Lines From the Ocean Writing Workshop

NSP Meditations, Writing , , , , , ,

Various lines written during the recent ocean writing workshop:

The ocean didn’t do it for me today. The people at the ocean with me today, did. They offered me a portal of possibilities to reinvent myself and reinvigorate my gifts. They were my keyhole limpets and I looked with them, not through. There is a difference.

Limpets induce limpid thinking.

Sixty percent of Americans have never seen the ocean in person. Perhaps that explains a lot about American politics and the election of Trump. Can you reasonably believe he would have won if 100 percent of this nation’s registered voters had seen the ocean in person? This is a topic worth exploring as a writer although I have no idea how to do so.

The ocean is listless today. Torpid. I don’t dare call it mediocre.

Fourteen writers writing on the jetty is a powerful sight. Unprecedented.

I need to initiate a new relationship to the ocean. Do I need a new running mate for this?

I loved the way she bounded on the beach. It was almost a hopping motion. When she discovered sand dollars, she became positively giddy. I miss seeing that.

I still can teach. I still have something to offer. A man gave me a hug after the workshop and thanked me for my effort. I had met him only four hours ago.

Even if you poured an ocean on me, my passion for life and wanting to help people, animals and watersheds would not be extinguished.

My attorney has the talent to write a great detective novel that makes supernatural use of Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

Watching waves reach the beach from an elevated perpendicular angle is wondrous. There is beauty in the math.

I changed a life for the better three years ago by building a driftwood fort with someone. He said it cracked his veneer. We all need a good veneer cracking. I sure got mine recently. No more veneers for me.

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Bonnie and Clyde Files 11

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

I winded down the Lewis and Clark River Road enroute to the dog sanctuary and another gimpy romp with Bonnie and Clyde. On the radio, a sports talk moron said that Miami has the best beaches in the country. They’ve got steak houses and discos right at the ocean’s edge!

My car was loaded with five boxes of items for the upcoming August rummage sale to benefit the Angels for Sara Sanctuary. I had gathered the donations from various friends and family members and planned to round up another five boxes. All I want to do is serve—what I’ve done my whole professional life. Now, dogs only. That might be forever.

I pulled into the gravel parking lot and saw Bonnie and Clyde at the gate, howling and dancing around.

We hit the pasture and the two old bank robbers didn’t have their usual gumption. I slowed us down, enticed them with treats, and we finally made it to the river. They went into the water. I sat down on the bank and started composing a haiku about old dogs in a river, counting syllables on my fingers. I waited and the current didn’t seem to go anywhere. The slack of summer low flow. I feel it inside me. I want more flow, into a new watershed of life.

The haiku wasn’t materializing so I stopped trying.

Bonnie and Clyde came over and collapsed in the grass on either side of me. I stroked their heads and we stared at the river together. We were 17 syllables strong.

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Agendas Delivered

NSP Meditations

Imagine a knock on your door at 6:30 a.m. Or midnight. You answer. It’s a pizza delivery.

But you didn’t order a pizza. In fact, you’ve never heard of the joint whose faceless employee is standing on your front step holding open the box containing the largest pizza you’ve ever seen. She say’s the pizza is free. You ask who ordered it. She says she doesn’t know.

So the question is: do you accept delivery? The pizza is right there! You could eat it for the rest of your life!

Now imagine receiving pizza deliveries of personal agendas from people, most of whom you do not know, in exactly the same manner as the scenario described above. Do you accept them?

The last year has seen me receive delivery of dozens of personal agendas, some of them truly bizarre and delusional. I never thought my fellow Americans were so disturbed and disconnected. It’s one of the many things I’ve learned the past 12 months.

I’ve never delivered a personal agenda to anyone in my life. I was too busy implementing selfish ones for myself!

The agendas typically come through the internet. Text message ones appear at the oddest of times. A few agendas have arrived through the mail, or left on my doorstep. A couple came via straw man proxy. I’m still waiting for a drone delivery or an agenda written in the sky.

I would estimate half the deliveries are from people I know or used to know. The other half are from complete strangers. Half are well-written. The other half are not. Some are laborious. Most are curt. The gender split is 50/50.

Not one agenda has been delivered in person.

I have compiled a list of all the personal agendas delivered to me during the past year. It’s a remarkable catalog of American neuroses and busy bodies. It will make for fascinating reading if I ever choose to reveal the list in print. Perhaps in the book. Perhaps in a broadsheet. Not here.

I would like to say that I’ve never engaged with any of these agendas, but the temptation exists.

No doubt, a knock on the door from the pizza deliverer will come again.

Just wait for it…

There’s one now, a little tap. There’s another. It sounds like a battering ram!

I don’t get up from the couch. I don’t stop reading my crime novel.

Reading “Song of Myself” in the Probation Office

NSP Meditations, Poetry , , , , ,

“All truths wait in all things,” wrote Walt Whitman in “Song of Myself.”

I wait for that truth; I take notes.

In the probation office this morning, Walt’s singing.

I record his music in a blue book.

Where, a man says, “Alcohol is my gig.”

Where, a rebuffed kiss got him three busted ribs.

Where, she cracked a beer bottle on his head.

Where, smoking pot burns a slit windpipe.

Where, poinsettias pen forced reports.

Where, Captain Crunch proves dangerous in the checkout line.

Where, a man in a three-piece suit reads Macbeth.

Where, the state stages another ventriloquism show.

Where, a grandmother falls asleep on her phone.

Where, she can’t fill a beaker with piss.

Where, a man can’t write an action plan because he can’t spell.

Where, I didn’t offer him help.

Where, I failed him right there.

Some writer.

Young Vaping Man and the Sea

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

South Jetty. Seven in the morning. I paralleled the rocks toward the river. The sky was gray. Not gun metal or pewter. Gray dammit! The perfect middle between black and white. No nuance or shade of gray. No poet’s gray. The color of this morning’s sky was the truth of life. Why can’t people seem to grasp that obvious black and white truth?

I moved with alacrity in depleted corduroys. I was trying to empty my mind, something so hard to do these days.

I looked up to the Jetty and saw a figure sitting on a rock facing the ocean. He or she was wearing a gun metal or pewter-colored hoodie, a thin designer model, with the hood pulled over the head. (See if you can find him in the photograph.)

Ahh, a poet, I thought, a good gray young poet, probably depressed, up early inhaling inspiration from the churning sea. The figure turned and gave me a profile—a young man. To his left, a fishing pole stood, wedged upright into the rocks. He was fishing with no hands. A moment later he produced a vaping mechanism the length of a piccolo. He inhaled, turned my way, blew out a cloud of smoke. I gave him a thumbs up and he did the same. He played another ditty on the piccolo and turned to away to face the ocean. I kept moving toward the river and trying to empty.

Imagine the poem this young stoned poet would write! I was imagining exactly that prospect and doing a little jig on the beach in anticipatory delight.

A half an hour later, I found a seat in the Jetty and wrote this up facing the ocean.

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PhDs

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Dad and I sat on my back deck and sipped vodka tonics. Foxglove surrounded us. Gulls flew overhead on their regular South Slope loop. Then an immature bald eagle soared by. Conifers swayed in the breeze. Gillnetters floated upon Youngs Bay. I wondered when deer might appear and had apples ready to toss their way. This is quite the back deck for thinking. I’ve been thinking there a lot this last year.

At one point during our conversation, Dad said something about me getting, “a PhD in the American criminal justice system.”

I didn’t disagree. I’ve conducted (lived) original research inside the system no criminologist could possibly imagine, let alone document (novelists did, though, a long time ago). My dissertation is coming, I assure you, a dissertation unlike any in the annals of such a literary genre. I expect to liven it up a bit.

Dad’s declaration made me think. I immediately began calculating all the PhDs I’ve earned the last year:

In the silent dissolution of friendships.

In the multiple physical and metaphysical benefits of building driftwood forts.

In splitting one’s self open.

In how to become an American pariah.

In inventing rock band names to mock my situation.

In George Simenon’s Detective Maigret novels.

In somehow inspiring people to deliver neurotic personal agendas to me like so many unordered pizzas from Domino’s.

In taking the high road.

In waiting, waiting, waiting.

In developing the fine art of patience.

In not getting jobs I’m overly qualified for.

In recognizing and implementing the creative possibilities of beaverwood.

In writing words that no one will will ever read.

In Bob Dylan’s early electric phase.

In the sociological effects of massive marginalization.

In experiencing the vertigo induced when your Bill of Rights are violated.

In reading and then applying Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a means of transcending dark moments in the lobby of the probation office.

In jettisoning things I needed later.

In performing an incompetent job of hospice care on myself.

In dying but not really dying.

(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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