Holiday Craft Fair (Part 2) A Christmas Tale

Fiction, NSP Meditations , , ,

The car asked Shana where she wanted to go. Shana didn’t know. She called up a map and started scrolling north, north, farther north, up Highway 101. She crossed the state line into Oregon. She’d never been to Oregon. What went on there? Logging and pot?

She saw a town named Gold Beach. Shana liked the sound of that. Gold Beach sounded nice. A nice place to die, right on the ocean, which she hadn’t seen in seven years. She’d even leave a big tip for the mortuary transport assistant who would transport her body to wherever they took bodies to in Gold Beach. Or maybe she would just drink vodka, swallow some pills, and walk into the ocean. No cleanup for anyone.

Before heading to Gold Beach, Shana stopped by her condo to pick up some clothes and toiletries. She also collected her pills (anti-anxiety, anti-depressant, anti-psychotic, pain), two bottles of flavored vodka (persimmon and dandelion), and her multiple vaping devices pre-loaded with her go-to cannabis delights.

The car found Highway 101 and headed north. She vaped every now and then while watching the Hallmark holiday marathon expertly matched with Christmas-themed suicide playlist songs. Nothing like Kenny G or Jim Nabors to wither the soul.

They crossed the Oregon border and met a ripping rain. Shana told the car to kill the movie, music and interior lights. She told the car to power down the window closest to her. A second later, she heard the old, non-neurotic sound of the ocean and rain typewriting the landscape. She stuck her head out the window and rain slapped her face like those old movies where someone tries to sober someone up.

Shana took the beating for a full minute and then stuck her head farther out the window and washed her hair.

North. North. North. Rain never relented. Shana kept the window down.

Her best friend, the car, drove her into Gold Beach. Dusk was settling in. Shana saw a red-lettered, stenciled sign on a piece of white plywood: Holiday Craft Fair.

She’d never been to a craft fair and why not attend and ratchet up the suicidal tendencies? She’d slug a couple of shots of vodka and put her slurry Dean Martin on, wander the aisles, see a hand carved nativity scene with a Caucasian baby Jesus sporting a Make America Great Again ball cap, and the proverbial trigger would be pulled.

Shana told the car to park. The fair was being held in the event center at the county fairgrounds. She’d never been to a county fairgrounds. She imagined goats and pigs and demonstrations of butter churning.

She slugged the vodka, got out of the car, and walked toward the entrance. Rain nearly knocked her over. Her hair was soaked and she needed a hat. They had hats in craft fairs, right?

Holiday Craft Fair (Part 1) A Christmas Tale

Fiction, NSP Meditations , , ,

Shana stepped away from her monitor. She looked out the window to a generic wasteland somewhere in Silicon Valley. Behind her, millennial work colleagues dressed in ugly and absurd Christmas sweaters played foosball and ping pong and constantly held up the action to Instagram their fashion choices. Perry Como crooned carols from tiny speakers. It was nine in the morning and three weeks before Christmas.

She stared at a mirror near the monitor. There was nothing there, not even a sly suggestion of her true Dorian Gray self.

Who was she? Well, for one thing she was a multimillionaire at age 27. Her parents were Silicon Valley pioneers but died when she was in high school while attending a yoga retreat on a remote volcanic island. The volcano erupted and entombed them in lava.

Shana owned a condo in Oakland and a fancy car where she sat in the back seat and told it where to drive her. She had no family, real friends and no real personal life outside of her various assignations with married men and women arranged on her phone with the swipe of a thumb.

It was time to kill herself and why not during the holiday season? It might garner a few more sad emoticons on social media once word got out, so, naturally, she wouldn’t close her accounts.

Shana went to her phone and downloaded an app that assisted in filing a perfectly legal will. She left everything to an animal shelter that was a few blocks from her condo, one she had never visited. Shana completed the will in seconds and sent it to the cloud.

As for work obligations, well, nobody really worked at her workplace so nobody would probably notice.

What passed for work these days in the Brave Instant World? Shana had majored in journalism at an elite university but had never written a news article. News was dead. Her first job was working for a digital start up whose business was to sabotage attempts at unionization by workers in the digital economy. She didn’t really know what a union was, but was successful at crushing organizing efforts through old fashioned gas lighting using newfangled tools.

After a year, (or was it two?) Shana got bored at union busting and went to work at another digital start up, this one out to destroy the belief that public education should actually involve face-to-face interaction between teachers and pupils. Management put her in charge of overseeing a plantation of Indonesians to produce a flashy online curriculum that was 99-percent rote and guaranteed to raise graduation rates, not to mention anti-social behavior.

Shana walked out of the office and onto the street. She had texted her car before leaving and it was waiting for her.

She got in and asked the car to play a suicide playlist. The car told her there were three million choices. Shana told the car to choose, but then changed her mind and asked for a Christmas-themed one. Music started playing. The first song was by the Red Hot Chili Peppers—“We Three Kings.” Shana also asked the car to turn on the television and find the Hallmark Channel. Mingle all The Way came on. She was as good as dead.

Beach Axiom

NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches , , , ,

In my many years of going to Oregon’s publicly-owned beaches, I always try to live by this axiom: don’t expect to find what you want find. That includes limpets, beaverwood, love, forts, wisdom, ideas. Go with no expectations and delight in the unexpected finds.

I recently violated my axiom and learned a valuable lesson in honoring it.

I was after beaverwood and figured a beach that had several small forested streams and rivulets running through it would provide a nice haul. So I went there expecting to find beaverwood and found absolutely nothing. The longer I searched the more I realized I was violating my axiom.

After a couple miles, I gave up, got back in the car, and took the route back home.

Before arriving home, I saw an entrance to a beach that I hadn’t visited in some time because I find it unremarkable and typically driftwood free.

Why not? I had nothing to do at home so I stopped in the parking lot, walked the short dune path to the beach….and beheld a staggering amount of driftwood that measured approximately 500 yards in length! It was all new wood, none of the ancient bleached beauties, and contained more beaverwood in one place than I had ever seen before.

How and why it all gathered at this spot was a mystery to me. Perhaps the wave experts would know, but I wouldn’t bother consulting them.

I collected more than 70 pieces and was astonished at the variety, including sizes and shapes that were previously unknown to me. Some could fit in my back pocket, like tiny ears of baby corn, others were the size of bazookas, and another was an entire alder tree!

It took three trips to the car to load up.

My collection mounts. My faith in the beach axiom is stronger than ever.

Fort Espresso

Driftwood Forts, NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches , , , ,

Fueled by a Bialetti-brewed espresso from Earl’s coffee shop, I went to the beach intending to build a great driftwood fort and commence another fort message project.

I found a perfect, semi-secluded spot. Wood was bountiful. Not a single person was around. The tide was rushing in but I built well, higher up, near the dunes, and felt certain the fort would last long enough to attract some visitors who might find the tin, open it, and leave a message. I think these messages might be my favorite reading material these days. They never cease to delight me with their originality of thought or crushing banality. The most recent memorable message: “We just had sex here.”

I built and built and built. Off came the Pendleton snowflake sweater. I worked an hour or so and sweated through two shirts.

I decided to stop (forts are never finished). I stepped back to admire the work. It was one of the taller forts I’d ever constructed. It could hold exactly one person, perhaps two if someone wanted to sit on someone’s lap.

There was no flotsam or jetsam to decorate the fort. It didn’t really need any adornment. I crawled inside and scraped out some sand. I placed the tin.

I left and continued down the beach harvesting beaverwood.

I’ll return soon. I am confident I’ll discover literature of a genre entirely of my own devising. It’s always there.

Slash Burn Rainbow

NSP Meditations, Poetry , , , , , ,

Smoke from the slash burns

hangs on the hills.

Soon, slash burns will have gone

the way of bloodletting.

But for now, they glow in the distance,

and send up a brown and orange haze

that brings to mind that song,

“Smoke From a Distant Fire,”

by the one-hit wonder, Sanford-Townsend Band,

the greatest slash burn song in rock history,

played by a band that never saw or smelled

a slash burn.

That song is playing, right now,

as I drive toward a rainbow

shooting and curling out of the haze,

a song on AM radio,

sandwiched between two Save-Me-Jesus stations

fire and brimstoning about the

end of the world.

Rain fell somewhere in the hills,

I know it did.

A rainbow is all the proof I need,

of the presence of rain,

and other good things.

Thoreau Radio

NSP Meditations , , , ,

I was driving a remote Oregon road, trying to find something on the radio, when I heard a familiar voice speaking immortal lines from Thoreau’s Walden. I knew the lines well because I’d read the book six times.

How in the world was this on radio? I listened to the entire program and realized Thoreau is more relevant today than he was in his time. If only preachers preached Walden like scripture instead of the Bible. It would make for a great country instead of a dying one.
I had to know the story of this show. I am loathe to Google anything these days because I hate enriching a monolithic corporation with sham progressive ideals. But what choice did I have? That’s how they’ve chained us.

My discovery: the program was part of an Armed Forces Radio series called American Masters, produced in 1968 that lasted one year.
I recognized the voice of Thoreau because it was the real voice of John Forsyth, the actor who voiced Charley in Charley’s Angels!!

See mind blowing information from a web site about the series below. The full story is at http://64.27.7.35/DigitalDeliToo/dd2jb-An-American-Gallery.html

“The premise of the series was both compelling and unique. Each of the thirteen weeks would provide a biography of either historic or contemporary Americans whose stories were a particularly compelling narrative of the unique promise the American way of life has afforded every citizen no matter how humble–or great–his or her origins. The series offered treatments of the following great Americans:
1. Louis Armstrong
2. Will Rogers
3. Cecil B. DeMille
4. (John) Gutzon Borglum and Mt. Rushmore
5. George Gershwin
6. Thomas Wolfe
7. Matthew Brady
8. Frank Lloyd Wright
9. Frederic Remington
10. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
11. Henry David Thoreau
12. Dr. Lee De Forest
13. Walt Disney

Given the selections for the thirteen weeks, one might well imagine how fascinating a continuation of the series might have been. But the goodness doesn’t stop there . . .

To spice up the offering, and give these remarkable Americans their due, the production has thirteen of the biggest names in Entertainment introducing and hosting each episode:

Bing Crosby introducing Louis Armstrong
Bob Hope introducing Will Rogers
Charlton Heston introducing Cecil B. DeMille
Lorne Greene introducing Gutzon Borglum
John ‘Bubbles’ Sublett introducing George Gershwin
Irving Stone introducing Thomas Wolfe
Raymond Burr introducing Matthew Brady
Anne Baxter introducing her grandfather, Frank Lloyd Wright
Edward G. Robinson introducing Frederic Remington
Raymond Massey introducing Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Bill Cosby introducing Henry David Thoreau
Edgar Bergen introducing Dr. Lee De Forest
Dick Van Dyke introducing Walt Disney
I know this sounding like a Ronco commercial, but it gets even better . . . 

Portraying the main characters in these docudramas were some of Hollywood’s biggest names:
D’Urville Martin and Sam Laws as Louis Armstrong
Pat Buttram as Will Rogers
Sebastian Cabot as Cecil B. DeMille
Ed Begley as Gutzon Borglum
Ross Martin as George Gershwin
Michael Anderson as Thomas Wolfe
Richard Crenna as Matthew Brady
Henry Fonda as Frank Lloyd Wright
Richard Widmark as Frederic Remington
Dan O’Herlihy as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
John Forsyth as Henry David Thoreau
Glenn Ford as Dr. Lee De Forest”

To download the Thoreau program, go to:
https://www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com/drama/american-gallery/american-gallery-afrs-xx-xx-xx-11-to-hear-a-different-drummer

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