Notes for a Rain Novel

NSP Meditations, Of Walking in Rain ,

A woman of the sun comes to visit a man of rain. There is possible romance in their weather. He looks forward to walks with her, forecasting what their future might hold in the land of rain. She’ll throw out her forecasts as well. Two forecasts will perhaps merge and reveal the true weather in their lives.

Both of them need new true weather. They know that, but it remains somewhat unspoken in their communications.

She visits and during her visit, it rains a record amount: rivers flood, roofs leak, roads get washed out. It pushes everything to the brink. In some cases, over.

They cannot leave his domicile. He wants them to brave it, walk in rain, relentless rain. He has the clothes ready for her. They might even work.

She won’t walk. She won’t advance into rain, into walls of gray. Her eyes and voice begin to change as the sounds of rain on his domicile begin to infiltrate her in ways she didn’t fathom. It feels almost dangerous and her mind races.

He walks alone. While he walks he thinks of her and wonders if rain had not fallen in record amounts, she might think differently of him and this place. For the first time in his life, he doubts rain. He wonders if it finally came to him in the form of something evil. The thought shudders him. He has always believed in rain and never in the cliché that rain foments depression.

By day four, it goes well beyond stir crazy for her. The medications have failed. She has to leave and they make plans for her escape from rain. No, not really from rain, but from him.

The novel takes place in the time the rain begins until they drive away (in rain, of course) and she returns to the land of the sun.

Fort Protest

Driftwood Forts, NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches , ,

The note (pictured here) read:

There’s enough
structures in the
world without you
also adding structures at
an undeveloped beach. I
enjoy undoing your work
every night.

The note rested inside a fort message container. The container rested on the sand surrounded by three upraised sticks in what used to be a modest corral fort I built in the dunes near a state wayside. The fort hadn’t been merely undone, it had been razed, and most of the wood hurled off the dune and dragged away.

I found the note with a fort companion during a hazy sunset. I had brought her to see her first driftwood fort.

In all my years of inviting messages in the forts I’d built, I had never received one quite like this. I wasn’t angry. It was more a feeling of outright astonishment. My fort building had enraged someone. All I ever intend with these forts is to delight. No strike that. I have no intention when I build. I let people make up their own mind about the forts they encounter.

Well, someone reacted in a way I never thought possible.

Let us examine the note, question and deduce:

The handwriting is that of a man’s. I sense a younger man. Not a hint of cursive you might see from an old timer.
He made only one grammatical error.
He’s a local.
He destroys at night.
He may or may not be one of the meth miscreants who Mad Max around this beach.
Why does he believe a driftwood fort is a structure?
Does he hate structure in general?
His reasoning hints of anarchism. There may be some reading in anarchist ideology.
Undoing is an interesting verb. Very benign.
Is he taunting me?
He didn’t sign the note. He didn’t date it.
The writing contains irregular capitalization.
He believes the beach is undeveloped. What is his definition of undeveloped?
Is he angry? Is it liberating in some way for him to destroy a fort in the name of protecting Oregon’s unique legacy of undeveloped beaches? Isn’t protecting Oregon’s beaches my shtick?
Does he want me to build another fort he can obliterate?
Would he try to kick my ass if he saw me building a fort?

So what to do?

My companion and I discussed the multiple options in response to the fort slayer:

Don’t respond.
Build another fort and see what happens.
Build a fort and stake it out, wait for him. Gather more intelligence.
Leave a message behind asking for a parley.
Leave an essay behind that shares my philosophy about fort building.
Leave a note behind saying he’s one in a million who hates my forts.
Leave a sentence behind asking why he’s so angry at a corral fort.
Leave an invitation behind asking for a longer explanation for his hostility toward the fort.
Leave him a screed that rips his wrongheadedness about forts.
Challenge to him some kind of duel.
Set up a booby trap.

How shall I respond?

Get Off My Cloud (An Epic Poem / Part 1)

NSP Meditations, Poetry , ,

A word deranged, a word profaned,
a word of Wordsworth, The Temptations,
meteorology and metaphor,
nursery rhymes and
teenagers skipping class
to splay on the grass,
take a toke,
guzzle rum
swiped from a mother’s stash,
hold hands,
tickle stomachs,
and gaze upward,
and find
black and white dragons,
meat cleavers,
rocking chairs,
trombones,
and make up stories
about faces
they find in the sky.

Hey, you, get off of my cloud
Hey, you, get off of my cloud

A word usurped, a word ripped off,
a word once without lucre,
a word kidnapped
by the Omnipotent Colossus,
and its well-paid drones,
drones who have never looked at clouds,
and certainly not from both sides now,
or seen clouds in their coffee,
clouds in their coffee.

I want the word back!
I want William to become a Word Slayer,
and slay this new vulgarity.

To do that, he must travel
forward in time,
through eons of time,
in a space ship
of a timeless cirrus design,
equipped with a cassette player,
and mix tapes with only songs
that mention clouds.

There must be 10,000 such songs.
Another 100,000 unrecorded.
Every tape begins with
Captain Beefheart’s “The Clouds are Full of Wine (Not Whiskey or Rye)”
Every tape ends with that rap song about Edna St Vincent Millay and her cumulus musings.

Prince sang: We’ll get to something higher that doesn’t require clouds
No, we don’t need no clouds.

William the Word Slayer, sir,
never mind Prince’s double negative,
or how terribly wrong he was (the only time),
embrace your new violent destiny.
Go forth and kill. I mean lop some heads.
Put them on pikes.
Dance around the daffodils
lit by a bonfire.

Poets have always wanted to kill.

Cliffs of Meth (?)

NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches , ,

Not too long ago, I wrote a piece about my admiration for the sentences and equations carved into the sandy cliffs along certain sections along Oregon Coast’s beaches. One paragraph of “Cliffs of Love” read:

These weren’t carvings by an ancient people suggesting the spiritual or supernatural. They were messages of lust and love, inspired by the ocean and the plasma of all mammalian things alive, scratched into a blank canvas of sand and dirt, messages declaring ideas and sentiments for all the world to see, at least the few people who walked by these cliffs and bothered to pay attention.

I added:

…some were 50 feet above me, straight up, no footholds, no visible way of getting up there. Except to crawl and hang on. Commitment. Carefree. Precarious. Dangerous. Dumb. Bravado. Wild. Rock and Roll.

The other morning, I walked down the beach that boasts perhaps the greatest number of cliff writings on the Oregon Coast, and the highest up I’ve ever seen. I stopped at my usual spot to read the writings. I looked up to see if there were any fresh carvings. (One can determine the older ones because of their faded, eroded appearance.

There was a new carving on this sunny morning, about 30 feet up: “I Love Meth.”

I read it a few more times to see if I was reading it right. I was.

Questions instantly fired up in my mind:

Were the cliffs of love really the cliffs of meth?
Were all those daredevils high on meth when they scaled the cliffs to carve their pronouncements of love?
Are their really that many young women using meth, because the highest carvings were made by women? (Assuming “I love Alex” and the like were carved by women.)
If it was meth, should I feel outraged about the desecration of my ideal? Sorry for the carvers? Happy for their frenzied urge to carve with the ocean rolling behind them?
Am I skeptical of these messages of love?
Should I be thankful for their carving when they could be doing something much worse with their meth time?
Should I appreciate their declaration of existential being? Hey, they love something!

I have learned in recent years to temper initial judgments and dig deeper into statements and questions. Obviousness is so simple, so banal, so loud, and often wrong.

I choose to dig deeper into the sentence, “I Love Meth” carved into a sandy cliff on the Oregon Coast. I will think it over and see where my thinking leads.

Oregon Tavern Age: Pickle Juice

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age , , ,

An OTA woman sat in OTA country and drank a cheap corporate lager. She was the joint’s cook and had just finished her breakfast shift and was done for the day. She was talking to the female OTA bartender and had the deepest voice I’d ever heard from a woman.

I sat at the corner table, sipped a porter, and was alternately writing a love poem about herons and looking out the window to see tourists taking selfies of themselves in the storm.

A game show played quietly on television and two cranberry farmers shot pool and bullshitted.

The bartender said she was cramping up. She hadn’t drank enough water.

“Drink pickle juice,” said the cook. “I always take a couple of shots from the pickle jar before work.” She explained the multiple health benefits of drinking pickle juice. It was damn near the elixir of life! The Internet said so.

The bartender left the bar and walked into the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator, took out the industrial-size dill jar of dill pickles, unscrewed the lid, and guzzled down some juice with both hands.

That was a first for me in OTA country.

A tall, thin, young, bearded man entered the bar and shook out the storm. He was clad head to toe in black and wore a ball cap sideways.

He glided toward the bar.

“Can I have a shot of Jameson and a shot of pickle juice?” he said.

Another OTA first for me, but I was more skeptical than surprised. Gimcrackery in motion. I mean, Jameson tastes good. Why kill the Irish burn with vinegar?

The bartender informed him that she’d just finished the last of the pickle juice, but then laughed, and said, “I’m just kidding.”

She walked into the kitchen and retrieved the pickle jar. She poured him a shot of juice and a shot of Jameson. He slammed the Jameson. Then the juice.

He shot two more Jamesons and two more pickle juices. Then a final belt of Jameson. The last shot made me wince.

All of this took five minutes.

Of Thinking in Rain

NSP Meditations, Of Walking in Rain , , ,

A woman from the land of sun bought a copy of the rain book. I wonder if it will work in her mind and heart while reading it where there is no rain. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Maybe that book was really one big fat metaphor.

I just returned from a long walk in rain and my thoughts of projects, people and possibilities were raining through me.

Rain is tinkling on the roof as I write this.

One of the sights I particularly notice when I am walking in rain is how rain erodes human constructs: roads, bridges, houses, boats, cars, barns, chairs, toys, lawnmowers, etc.

Many people are eroded by rain. Some can escape.

I wonder if I’ll ever leave the region where it can rain 90 inches a year. What would a year in the desert do to me?

More signs of the new American diaspora are appearing. People are on the move and checking out. They check out in various ways. I still want to be engaged with America and American people.

This blog may go on hiatus soon, as I turn to fiction and fiction that doesn’t work well as presented on a blog. We’ll see. After two years and over 600 posts, maybe it’s time to scale back….once a week instead five or six times. Something interesting is always happening to me and I suppose I’ll still want to share it with the few reader who are reading this.

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