A Short Story About the City

Fiction, NSP Meditations , , , , ,

I await her. We haven’t seen each other in three years.

The coveted window seat is occupied by a woman fiddling on her phone. Men’s soccer and women’s fighting play on television. I hear bacon sizzling and smell bacon.

A woman behind me discusses her health care job. In a normal country, she’d be a decently-paid public employee.

I walked by three zombie RVs on the way here. The City reports over 2,000 dilapidated rigs on various streets. How did it come to this in one of the more progressive cities in the world?

In the distance, I hear someone winning at slots. Or losing. It all sounds the same.

I’ve got a keyhole limpet in my pocket. I’m wearing new old J. Crew brown corduroys with a 12 wale. $7.99 at Goodwill and never worn before. I’ll wear them into disintegration. I’m also wearing a gray V-Neck wool sweater spotted with mustard and wine. It’s disintegrating, too.

The woman vacates the window seat. I commandeer it.

My craft malt liquor tastes good.

The bartender has kilometers of tattoos spread across her chest and neck. A red-haired goddess clutching a triton stands tall in the bartender’s cleavage.

People in the City talk louder than they used to. They are struggling to be heard.

She is late. I’m early to everything. I was early to my own jailing.

I am writing all of this from a driftwood fort that I built and where I encourage unknown poets to write about everything that has nothing to do with the City.

A man just left the bar holding a high school U.S. Government textbook that I didn’t use my first year teaching American government 30 years ago. All I used was the Constitution. A thought occurs to me: the election of Donald Trump is the culmination of 30 years of terrible, irrelevant and rote teaching of American government at the secondary level in public schools. In this case, it is the teacher’s fault.

Everything is wet outside. The rain creamed and dreamed away the dust.

She’s not going to show.

An angry-looking man walked in and was talking angrily to himself.

My ex-wife just texted me. She wants to know how I am doing. In response, I lie.

I’m writing this in long hand in the margins of Keno cards, Oregon’s state stationery. I am writing with a Keno pencil. It is very sharp.

There is stimulation in the City. It doesn’t stimulate me.

I’m reading a book about writing fiction and it has a list of do’s and don’ts. I’m not paying attention.

A critic complained of Proust: “Introspection to the point of insanity.”

Am I going insane?

D.H. Lawrence wrote: “Love is action. Action is consolatory.”

I am gripped with torpor, but dammit I want to run!

Back in the fort, I play heads and tails with a mysterious sand dollar. It’s tails. I win. I found it on my back deck, delivered by a mysterious force I don’t yet understand. But someone out there knows what the sand dollar means. I’m going to wear this sand dollar in the pocket of my shirt or coat until it crumbles.

A woman outside just ran to the mailbox and deposited a letter. I haven’t seen anyone run with that kind of urgency in a long time.

She’s now 22 minutes late. Is that really late in the City? You just text you’re going to be late and you’re not late.

The Rapture is late, very late, at least according to the couple behind me. They talk loud.

People see the signs of the Rapture and rip off their clothing and we see it on the streets and sidewalks. So that’s how those stray clothes got there, in case you were wondering. I own an article of Rapture clothing. It’s not an item of corduroy. No one wearing corduroy believes in the Rapture. We are what we wear.

I see movement on the sidewalk. There she is, outside, gliding her glide. I knock at the window. She sees me and there is a smile. It’s not the same one I’ve known for 30 years. Can a smile ever remain the same for that period of time? It’s probably better that a smile changes. It suggests you’ve lived and learned.

There is so much between us; it’s a novel, except that it’s all true. In the past year, I have found novels more true to life than real life. I will write upon that theme soon and probably on a Keno card or on the back of a sand dollar.

(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.)

Beach Rutting

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

I passed a yawning Minnesota Man with his two leashed huskies. I went to my knees to greet the dogs and they gave me howls and that wild husky look I know so well. They wanted to run through the foam at the ocean’s edge and wreak mischief!

The sun was rising over the Coast Range. It mixed with smoke from somewhere where land was burning from human foolishness—a single act by a kid or a collective policy from a corporation.

I climbed through the crumbling jetty and hit the beach. I turned around and saw the huskies watching me from the dunes. I dearly wanted to borrow them for an hour.

Pelicans undulated over the waves. A few gulls cracked open crabs. Blue mussel shells everywhere.

I headed out to Fort Chivalry to see if anyone had left more poetry behind. Soon, I beheld, a large design in the sand made with feet: a smiling tulip that made me smile. Next to the tulip was a big heart with J + C ’17 written inside. An equation for sweet horny math and evidence of an innocent teenage semi-rutting.

It was a long, long time ago in an America far, far away, but I still remember the equation and I had a semi-rutting or two on an Oregon beach in my youth.

I picked up a log and did my driftwood exercises while on the move. It must look weird from a distance. I’ve seen a lot weirder on the beach. I’ve done a lot weirder.

These driftwood exercises are getting me in the best shape of my life—body and mind. I highly recommend them.

A few minutes later, I approached a strange circular and jagged set of tracks dug fairly deep into the sand. Initially, I thought horses made them, but quickly ruled that out after discovering fresh elk scat and distinctive elk hoof prints. I also noticed, here and there, parallel marks/indentations of twos and threes in the sand, almost as if someone had dragged sticks for very short distances. There were no other animal tracks of any kind.

From what I gathered, doing my best Natty Bumppo, there were two elk on the beach earlier that morning and they had run wild around in circles and were not being chased by coyotes or dogs. Odd. I have seen a herd of elk on the beach a couple times in my Oregon life, but never seen two elk cavorting at the ocean’s edge at dawn.

That is something I would like to see.

The tracks and drag marks made no sense to me. Then they did. It just popped into my mind. I had walked into the sandy choreography of a rutting. What other possible explanation was there?

I kept moving south and found another circular hoof pattern and drag marks. Twenty yards later I found another. Sweet horny elk.

At one point, I noticed the tracks led to the dunes. The elk must have come from there and not the sky or ocean. Follow the elk has been a recent mantra of mine, so I followed the elk. A few minutes later I was in the dunes and into a clump of wind-sheared shore pines. The trail ended 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.)

Bonnie and Clyde Files 23

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

Drizzle fell. Clouds draped the clearcut hills. A log truck loaded with hemlock rumbled down the road. Beef cows grazed and bellowed in the pasture. I had treats stuffed in both pockets as Bonnie and Clyde and I took the trail that paralleled the river.

Elk has just come through earlier that morning; their scat was still steaming.

I wanted rain. I wanted to feel a good dousing.

My mind wandered as it always does along this river and with these old dogs. The wandering is good. Some of the metaphors generated by the wandering even stick.

I decided to take a new path, or more accurately, follow the one created by the herd of elk. Follow the elk—that’s damn good existential advice.

We trudged through high grass and past shrubs and new Sitka spruces. The river below us barely moved. We came upon an ancient and massive rotting log, left stranded on the bank after a 100-year flood. I climbed atop the log. Bonnie and Clyde tried but couldn’t get up. I fed them some treats and they flopped down on the ground.

I had a good view from the log. I could see other stranded logs on the bank. A few had shrubs and tiny conifers sprouting from their rotting mass. A nurse log, it’s called. I suppose dead human beings can become a kind of nurse log for other life, perhaps even human life. One can imagine a person being a nurse log and that person isn’t even dead.

The clouds began to move down from the hills and into the pasture across the river. There was rain in those clouds, I surmised. No, I didn’t surmise. I knew there was rain in there. Whether it would fall this gray morning, that was something else to ponder, and so I pondered from atop a not-so-dead log.

(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.)

Polishing and Professionalizing Your Writing: A Workshop

NSP Meditations, Writing , , , , , ,

All writers, whether a beginner or published, hobbyist or professional, can benefit from participating in innovative exercises that polish and refine writing and stimulate thinking on how to improve one’s craft, technically and creatively. It’s an important step to publication.

Join me Saturday, November 11th, for a writing workshop in Astoria that I call “Polishing and Professionalizing Your Writing.” In the workshop, I will guide participants through a series of exercises and discussions that improve the writer’s intent, organization, voice and engagement with readers. The workshop will help writers of creative nonfiction, fiction, grant and report writers, magazine and newspaper contributors, even poets, polish their prose to deliver better writing to their respective audiences.

Workshop exercises include: experimenting with different ways of opening pieces and paragraphs; writing in the active versus passive voice; focusing on brevity and clarity; keeping a consistent tone and psychic distance in a piece of writing; exploring a subject from a point of passion and curiosity; how to write more dynamic dialogue; how to employ repetition for stylistic effect.

The workshop runs from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. in Astoria in a private home. The class costs $65 and will cap at 15 participants. Participants will pay at the beginning of the workshop. Scholarships are also available. To register, email me.

Pelicans at the Jetty

NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches , , , , ,

Pelicans flew overhead. They glided. They undulated. They stacked on top of each other. They lined up. They landed near the river. They scooped the river. They flew parallel to the jetty. They flew perpendicular to the jetty. Five pelicans approached the jetty in formation and then when they reached the black wall, three would break left and two would break right. Why? Why not stay together?

A few gulls joined with pelican formations at the margins. Call them interlopers or call them pretenders. Perhaps even call them rebels.

I ate my breakfast of of apple, hard boiled egg, bread and watched pelicans on a gray morning before teaching a writing workshop. A few minutes before breakfast, I had climbed atop the jetty, a good 20 feet of climbing, and added a few flourishes to a driftwood sculpture that mysteriously reminded me of a pelican in flight when I came face to face with it.

The sculpture hadn’t been there the previous morning.

The jetty was slick and jagged. It felt vertiginous to stand here with the ocean on one side and the might river on the other. This was a risky place to make art. Nevertheless, there art was and it crooned to me. (Croon is such a great verb.)

I sat on a log. Pelicans kept coming. I looked up at the sculpture. It would topple soon, into the ocean or river; it all depended on the direction of the wind and waves or if a Philistine fishermen put in an appearance.

This sculpture’s crooning had induced me to climb the jetty to assist in its creation. It was made by an anonymous artist. I would be anonymous in my contribution, because no one was around for miles. I want to do this with my writing. Be anonymous to the reader, but share something that induces physical and metaphysical participation in the finder of the writing. The writer’s name doesn’t matter. It is completely irrelevant. In the past, I have experimented with methods of distributing my anonymous writing in anonymous fashion. I stole most of my ideas from other writers and artists, some from hundreds of years ago, but perhaps the best one from my ex-wife.

It’s gigging by stealth. There are no bylines. There are no press releases. There might not even be an audience except for gulls that can’t read. I sense this is my new writing path.

(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.)

Rainy Meditations

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

A prodigious rain is falling and my thoughts rain toward a prodigious man of rain, Pablo Neruda. I just finished reading his memoirs, published in 1973. Toward the beginning of the book, which was quite obviously written under the influence of watching rain, he writes about the rain in his Chilean youth and the word “rain” appears 11 times within three short paragraphs. I just used it six times in this one.

Neruda writes of the “art of raining” and I had never seen or heard that phrase before. The phrase arrested me. Neruda claims his homeland had lost the “art of raining.” It was drying up. Will Oregon ever lose the art of raining? Other places have. Other places are. Will I lose the the “art of raining” in my life, the non-weather raining? I have thought hard about that during the past year.

I look forward to a rainy walk along the river with my two old canine friends, Bonnie and Clyde. The water will be up, salmon will lurk in the depths and swirls, and that smell, that petrichor smell. It will smell like victory.

Another interesting line pertaining to rain from Neruda’s memoirs was about umbrellas. Umbrellas were cheap in his childhood and only poor people used them. Only rich people could afford raincoats. It was a class thing. There were drops of Marxism in Neruda’s comparison and he was a card carrying communist who once glimpsed Stalin and was accused of killing Trotsky. The proletariat and their umbrellas! The bourgeoisie and their slickers and imperialist running dogs (with rain coats)!

Neruda was probably the most determined and varied gigger in the history of poetry. He’d do a gig in a factory for illiterate men and do one at the front for men dug in deep. He’s do one in a barn and for three naked women around a pool. Neruda had a pet mongoose, too, He also once drank a pitcher of beer at a cafe table with an an ancient tamed orangutan, the only surviving resident of a botanical zoo in Sumatra gone to seed. I want to make a movie of this scene. I’ll have them drink Rainier.

I once was with a woman named after a figure from Greek poetry who called to me to walk outside into the pouring rain and whiskey at three in the morning. She was wearing only a blanket. I demurred. It was a huge mistake. I never told her that. She should know.

Not too long ago, I took a walk in rain in my mind through a neighborhood that had gone to seed. Or should I more accurately—gone to rain—because rain had made it go to seed. The wildness of the vegetation taking over, the mold, the moss, the gutters hanging by a thread, the branches on the roof, the chimneys tipping, the cars sagging in the rain-split driveways. It was a sad neighborhood. The rain falling there for years and years made me sad and that is unusual for me.

I only write in this meandering style when it rains. There is utterly no commercial value in this style. There has been almost no commercial value in anything I have ever written. I wrote a book about rain and it wasn’t about the weather! I didn’t make it rain ($$) with that book, makin’ it rain like the rappers rap. Perhaps the only time my writing on rain will have a sliver of commercial value is if someone reading this makes a contribution to the blog. Make it rain! What’s a meandering meditation on rain worth to you?

All of this is being written while I am outside, sitting on a vermiculated iron chair, under a transparent rain roof, and it is raining and there does seem to be an art to this rain. An artistic exchange is going on between me and rain.

I have been reading classic French and Russian novels and they always contain a “count” character, typically shady. What exactly is a count? I want to be a Count of Rain, an honorable one, however.

And the word “viceroy,” that appears in the classic English novels of empire. I want to be a Viceroy of Rain, in charge of some of its qualities.

Ken Kesey rarely used an article with the noun “rain.” Why bother?

I have 40 copies of my rain book left. I have met so many interesting people through it.

I have swam in the ocean when it is raining. This was in Oregon. It was at dusk and closing in on winter. I was mad, mad, mad, mad to be in contact with everything wet.

(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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