Playing Ball with The Mick

NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches , , , , ,

I took my friends’ little dog to the South Jetty beach and we played ball at low tide. It was just me and the dog. No one else was around, except a lone, aggressive clammer.

He’s called The Mick. He is insane for the ball. He will launch himself into the ocean to retrieve it. He will splash into tidepools after it. He will dig to China to find it. I’ve never had a ball dog. They are relentless in a goofy way and I found myself laughing at The Mick’s ball antics. The more laughter in my life these days, the better. These are dire, laughless times in America when the State separates innocent children from their parents and locks them away in a concentration camp without moral due process. A reactionary commentator calls it a “summer camp.” The late night hosts will have a field day with that lie and yuck it up with the audience. It’s not funny. And I bet 99.999 percent of Americans don’t remember that the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the internment of Japanese-American citizens in WW II was constitutional.

What have we become? What can I do? Can I get back into the fight?

The Mick and I played for an hour. Gulls napped on the wrack line. The maniacal clammer clammed. The water sparkled like sequins on a Flapper’s dress. The Mick was oblivious to it all. He didn’t care about birds or similes. He kept his eye on the ball.

His focus educated me.

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A Drifting Mind in the Dunes

NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches , , , , , , , , ,

I am writing this from the dunes overlooking the South Jetty and the ocean. I’ve never written from the dunes before.

A bald eagle rides an updraft past me. A multitude of clammers go at it with gusto. Gulls glide through the trestles. An old rotund man walks a brown dog on the beach. Barn swallows dart around a fort I built two months ago.

My mind drifts toward thoughts of dunes. A year ago I read The Woman in the Dunes, a novel by the Japanese writer Kobo Abe. It is easily one of the stranger novels I’ve ever read and incredibly bleak. It’s about an entomologist engaged in fieldwork who falls into a deep sand pit in the dunes near an ocean. He becomes trapped there and meets a woman who is apparently trapped there as well and living in a crude cabin. They live together in near silence. I think the man dies in the end and is buried by the dunes. I have no recall what happened to the woman.

I remember a woman in the dunes with me. Below is an excerpt from a chapter about her from a book I never published. In many ways that book is about Oregon Coast dunes and finding adventures and philosophies in them. I wonder what I’ll ever do with it. I do know that it contains some answers to some of my current questions in life.

We were hidden in the dunes of Nestucca Spit on a sunny summer afternoon. A had her lean tattooed back to the sky. She looked up to that sky, rather than at me. In the distance we heard a small plane’s buzz. It must have just taken off from the Pacific City airport. Suddenly, the plane, a blue contraption bouncing out of World War I, appeared just off shore. It puttered on a course parallel to the ocean for a few seconds, then changed direction toward us.

The plane passed directly over. We laughed and waved at the pilot. A few seconds later we heard the plane again. We managed to twist ourselves to look to the sky. The plane approached us as if preparing to make a strafing run. It flew overhead and we waved again.

We moved deeper into dunes. Here came the plane again, lower in altitude. A was busy so I waved for both of us. Later, we wondered if the pilot landed safely. There was nothing about a crash in the news.

I recall another woman in the dunes with me—a drug addict, hustler, rock hound, poet and blackmailer. There is a novella in her, a modernized Henry Miller-tale of deceit and carnality and rock hounding. It wouldn’t be a bleak story. No, it would be rather jaunty. I believe we need more jaunty writing for these times and jaunty writing about dunes.

My favorite sand dunes along the Oregon Coast are the ones at Pistol River in Curry County. There are driftwood forts dispersed among them.

I once erected a historical marker in the dunes of Nestucca Spit because State Parks doesn’t really educate visitors to the Oregon Coast’s beaches about the state’s unparalleled legacy of publicly-owned beaches.

Last Halloween I had a concealed encounter in the dunes that was not of this world.

Dune, by Frank Herbert. I’ve never finished it. I tried three times. I will succeed soon, once I can find another copy. It is not widely known that the sand dunes around Florence, Oregon served as inspiration for this novel. Herbert spent time there working for the government in some kind of scientific capacity. I could Google it but I don’t feel like making money for Google, and besides, I can’t because I am writing this from the dunes.

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Youngs Bay Coffee Shop

Astoria, NSP Meditations , , , , ,

I am sipping a fancy coffee from a backyard on a fine weekend morning. Youngs Bay barely moves in the background. Let’s call this place the Youngs Bay Coffee Shop. I like writing here, but not the ongoing coffee shop novel, which is a city novel, and I am not writing this from the city.

Tourists have descended upon the Oregon Coast. Doubtless another record year. It feels time for me to sell the house and leave. But where do I go? This question is consuming me. I have options, then I discover they’ve vanished.

Gulls, jays, crows, hummingbirds and doves fly around me. It is good to have coffee with them.

I think about some old friends who have recently returned to my life. I think back to all my coffee shop writing the last 33 years, even in Portland when Portland wasn’t a coffee town and not a single Starbucks was in Oregon. I think back to the people I met in coffee shops over the years. I used to love to visit the barista who later became my wife when she was working in downtown coffee shop. She was one of the Rose City’s original baristas and she mesmerized me with her beauty and grace behind the counter. She introduced me to good coffee, but I have since returned to Yuban and other cheap drip brands. I feel like I write better drinking cheap coffee, and even better when it’s leftover a day or two.

I am lucky to have Youngs Bay Coffee Shop. It has saved my soul more than once that past 18 months. Watching the actions of the intertidal is powerful medicine.

Is it too early or too late for morning brandy in the coffee? There is yard work to do later.

Here comes another customer, a great friend. He sits down next to me. His little speckled dog joins us, too. My friend and I begin to talk and the dog wants in on the conversation.

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Christian Coffee Shop Notes

NSP Meditations , , , , ,

I sit in a stuffed chair in a Christian coffee shop.

Christian reggae plays.

The barista appears as a tired, long-haired angel, if angels wore noserings and clubbed until dawn before their morning shift.

Before I leave, I’ll stash some of my secular books in the lending library. I’m sure they’ll be removed forthwith, although the rain book has plenty of Christian iconography. I was a preacher’s kid after all.

Several Bible groups meets around large square tables.

Curiously, ESPN plays on three flatscreen televisions hanging from the rafters among wooden crosses wrapped in white Christmas lights. Why not CBN? I guess management understands the proper religious hierarchy when it comes to Gods and spiritual programming.

A street minister in blue jeans comes in wearing a Bluetooth and discusses his work with the homeless camped near the swamp in tents and tepees and dog igloos. He is trying to help them live a more ecologically attuned life, meaning getting along with the beavers by not stealing their food.

One wonders if America’s staggering homelessness is remotely solvable as a social calamity.

I notice a Dictionary of Paul’s Letters. I must possess that book although I’ll certainly never read it because Paul is far and away my least favorite character in the Bible. I even like Pontius Pilate and Pharaoh more than Paul.

Surrounded by Christianity, my mind returns to my years as a preacher’s kid. There is a novel or memoir or confessional in that experience for sure. It’s already written in my head.

Marvin Gaye comes on. I guess there is a God.

I often believe I would have made a good preacher…dressed in corduroy vestments, with the ocean as my holy book and the gulls and eagles as my congregants. I also believe my qualification to serve as a preacher man is bolstered by my witnessing a hummingbird flying through fire. Once you’ve seen that, you understand the universe with new enlightenment.

The Bible group behind me speaks of making strawberry jam and the inherent presence of Satan in social media.

I see a massive hardback version of the King James Bible. I pull it from the shelf and find the story of Jonah. I never get tired of it. One wonders where the Nineveh of our time is.

Silicon Valley for sure.

I almost forgot to mention that a cigar store is in front part of the shop. A Christian cigar store in a Christian coffee shop. You can buy a cigar and read the Bible in the smoking area that is designed a bit like a frontier church. There are even pews.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

On My Relationship with Bob Dylan

NSP Meditations

As I read Bob Dylan’s Chronicles (Vol. One) in the waiting room of the dental office, it struck me that there was no other reading material available.

Waiting rooms were once great places to read where people who rarely read or never read has the opportunity to read newspapers, books, magazines and religious pamphlets.

The smartphone, of course, murdered this custom, as it has murdered countless other healthy American cultural customs (such as fist pumping at a rock concerts and love notes passed in elementary classrooms). What is left for the phone to murder? That would be a fantastic subject for a book.

Dylan began driving through me like an ancient jalopy on a dirt road. His words took sharp, bumpy and winding turns. I love this book; it is not a rock memoir. Cracking it is like taking a manual can opener to a treasure chest containing one of the unique and inscrutable minds in American history.

I thought about my long and never-ending relationship to Dylan and made a bullet list with a quill pen constructed from an eagle feather.

  • I didn’t listen to Dylan until my early 20s and didn’t truly connect to his music then. It was more history than music. I’d read more about him than listened to him.
  • I bought the three-record set Biograph when it came out and that changed everything. I gave that box set away to someone special years ago, for a birthday, a new Dylan fan who was hungry for the obscure tracks. I don’t regret that gift but I sometimes I could play those records again. The liner notes were the length of a novella.
  • Thirty years ago I was gifted a poster of Dylan and it hung in every classroom until I gave it away to the wrong person and the person I should have given it to never forgave me. Forgive me.
  • I played the same Bob Dylan song at several classroom open mics: “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door. It is, in fact, the only Dylan song I know. I once held a Bob Dylan-only open mic in my classroom.
  • I saw Dylan backed by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in Civic Stadium in Portland. It was one of the worst shows I’ve ever seen and Dylan admits this in Chronicles.
  • I saw Dylan on the Time out of Mind tour in 1999 and he still had it. I love that album. I also love that song from the Wonder Boys, “Things Have Changed.” He won an Oscar for that.
  • I commenced a new relationship with Dylan two years ago when I ended up the ultimate pariah in American life. Dylan wrote countless songs about pariahs. He was one, at one time. My dusty Dylan cassette tapes brought me to new old Dylan songs and I found better lines than the classic lines.
  • It often surprises me when a line from Dylan magically materializes when I write. I always manage to: (choose one below)

    merge

filter

mince

whisk

layer

carom

graft

saute

his words into my words. It is not plagiarism or paraphrasing. It is Dylaning..something Dylan did with the ancient and venerable and obscure and discarded masters of poetry and film and vaudeville and music and sports and journalism and history and murder and agriculture and alchemy and painting and theater and technical manuals. He brought all of this into his songs. Dylan taught me how he taught himself. Borrow. Merge. Change. Forget attribution. Fake attribution. Disguise. Document.

At 54 years old, I finally learned his lesson. How does it feel? Loose, free, true.

New Flavors to the Coffee Shop Novel

Fiction, NSP Meditations , , , , , , , , , ,

Corporate coffee has a new coffee, Veranda, and it sports a hummingbird logo. I though about ordering a cup but I’d recently seen a hummingbird fly through fire and a corporate hummingbird wasn’t going to cut it.

A man reads the Bible on a Kindle near me. How do I know? Look, I was a preacher’s kid. I know these things. He’s reading about Jonah. I won’t spoil it for him. Why spoil the greatest tale in literature? My favorite part was when the ship’s crew threw him overboard. No, I prefer when the whale vomits him on shore.

I’m not trying to be a Jonah in this new life I am living. I think about that metaphor daily. There is a lot of the Jonah Syndrome going around these days.

A massive truck gets stuck in the drive-thru. They’re looking up in the policy manual what to do. They may have to call a mobile welder.

I was writing about Bob Dylan ten minutes ago. I was a drinking cold brew Yuban (left overnight in the car) and watching a green river while I recalled my relationship with Dylan. It’s long and involves some very special people to me, but that’s all over now baby blue.

The cold brew here goes for $4.75.

The staff appears frantic. Someone forgot to set a timer. The boss is giving one employee the devil stare.

The sound of sameness is deafening.

A fly lands on my threadbare corduroys. It nestles in the wail.

A man from corporate shows up carrying a huge white binder. New policies no doubt, to fight growing income inequality.

Bob, I am so happy you won the Nobel Prize for Literature. It pissed so many authors off.

I’m wearing green Pumas from the Walt Frazier era. I’ve had them for 25 years.

A tow truck just rolled up. A burly man got out. He’ll have to winch the truck out of the drive-thru. Metal will undoubtedly be sheared away.

Newspapers for sale. No one’s bought one in months. They stopped switching them out. It’s all the same news anyway.

They used to sell Bob Dylan CDs here. They no longer sell CDs.

I’ve often wished I had a job writing liner notes for albums and CDs. That unique American literary genre is dead and never coming back. I hope someone writes my biography in the liner-note format. No one will write my biography although someone did tell me they wanted to. She is a big Dylan fan.

Scraping metal sounds. They belong in a Neil Young Crazy Horse guitar solo.

The truck was just extricated from the drive-thru. The drive-thru didn’t survive.

My coffee shop novel just passed 15k words. It’s an experimental, Yuban cold brew novel. I’ll publish it as a zine and give it away for free in non-corporate coffee shops. Someone might read it there.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

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