Oregon Tavern Age: Christmas Day

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The talk around OTA country on Christmas Day was, that later on Christmas Day, after a few beers and hot dogs:

Going to get a six pack and fish from a gravel bar. Word is, steelhead are there.

Heading to a draw where late chanterelles might be. Maybe some other mushrooms, too.

Got to cut up some firewood.

Need to run the dogs in the clearcut.

Going to build a driftwood fort.

Trap line needs checking.

Got an idea for a stew from possum.

Want to go for a motorcycle ride, assuming it will start. Haven’t ridden it in five years.

Going to stay here and get drunk so I don’t have to see my grand kids.

Oregon Tavern Age: Election Day

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I was somewhere in endangered OTA country. I say endangered because the joint was being surrounded by gentrification, practically under siege by craft beer, pot, condos, tech people. Still, it was holding out to the last OTA man, woman and dog. They’d go down drinking.

Classic rock played. Two OTA men behind me played video poker. A date?

The female OTA bartender discussed how wild she became on tequila and magic mushrooms.

It was election day in the Republic, and more than half the eligible voters weren’t voting, and in that way they were voting.

On television, an African tribesman beheaded a water buffalo.

An OTA man walked in and announced, “I’ve almost died three times and I got no more dying in me no more.”

I drank a dark beer and wrote a letter.

A vintage St Pauli’s Girl neon featuring a blonde buxom babe holding three overflowing mugs of frothy beer glowed over the bar.

A Hamm’s bear winked at me.

“I caught a 65-pound King salmon when I was in seventh grade and the thing damn near pulled me into the river,” said an OTA man sitting at the bar.

“I was drunk,” he added.

A ponytailed OTA man seated next to the salmon man then launched into a story about the time he was almost pulled into the river when he battled a sturgeon. He and his dad fought the mighty beast for four hours and finally had to strangle it with their hands and beat it with a club to kill it. They drifted miles and miles past their point of no return.

“We never stopped drinking the whole time,” he said.

“That was the last time I ever went sturgeon fishing,” he added.

Oregon Tavern Age: Random Thoughts

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Somewhere in Oregon Tavern Age country:

I overhead a story about a man who drank a fifth of Crown, sixer of beer and smoked multiple doobies during a recent crabbing adventure. He apparently lived. (What is it about Crown and this kind of excess? I need to ask my friend Christine, who loves Crown.)

Not too long ago, I found a third dildo on an Oregon Coast beach. Three! That’s got to be a record and there’s got to be a novella in that.

I overheard a line from a bartender: “I grew up on bologna.” Great story starter.

I recently finished Bukowski’s Ham on Rye. I think it’s far and away his best novel and holds up magnificently in a way Updike’s novels do not, could not. Bukowski never yielded. His blunt commentary about the debasement of American life by corporations and conformity is even more relevant today. This was 40-50 years before reality TV and social media and the new glaring debasement that followed. Sure, the woman thing with Bukowski, but I’ve known more women than men who love his writing. Far more. He cut through. He wrote with clarity. He never elevated himself while he wrote of the debasement. His honesty was brutal and without regret or irony.

I wish I had his courage to spill everything I have seen and lived. No equivocation. No parsing. Name names in fiction or memoir…it’s all the same thing. Just spill it all. One day, I think. There is other writing work to do first.

My collection of beaverwood grows.

I’ve met a person with a mobile recording studio. He wants to start a podcast of some kind, with me as the host. I’m considering it. I’d call it The Secret Coast. One segment would be devoted entirely to beaverwood, its realities, mysteries, and metaphors.

I overheard a story from a man who said he was running errands and his girlfriend texted him and said their daughter took a terrible shit and overflowed the diapers. It was his turn to change so he had to come home straight away. He was drinking a beer and gambling when he told this story. He didn’t want to go home, so he stalled for five minutes and then left.

The new bartender has a great voice and wants a typewriter.

I overheard a story about a family’s Thanksgiving plans. They’re gathering in some field, from all over Oregon, coming in trailers, fifth wheels, pop ups, motor homes, you name it. The kids get one rig to themselves, the drunks get another, the Trumpsters get another, and the potheads get a tepee. They’ll occasionally interact at the fire and, of course, the big meal, but only for short time.

I never thought I’d see a bartender drink the detritus from a pitcher of kamikaze jello-shots, but I did. It was green and she guzzled it down.

I overheard a story about a dog that comes into a tavern and plays a kind of pool. Apparently, his master breaks the rack and the dog comes over to the table, puts his paws up, grabs a ball in his mouth and puts it in a pocket! He always runs the table! This, I have got to see. I’ve got to see it in a movie, too.

Oregon Tavern Age: Failure

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An OTA woman pushed her way into OTA country. “I’m wet,” she said.

Everyone at the bar turned toward her and nodded. She ordered a beer and jello shot and paid in change.

Rain was stapling the Oregon Coast and everyone was speaking in hushed revered tones. Rain had flummoxed their schedules and, thus, they ended up in the bar drinking at one in the afternoon. They gave thanks for rain.

Golf in Mexico played on television. An OTA man sipped a well whiskey.

I wrote a letter at a table with a dead house plant and porter as my companions.

An OTA man in a motorized wheelchair emerged from the gambling area. He navigated with his left hand on the stick while his right held a can of Hamm’s.

He steered to the bar and ordered a Hamm’s. The bartender produced one and announced the joint was out of Hamm’s. Out of Hamm’s! Ohhhhh, the humanity.

The man grasped the Hamm’s and began driving straight at me. He was coming my way.

What did he want? Money? Beer? A ride?

Shit, I didn’t want to deal with it.

He halted three feet away.

“Can I help you sir?” I said.

He fist bumped me and said, “hello.”

I’d never been fist bumped in OTA country before.

He was balding, hunched over, wearing tattered, soiled clothing, and had green and black teeth. He extended his fist again and opened his hand. It was full of quarters.

He said something but his words came out garbled.

I thought he might need assistance to play the jukebox or the slots. A magic trick?

He spoke and this time I was able to make it out. “It’s like reading a dirty book by yourself.”

“I don’t follow,” I said.

“Pool,” he said, “Will you play pool with me?”

I didn’t hesitate. “I’m sorry sir, I don’t play pool.”

He didn’t say anything, but stated at me, shook his head slowly, and started crying.

Then he motored away and plotted a course toward the far end of the bar, where several OTA men congregated and shot the shit.

In turn, he was turned down three times for pool.

He approached a man wearing a black leather jacket from the 1990s and a red Trump ball cap.

“Sure! I’ll bet your a pool shark and will kick my ass!” the man said.

They both laughed. The wheelchair man plugged the table with quarters and the balls crashed down. The Trump man racked and the wheelchair man veered around the table and took up break position. He was left handed and executed a near perfect break that sent a crack ricocheting around the joint.

Their game was on. I sipped my porter and watched them knowing I had executed the greatest failure of kindness in my life. It was right there. It was free. It would have taken ten minutes. It was supposed to be what I stand for.

What was wrong with me?

I stood up with the intent of apologizing and buying the wheelchair man a beer as penance.

Then I sat down. I knew my proper place.

Final Notes from Life on Probation

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I sat next to a woman in the lobby of the probation office. She was talking to a friend and the subject was her current boyfriend. Things were a little rocky for a few weeks, but had finally smoothed over after some heart to hearts. They had a unique history together. The boyfriend had slept with her two sisters and her daughter but she could see past all of that. It reminded me of a scene from a novel that’s never been written, nor remotely conceived because no other American writer has ever seen or heard what I have in these meetings.

The meetings are over and with this ending comes the end of my probation poems or whatever they were. Walt Whitman just took over and I let him guide me. I never tried to make the writing conform to any known genre. I became a poet during these moments, really for the first time, and produced poems that I know poetry journals will never publish because they wouldn’t consider them poems. That’s why they are poems.

We shall see if they ever see the light of publishing day outside of this blog. I wrote them to make sense of insanity and to fend off the cannibalization of my being.

We all shook hands and then I drove away for the last time, but I believe my mind will linger here forever. I developed a new, deeper empathy for people during my time in probation. I saw the debasement and destruction of basically decent people. I helped every way I could, from handing out clothes, toiletries, books, gift certificates and clarification of laws and processes. I was transformed into the person and writer I always wanted to become, but never conceived could possibly exist.

I plan to use what I have learned to serve in new ways.

Onward to the future.

Columbus and other Cannibals

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I recently reread one of the more important books I’ve read in my life. I pored over my old annotations and added new ones. I refreshed old insights and conjured new ones. I poured the new insights into a forthcoming book of my own.

My discovery of this book has an interesting provenance. One morning, a year ago or so, on a wind-whipped walk down the beach, my friend Glen had recommended Columbus and other Cannibals by Jack D. Forbes. I’d never heard of it, but I always pay attention to Glen. His book recommendations have changed my life. A week later the book arrived and I devoured it in one setting.

In Columbus and other Cannibals, Forbes introduced the Cree word wetiko and defines it as, “a disease of aggression against other living things, and more precisely, the disease of the consuming of other creatures’ lives and possessions…for one’s own private purpose or profit.”

In other words, Forbes’ words, “cannibalism.” He called it the “greatest epidemic sickness known to man.” He called it “insanity.” It began with the genocide of indigenous peoples, expanded to the destruction of nature, and kept going on from there to slavery, imperialism, colonialism, endless wars of greed, religion, racism and conquest, and, unique in American society, mass incarceration.

Interestingly enough, Forbes barely writes of incarceration because when the book was originally published in 1977 we didn’t have mass incarceration in the US. We now have almost four times the rate of incarceration in the country. It’s a new strain of the cannibalism that has proven incredibly profitable.

It made perfect sense the first time I read it. It slapped me in the face the second time. Forbes presented wetiko and cannibalism as a thesis. It is no thesis. I saw it proved beyond a reasonable doubt in the criminal justice system the past three years. I witnessed insanity. I will never forget what I saw nor do I want to. I hope it will inform the rest of my writing life and perhaps one day I can raise awareness.

There is more to Columbus and other Cannibals, much more. And I urge everyone to read it.

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