Thoughts on Seething

NSP Meditations

The nation seethes. Left and Right. It does nothing for us except debase and run roughshod over compassion and common sense.

But not the Golden sprinting down the sand. Not the pelicans dive-bombing into the surf. Not the rebuilding man who rebuilt the fort in rain. Not the gulls that feast on crab. Certainly not the ocean. Oceans cannot seethe. Only bad poets depict oceans as angry.

Where does seething go inside a person? What does seething do when released?

I am trying to create and nourish organizations, words, forts and friendships that serve as an antidote or inoculation against seething. I am a one-human, largely silent, army engaged to combat seething. I just did it the other day, by giving away a copy of Siddhartha to a seething young man. I also included my writing prompts for the novel. If he responds, they may save him from the destruction of anger.

I find it impossible to imagine anyone seething while wearing corduroy or crochets garments. Seething is one of those rare words that sounds like what it is. I am reading a biography of one of the greatest Americans, Arthur Ashe. They should make movies and documentaries about his remarkable tennis life and pursuit of justice, his utter lack of anger when anger would have been the most natural response to racism and bigotry. He used the lob shot instead. I love that metaphor and have employed it many times the past two years.

Instead, we get movies and documentaries about John McEnore, a grotesque seether like no other in American sports. There is nothing to learn from John McEnroe for these times. There is everything to learn from Arthur Ashe.

Idea for a Novel, Possibly Erotic

Fiction, NSP Meditations , ,

An atheist writer writer her erotica stories in a church coffee shop. The coffee is weak but cheap. The light is good and the tables and chairs made from wood. The writer likes the contrast of writing about unsuppressed lust in a place that preaches healthy suppression. She smiles when she’s writing the sex scenes while Christian rock music plays quietly. She really smiles when she works some of the music into the scenes. The power ballads take everything over the top.

She was only going to write there for a week, but the place got the hooks in her, and now she’s considering writing an erotic novel about the shop where all the characters are undercover devil kink and they use the church/shop for their wicked assignations. They love throwing out that word wicked.

It really isn’t fiction because that’s what happened at her church when she was a kid, a preacher’s kid. It got pretty wild at times. This novel would write itself!

Another reason she likes the shop is because she met some of the volunteer baristas. There’s the mute woman who colors and plays solitaire with real cards. There’s the old man who plays games on his tablet and bitches about digital privacy. There’s the single mom recovering from sex addiction who claims she saw the visage of the Savior in the frosting of a maple bar. And there’s the owner of the building where the church/shop is housed. The church used to be a bar/strip club! He ran it for years and nearly drank himself to death. Lots of coke, too. He got multiple DUIS. He got into fights. He went to jail. He lost an arm. He finally gave up the booze and shut down the bar but it wasn’t about finding Jesus. One day a man walked into the closed-down bar and asked about leasing it for a church he was starting in town, a real rock and roll church. The owner thought why not? A few months later he was converted, a deacon, and now played drums in the church rock band. Yes, a one-armed drummer for Christ. They even covered a Def Leppard song as a gag.

When the writer heard this Def Leppard detail, she knew it was going into the novel.

A Window Washing Tale (Part 2)

Fiction, NSP Meditations, Of Walking in Rain , ,

The dad decides his kids need to meet Hector, meet a gas station attendant, talk to a human being in public. He powers down all the windows and rain rips into the SVU, spraying the kids and their devices. There is a chorus of howls and protestations. One kid is on the verge of bawling.

He commands the kids to stow their devices. He introduces Hector and Hector shakes all their hands through the open windows. He smells of gasoline. Now they do, too. They dig it. What kid doesn’t?

The gas keeps flowing. The rig can take about a hundred gallons.

Hector asks what each kid was watching or playing. He knows their shows and games.

The dad exits the car. He tells the kids to get out. They are dumbfounded and whine but comply. The dad herds them over to the window washing station. He yanks a red-handled squeegee out of the blue cleaning fluid. It feels good to wield a squeegee again at a gas station. He was once a master. The girls loved it when he cleaned their windshields without asking. He cleaned every driver’s windshield.

He tells the kids he is going to teach them how to wash a vehicle window with a squeegee at a gas station, and they are going to wash the SUV’s windows—right now—just like their old man used to do. That’s how I met your mother!

The kids don’t say anything. They get out of the vehicle.

Hector smiles, watching it all.

The lesson commences. The dad demonstrates proper squeegee technique and then holds up each kid to a window because they can’t reach it on their own. One of the kid crawls on the hood of the SUV.

They all suck at squeegeeing. It’s not as easy as it looks, and the rain doesn’t help matters.

The rain picks up. Sheet metal rain.

Hector replaces the nozzle and punches up the receipt. He goes over to the other window washing stations and retrieves two squeegees. He hands them out to the other kids and now it’s a three-squeegee child army. They begin running around and squeegeeing everything with a flat surface and even the tires and bumpers.

The dad stands back and directs the effort, if effort is the word. More of a frenzy.

A late model sedan pulls into the island. An old woman is driving and her windows are filthy, coated in dirt, road grime and streaks of mold.

The dad gets the attention of the kids and points to the sedan. They all nod. It’s on! The kids dash over to the sedan and attack the windows. The old woman sees them, gasps a bit, but then claps her hands. She thinks they are elves of some kind. They are, Oregon rain elves, with purpose.

The dad says goodbye to Hector and rounds up the kids. He checks out the sedan’s windows. Streaked and still dirty here and there. So what? He waves goodbye to the old woman. She gives him a thumbs up with the same hand holding a lit cigarette. Quite the trick.

He gets in the SUV and checks the rearview mirror. His three kids are sitting together, each holding a squeegee.

A Window Washing Tale (Part 1)

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

An affluent dad pulls his SUV into a gas station. Inside the vehicle, his three children, ages 7, 9, 10, a boy, girl and in-between, fiddle on their phones and tablets while a movie plays on a monitor.

It’s raining like hell outside. The dad waits for an attendant to emerge from the store to pump his gas, this being Oregon, only one of two states that prohibit customers from dispensing their own fuel at gas stations. Oh what sweet Oregon legislation! It actually facilitates interesting or banal conversations between perfect strangers. It can facilitate two people falling in love. You always get better directions from a person than a phone.

The dad wasn’t always affluent. He’d worked hard at a rural high school to earn a minor scholarship to a middling state university. He’d pumped gas full-time in high school and even pumped part-time in college for spending money and to meet girls.

He graduated and then went into IT and made a lot money in the amorphous ways IT people make money. He married a woman he’d met pumping gas his senior year, an elementary teacher fresh out of the same school. They bought a big new house in a leafy neighborhood (where no one raked leaves) and the kids tumbled out of the womb forthwith.

The years passed. The kids grew up. They had all the gadgets and fiddled on them all the time. They never did in any yardwork because they were always scheduled for activities. They don’t have any pets. They’ve never camped.

The attendant taps on the dad’s window. The dad awakes from a trance and powers down the window. Rain blows in, soaking the steering wheel and console. The attendant is a young Latino man dressed in orange rain gear and rubber boots. He says hello and the dad hands him a credit card and asks for a fill up. He says please. The attendant goes to work and stands near the vehicle, holding the nozzle in place.

There are no other customers. Rain wallops the vehicle. Rain wallops the attendant. The dad looks at him. He starts up a conversation, about rain of course. Always back to the rain. It means something in Oregon.

The attendant loves rain. It makes people more talkative, more alert to humanity and nature. His name is Hector and he’s studying welding at the nearby community college.

The dad checks his rearview mirror and sees his kids glued to screens. Then he looks at himself in the mirror. Rain slaps his face hard and slaps some insight right into him.

Rain on the face can do that. Try it sometime.

The Clearcut (Part 3)

Fiction, NSP Meditations , , , ,

Jack turned the truck off Squaw Creek Road onto a rutted spur that led to the top of the clearcut. As he climbed, he noticed a brushcutter had marauded through since his last visit, mowing down volunteer trees and shrubs at the edges of the road. He also saw other shrubs defoliated, sickly, yellow, near death, victims of herbicide to reduce competition in the plantation. Some other piece of heavy equipment had also trenched the roadway and constructed water bars. They wouldn’t log this unit for another fifty years, but still, some business entity planned well ahead for the possibility.

Jack kept the truck climbing, and the road narrowed to a point where a brushcutter couldn’t follow and that meant passing ripe salmonberries, thimbleberries, elderberries, foxglove, vine maple, and bitter cherry trees.

Finally, the road crested, came to a dead end and Jack stopped the truck. He jumped out, threw down the tailgate, and the dogs flew out. Jack returned to the truck, grabbed the rest of the Hamm’s, and started off to find his favorite place in the clearcut—the super stump. As he walked, he took in the scene around him: the replanted conifers, the charred slash piles, the stumps, the snags, the tires, the beer cans, the multicolored shotgun shell casings, and the makeshift shooting targets, usually empty jugs of bleach nailed to plywood. Jack always tore the targets down and wrote on them with a Sharpie he carried for just such a purpose: “Can’t you enjoy nature without a gun?”

The dogs fanned out ahead of Jack, darting in and out of the undergrowth. How purely and sensuously green it was everywhere, thought Jack. The green, its many shades in many shapes, its many smells and multiple textures, seemed to be exploding all around him. Sometimes, Jack was amazed how a clearcut could regenerate itself after such mechanized obliteration. He often wondered if human beings had the capacity to regenerate after experiencing something as totally destructive as what a clearcut did to a watershed. Of course a forest, like a man, could also be denuded one tree at a time, by one logger, on one job, with one chainsaw, over a long period, and Jack thought about that too.

He walked a mile, maybe more, leaping across rivulets, examining coyote and bear scat, tasting salmonberries, finishing a Hamm’s and then starting another. Some thirty minutes later, Jack arrived at the super Sitka spruce stump, one that bore the notches of many, many years ago, when a plank fitted into the notches bore the weight of two men laboring for hours, days, with a fifteen-foot crosscut saw, to fell the tree.

Jack always used the same notch to step onto the stump. From there he looked around in a three hundred and sixty degree rotation. Nothing but Douglas fir as far as the eye could see. Nothing but densely, unnatural young stands of the plantation conifer species. Nothing but a cell in a spreadsheet.

He sat down and counted, as he always did, the stump’s rings. This afternoon he stopped at two hundred and eighty. Sleep began to undermine Jack’s concentration. He could hear the dogs thrashing in the slash. He shielded his eyes from the sun to survey the sky. He opened the last beer and took off his shirt. Reclining on the stump, he dangled his shoes over the edge. The stump’s surface was level and smooth: decades of one hundred inches of rain washes away all roughness. Well, almost all.

For ten minutes Jack didn’t move and kept investigating the sky. A kestrel zoomed by with a vole in its mouth. He saw a jet’s vapor trail. People were going somewhere. He noticed a couple of Sitka and Western hemlock seedlings sprouting from nearby rotten stumps. Nurse logs they called them, nursing tree species that weren’t wanted in this watershed, wanted by the industry. He saw the tops of Douglas firs at the edge of the clearcut oscillate in the breeze. He shot straight up in bed, his favorite stump—all that remained—from a grand conifer from an epoch when people like him didn’t teach, couldn’t teach, would not teach. Christ, he thought, he had to go back to work in nine fucking weeks!

A few minutes later, the dogs scrambled up on the stump to join him; there was ample room for all. They waited for Jack to get up, and keep heading down the trail or back to the truck, or really, anywhere. They waited for him to move and offer some instruction.

The Clearcut (Part 2)

Fiction, NSP Meditations , , ,

Jack turned off Highway 101, onto his gravel road, and sprayed rocks like a spread from a shotgun. He raced the half mile to his home, skidded to a stop, scattered the several dozen barn swallows roosting in the house’s eaves, left the truck idling, leapt out, threw open the garage door, and braced himself for the onslaught of his three large mutts. They attacked him as they always did and Jack addressed each one of them separately with a special voice, telling them what nuts they were. He also told the dogs he was looking forward to hanging out with them exclusively the next two months, as opposed to teenagers in desperate need of English instruction.

The brief rumble concluded, Jack dropped the tailgate down, and the dogs hurled themselves into the back of the truck, where they proceeded to generate an unhinged cacophony of barks, cries, whines, and snarls that Jack recognized as one of the happiest sounds in his life. He turned the truck around, gravel sprayed again, and he headed for the clearcut he explored with the dogs to commemorate the end of things.

It was a pedestrian clearcut as far as devastating Coast Range clearcuts went: not a tree left standing when the industrial massacre took place five years ago; access roads and culverts poorly constructed; slash piles incompletely burned; garbage strewn about; and thousands of quality board feet of timber left behind, wasted. All of this, too, at a substantial lost to taxpayers, a generous government subsidy to some corporate low bidder employing tough men who railed against the government and then depended on it when their children were born with Down’s Syndrome or they needed job retraining after all the trees they cut near their homes were gone.

Jack was somewhat cognizant that this clearcut represented a model of retarded and obscene forest policy. But he hadn’t seen this stand of trees, or unit as it was called, before loggers working for a far-flung investment corporation laid waste to it. Jack had discovered his clearcut in its fifth year after replanting, and the landscape was rapidly assuming different characteristics than that of a No Man’s Land where no men died, just everything else, including the soil.

As Jack drove, he reached over to the floor in front of the passenger seat and opened the lid to a small round Styrofoam cooler. Inside, iced down, was a six pack of 16 oz. Hamm’s. He grabbed one and cracked it. He used to celebrate the end of school differently, especially with his ex-wife, who, when they were married, surpassed genius at surprising him on these occasions, such as the time he opened the refrigerator and found she had tied a bow around a new Gerber knife sticking in her prized homemade pumpkin cheesecake. She had left him and the dogs several teaching gigs ago, to become something other than a nomadic teacher’s wife, but Jack still hung her art on his walls and she still sent handcrafted Christmas cards to the dogs. They occasionally talked on the telephone, about the health of the dogs, and if she was making art. One day not too long ago, she told him a prominent Portland gallery planned to show her new work, huge oil paintings of deer, broken, bloody and twisted along Oregon country roads, victims of accidents with vehicles. Jack offered his congratulations and remembered her insisting they pull over whenever they came upon a dead deer so she could sketch it.

Jack turned north onto Highway 101 and a few miles later, the Hamm’s can emptied, he forked east onto the Little Nestucca River Highway, which followed the river, cutting into the Coast Range and the Siuslaw National Forest. He pushed the truck over 65 mph for several minutes until he saw the familiar sign that someone had spray painted over ‘Squaw Creek Road,’ which loosely meant ‘Cunt Creek Road’ if you knew anything about derogatory Pioneer terms for Native American women. Every time the Forest Service repainted the white lettering, some vandal spray painted over it within twenty-four hours. As an English teacher, Jack loved watching this semantic struggle unfold, a literal war of definitions. Clearly, a renegade and master teacher was at work here, producing instant and verifiable public education. One day the Forest Service would simply give up and maybe Squaw Creek would be renamed for someone else, or better yet, become nameless.

The truck made a sharp right onto Squaw Creek Road, also designated as Forest Service Road 1633, and Jack unavoidably bounced through several potholes and one gigantic crater that sent sparks flying. As soon as the dogs sensed the shift from smooth asphalt to rough road and the light from the highway to the darkness of a forest canopy, they went completely nuts. As Jack reached for a second Hamm’s, he saw three turkey vultures picking through three or four carcasses of spawned-out salmon near the creek’s bank. To the uninitiated, this scene might have appeared macabre, perhaps even suggestive of a bad omen, but Jack knew the carcasses meant wild salmon had returned to a watershed pulverized by expediency and indifference during the Reagan years. But, miraculously, and it was a miracle, somehow how this watershed had started healing itself and was coming to life again.

Squaw Creek Road wound its way through the trees and here, inland, at higher elevation, the fog had vanished, and sunlight punched though the canopy. Jack followed the road for several miles, drinking Hamm’s, listening to the dogs and the creek. This afternoon marked the fourth end-of-the-school year visit to the clearcut, and although it was shaping up as a gorgeous day, Jack doubted he could top last June’s celebration when he brought along a date, a twenty-three year old nurse he’d recently met online, and a half pint of tequila and a dozen Mexican beers. After her second or third shot and third or fourth beer, Jack’s date, without prompting, jumped on the hood of the truck and began wordlessly taking off her clothes while the dogs panted in the background. A few minutes later he joined her and a few minutes after that they left a sizable dent in the hood that Jack took notice of every now and then but never bothered to have repaired.

Jack also doubted this year’s commemoration could match the sheer bizarre nature of the first two years coming to the clearcut. In year one, as Jack walked up the road, suddenly out of nowhere, a feral cat jumped on his back, clawing at him, ripping through his corduroy jacket down to the skin. The cat appeared almost as an apparition, initially spooking the dogs into an unprecedented reticence. They watched for ten seconds, regrouped, then charged barking into the fray, commencing a running, hissing, snarling pitched battle for a hundred yards that ended when the cat disappeared into a charred slash pile. Jack watched the raw spectacle silently, trying to recall the last time he’d been inoculated against rabies.

In year two, walking in almost precisely the same spot where the cat attacked him, Jack noticed the dogs tightly circled around something twenty yards ahead of him. As he came closer he saw a blood trail and then what appeared to be the entrails of a large mammal. He yelled the dogs off, moved forward, and beheld the severed head of what was either a burro or donkey or mule—Jack never could keep them straight. There was no smell of decay. Something very recently, perhaps within the hour, had eviscerated a domestic animal, eaten most of it, and left the head intact. Jack recoiled when he saw the mess, dropped his beer, and instantly came up with twenty questions about what had happened here. He couldn’t answer any of them and kept walking up the road.

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