On Becoming a Visual Artist

NSP Meditations , , , ,

Something is overtaking me. I felt it recently while walking in rain, when most of my interesting or sometimes great notions manifest.

I am becoming a visual artist and visual artist entrepreneur.

The overtaking began when:

I had just shored up a driftwood fort that I photographed for an upcoming gallery show.

I had just collected another keyhole limpet for the magical necklaces I make and sell.

I had just placed a sand dollar atop two rain-soaked mushrooms just off the dune trail as a kind of mini, far out sculpture of nature, in nature, that would surely delight any person who happened along it.

I had just used a stick to form a heart out of elk scat to offer a stark metaphorical contrast between the shape and the material that would surely unsettle or amuse any beachcomber who bothered to check out elk scat.

I had just picked up an exquisite piece of beaverwood for an upcoming gallery show in collaboration with Oregon Coast beavers. I’m going to make a fortune and donate it all to the beavers!

I had just constructed a driftwood sculpture that would blow out with the next incoming tide and a man walking at the edge of the ocean gave me a big thumbs up as he marveled at my creation. He would most likely be the only person to see my art—the truest definition of a man-show I’ve ever encountered. I will also add that a little dog came up to the sculpture and took a power whiz on it. So it was a one man-one dog show as well because the dog would have never come over without the sculpture to amaze him. I’m making art for dogs, too!

I walked and walked and walked. I am going beyond writing and publishing into new frontiers of Oregon creativity. I’ll bring the words along, of course, but they will perhaps serve other purposes than before.

At the River

NSP Meditations, Poetry , , ,

A sandpiper plucked a dead jellyfish the size of a garbage pail lid.

Thousands of dead jellyfish turned the beach into a translucent moonscape.

I clutched a limpet in one hand and beaverwood in the other.

The river swirled green, blue and white.

A gillnetter fished for fake fish.

Sea lions roared from the buoy.

I walked to the Jetty in a slight sunlight after three inches of rain.

The pea coat was on for the first time this season. It begins its 21st year.

I passed an empty half pint of vodka wrapped in dead kelp
and a vaping device.

Gulls were around.

I emptied my mind and meandered, looking for treasures.

My mind filled up again with thoughts of an estranged friend. We have walked so many beaches together. If only we could walk together again, and talk.

Oregon Tavern Age: Stalling

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age , , ,

An OTA man played the video slots. His OTA brother sat next to him and played video poker. They drank grapefruit juice and Crown, neat.

I waited on a friend and scrawled in my notebook. Why write? I had no idea.

An ad for Untuckit shirts played silently on television. Their inventor was discussing his vision for the fashion. Interesting, now I knew what Satan looked like and how he dressed.

The poker player took a call from his wife. She was waiting for him at the auto mechanic’s garage. Where was he? He said he was running late and would be there in 15 minutes. He hung up, ordered another grapefruit juice and Crown, and went back to gambling.

The slots player took a call from work. There was trouble. The newly hired man had just quit after one day on the job. Okay, he’d be right in to troubleshoot. He hung up, ordered another grapefruit juice and Crown, and went back to gambling.

It was a late afternoon on a weekday.

Oregon Tavern Age: Sex Stop

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age , , ,

I pulled into a parking lot of a building that appeared abandoned. The building had the unmistakable architecture of a drive-in hamburger/malt joint from the American Graffiti era. I could almost see the girls rollerskating up to take an order and hear the Coasters blasting through tin speakers.

But now this was OTA country, hours 10 am to 2:30 am.

I walked inside and investigated. My knees nearly buckled in the course of my investigation. I beheld a 400-pound OTA woman taking on all comers at pool and loudly kicking ass. The bathrooms had hatchets for door handles. I saw two OTA men with walkers, another on a motorized wheelchair, another with a cane, and another with a hook where his left hand should have been. There were at least 500 pool trophies decorating ponderosa pine walls, easily the most I’d ever seen in an OTA joint.

And there was something else, oh yes, definitely something else, shining brightly near the restrooms: a twinkling red and white vending machine named Sex Stop, that sold sex toys, condoms and kink DVDs. I’d never seen anything like it in OTA country and it staggered my imagination to think a regular ever wasted perfectly good beer and keno money and purchased a product.

I went up to the bar to order from the diminutive female OTA bartender and felt a jolt. No liquor served! A real Oregon tavern! They haven’t gone extinct yet. The joint also didn’t have a single micro beer available and for that absence, I did a little stealth jig for joy.

After receiving my beer, a corporate ale, I retreated to a a high table in a corner that afforded the best place to eavesdrop. Thus, I eavesdropped.

Profane, staccato bursts from the pool shark, a story about a bald eagle scavenging roadkill, a crusty reminiscence from an old timer’s gold mining days.

I sipped the ale and wrote, my notebook paper illuminated only by the lights of Sex Stop.

Rain Hammers the Roof

NSP Meditations, Of Walking in Rain , , , , , ,

Rain hammers the roof. There is an army up there. It is that Ken Kesey Sometimes a Great Notion, Halloween rain. It transfixes and it tranquilizes; it whispers and it roars. I will probably venture forth into it this morning, in body and mind, and seek out my fellow rain addicts. We never meet, of course, in rain that is, only through words that worship it. Everything is soaked and water pools on the yard. The dog stares out the window and longs for something. Open the door, and he won’t go out. These are the great gray mornings of walking in rain, maybe with a cup of coffee open to the sky, rain with coffee, not a dilution, but a vitamin supplement, a secret supplement. This is the perfect time to write noir and roll rain into the plot, but not the clichés of rain that always appear in noir. One day I hope to write the great rain mystery novel. I’ve been thinking about it for years. I want to go see a river running full and white, frothing, churning, spilling over man made channels. Somewhere in dive taverns and bars along the Oregon Coast, Hamm’s are being cracked open and men and women are sipping them in concert to the hammering on the roof. In a few of these joints, the drinkers will drift toward the windows an watch. In the windowless joints, they will just have to imagine.

Falling Leaves

NSP Meditations , , , , ,

I parked under three deciduous trees and beheld so many leaves of fading red, yellow, green and orange that I felt compelled to write a tribute to their beauty. There was even a single purple leaf serving as an exclamation point, or more likely, a question mark.

A leaf fell, then another. Birds flew into the branches and dislodged more leaves. Fall was on.

Everyone was talking of rain. Rain rolled off everyone’s tongues. The weather people forecast a big rain. They practically guaranteed it. With the storm, the trees will be denuded of their leaves. A few might survive to hang lonely in the branches, but hardly anyone will notice them, except a poet or photographer.

More leaves fell and my mind drifted to a poem, “A Leaf Falls,” by e.e. Cummings. I used the poem with my students in our leaf poetry writing workshop. We would assemble on a grassy field. They would sit down around the step ladder I brought with me. I would climb the ladder a tad higher than the safety instructions recommended. There, I would cast a leaf into the air. The students had until the leaf hit the ground to write a poem.

I’ll never forget the time when a kid bolted up from the ground and caught the leaf before it reached the earth. He then climbed up the ladder (I was still on it) and hurled the leaf (if one can actually hurl a leaf) into the sky. He yelled that he needed more time to write his poem.

Brazen. Rebellious. Dangerous. Usurping my teaching authority. Reckless. Wrecking my finely-honed lesson.

A+

More leaves fell from the trees. I sensed the orange ones were the generals and three green ones the proletariat.

The novel The Virgin Suicides entered my consciousness. I had recently read it for the first time and encountered easily the best leaf scene in American literature (ch. 3, pp 86-89). The author, Jeffrey Eugenides, compared the different methods that various suburban households raked their leaves. “The first weekend after leaf fall, we began raking in military ranks, heaping piles in the street.”

It was utterly original and brilliant and made me wish I could write that well. It’s the kind of scene that I’ll always recall whenever I see a family raking leaves together, which of course, I will never see again because American families don’t rake leaves together anymore.

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