Rain Coffee Shop Notes

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Rain threatens outside the Christian coffee shop. It’s a hip Christian coffee shop—Aerosmith is playing.

Three college students sip fancy drinks and discuss their recent failures in class.

World Series highlights play silently on television. Baseball seems to be dying before our eyes. Computers are murdering it, making it inhumane. As a kid, I never much liked playing it. Too static. Too much standing around.

The shop has a set of World Books, the sort of Google of its day. Every family owned a set and every kid used it for school reports. My mom still displays the red-colored set from my youth. It’s so old that Robert F. Kennedy isn’t even dead.

A few tables away, a female pastor counsels a female parishioner. She uses her phone to read soothing scriptures.

A novel was recently published. It’s about how nobody reads anymore and everyone plays video games. It will be a novel nobody reads because its intended readership doesn’t read—it plays video games.

Rain is picking up. I long for a cozy place to read a World Book encyclopedia at random and learn something old. In my next home, I want a set from the 1970s. I want Nixon out of office and the Democrats in control of all three branches of government. They used to be able to do that.

Oregon Tavern Age: Jello Shots

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The bartender poured his jello shot concoction into tiny paper cups on a silver tray. They looked like a kind of communion, for a kind of church, an OTA church, where the bar is the pulpit. It’s the only church in the world where parishioners get multiple shots of the sacrament.

I sat near the window writing a post card as post cards go extinct. They are almost impossible to find in traditional retail outlets.

This OTA joint was all Halloweened-up. They were laying in the chilled stores of jello-shots for the big party.

Near me, an OTA woman sipped a colossal glass of wine. I heard her tell the bartender she was playing hooky from teaching middle school. I was a teacher once, I get it.

The female OTA cook emerged from the kitchen. She told the bartender her memories of a concert at the Fillmore that changed her life back in the day: Quicksilver Messenger Service. I felt the same way about seeing the Bus Boys at Starry Night. I’ll never forget their cover of “Brown Sugar.”

An OTA woman walked in the joint with a hamburger basket. She set it down on the bar and ordered a double rum and coke.

The bartender came up to the hamburger eater and offered a free jello shot as a kind of taste test. She didn’t hesitate and gulped it down.

Another one? Sure, why not.

The bartender proclaimed he was a jello shot “master” and this serving was his original Cherry Cheesecake recipe. His other concoctions included Fudgesicle, Banana Cream and Pumpkin Pie.

I winced hearing that.

The bartender said he’d made 96 shots so far that morning and had to make a couple hundred more.

I winced at that, too. But I also smiled because it was so utterly preposterous, harmless and depraved and the essence of Oregon Tavern Age life, a life that is increasingly endangered. I will document it to the very end.

Patio Thoughts

NSP Meditations, Sports

I am sitting on a patio looking at another patio I am helping construct for a special friend. I’ve never built a patio before. One can always learn something new. I worked hard this morning on the project and felt the sweat and grind that comes from manual labor. I need more of this in my life.

Soon, this friend is driving the length of Oregon to investigate a possible opportunity to help me reinvent myself. That’s a long way to drive for someone. Who knows if the opportunity will pan out, but I’ll never forget this friend’s drive. It reminds me of what Werner Herzog did for his friend in Of Walking in Ice when he walked to from Munich to Paris in the early 1970s in the middle of winter because his friend was ill. It’s one the greatest books ever written and I urge people to find it, although it is almost impossible to find. Reading it for the first time changed my whole idea about what writing can achieve.

I’m reading Jack Kerouac’s Dr. Sax and going nowhere with it. Nowhere. It’s more of an archaeological experience that a literary one. It’s sixty years old but feels more dated than something by Dickens.

I wonder if anyone in Oregon will be reading my book about rain, Of Walking in Rain, 60 years from now.

I’m also reading a thousand-page biography of one my heroes, Arthur Ashe, the African American tennis champion, who died from AIDS (from a blood transfusion) in 1993. It is inconceivable to imagine what he experienced in the segregated south of the 1950s and 1960s as he moved up the tennis rankings. Then, of course there was his advocacy against apartheid in South Africa and his pioneering work to destroy that racist system. And of course, there was his cool, unflappable demeanor on court, which stood in such contrast to the asshole antics of Nastase, Connors and McEnroe. I wish I would have emulated Ashe’s style in my tennis-playing youth, but I did not. Most of us succumbed to the assholes’ way of comporting themselves. I like to think I’ve learned the Arthur Ashe Lesson in Life, in my writing and personal and political lives. It’s going to serve me will during this reinvention. It would serve a lot of other Americans well to comport themselves like Ashe in the days of social media and President Trump. It’s so easy to be arrogant and demeaning. It takes stamina and concentration to be deliberate in life.

Birds and squirrels are all around me. Deer lurk on nearby lawns. I see a quail feather stuck among branches in a burn-pile ready to be set off into a clear night. I might let it off tonight and think around the fire.

On Finding James Baldwin

NSP Correspondents, Writing , , , ,

One never knows what you’ll find on the drooping shelves of a second hand store in a dead logging town situated in a phony plantation watershed.

I found James Baldwin’s collection of essays, Nobody Knows My Name, in such a store. First paperback printing, 1961. Mint condition. Uncut. A dime.

I bought it and wondered if James Baldwin had ever visited Oregon or seen a clearcut, or met a logger. Probably not. I vaguely recalled reading snippets of his essays and novels, but had never fully engaged with him as a writer and activist. I hadn’t watched the recently released acclaimed film documentary about him, either.

A few days later, I dipped into the collection. In the introduction, Baldwin wrote, “I still believe that the unexamined life is not worth living: and I know that self-delusion, in the service of no matter what small or lofty cause, is a price no writer can afford. His subject is himself and the world and it requires every ounce of stamina he can summon to attempt to look on himself and the world as they are.”

I like to believe that during the past two years of my upended life, I have never practiced self-delusion. I would have never made it this far if I had. I have had many, many hours, days, months, of exile to consider myself and the world around me. I believe I have learned to see anew and I hope to share my sights and insights with a new audience in the coming years. It may not happen.

Baldwin wrote that his writing life was, “entirely up to me.”

That is precisely where mine is now. Where it has always been. Only this iteration will be a harder swim, up a river at flood stage with trees and water heaters to dodge in the current.

Baldwin’s ideas and directives in this book confirmed my approach to writing about what’s happened to me. Baldwin wanted to explode the mythology of American life and discover what was happening here, on the ground, face to face. He said it was up to the American writer to do this. He didn’t mention another profession.

Dear Friend of the Meditations Blog:

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In March 2017, in the midst of a deep and life-altering personal crisis, I started the Meditations blog. When I began, I had no idea where the writing would go. It just felt imperative to publish, as if I was writing to save my life.

Recently, I passed the 500-post mark, well over 250,000 words, and have reconnected with old readers and been delighted to meet new ones.

The blog directly led to a new book about my experience as a volunteer at a senior dog sanctuary, the forthcoming Bonnie and Clyde Files. It energized my interest in fiction. It also turned on a poetry switch inside me that I didn’t know existed.

When I launched the blog, I asked readers to consider making a financial contribution to support the writing, as a sort of magazine subscription. Many readers did and I am eternally grateful.

Over 18 months later, I am asking readers to consider making another contribution to support my future publishing projects, which include this blog. This is the final time I will make such a solicitation. Consider any amount you donate a lifetime subscription to Meditations.

The blog will keep going forward and probably move in mysterious, unforeseen ways. And if a contribution isn’t in the cards, please keep reading and reaching out if a particular post connects with you.

You can donate via Paypal here (tab to the right) or contact me via email to arrange another form of payment.

Thank you. Your faith in me has meant everything.

Matt Love

Still Teaching

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Rain. Wind billows the American flag. Rain. Rain. Rain. The bedraggled men will slosh on up in the coming minutes—or they will not. They might miss the probation meeting and sleep off a rain drunk in a culvert or under the bakery.

Can a man sleep in a culvert that drains a coastal watershed when it’s raining like hell? Yes. I’ve met such a man. He told me he only stays dry if beavers build a few dams upstream. I am not making that up readers. This is what I have learned. What is this all about? I continue to assay.

A man on a phone walks up in the mist. A man in black rides away in the gray.

I wonder how much cannibalism for breakfast I’ll observe this morning. I almost passed out last time watching the meal.

Here comes a fat man in fleece. I don’t recognize him, but that’s impossible because I’ve seen him the last four months. His face and body have been completely rearranged due to injuries inflicted by indifference and marginalization.

He must have been a tasty repast for the cannibals.

A sweet pickup truck from the 1960s rolls up. Two-tone, blue and white. It has a potted Christmas tree in the back. It is an utterly incongruous sight.

My mind drifts toward Siddhartha. “I can wait,” he tells his father, who has refused him permission to leave the comfort and privilege of a royal life. Siddhartha waits and waits and waits and receives permission.

I can wait. I am waiting with all my strength to return to a life of assisting others, assisting dogs and watersheds, calling attention to the cannibalism.

We assemble around a table. We hear grim news of those dead, busted, addled, back in prison, eaten whole, well, everything except the skeletons they sleepwalk around in.

There is a new young man. He remains silent until he asks, “How do you handle anger? I am so angry.”

His question goes around the table and each sane man gives his two cents. When my turn arrives, I say, “Have you ever read the novel Siddhartha?”

In my former life as a high school English teacher, I’d taught the novel with a unique method that changed students’ lives, as well as my own, for the better. In fact, I had developed a personal writing curriculum around the book that went far, far beyond the teaching of literature, and asked students to jump in the river of life. In that river, were the answers.

“No,” he says, but I detect interest.

I provide a 30-second summary of this classic novel and its eternal lesson of letting go of whatever you most desire, because that desire is causing you the most suffering.

“It’s short,” I say. “You can read it a couple of hours.”

He listens. He looks at me. I wonder when he’d last read a book.

I ask him if he can go to the library. No. I ask him if he has access to a computer and the internet to download it for free. No.

“I’ll get you a copy,” I say, “and I’ll drop if off here at the office for you to pick up.”

I have to drop it off at the office because he is living in the woods near a river.

He’s game. His anger is destroying his spirit, extinguishing his singular flame as a human being. The greatest novel ever written about the spirituality and ecology of rivers might be better than death, quack therapy, eternal pills, or prison.

And he could read it beside a river. He could jump right into the metaphor, splash, if he grasped the concept of metaphor, and I think he could because I taught it to him right then and there and never used the word metaphor.

We get up to leave and I pat him on the shoulder and whisper: you can make it.

I have a teaching mission and it feels energizing. It immediately brings to mind an incident from two years ago, where I stood pilloried before a judge, and she said I had forever “forfeited” my right to teach.

Later that afternoon, I hunt down a battered copy of Siddhartha and print out my list of journal prompts I’d devised for the instruction of the novel. I enclose the prompts within the book, along with a note explaining their purpose and that I would be happy to read anything he writes. I include my address.

I drive to office and leave the book with the receptionist.

We’ll see. I have no expectations. I have let go of all of that.

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