Vortex I Light Man and River

NSP Meditations, Oregon Coast_History , , , ,

I received a communication the other night. It started like this:

I did the lights at Vortex. I had PGE come out and erect two lighting towers on top of which we placed a 1000-watt Super Trooper spotlight with color filters. While the stage was being built, we set up by the bathrooms and projected a liquid light show from atop our panel truck onto a white screen we attached to trees while Notary Sojack and River played. We ran out of dope early so we had to make a trip south before the weekend of the convention.

Incredible. I asked him about River. In all my years of researching and gigging this unending far out story, River had never come up as a band that played the festival. In fact, I had never heard of a Portland-based band called River from that era.

After all these years, I’m not too sure that they were all there or if they performed as a complete entity. What kind of music? Beyond my capacity to define.

Beyond my capacity to define…that’s about right when it comes to Vortex I.

River existed though and the light man sent me visual proof. They opened for The Grateful Dead! At a SE Portland club called Springer’s. All ages show. $3.50 a ticket.

He went on:

We were putting on a lot of festivals in those years and it is difficult to remember who played where and when… Bullfrog Lake I, II and III, SkyRiver I, II and II, Buffalo Convention, I was making LSD as fast as I could give it away and memories are muddled a bit!

The light man wrote up his wild Vortex story on his web site: https://www.fallingstarmedia.com

There are some historical inaccuracies in his account, and he acknowledged this when I pointed them out, but really, I urge anyone with any interest in the tale of the only state-sponsored rock festival in American history, to read his story. I absolutely needed his narrative in my book about the festival, but as I found out, I heard some of the best Vortex stories after the book’s release in 2004. They keep coming. They probably will never stop. I am happy that people still seek me out and want to share them. There is a magical power in this Oregon story of peace. I only wish I had somehow got it to the attention of a national audience. It deserves it. Now more than ever.

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On Birds

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I heard on the radio that a new study reports that watching birds for a short period of time can lower a human being’s stress level by almost 90 percent during the moment of observation. I know this study’s finding to be completely true in my life.

Pelicans, gulls, hummingbirds, chickadees, finches, bald eagles, crows, morning doves, sandpipers, sanderlings, barn and sea swallows, ravens, robins, cormorants, blue herons, geese. Even those pesky terns!

I’ve communed with all these birds in recent months. I’ve spent hours observing them and tossing them bits of breakfast. Many of those encounters have been documented on this blog. My bird metaphors are alive and well. Birds are flying with and through me.

I never really paid attention to birds until I moved to the Oregon Coast. I never noticed their individuality. I would have never tattooed birds on my upper arm. I would have never truly appreciated Steve Miller’s “Fly Like an Eagle.”

It must be terrible to live where there are no birds to notice or people don’t notice birds. One has to believe that current politicians don’t notice birds. If they did, our country might be a lot different.

I once saw a standoff between a raven and squirrel. It was over fast food fries and the remains of a kale shake! They really stared each other down and squawked their respective blustering noises. Eventually, they settled up and each got something.

A hummingbird just whizzed by as I wrote this. They somehow find sustenance in the dead flowers of fall.

I once owned a Western shirt with birds on it. I got rid of it. I want it back.

What are the birds in your lives? I’d like to live in a home that attracts many more birds than the one I own now. Too many cats around.

My ex-wife was a woman of ravens and owls. Those were her birds. I once saw her rescue a tiny burrowing owl who knocked himself out by flying into our living room window. The owl came to his senses in a shoe box full of cotton and then flew away into the sky.

I put together a writing workshop called Birds and Metaphors. I haven’t taught it in ten years. It’s time to dust it off.

(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.)

Thoughts on Recent Conversations

NSP Meditations ,

In recent months I’ve had important conversations with multiple people. These conversations, some coming as a complete surprise, have helped me navigate life. Out-of-the-blue conversations without agenda are always, I think, the best. They mean someone had to employ deep consideration to initiate them with and that is hard work indeed.

I have tried to initiate conversations with several people, but have been mostly rebuffed or met with indifference. I will keep trying, though. And I still haven’t returned a conversation offered in April with someone once special to me.

There have also been a few one-sided conversations where the talker monologues a rock solid paradigm or all-knowing, cocksure, philosophy that has nothing to do with me and everything to do with the other talker.

That doesn’t help me. Listening does. Saying nothing, too. Asking questions often works well. There is an art to asking pertinent personal questions of someone and then actually listening to the answers, perhaps not even responding. It’s a fine art, listening, particularly listening without immediately telling someone what to do or how what they just heard connects to something from their life.

It’s called a pause, pausing before responding. I’m getting better at that all the time.

Recent good conversations include topics such as poetry, the eclipse, Oregon politics, Oregon’s marijuana industry, seeing the other side of probation, a documentary film, my family, struggle, civil rights, healing, reinvention, caulking, Calvados, listening, unhappiness, happiness, Neruda, detective fiction, writing, Sometimes a Great Notion, driftwood forts, the importance of art, land use laws, depression, dogs, Catholicism and dams.

Please keep conversing with me and I will with you. I will listen, too. It’s the first step at advancing.

(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.)

In Praise of the AlphaSmart

NSP Meditations, Writing , , , , , , ,

Let me sing the praises for my trusty AlphaSmart word processor. This fall marks my 20th year anniversary of discovering this odd writing contraption that basically operates as a quasi-digital portable typewriter when I began teaching at Neskowin Valley School on the Oregon Coast.

I no longer recall the first time I saw an Alphasmart (a creme-colored model, their initial product). I do recall being startled by how younger students used them to practice keyboarding by taking them everywhere around campus, even down to Neskowin Creek to write about the creek! I saw kids writing on the merry-go-around and atop the jungle gym. Later, they would download what they had written onto a computer via a cable or print directly from the processor. It ran on two double A batteries and the batteries lasted forever. It booted up in one second. It was durable. It was light. It was astonishingly portable. It had eight separate files and always saved the work. It could store about 80,000 total words!

So I borrowed one and started experimenting with it, because I wanted to get the writing going in my life. I’d written hundreds of thousands of words in my paper journals, but this kind of writing didn’t translate to anything publishable.

The AlphaSmart changed all that. It became my Great Writing Facilitator. I began carrying one with me everywhere and blasted away when the inspiration hit. It also enabled me to write outside (or in a dive tavern) with ease and writing from a deck, driftlog, patio or tavern seemed to bring forth a torrent of words. I’ve even written in my trucks with one. I stash an extra one in the trunk of my car.

My first AlphaSmart never conked out. But I upgraded in 2003 to the blue 3000 model when, quite ironically, I was working as a watershed council coordinator with an office in Neskowin Valley School and espied the new model. I “borrowed” it. Actually I “borrowed” three.

Those three machines worked for almost ten years. Then the last one died and I went online in 2013 and bought a lot of 10 from E-Bay for $50. These AlphaSmarts came from Orange County Community College and were apparently used by elementary students for some after school program because their writing was still stored on the machines! One kid wrote a priceless line about missing swing sets when he has to attend junior high. Another left behind a sad riff about missing her dead dog.

The company that produced AlphaSmarts stopped making them about a decade ago. They had a couple of newer models before folding that included some bells and whistles, but I never upgraded.

I consider the AlphaSmart as the secret weapon to my productivity. I’ve never understood why more writers don’t use them, particularly with all the distractions posed by ubiquitous Wi-Fi. There is a small cult of users and you can read more praise of the AlphaSmart online. Most of us tell a similar story of intense affection for this machine. There’s only one thing to do with it and that’s to blast out first drafts without any consideration of polishing during the blasting. So many writers slow themselves down during the writing process by rereading and revising during the initial writing. The AlphaSmart’s tiny screen (only four lines of text!) and awkward editing tools make rereading and revising nearly impossible. You just start typing and then stop when you run of out of gas. I’ve written all the drafts of my books and thousands of columns, reviews, essays, features and posts like this. I get a rapid, almost stream-of-conscious beginning on the AlphaSmart and then finishing is easy, at least for me.

What has always delighted me about using the AlphaSmart in public is how many people come up to me and ask what the hell it is. The cooler and hipper the cafe or bar, the more curiosity I get. Even the OTAs ask me questions every now and then. I am always happy to stop typing and explain the simple wonders of this machine. Some people think it looks like a deaf reading device and think I’m deaf. One dude just had to Instagram it and check out #alphasmart for the images. I almost got a date once because of using one.

Over the years, I’ve given a few away to aspiring writers who complained about the distractions of public writing on tablets, laptops and phones. Perhaps this contraption will work for them like it has for me.

(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.)

Ruminations from the Back Yard

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I can see a sliver of Youngs Bay as I write this on the AlphaSmart. It’s 80 degrees. A slight breeze blows. The gulls should be making their afternoon updraft appearance soon.

The house is freshly painted. The gutters emptied. The yard buttoned up. The deck stained. The garden bears its final bounty. I stand poised for rain. I want tuna season to arrive so I can buy fresh fish off an OTA boat.

A sand dollar occupies my mind, a mysterious sand dollar that appeared on my back deck. This sand dollar might hold the answer to many mysteries that keep mystifying me. It is strange to consider that a sand dollar, and a small one at that, could contain such power. But that is the life I am living.

Honest, unscripted, face-to-face encounters keep moving me forward. They are the means of surmounting. I’ve got show my face and let people read it. It’s changed.

I have nearly finished reading Stendahl’s The Red and The Black, a 500-page French novel published in 1835. I read it 33 years ago in college and barely  remember a word of it. It does contain one famous passage about how a novelist is like a mirror traveling through a given society and the novel written in this style is the true reflection of that society. This is a highly interesting metaphor for the novelist. In the book I am writing about my life, I must consider this mirror metaphor and perhaps embrace it as a method of recounting all the terrible and wonderful and utterly bizarre things that have happened to me during the past 16 months. Mirrors don’t opine. They mirror can only reflect. The looker into mirror can decide what they see. They are not told what to see. The writer doesn’t even provide hints or clues.

A friend gave me a copy of an extraordinary book about the ocean: West Coast Shells by Josiah Keep. It’s a 1935 edition (slightly revised) of book originally published in 1887. It contains over 200 exquisite black and white illustrations of shells. The book begins with this simple immortal sentence: “The ocean is a home.” More on this incredible book later. I urge everyone who loves the ocean to seek it out and read the stunningly casual yet beautiful and informed nature of the prose. No one can write like this anymore and that is a grave loss to arts and letters.

I must learn to fish for surf perch. It is time.

(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 9-25-17

NSP Meditations, Poetry , , , , , , ,

Men in the waiting room

speak of addiction.

One wears the uniform

of a road flagger.

 

He shoots a text

to a treatment center

on the last Blackberry

in America.

Rain falls outside.

Give me 40 days

and 40 nights of

Bladerunner rain.

Give me Noah meets Deckard

and let us all drown

and start over

with replicants in Congress.

 

I hear an insane man

beyond the door.

I’ve sat in a room

with his insanity.

It caromed like an object in a cartoon.

Euthanasia crossed my mind.

But not for myself.

 

Why do I write

poems in here?

They clash with the

coke machine and gray carpet.

I should stop reading Whitman in here.

He’s clouding my vision

with his hallucinations of democracy.

 

I am no poet

with these probation poems.

Read this non-poem

for corroboration.

Corroboration is a terrible

word for poetry.

(Carom isn’t bad.)

At least I know that.

 

A sign on the wall

says the seafood plant is hiring.

ASAP!/ $11 an hour.

 

The local seafood industry

dies without this office.

They cast their nets

in the parking lots.

I’ve seen it.

Casting from a truck,

not a boat.

Fishers for marginalized men.

Fishers not taught by Jesus.

 

I’ve seen so much here,

none of it poetry.

(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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