Casting About with the Word “Cast”

NSP Meditations, Writing , , , ,

I walked north down the beach in a drizzle. In the distance, I saw two men, one sitting, one standing, fishing for surf perch. They looked like figures in a colorless oil painting. I stopped to observe. A minute later, the standing man began reeling in the line. The game was afoot. He reeled slowly, then picked up the pace, and moved deeper into the water. As I watched, a sporting urge overtook me. I’ve always wanted to learn how to fish for surf perch. The activity must produce highly interesting thoughts.

So I taught myself right there, without an internet search. I whipped out a pole, rigged it up, baited the hook with shreds of myself, and cast my line far out to sea. I didn’t know how to cast a line worth a lick but I did all right.

I waited, waited, composed a haiku or two, and then felt something tug. I begin reeling, slowly, then picked up the pace. Something emerged from the water. I could see it dangling at the end of the line.

My catch was shapeless, but certainly not meaningless. Upon inspection, I could see I had landed the word “cast,” with all its multiple metaphorical definitions, and I was going to gut it, build a little driftwood fire, fry it up in a pan of corn meal and oil, and eat it with my hands while the ocean rolled a hundred feet away.

And that’s what I did:

Cast aside. Cast out. The die is cast. Castaway. Cast of characters. Miscast. Cast (plaster). Cast about. Cast a spell. Forecast. (Homophone) Caste.

I know I was cast out. Was I cast aside? If so, by whom? At what point does being cast out and cast aside turn into exile? Is this exile temporary or permanent? What does it feel like to be exiled off Main Street? I’m writing a book these days that answers that very question. The working editorial mantra for the project is: let it loose.

When a shipwreck survivor washes ashore on a uncharted, deserted island, at what point does he or she becomes a castaway? How long to achieve that exalted status? Am I castaway? Did I wreck the ship? Did Ahab in mad pursuit of his Freudian Moby Dick wreck the ship? If I am a castaway, how do I escape the island? I know nothing of boat building, tides or the shipping lanes. Is someone even searching for me? I think the search has long since been called off.

Most friends I had never signed my body cast after the busting up. You can’t text a signature to a cast.

The forecast for me calls for gray with perhaps gentle unstrained rains, twice blest, that droppeth merciful from heaven.

Or the forecast calls for drought and wandering unemployed in the wilderness.

I definitely belong to a caste. Who will buck that taboo and befriend me or give me a job? (Buck That Taboo…good band name.)

Man oh man, you talk about miscast. I am John Wayne as Genghis Khan, Donna Reed as Sacajawea, Jeff Chandler as Cochise, Gary Cooper as Marco Polo, Charlton Heston as El Cid, Jeffrey Hunter as Jesus, Richard Gere as King David, Paul Newman as Hank Stamper. You get the idea.

Who will answer a casting call for the next production of my life? Or is there no casting call? Perhaps it’s an eternal one-man show to an empty hall. The dog applauding in the wings doesn’t count.

How do I break the spell of mass marginalization? What are the incantations, elixirs and potions needed? Where are the good witches to help me incant?

Has the die been cast? Did I throw it? Did I cross a Rubicon? Do I want Civil War and the overthrow of the Republic?

I do desperately want to cast about again. People walk better when casting about. I am at my best that 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.)

Bonnie and Clyde Files 4

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The river beckoned. The sun was out and lit up the channel. Clyde took point, along the bank, through the high grass, followed by Bonnie. I brought up the rear and admired the blooming foxglove and bleeding hearts. Bumble bee scouts protected our flanks. I was half out of my mind to reach my writing spot at the water’s edge, rig up the studio and get down to it! I had something I craved to write: a riff on the speculative subject if Emily Dickinson had owned a dog and taken it for long walks instead of staying almost exclusively in her bedroom and garden. Who would she have become with a dog? Who would she have become walking a dog in the rain? Who would she have met while walking a dog? Did New England women of her social class from that era even walk dogs? How would her poetry have differed?

I was practically frothing to get at it!

Bonnie and Clyde reached the spot and took refreshment in the water. I was well back, lollygagging with delight. No rushing on this river.

Then I saw it and recoiled—the horror! The umbrage! The affront to the creative mind along the river! The despoilment of the Garden of the Meditative Eden!

A can resting on a white towel! A black and neon can containing Satan’s swill—an energy drink! An extra large can.

Someone was lurking around the bend, disguised by the fallen alders, an energy drink drinker, someone who brought an energy drink to the river in the morning to drink for energy.

If only it had been a 40-ounce bottle of Old English, a can of Rainier, a pint of Crown Royal. That I could abide. That I could understand. That I could hunt down for story.

There are no interesting stories in energy drinks at the river.

I called out to Bonnie and Clyde, they hustled to meet me. We turned around and headed for home. Emily and the dog would have to wait for another 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.)

One Year Without Sonny

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A year ago I euthanized Sonny, my beloved husky of almost 17 years. It was raining hard that morning, and I took her to the beach once last time, more for me, perhaps, than for her. It wasn’t much of a visit, barely five minutes, but I cherished our last mini ramble together nonetheless. Five minutes is an eternity when there is nothing afterward.

Sonny and I rambled Oregon’s publicly-owned beaches over 10,000 times. That damn well might be a state record. In my mind, it is. What madcap adventures we had! I wrote a lot of them up. Others are strictly between us and the ocean.

I thought I might do something at the beach to commemorate the one-year anniversary of her death. I won’t. I thought I might write something special: I won’t. Currently, I have no financial or existential wherewithal to get a dog. My one and only goal is to one day have the ability to enjoy a dog (or dogs) in the manner in which I enjoyed Sonny’s company—as a mind-melded, inter-species crew bounding down ocean beaches at first light, midnight, in sleet, snow, rain, hail and sunshine, sleuthing out mystical Oregon stories, driftwood forts, limpets, and meeting unusual people, animals and mermaids.

When that dog-day-morning, afternoon or evening comes, I will know my transcendence is complete.

It could take years.

Unopened Fortune Cookies

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A great Astoria friend of mine, who is assuredly the greatest repurposer of abandoned items and people in the entire Pacific Northwest, recently presented me with a fortune cookie courtesy of Panda Express, and courtesy of some Astoria High school student who discarded a bag containing three unopened fortune cookies in a garbage can on campus. My friend had dug the cookies out and rescued them from a fortune-telling-less future.

My friend told me it wasn’t the first time she’d come across unopened fortune cookies in the campus trash.

Think for a moment: what does is say about American teenagers who drive across a bay with bald eagles and blue herons hunting in the mudflats to get Chinese-themed fast food for lunch, eat the meal, yet do not bother to open the fortune cookies that accompany the order? They throw them away! I want someone to explain this to me, this utter lack of curiosity. Has anyone reading this ever not opened a fortune cookie when it was in hand? Is it possible these teenagers don’t know what a fortune cookie is?

If I was teaching, I would have made this scenario the supreme American cultural study of the week. I probably would have structured a literary review around the inquiry.

Help me out, please. The best response wins an envelope of surrealism. I’m not kidding. Wait until you open it and dump the contents onto a table.

My fortune from the rescued cookie was: “Kindness makes for happiness.” I’ll try to make it come true this weekend.

(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.)

The Bonnie and Clyde Files 3

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I walked out of the probation office into drab sunshine. I felt dizzy, on the verge of collapse. I had just spent a half hour inside a small windowless room where a human misery pinball machine was played deftly by an unknown being. I was inside the machine, one of the rubber bumpers. Other men were the steel balls. Careen. Collide. Ring. Ding. Bells. Lights. Game over. No score except negative numbers. Have you ever heard the sound of human misery pinball machine being played? Have you ever watched a game?

The Talking Heads’ “Take Me to the River” entered my mind. I hadn’t heard the song in 25 years. I never really liked it but there it was, playing in my head, with its slow gospel groove.

Take me to the river indeed, where Bonnie and Clyde are, where I can walk and talk with them, release everything into the water. I might even jump in!

I drove to the sanctuary and didn’t get a ticket. Bonnie and Clyde were waiting at the gate. Clyde tried working up a howl. He knows who I am now. I stuffed my pockets with treats, unlocked the gate, and we made for the river. I walked faster than usual and the old outlaws kept up with me. I heard a bald eagle make its twerping sound overheard. I didn’t bother looking up. It was there and that was enough. We kept moving through the tall grass and I occasionally glanced at the Lewis and Clark River to our right.

The river floweth. I feel compelled to type an old word like floweth because “flowed” wouldn’t suffice, not after that game of pinball.

I saw two people, a man and a woman, near the ODFW fish trap. Joy! I would quiz them on their study and get the dope.

Twenty minutes later, I had the dope: chum salmon research. The biologists were young and hailed from North or South Dakota where wild salmon don’t exist. They were thrilled to be in Oregon studying wild fish. They were thrilled to meet Bonnie and Clyde. We shared the river together and parleyed about matters of keeping the river alive. Then I left them alone to get on with their gig and Bonnie, Clyde and I headed back.

Lost and Found 13 / The Creative Mind

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The Old Man always taught me: when the going gets tough or farcical, find your creative mind and go into it. Right then! Don’t wait to get home and put your feet up. If you don’t, you could lose it, in the voluminous self-defeating ways people lose it. Often the loss is noisy and messy, but more often than not, it is silent and inconspicuous.

Good advice Dad; entering the creative mind sustained me more than once the past year. It did a lot more than that. My creativity resurrected me. I found a new person through it.

He was referring to school faculty meetings. I refer to the extraordinary Kafkaesque moments connected to my case where I nearly lost it and saw other lose it and lose it badly.

Time to go into the creative mind right now and find new things: Here I sit on a slab of gray rock in a crumbling section of the South Jetty, pen and notebook in hand, surrounded by rotting pilings and rusted iron, remains of the mighty railroad into the ocean. I survey and document. Extreme low tide. Two German shepherds gimp in the surf. A fort I built beckons weary travelers. Tillamook Head calls out: there is something incredible here! Climb me brother! No Kafka in my trees! On the horizon, a freighter can’t seem to make up its mind whether to cross the bar. Contrails overhead bring to mind an Apache proverb: the earth will perish with spiderwebs in the sky.

Perish is such a beautiful-sounding verb to describe the act of dying. There is poetry in it. There is something transcendent there.

At one point, I lost everything and did die (see my hospice post) but I didn’t perish from the earth as the saying goes about government of, for and by the People from President Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address, the greatest 272 words in the history of everything decent American. He wrote it himself and read it to the people on deadly ground. Now our country revolves around a President’s 123 characters he writes himself in private paranoia. Is write the right word?

No one made money from Lincoln’s words and we were inspired. A media corporation profits from Trump’s words and we are degraded. Think of that colossal difference. Perhaps we are dying as a nation. Perish the thought! Or relish. Perish and relish can rhyme in a poem! Sweet, sweet assonance.

I have a suggestion for people in crisis: occasionally, try going into the creative mind to alleviate the terror. Or go there all the time. It doesn’t have to cost a cent and can dramatically lower stress. It can lead to results or nothing at all. It can occupy or empty the mind. A creative addiction can help lick another type of addiction. Knitting or crystal meth? Needles or syringes? You think I’m kidding? You haven’t seen what I’ve seen. I only write this because I believe I am onto something that could help people. I am well into my creative mind right now writing about it. I feel instantly better when this occurs.

Try it sometime in a moment of crisis.

In this past year, I have seen men perish in part and full because they didn’t cultivate the creative mind. Such creativity might have never have hitherto existed within them or it was murdered by this or that nefarious agent, but it was absent when I sat next to them. The absence of a face gave the absence all away.

You haven’t lived until you’ve seen a faceless human being perish right in front of you after his perishable goods-expiration date arrived like so much a bell buzzing to announce the end of a classroom period.

I’ve seen it, but I’ll never be able to accurately describe what I saw of faceless perishing. I felt part of me as an American disintegrate during the observation. Luckily, I think, most of the men were loaded to the gills on prescription opioids and pyschotropics to ease their passing. There is something in that, prescription drugs employed as a hazy (and lucrative) method to carry out a totalitarianism that is far from benign. What is that something?

As I said, I’ve seen this perishing. When it happens, my creative mind kicks in hard. My eyes start blinking, photographing the secret living documents of the American human underworld. I hear the camera’s shutter clicking fast, the sound vaguely reminiscent of the opening of that one Duran Duran video from the 80s…what song was that?

Think.

“Rio.” That’s it! Is it?

In the interest of personal accounting, I have listed the results of going into my creative mind during the last catastrophic year of my life. Most of these would have have never resulted had I not experienced the catastrophe. Believe me, I have thought long and hard about that.

I took directions from a bald eagle.

I wrote poetry, some of it along a river, some of it sitting on driftlogs. I may have a chapbook in me.

I started a blog.

I recorded dreams.

I made up dozens of band names (even in jail!).

I built 100 driftwood forts and started a Fort Message Board.

I wrote letters to friends that were never read.

I wrote letters to my friends in jail expounding my faith in going into the creative mind while in jail and asked them to mail me their creativity.

I willed creative freedom to a friend incarcerated in a church.

I wrote a proposal to the county jail commander offering my services in overhauling the jail library to no avail.

I thatched the yard.

I imagined a new life in Gold Beach.

I sowed wild flowers in a drainage ditch of the probation office.

I went through an early Bob Dylan phase 30 years after the first one, and began to better understand his ideas. Yes, don’t look back.

I applied creativity to strengthen friendships.

I concocted fantasy scenarios of reunions with lost friends and collaborators.

I conceived, co-produced and co-marketed a line of limpet necklaces (buy one for the summer!).

I gathered beaverwood and appointed my writing studio with it.

I wrote the first novella of a projected three-part erotica series—one set on the contemporary Oregon Coast, one set in Oregon City in the 1970s, one set in Turkey in the 1990s.

I put some of my writing curriculum on website that pays teachers for their materials and made $2.46.

I taught five writing workshops in a wonderful private home.

I wrote two dope articles for the cannabis trade press that were entirely made up.

I meditated on the word “blackballed” and manifested positive energy from the effort.

I whipped up several new recipes with turmeric and purple cabbage.

I conceived of a detective novel/TV show concept called The Watershed, set in the accursed Columbia River Watershed.

I invented a board game.

I read 300 books.

I cast the verb “cast” into the ocean, like fishing for surf perch, and reeled in some ideas.

I wrote 8000 words about growing up in Oregon City that will never be published in a book.

I wrote 47 cover letters to no avail.

I embraced a radical and successful approach to healing my body.

I took the high road over and over and found good creative ground there. There is no entering the creative mind when taking the low road. There is nothing there but loss and those doing the losing.

(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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