Give Me Beer or Wine or Whiskey on Oregon’s Ocean Beaches or Give Me Death!

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

On Tuesday, a state lawmaker introduced a bill that would prohibit drinking alcohol on Oregon’s ocean beaches. According to the Eugene Register Guard, “House Bill 3441 would ban people from having either unopened or empty booze containers on the beach as well. The new misdemeanor crime would be punishable by a maximum fine of $1,250 or 30 days in jail.”

Thirty days in jail for drinking beer around a beach bonfire, a sacred rite of Oregon passage since cheap lagers and jug wine were available to drink in moderation or to excess.

I may have to brush up on the most efficient methods of self-immolation as a form of political protest. It’s worked before. Perhaps it is a good thing that Oregon is one of the few states that allows the retail sale of 190-proof Everclear. I take a couple of shots, douse myself, fall into the beach bonfire, and the rest is history. YouTube it to the world. Give me a beer on Oregon’s great birthright or give me a fiery sacrificial death!

The article went on: “The bill’s lead sponsor, Rep. Janeen Sollman, a Hillsboro Democrat, said she introduced the bill at the request of a constituent who, for years, has been documenting the alcoholic beverage bottles and cans that are left on Oregon’s beaches.“I’m not a party crasher…I don’t have a problem with people enjoying a drink,” she said. “It’s unfortunate that this will impact good people who have been doing it the right way.”

The good people? The right way? Who is that? What is that? Show me Ms. Sollman. Teach me with a new brochure and the right recycling suburban people. It’s strictly BYOB. I’m thinking a bottle of Jameson for me.

When is the last time you visited the beach Ms. Sollman? Have you ever imbibed there? If you had, you would have never sponsored an insane bill that undermines virtually everything I love about Oregon and its great embrace of useful sandy socialism.

Someone from State Parks has a nefarious Puritanical hand in this. I bet this person hasn’t seen the ocean in years.

I had the best date of my life on a beach, cooking salmon on a cedar plank on a smoky driftwood fire, drinking wine with a spectacular woman I should have married. You want to make that illegal?

Let’s crush this bill and mock the Representative for perhaps the most absurd proposal to restrict earthy personal liberties in state history. She has no idea where she lives. Come down to a beach bonfire populated by senior citizens and cans of Rainier this month and make a speech. I’ll give you a copy of my novel, The Great Birthright.

More from the article: “Sollman said her bill targets only alcoholic beverages because, she claimed, those are most frequently the containers that get left behind. “I don’t think this littering is what Gov. McCall had in mind,” she said, referring to the Beach Bill.”

I know for a fact Governor Tom McCall loved drinking a stiff scotch on the rocks on the beach near his (Lincoln City) Road End’s vacation home. I have interviewed witnesses who were right there with him. He was a supremely happy man during those moments.

Rain Meditations: New, Old, Refashioned, Repurposed

NSP Meditations, Of Walking in Rain, Oregon Coast_History, Writing , , , , , ,

Recent record rains in Astoria brought to watery life some new, old, refashioned, repurposed meditations on rain. They are not about weather. Good hard rain rarely is about the weather.

In Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey wrote: “Give me a dark smeary shiny night full of rain. That’s when the fear starts. That’s when you sell the juice.” Charles Bukowski wrote, “People run from rain but sit in bathtubs full of water.” Henry Miller wrote, in Tropic of Rain, “These are night thoughts produced by walking in the rain after two thousand years of Christianity.”

These are my thoughts produced by walking in morning rain for 20 years on the Oregon Coast:

Rain is born to run, the sun born to sit in a soft chair. Rain is random, exciting, the sun constant, boring. Rain gallivants, the sun merely beams. Rain ruins guns, the sun keeps powder dry. Rain ruins smart phones, the sun facilitates their non-stop use. Prometheus stole fire from the gods. Who stole rain? No one. Rain was an anonymous gift. The sun compels people to pay for dangerous indoor tans. Rain costs nothing. Rain plays chess and solitaire with you at the same time. The sun plays no games. If you could be any type of rain, what would it be? What’s cooler? Sleet or drizzle. Rain exudes perpetual ruth; the sun often shines ruthlessly. Who would you rather play outside with? Rain or the sun? Puddle smashing is the best kind of smashing. Join the monochrome adventure club. What is your rain dance? What is your best rain story of all time? Lawnmowers loathe rain, grass loves rain. Rain is a bindle, the sun carry-on luggage. What is the color of rain? What’s in a box of rain? You can slide in rain. You can smear rain, but never touch the sun. Rain sluices gold. Rain inspires calm. The terrain of rain is unknown, so go exploring. Rain lubricates the organic machine and pedals the water cycle. Rain is the ultimate in evolution and revolution. Rain transmits, the sun dehydrates. Rain never gives you the whatever. Corduroy is not a great rain repellent fabric yet wearing it feels like rain. Bill Murray character in Tootsie said, “I want 90 people who just came out of the worst rainstorm in the city’s history. These are people who are alive on the planet until they dry off.” Rain strops those who walk into it. Strop! What a verb! Football is always more memorably played in rain because there is mud. I was water-boarded in a junior high football game during a deluge when I went to recover a fumble and became submerged in standing rainwater on the field; ten players buried me face down and I nearly drowned. It was back and forth under the water, gasping for air, until the referee unraveled us. I recovered the football and came out alive. I later scored a touchdown to help my team complete a perfect season of no losses.

Skateboarding in rain is totally bitchin.’ Using an umbrella is cheating rain, a chastity belt. Eliminate all umbrellas from your life! Steal them from bars and hotels and let rain do its proper magic on arid, rainless people. In The Warriors, the boys almost get undone by a gang of girls wielding umbrellas. There is only one rule for rain: advance directly into it. Never let it rain on your parade; rain is the parade. Rain is democratic, the sun a dictatorship. Rain is a woman. America is not a nation of rain. Even corporations need rain. Walking in rain is the beginning and end of understanding yourself. Rain is mystery, the sun obvious. Rain is sonic, the sun silent. Rain meanders; the sun stays put. Rain grays; the sun blinds. Rain makes you improvise; the sun makes you rehearse. Rain is a semi colon, the sun a period. Rain is a noun and verb. Rain doesn’t need an article to introduce it in a sentence; the sun does. Reflections generated from rain are the most beautifully mirrored images in the world. Rain portends nothing. It means everything. Rain falling on the ocean is the waking dream of life. More Portlanders are using umbrellas; this trend will not end well for Oregon. The eleventh episode of the second season of Barney Miller is the greatest existential mediation on rain in the history of television. Dial it up on YouTube and see for yourself. When I served ten days in jail, the only time I saw natural light was on the roof of the jail; it was ten o’clock at night and it was raining and I played the basketball game of horse with other inmates while it rained. I wore an orange windbreaker, decent rain apparel. My rooftop moment was most certainly not like the great ablution rain escape scene in The Shawshank Redemption. My great ablution rain scene after leaving incarceration has yet to occur. It will. It’s gonna be awesome.

I wrote a book about rain that only sells when it rains. I tried to make it rain for me, like the rappers rap about. I broke even on rain. I have about a hundred copies of the book left. I recently met a new friend precisely because of my rain book. She is as eternal and analog as rain, although she must move like stereo in rain. Dire Straits is a remarkable rock band of rain. Bebop jazz is the music of rain. In the song “Raspberry Beret,” Prince sang:

The rain sounds so cool when it hits the barn roof

And the horses wonder who u are

Thunder drowns out what the lightning sees

U feel like a movie star

Prince is dead and there isn’t any rain in Purple Rain, but nevertheless he is still a prodigious man of rain with many more rain songs in the sacred sonic vault just waiting to leak out.

I miss Sonny, my beloved husky. I put her down after almost 17 years and countless moments of walking in rain together. During our last visit to the beach, 20 minutes before euthanasia, it rained. A few weeks later, I let her ashes loose upon the ocean; it rained that afternoon, and one day I will recognize when she falls upon me…as rain…and I will cry with joy.

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Hummingbird Healing

Astoria, NSP Meditations , ,

Last night, I walked outside as dusk fell and noticed a lime green-colored hummingbird splayed on the deck. She probably flew into the window. I knelt down and inspected her. She was alive, apparently stunned, barely breathing. I took her inside to the kitchen and wondered what to do. I felt desperate. No time to Google. I am sick of Googling and later seeing ads connected to my searches. So I called a friend to Google for answers but she didn’t answer.

The bird rested on the cutting board. I went to work and improvised it without Google. I put some cotton balls in a small bowl, nestled the bird in the cotton, sliced up a pear for nectar (??), placed a thin wedge near the bird’s beak, draped a dish towel over three quarters of the bowl, took a picture of my patient (whose coloring had now dramatically changed), turned off the lights, left the kitchen, sat on a chair, and waited. The living room soon became dark and I sat alone in the dark missing my husky and wanting that bird to live with such fervor that it brought me to tears.

An hour later, I got up to check on the bird. I turned on the lights, rolled back the towel, and the bird flew up into the kitchen and over to my adjacent writing studio, where it perched on a piece of driftwood!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I walked over, gathered the bird up in the towel, walked outside, opened the towel, and the bird fluttered away into the night, right to the rhododendron bush in the back yard.

I fell asleep an hour later, happier than I had been in months.

This morning, I saw the bird outside the window. I’ll rig up a hummingbird feeder soon.

 (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 New Oregon Coast Pot Trail

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The short modern history of legal marijuana in Oregon goes like this: In 1973, Oregon became the first state to decriminalize the use of marijuana, making possession of less than an ounce akin to getting a traffic ticket. In 1998 voters approved a ballot initiative establishing a medical marijuana program, the second one in the nation after California in 1996. In 2014 Oregon became the fourth state after Colorado, Washington and Alaska to legalize recreational use of marijuana. The 2014 law also allowed Oregon residents to grow up to four plants. On October 1, 2015, people in Oregon aged 21 and over could purchase marijuana from licensed dispensaries in municipalities and counties that approved retail sales.

And then the great Oregon green rush began. It was a stoned stampede if there is such an oxymoronic image. Pot use in Oregon is the most beautiful peaceful democratic happening I’ve seen in my lifetime. Over the decades, I voted for legalization multiple times via poorly conceived ballot measures. They were all crushed. My mother voted against every one of them.

Then one day, my mother didn’t. Then came sweet leafy victory, and it almost makes one believe in the power of direct democracy, which of course doesn’t have anything to do with the Presidential election and certainly should.

I love watching the revolution unfold. (And I don’t even use pot!) It’s transforming the state’s economy and cultural groove. I can’t wait until the rural dispensaries join the Chambers of Commerce and enter floats in parades and sponsor 4-H events. Fire up all the abandoned kilns in high schools around the state and start having students learn how to make proper ceramic pipes and bongs. The community college associate degrees in cultivation are coming, too. The industry, and that’s exactly what it is, organized a political lobby as well. Imagine those meetings in smoke-filled rooms!

Dog Walker, Pineapple Chunk, Jonah, Obama, Queen Funk, Flo, Crater Lake, Violet Delight, Happy Accident, Bruce Banner, Homer Simpson. These are names for buds on sale at Oregon Coast dispensaries. I must say, they handily beat out titles of Oregon Coast craft beers. But…I have to ask…where the hell is the Tom McCall strain? He was Oregon’s Governor in 1973 when he signed that pot decriminalization bill into progressive law. He was a Republican! Someone get on that.

Oregon’s visionary law was the slow sticky genesis of everything modern marijuana in the future nation known as the United States of Marijuana. The terrible destructive reign of alcohol in America will come to an end in less than a generation. When it happens, we’ll be a much better country, I assure you. Our foreign policy will be distinctly different. We’ll finally save the whales and let beavers do their thing to heal our watersheds. We’ll garden more, play flutes, and bring back corduroy and macramé to its rightful place in fashion.

Perhaps the only thing some of us might lament with legalization is the extinction of the shifty pot dealer who overstays his welcome or dilutes the product with oregano. He was an American cultural icon who will go the way of the Pony Express rider and the newspaper delivery boy. So it goes.

I sense that even if a visitor to Oregon has no interest in pot, they will investigate the marijuana retail scene out of sheer curiosity or historical value. I’ve actually seen this with my own eyes with cruise ship passengers flooding downtown Astoria. The Oregon Coast’s pot shops particularly reflect the contrasting approaches of legally selling marijuana to the public. You might get the jewelry-store/dentist office aesthetic with a hot young tech running the front desk or the dank, beaded basement of a bespectacled stoner uncle who worships Frank Zappa. From what I can determine, there isn’t much in between. I hope there never is.

As of this writing, there may well be over 70 dispensaries on the Oregon Coast—Seventy! It’s the new cloud cover, the new Oregon Coast Pot Trail up and down Highway 101. It’s rapidly becoming a tourist road trip destination attracting customers from all over the country, if not the world. The gospel is out. How could it not with access to free beaches, jetties, yurts, driftwood forts, forested trails, keyhole limpets, lighthouses, tribal casinos, mushrooms, secret coves, osprey nests, clearcuts, fishing ports, dive bars, bonfires and mermaids? Some of the pot shops even have ocean views! There are even special products for uptight dogs!

All across Oregon, the tax revenue is pouring in. Entrepreneurs have: created hundreds of living wage jobs, many in poorer rural areas; repurposed hundreds of formerly abandoned buildings and added them to property tax rolls; let loose an exploding market for seeds, clones, concentrates, tinctures and edibles; established multiple marijuana print and online media empires which have generated millions of dollars of advertising and untold profits for digital and ink printing businesses. Let us not also forget the millions of tax dollars saved from ending the insane incarceration for marijuana-related crimes, a dramatic reduction of illegal grow operations on private and public land, and a new jargon for all things pot production that will blow your mind and make you laugh at the same time. There isn’t a shred of irony to the pot revolution in Oregon. How could there be when it was 40 years in the fomenting?

I see no end in sight to the benefits of pot in Oregon, although the kinks of production/selling are still being worked out. They will be soon. Marijuana will continue to integrate itself subtlety into everyday Oregon life and eventually smooth its way into tailgates at college football games. Why other states don’t legalize it immediately is beyond rational comprehension. That’s a self-inflicted, largely red-state problem and a needlessly dumb one. Their legislators can drink themselves to death and watch their states get left far behind in the vapor. Let them eat Bud.

(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.)

 

Henry Miller Writing Time

NSP Meditations, Writing , ,

The writings of Henry Miller burned through me like wildfire the other day. I don’t recall what I was doing, possibly gardening, or where I was, perhaps waiting outside the probation office, but key passages from many of his classic novels and overlooked memoirs seared my imagination like never before.

I always wanted to teach a Henry Miller-themed nonfiction writing workshop but doubted it would have attracted enough interest to fly. I also wasn’t sure how I was going to teach it but I sensed a potential session would produce the most extraordinary writing from participants if they managed to let go of everything repressed and traditional American about them. Moreover, I have also always wanted to write about the only woman I ever met who reminded me of everything I read about Miller’s second wife, June Miller, if June Miller had lived on the Oregon Coast and had come of age in the era of smart phones, rap music, methamphetamine and yoga pants. (I think I’ll leave this project for later.)

Below are some of my favorite Henry Miller lines, many of which found their circuitous way into the rain and gig books. In fact, Miller’s entire unconventional career provided a section of the literary road map I used to publish my books and hustle up an unlikely audience for them. As I try to reinvent myself and my publishing life, I will have to consult this map again on how to get the writing (on real paper) out. I’ve done it before and believe I can do it again. I must try. This time, however, I don’t have any money to pay for printing. Henry Miller didn’t either, in the early days, none, and yet he managed by inventing new methods. Of course he had June to assist him, somewhat.

A paragraph from the The Air-Conditioned Nightmare: “Often, on returning to my studio at midnight, I would stand at the table and register in this celestial sort of ledger the innumerable little items which constitute a writer’s bookkeeping: dreams, plans of attack and defense, remembrances, titles of books I intended to write, names and addresses of potential creditors, obsessive phrases, editors to harry, battlefields, monuments, monastic retreats and so on.”

Lines from Tropic of Cancer:

“These are night thoughts produced by walking in the rain after two thousand years of Christianity.”

“Ideas have to be wedded to action.”

“Get off the gold standard of literature.”

“The earth is not an arid plateau of health and comfort, but a sprawling female with a velvet torso that swells and heaves with ocean billows.”

“That the task the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values.”

“I have nothing to do with creaking machinery of humanity. I belong to the earth.”

“Let us have more oceans, new oceans that blot out the past…”

“The great incestuous wish is to flow on…”

Henry Miller’s advice in Big Sur and The Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch:

“The most important thing (for a writer)—how to reach the public, or better, how to create your own public—still remains to be faced. Without a public it’s a suicide. No matter how small, there has to be an audience. I mean, an appreciative, enthusiastic audience, a selective audience.

What few young writers realize, it seems to me, is that they must find—create, invent!—the way to reach their readers. It isn’t enough to write a good book, a beautiful book, or even a better book than most. It isn’t enough to even write an “original” book! You have to gig that book with all your heart in order to gain traction.” (I changed one word in the last sentence.)

Lines from The Colossus of Maroussi:

“I like men with weather in their blood.”

“With this troupe of linguists, jugglers, acrobats, and water nymphs things went whacky right from the start.”

“There is no salvation in becoming to a world which is crazy.”

“We’ve got a language…we’re still making it. It’s a language for poets, not for shopkeepers.”

“It isn’t money that sustains me—it’s the faith I have in myself, in my own powers. In spirit, I’m a millionaire—maybe that’s the best thing about America, that you believe you’ll rise again.”

(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 Last DJs of Rock and Roll–Tune in on Oregon Coast Radio!

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On my existential born to run, born to lose errands up and down the Oregon Coast last summer and fall, I stopped listening to my mix tapes and CDs. I’d heard them all before and I needed something new to survive.

I turned to radio and radio delivered.

I wrote the little essay you are about to read as a tribute while alternately listening to FM rock stations in Coos Bay, Gold Beach and Brookings. I wrote it while holed up in a RV Park in a rusted and porous 1977 Winnebago rig I christened “Hey Joe” because its previous owner was named Joe. He had recently died of internal rot and left his coffeemaker (and cane) behind in the rig and I drank cheap coffee brewed from a dead man’s coffeemaker while every now and then, a classic from Jimi Hendrix came on, including one time, “Hey Joe.”

Now that’s rock and roll and like it.

In 2002, well before iPods, satellite radio and streaming services, Tom Petty released a scathing rock song titled “The Last DJ.” It hit number 22 on the Billboard hot singles chart and then disappeared. Part of the chorus went:

And there goes the last DJ who plays what he wants to plays / and says what he wants to say / hey, hey hey

The song predicted the impending extinction of the independent rock radio DJ, a frequently notorious and influential player in American popular culture for nearly half a century.

I am happy to report the extinction hasn’t yet arrived at the Oregon Coast and one of the sublime joys of cruising Highway 101 is tuning into local stations and listening to hometown DJs broadcasting the rock music they want you to hear—and not a corporate suit lounging in LA or New York! It’s almost never current. Sometimes it’s not even rock and roll. Who cares!

In Astoria, Tillamook, Florence, Reedsport, Coos Bay, Gold Beach, Brookings and other stations I undoubtedly missed, the last DJs are playing what they want to play and saying what they want to say. So tune in! Search the dial as you roll on down the highway. It’s fun, utterly spontaneous, educational, and at times, vertiginous.

These DJs are true men and women of rock. They care about Rush’s new album. They care about Neil Peart’s drum kits. They wax passionately about an upcoming Rick Springfield or Joan Jett concert at one of the tribal casinos. They will hook a listener up with free tickets and backstage passes to Cheap Trick gigs at county fairs. They will argue that the Moody Blues belong in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and not Madonna. They believe Toto’s first three albums were vastly overlooked. They will play tracks from those albums that should have been hits. Because these DJs know early Toto!

They will play deep cuts from Sniff and the Tears. They will know the name of the lead singer of Sniff and the Tears and have interviewed him by phone or in person when Sniff and the Tears were gigging boat or hunting shows.

These DJs know rock. They know the lineups of Oregon Jam I and II. They were most likely rocking there as teenagers or young adults. They still have the concert t-shirts and wear them to church or bed. They’re probably broadcasting from tiny, slapdash studios, feeling the rock. It might be raining. This being Oregon, they’re probably stoned from the pot they bought legally across the street. When they start talking about rain and they’re stoned, a listener has just entered the Oregon Coast Rock Zone and you will never leave. Why would you want to…for Coldplay?

During the breaks, they’re reporting local news or plugging events like a goat show, muscle car rally, reading to dogs at the library, a Viking festival, a mushroom tour, a Halloween dance at the grange, a canned food drive.

Then it’s back to the music and sets with juxtapositions that create instant surrealism in a listener. A streaming service could never produce this dizzying effect.

Try:

Alan Parsons Project

Night Ranger

The Richie Family

Tony Bennett

a-ha

The Mills Brothers

Or:

Gene Vincent

The Byrds

Sheb Wooley

Rolling Stones

Doris Day

War

A DJ might even play “This is Radio Clash” before the station broadcasts the Gold Beach High School football game in mono. If there is another DJ playing that raucous anthem in America, Friday night under the lights, I’d like to know.

There isn’t. This is the Oregon Coast!

One Saturday afternoon drive from Gold Beach to Brookings, I tuned into 95.3 FM, easily my favorite coastal station, and listened to Ed play a set of great rock songs that I had never heard in my life and I’ve been listening to rock for 35 years! I heard “Warm San Francisco Nights by The Animals” ; a b-side hit from the Beach Boys I can’t identify; “Still, You Turn Me On,” by Emerson Lake and Palmer; “Everything’s Coming Our Way” by Santana; and a deep unknown track by The Pretenders, a band I worship and saw in concert in 1984.

Who is Ed? He is a man of rock. He is high on rock. He is no algorithm. He is a real DJ playing what he wants to play. He is wearing an April Wine or White Snake concert t-shirt while doing so.

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