A Good Kick in the Ass

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

I walked south down the beach in a heavy fog. Or was it north? The ocean was there but not there.

Something in the sand caught my eye. I picked up it up: a tiny toy cowboy boot in the sand. It wasn’t exactly Neil Young’s “Cowgirl in the Sand” but I’d take it. Anything cowboy, like Thin Lizzy’s “The Cowboy Song” or “Come back Shane” or disseminating my collection of cowboy shirts to homeless men on the North Oregon Coast. It always makes me smile when I see a Warrenton man wearing one.

I raised the brown boot to the sky, then brought it closer for inspection. I stood it on a rock and a driftwood round and a sand dollar. It was a good cowboy boot for kicking someone’s existential ass and I mimicked the boot kicking someone’s ass.

Wait! I thought. Why not my ass? I needed a good kick in the existential ass and I had found the perfect cowboy boot to do so. A lone galosh would never work for the metaphor. Neither would someone telling me to bend over and then kicking me. I needed the kick from within.

There I was, in the fog, wearing a damn cowboy shirt and the cowboy boot began kicking me in the ass. I even told it to: Okay, boot, get to work!

Kick me out of depression.

Kick me out of the past; kick me into the future (it’s not the same thing).

Kick me into 12-hour writing days.

Kick me into facing the faces and walking the walk.

Kick me out of the tiny darkened corners of marginalization.

Kick me into new vistas.

Kick me through the keyhole of a keyhole limpet.

Kick me into the path of a stray dog.

Kick me into realms of new writing and publishing.

Kick me into the place of becoming a kick ass ass kicker in life.

Kick me toward a real ass kicker who wants to help me kick ass in life.

I sat down on a log. Getting repeated kicks in the ass is exhausting. It also hurts. It also feels pretty good.

The cowboy boot found a home in the pocket of my corduroy duster. I carried it home and placed it on the shelf near the toy beaver. I look at the boot every now and then.

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Matt Kramer Memorial Memories and Almost Instagram

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

Rain and wind blew across the parking lot at Oswald West State Park. It was a weekday morning in October and the parking lot was empty. I parked my car, loaded up my gear and took the path to the Matt Kramer Memorial, perhaps my favorite inspirational place in Oregon.

Kramer was a veteran journalist whose dogged and unbiased reporting helped save Oregon’s beaches from privatization during the fight to pass the Beach Bill in 1967. The state erected a memorial in the park to commemorate his reporting in 1972. Something like that occurring today is right out of science fiction.

I have visited the memorial at least 50 times since I first discovered it 15 or so years ago after reading a footnote in an obscure history of Oregon State Parks. Since that discovery, I have written thousands of words about this unique memorial in at least a dozen publications. I wanted everyone in Oregon to know what Kramer did with his writing. I’ve always said any writer needing inspiration should visit the memorial. Every Oregon journalist in training should lay hands on it and imagine where great journalism can lead.

As I walked the path, paralleling the creek, through a dripping old growth stand of Sitka spruces, hemlocks and Western red cedars, past massive downed trees and root wads, I thought about previous visits to this park and memorial and began to construct a Matt Kramer-themed stream of consciousness in my mind. I doubt he would have approved. He was more of an inverted pyramid straight news man. It is my hope that one day I can become an inverted pyramid straight news man and write on issues with the succinct clarity that Kramer once did. And make the writing count for the greater Oregon good and not have one word of it about me.

There were three field trips, one in 4.75 inches of rain, fires, soggy Subway lunches, pizza, football, Led Zeppelin on the boombox, pledges and poetry, a special magazine, a middle finger to Lars Larson, the Field Trip Runaways smoking dope, jump rope with kelp, presentations, talks and tours, dates, crushes, a Christian youth group outing in my youth, a secret kiss in the driftwood in 1976 with a lapsed Christian girl wearing yellow, rain, mist, Rose, Rose on the Memorial, bringing tools to care for the Memorial (remember caulk next time!) This park and this memorial encompass my whole Oregon life. Honor it forever. Keep writing about it forever. Keep coming here forever.

I groomed the memorial as I always do, and left behind a token for anyone curious enough to visit this place.

It was time to go and continue my journey into reinvention.

I came down the rooted trail from the memorial into the clearing that overlooks the beach. On the beach, in substantial rain, three young people, one man, two women, were taking pictures with phones in that easily identifiable Instagramming/curating style. Their presence seemed impossible since the parking lot had been empty. They very well could have been part of a national Instagram campaign of the types I have been reading about with mounting astonishment.

An idea sprung to mind, catapulted there by rain! Why not head down the beach and give them a heads up on the memorial and let them showcase it to the larger Instagram world? Matt Kramer on Instagram! If they were all gorgeous and wearing cool sexy clothes then it would be even more spectacular!

I watched them ply among the driftwood, along the beach, and hop across a stream. They knew what they were doing with their phones. They were pros!

Matt Kramer on Instagram? #mattkramermemorial. Perhaps one day, but not this morning. That is, unless the trio found it themselves. It could happen. The Instragram van probably wasn’t picking them up for another hour. If it did happen, I wonder what they’d make of the token I left behind. I’m sure it would result in some hashtag.

(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.)

Probation Poem 10-17-17….Kissing

NSP Meditations, Poetry , , , , , , , , , ,

I lean against the wall

inside the probation office.

Joint is packed.

Reprobates are jacked.

I read Walt Whitman

at random,

waiting for a form

to set me free.

It’s come to that:

a form for freedom

in a democracy.

Can you believe

they want it in longhand?

I look to my right:

Two couples

make out

before their

meetings and UAs,

wearing her Pink sweatpants,

his black hoodies,

both clutching phones.

Nothing surprises

me in here,

not the sparkled jeans

nor the man reading Macbeth,

not the dog food coupons,

nor the reek of fish.

Okay, this making out does,

these two couples!

It’s like that poem,

“Kissing,” by Dorianne Luax.

Kissing is sometimes

all we have

to stave off extinction,

to undermine Stalin,

to hang from

a thread over the abyss.

Laux writes:

They are kissing
to begin the world again. Nothing
can stop them…

they are doing what they have to do
to survive the worst

It’s the one human act

they can’t take from us.

Even in here:

florescent lights,

plastic chairs,

gray carpet.

It’s an act of

secret rebellion,

or smack dab

in the open,

face to face,

in our faceless times,

not a reckoning,

but a puckering.

I read another line from Walt.

Walt writes a lot about kissing

but never uses the word.

I watch the couples,

the two women

angled toward me,

their eyes are closed.

One has her feet,

out of flip flops.

She is barefoot

and kissing

in the probation office,

and I am no poet

if I don’t write

a poem with that image.

Because it is

a unique image

in the annals

of American literature

and I will take that.

It’s free.

It might even set me free.

A woman emerges

from behind the glass,

long blonde hair,

on taxpayer’s time.

She looks at me,

smiles, turns my way.

We knew each other,

in my other life.

We almost dated.

We would have kissed.

She asks me

how I’m doing.

I show her the cover

of Leaves of Grass,

she nods,

and walks out the door.

One couple has stopped

making out.

The other has not.

I return to Walt.

He’s in love with

democracy now.

No American poet

writes about a love for

democracy anymore.

But more kissing

might help us survive it.

(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.)

Another Short Story from the City

Fiction, NSP Meditations , , , , , ,

Rain falls. Noise of the city drowns it out. No one is paying attention to rain. Maybe I pay too much attention. Is that possible?

There is talk at a table behind me. Urgent, knowing talk how to reverse the fortunes of American soccer on the World Cup stage, the men’s team that is. This table has the answer and the talk is led by a woman. She is loud. Maybe that’s what it will take.

Believe me, the answer is not at this table. The answer is somewhere on a bumpy field, perhaps even a pasture, where a regular game of pick up soccer is taking place, in rain, in mud, without coaches or adults around, and that regular game produces our Pele.

He won’t be white, I assure you.

Some Gershwin plays through the speakers. It feels wrong for this city.

One wonders if anyone ever meets anyone in cafes anymore.

Wind blows rain off the leaves and onto the pavement. Is that real rain?

A jogger jogs by. Terrible form.

An elderly couple plays loud videos on their phones the size of a waffle iron. I want to overturn their table but it’s bolted to the floor.

A man walks in wearing a blue velour jacket. He’s pulling it off.

I wrote a short story about a culvert. It has no commercial value. It has an audience of one. The story is based on true story that took place inside a culvert, on a salmon bearing stream, not far from a clearcut. It’s a love story.

A homeless man is whittling the end of staff. He’s standing up while doing so. I have never seen anyone whittle standing up, much less in rain. He could impale someone with this staff. We live in strange times when homeless men craft pikes.

I’m thinking about my dead dog. I’m thinking about stealing a husky off a chain. I’m thinking about reading Kafka’s short story about a dog that’s written by a dog. I bet Kafka wrote it in his cubicle, in between breaks from selling insurance. One wonders if Kafka even owned a dog. His writing doesn’t indicate that he did.

Aren’t 400-word short stories refreshing to read? They seem to stay with me longer than longer ones.

(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 27

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

Kerplunk!

The fist-size rock hit the middle of the shallow Lewis and Clark River and the sound it made was kerplunk.

I’d never heard an actual kerplunk before and I liked the sound. It was deep and low and with a hint of gurgle.

Bonnie and Clyde came over to investigate the sound.

I picked up another rock, tossed it high into the air, and watched it splash into the river. Kerplunk. I tossed another: Kerplunk. I threw three rocks at the same time and her a triple Kerplunk. I underhanded the largest rock I could pick find. Kerplunk. I was kerplunking the hell out of the river and I had no idea why.

At one point in the madness, Bonnie and Clyde started barking. Kerplunks and barks resounded up and down and the river and produced the most pleasing cacophony.

The rock show ended and I noticed ripples rippling out from the last kerplunk. I had never noticed ripples in an Oregon river before.

They were beautiful. They were concentric stanzas of a perfect poem that drifted with the current and then disappeared. I knew there was perfect math in the ripples, too, but my brain couldn’t fathom the sine curves and amplitudes and equations of it all. Perhaps in another lifetime, I would return as a math teacher who taught the math of the watery universe through ripples in a river. My classes would march down to a river and toss rocks into it for their final. In this other math teaching lifetime, I might even double as the creative writing teacher and introduce mathematical concepts into love stories and have students write about the unknown variables in their lives.

I picked up a rock and tossed it into the river. Then another, another. Ripples formed and then disappeared. I pitched three rocks in at the same time. Three separate ripples rippled into and out of one another. It was a ripple party.

Something broke the spell and my mind rippled toward perhaps my favorite poem of all time, “We are Transmitters” by DH Lawrence:

A stanza reads:

And if, as we work, we can transmit life into our work,

life, still more life, rushes into us to compensate, to be ready

and we ripple with life through the days.

Even if it is a woman making an apple dumpling, or a man a stool,

if life goes into the pudding, good is the pudding

good is the stool,

content is the woman, with fresh life rippling in to her,

content is the man.

I taught this poem to my creative writing students for years. In fact, I invented a one-period writing workshop around it. One of the prompts was: how will you ripple through the years? Another was: what is your rock that creates the ripple? Some of their rocks included: my music, my belief in God, my friendship, my love of animals. One student wrote his serenity would ripple through his family’s chaos and smooth it over.

Clyde moseyed over to hustle a treat. I pitched one in the water and it generated a tiny kerplunk and ripple. Clyde’s body generated much larger ones.

I closed my eyes and tossed another rock, a final one for the morning. I winged it high into the sky, way upriver. I asked myself: how will I ripple through the rest of my years? The old ripple is gone forever. Good. I also asked: what will be the new rock to create the new ripple? How will I even find it?

Kerplunk! I heard.

I waited for a few seconds and opened my eyes.

The ripple was coming my way.

(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.)

Oregon Tavern Age: The Couple

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age , , , , , , , ,

“Take it out of savings honey,” the OTA man told his OTA wife, “I’ll put the work check in later.”

The woman got up from the stool and left the state-sponsored video slot machine. She went over to the ATM and withdrew funds.

Both of them were drinking water.

I sat at a table and observed them. We were somewhere in OTA country, the exact location unimportant.

It was 11:30 in the morning and I was nursing a beer. I was writing a sonnet on a keno card, a sonnet whose key word was lasagna. If only I had paid attention to the lasagna she made for me. That’s what the sonnet was about.

The bar was practically empty. Eight grown men wore OSU colors and watched the Beaver football team flail on television. Tequila was misspelled on the drink special whiteboard.

They sat three machines away from each other. She talked to the machines, he did not. She said, “Come on baby, I got 227 nickels in you.” It was vaguely sexual.

She thanked the machine when she won. She clapped and caressed. When she lost, she cursed. She played near the wall where three Hamm’s bear mirrors, Polar, Brown and Grizzly, hung next to the poster warning against gambling addiction.

At least she was talking. I’ve seen people sit at these machine in silence for hours, transfixed.

I got the feeling she talked more to the machine than she did to her man. I think they were married. I saw wedding rings. He was a head shaker, not a talker. Maybe that’s why they were still married.

He played a game called Wild Ride. It was a game about horses, not women. I saw him hit a hundred buck winner, the dinging went on forever. He didn’t say a word, not even to his old lady.

She got up and went to the ATM. She returned and switched machines.

“Why don’t you come over here and give me some good luck,” she said.

She patted the stool next to her.

“OK,” he said.

He punched out of his machine. He left a hot machine. This is unheard of in OTA country, or Vegas for that matter.

Must be love. I’d take it.

He went over and sat next to her. She was talking to the machine, flattering it. She reached out her right hand to him. He clasped it with his left. They held hands and played slots, one handed.

A few minutes later, the woman hit a winner—37 dollars. They kept holding hands.

I thought I might try that one day with someone I love, but for now, I was writing a sonnet about lasagna.

(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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