a Red Sox t-shirt.

The bartender came up to the bride and groom. He ordered three Jello shots and a vodka cranberry. She ordered a shot of something and a vodka cranberry.

I took all this in from a few feet away, drinking the worst craft malt liquor I’d ever tasted.

They had escaped after the wedding at a nearby grange, for a mad dash into OTA country to get fucked up before the they had to cut the cake and the band started up.

Married in a grange! I want to get married in a grange! I want to serve the guests cold cracklin’ Hamm’s and two kinds of chili, vegetarian and elk, with lots of cornbread to sop it up. No cake. Just cannabis cupcakes. A hillbilly band, too.

The couple ordered another round.

No way they were consummating tonight.

Welcome to married life.

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