Love is Movement

NSP Meditations , ,

Love is movement. James Salter wrote this sentence. I will ponder it.

It seems true to me, that love has to move. Stasis implies decay or death. The movement doesn’t need to be swift. It could be dilatory or incremental. Perhaps even meandering. It seems impossible that the movement could be predictable. Really, how does love move? Maybe it moves like stunted cedars in a wind storm. Does it make a sound?

I think about my great loves. They all had movement in them, some incredibly fast movement. When I ran with the dogs on the beach, that was love moving with abandon.

Some of the loves stopped. Some inch ahead like tectonic plates.

Can you restart the movement of a stopped love? Possibly. Perhaps it is worth a try. I’ve got one in mind.

Is the movement of love moving faster in the digital age? Or just haphazard or erratic movement?

A love letter written on paper is so slow. Or is it? Does it move love along faster than a text message? If it’s not faster nor slower, perhaps it’s better movement.

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Things to Know About Coastal Oregon

NSP Meditations, Oregon Coast_History , , , ,

I recently found a tiny pamphlet printed in a tiny font about ferns titled Ferns to Know in Oregon that was written in the mid 1950s by an unnamed Oregon State University Extension agent and ardent fernologist. It contains some of the most delightful and knowledgeable nature writing about Oregon I have ever read. I had no idea ferns were part of such magical historical and literary lore! I had no idea that American POWs in the Korean War were fed ferns. I knew nothing of spores! I couldn’t name a single fern and now I can name seven. I even identified a fern (licorice) growing from the side of a 40-year old RV. This tiny pamphlet opened my eyes to the larger world of something beautiful and ubiquitous around me. It also has inspired me to produce a similar pamphlet of design and tone called Things to Know About Coastal Oregon that I will distribute free around Coastal Oregon in the usual and unlikeliest of fern and non-fern places and classify it as Nestucca Spit Press’ next publication. Yes, the reader may have to use a magnifying glass to read the text and consider the illustrations I will include, but that makes it all the more fun. I will begin brainstorming my list of Things to Know About Coastal Oregon here:

Things to Know About Coastal Oregon:

Clearcuts

Nestucca Spit

Ferns

Mushrooms

Rain

Sometimes a Great Notion

Conde McCullough’s Bridges

Zane Gray on the Rogue River

Clark Gable on the Oregon Coast

Oregon Tavern Age Country

Tom McCall

Heckletooth 3

Brownsmead

Seal Rock

Coffee Girl

Bastendorf Beach

RV Parks

South Jetty on the Columbia River

Camp Angel

Animal Welfare Thrift Stores

Rock Haus

Port Orford Radio Station

Saddle Mountain

Matt Kramer Memorial

Highway 420

Mt. Hebo

Godfather’s Books

Keyhole Limpets

Driftwood Forts

Slab Creek Road

Carpenterville Road

Jack London in Port Orford

WPA Guide to Oregon

Steve Prefontaine Memorial Museum

Notes on a Novel

NSP Meditations, Writing , , , , , ,

Imagine an RV Park named after a vanished Indian tribe on the Oregon Coast where many, if not all, the park’s inhabitants enact a tiny part of a great new American diaspora. And they get to enact their tiny part with a real estate novelist’s idea of an ocean view.

That’s the novel, the story of a diaspora that’s been fairly well documented by journalism and some academic research, but not explored in fiction.

There are many older rigs inherited by the park’s owner because their previous owners died in them, intestate or estranged from their families or without families, and there was no one to claim the rigs.

Work that in…the intestate riff, about America being a nation intestate….don’t mention ripping this idea off from Cormac McCarthy in The Road.

Many of the rigs have names that connote existential promise or dread and also unwitting evidence of the diaspora: Wildwood, Nomad, Brave, Prowler, Intruder, Pinnacle, Conquest. Many of the rigs have ferns growing out their sides and conifers sprouting from their roofs.

The narrator of the novel is living in one of the dead man RVs, a 40-year old Winnebago with an 8-track player. All the dead man left behind was a coffeemaker, cane and flyswatter. The narrators uses all three of them. The narrator is on the lam and mopping floors of rock bottom.

A clearcut looms over the stateless park. Roosters cry in the distance. Quail roam the grounds. Dozens of hummingbirds duke it out with each other. The smell of pot occasionally wafts though. There are mysterious comings and goings at the park and a mysterious woman who wears striped yoga pants. One of the inhabitants likes to speak in tongues. Another plays various woodwind instruments. There are many happy rescue mutts rescuing sad human beings.

One important note: the narrator really likes the park’s inhabitants and tries to engage them. He wonders if he’s like the doctor in the famous Chekhov’s story, the doctor of an asylum who gradually becomes an inmate of the institution he once administered. Yes, explore that angle!

There really is no tension in the novel. There really is no plot. There are ferns growing from metal and dramatic inertia. Is there a novel in ferns and inertia? The narrator will face that challenge.

(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.)

Life is Weather

NSP Meditations , , , , ,

“Life is weather,” writes James Salter in his 1975 novel. Light Years.

When it appeared, like a cirrus cloud on the page, I read this sentence again and again. It might be the most arresting three-word sentence I have ever read. It is a sentence about weather that has nothing to do with meteorology, but might have something to do with forecasting or not forecasting changes. It reminds me of sentence written by Henry Miller: “I like men with weather in their blood.”

I tend to like people with weather in their blood and lives. Some dogs have that quality as well. Sonny did.

What does the statement “life is weather” mean or imply? It seems like a good question to take up when weather knocks the power out or seeps water through windows. Wind just shook my domicile. Even better.

Almost 18 months ago the weather in my life instantly changed and I am still trying to come up with a proper adjective to describe the change. There was no forecast for this change in the weather of my life.

I have had to adapt to the new weather, wear a new face, walk a different walk, learn to live almost totally alone in a far-off territory where I don’t have any familiarity with the weather. Gimme shelter. I am tacking into a different wind that blows in 10,000 directions. I found strong shelter in new non-fair weather friends. The didn’t give me shelter, they offered. Had they not, I would have faded away.

It occurs to me as I write this that Bob Dylan had many interesting things to say about weather and their metaphors.

Reading Salter’s Light Years (which I highly recommend for his unique command of brevity and staccato in fiction) perhaps has changed the weather in how I must write about my life and other people’s lives. Perhaps fiction is the new climate to explore ideas of friendship, love, wind, rain, marginalization and despair. Is the cultural climate right for a novel I envision about the changes in my life’s weather? Perhaps not.

I wish I could forecast what will happen to me in 2018. It’s impossible. I intuit, however, that drastic weather changes in other people’s lives will somehow intersect with mine. Call it a blending of big weathers. The wind brings many interesting things.

(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.)

Smiling: A Story

Fiction, NSP Meditations , , ,

The coffee stinks. I’m probably frowning when I sip it.

I’m trying to write about a river but instead I’m overhearing a manager role play with an assistant manager how to confront a barista who isn’t smiling enough for the customers. Smiling is in the job description. Smiling sells. If the barista doesn’t smile more, a firing is inevitable. And the smile better be real, the manager continued. A customer can spot a fake smile. They want real smiles in here, not the fake ones already frowning in their lives. I don’t want a damn emoticon smile, either! They get enough of that superficiality, too.

The manager then demonstrated the difference between a phony smile and an authentic one. It was right out of the online manual. The baristas were supposed to review the smiles in the smile bank on the break room tablet and then practice smiling into the camera, take photographs, and then upload their smiles into the cloud for managerial review.

All those smiles were also subject to district, regional and national review by the Smile Enhancement Team. We could win an award, the manager said, and I want to win an award. So get our crew smiling goddammit!

The meeting adjourned. No one was smiling, except on the inside. It was so sad.

(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.)

Bonnie and Clyde Files 30

Bonnie and Clyde Files, NSP Meditations , , , , , , , , ,

At long last, hard rain fell on the Oregon Coast, the first big rain that arrives around Halloween that Ken Kesey immortalized in Sometimes a Great Notion with his unforgettable lines on rain and Jack-O-Lanterns with their mildewed grins.

Time to read that novel again. There will be something new in there again; there always is with scripture.

I drove the slick road to the sanctuary wondering what the river would look like after seeing it almost slack for six months. I was also wondering what it would be like to only walk with Clyde. Jacque had called a couple days earlier with the terrible news that Bonnie had a torn ACL that required surgery, a procedure that cost $1300. Bonnie was confined to the house and back yard for the foreseeable future but the hope was that she would ramble again after surgery and convalescence.

Clyde met me at the gate and barely made a sound. He was greatly subdued without his veteran running mate. He wasn’t even excited about treats.

Rain battered us as we traversed the pasture. Clyde struggled to keep up with me.

We reached the river and I couldn’t believe what I saw. It was moving high and fast and covered everywhere I had previously stood or sat the past six months.

Rain continued to pour into the river. The water was rolling down the watershed and gathering momentum. I watched it for a few minutes. It was strange not having Bonnie around. She provides a healthy dose of much-needed mysticism.

I looked up.

Cirrus clouds were silver and black and trailing dark tentacles to the top of the clearcut hills. Everything felt heavy, like the sky was going to collapse and bury the world in a congealed gray. Ominous was the word. For the the first time, this riverine place felt ominous.

Clyde started back without me. He got it.

Back in the yard, I gave Clyde a final soggy treat, petted his wet head, and he trudged toward the house. Sadness was infiltrating me and I felt powerless to defend myself.

Then I remembered something. Pumpkins! Pumpkin was afoot. It was time for trick and treat for my mates.

I went back to my car and fished out two glazed pumpkin doughnuts from Costco left in the back seat, a gift from friends to feed to the gulls.

Doughnuts are not my kind of food. Nevertheless, I took a bite because I’d never tasted a Costco pumpkin doughnut.

My god! Lard, sugar, and perhaps traces of real GMO pumpkins grown in Mexico.

I sacked the doughnuts and went around the back of the house and entered through a sliding glass door. The rest of the dogs went berserk and Clyde nearly ripped the sack out of my hand. I released Bonnie from her enclosed area and three of us went out to the back yard. I tried to limit Bonnie’s movement, but the doughnuts, you know, and she was doing a little doughnut dance. Clyde was losing his mind as well and making the most delightful guttural sounds.

There we were, near the river, it was raining a sheet of plywood rain and I had a sack full of sweet spiced lard and I was going to feed it to a pair of old dogs who surely shouldn’t be eating such food.

I fed the dogs and then ushered them back inside, put Bonnie into her enclosure, said my goodbyes, and wished them a happy Halloween.

(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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