Three Recent Deaths: Breslin, Berry, Barris

NSP Meditations, Writing , , , ,

Jimmy Breslin. Chuck Berry. Chuck Barris. These men died recently and I’d like to share my somewhat unique connection to each one of them.

Jimmy Breslin first. He passed away at the age of 88 after a long career as a NYC newspaper columnist and author. He wrote probably the most famous column of all time, “Digging JFK’s Grave was His Honor,” in the immediate aftermath of JFK’s assassination. Breslin found an angle for the story where no other reporter even dreamed of looking. I’ve used the column in writing workshops for years as a way of instructing students how to look for an original angle to a story, and that story could be themselves. The prompt is: where am I not looking? I also wrote a column years ago called “The Breslin Angle” where I went to the beach during the Super Bowl and found some truly incredible stories of people (and their dogs) who had no interest in watching the game. Those people included a group of homeless men and women barbecuing hot dogs and drinking cheap beer. They didn’t even know the Super Bowl was being played!

In recent months, I have thought a lot about the Breslin Angle for the life-altering story I am living right now. Where am I not looking? I keep asking myself this question as more and more unexpected events and feelings unfold. I’ve written a lot on that prompt, lately, and it invariably leads to fresh insights on how to survive.

Breslin’s comic novel about the mafia, The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight, is also an inspiration. It provides the perfect model for the teaching novel I want to write one day, a definitive book, THE BOOK, about teaching high school that no one seem to be able to write. I completed a teaching novel back in 2012 but it never went anywhere—it was an attempt by a rank amateur—and I can see now that its tone and format were the wrong approach, very wrong approach. I think there was one short scene with any humor in it. I see now how important a role humor can play in telling a certain bleak or unjust story, fiction or nonfiction. I certainly plan to inject humor into the book I am writing about my current situation as a newly-minted sex offender who never had sex because at times this story is funny in a black comedy kind of way. I keep reminding myself how funny some of the scenes are in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. If I hadn’t found humor in my situation, I would have gone down the drain with it a long time ago.

Next Chuck Berry. He died at 90. I saw him in the flesh when he opened for The Grateful Dead at Portland Meadows on May 28, 1995. The sound was terrible and it pushed 90 degrees that day but I got close enough to the stage to see Chuck, in a suit, then in his late 60s, do his thing for 45 minutes. I’ve always wondered what Portland pickup band he played with for the gig. And to think he would he keep gigging another 20 years after this show! Will I gig in my 80s?

After Chuck, the Dead played one of their final shows before Jerry died three months later. It was completely forgetful performance except for the unforgettable incident where one of my then Hillsboro High School students, buck naked and body-painted, twirled up to me and informed me that she was flying on acid and did I want some? I declined the gift, introduced her to my girlfriend, and then she gave me a big hug and said, “I love you Mr. Love.” Back in class the next Monday, she barely remembered a thing.

I have listened to Chuck Berry’s immortal rock and roll music my entire adult life. His tunes are littered through most of my 500 or so mix tapes. They are raucous or lilting two-minute sonic novels about lust, wanderlust and social upheaval. “School Days” is the best song about high school I’ve ever heard. (Nirvana’s “School” is a close second.) It still holds up because it chronicles a certain endless American teenage desire that is exactly the same as it was in the 50s when he wrote it—get me out of class! There is something better waiting for me! Hail Hail rock and roll / deliver me from the days of old!

Chuck Berry was also a superb author. His, autobiography, published in 1987, begins with this sentence: “This book is entirely written, phrase by phrase, by yours truly, Chuck Berry.” He wrote the first draft in jail, serving time for tax evasion. I consider it the best rock memoir I’ve ever read and I’ve read about a hundred of them. Hmmm, maybe there is something to be said for writing a draft of a potentially great book while behind bars. Maybe I’ve got that going for me now.

Finally, Chuck Barris. He gave up the ghost at 87. He was the creator of The Dating Game, The Newlywed Game and The Gong Show, which Barris also hosted. Remember The Gong Show, with a cocaine-fueled Barris running all over the set and introducing truly bizarre acts? I sure do because I watched it almost every afternoon in junior high when I wasn’t playing sports.

Chuck Barris was also an author of several books, one of which was his 1984 autobiography, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. In the book, (which I have read) Barris claimed to have worked for the CIA as an assassin during the 1960s and ‘70s. George Clooney directed the cinematic version of it (I’ve seen it).

I met Chuck Barris once, in 2007, and I will certainly never forget our three minutes together. It was in the liquorless green room of Wordstock, a huge and boring literary festival in Portland. At the time the event was staged in the Convention Center and had a cavernous, industrial feel to it. I was there promoting my book about the Portland Trail Blazers’ 1977 NBA Championship and Barris was there promoting a book I no longer recall. He would have been 77 then and barely stood over five feet. I did a double take when I saw him, but sure enough, it was him! We were the only two authors in the room and he was sitting on a couch drinking a Coke. I got myself a 7-Up and came over to him.

“Mr. Barris, my name is Matt Love and I am an Oregon author presenting at the festival. May I join you?”

“Sure, have a seat,” he said.

We shook hands and I sat across from him in an overstuffed cartoon chair.

I had only one thing on my mind and it wasn’t his book. It was The Gong Show. I launched into a story about me being a high school teacher and having witnessed various student councils raise a lot of money for good causes over the years with The Gong Show concept. I thanked him for that and said it probably happened all over the country and was probably happening right now as we spoke. I told him his idea helped a lot of students and made them laugh at the same time. That is an excellent combination to pull off.

Barris waited for a moment. His face appeared a bit puzzled. “No one has ever said that to me before,” he said. “Thank you.”

He held out his soda pop and we clinked glasses and it resounded through the empty room. Chuck Barris! I was smiling. He was, too.

I knew he had a gig coming up soon so I got up to leave him alone to prepare. I had a gig, too, same time as his. He was in the big room; I was in a little room.

Barris reached out and shook my hand. “Good luck,” he said. I thanked him, walked out of the room, and went and did my show. I don’t recall a single thing about it.

Lost and Found 2: Rescuing Dogs, Reality and Metaphor

Lost and Found, NSP Meditations , , , , ,

Long ago, I dated (and eventually married) a remarkable woman who taught me some of my greatest lessons on the meaning of Lost and Found. One lesson in particular has always stood out, but it recently evolved because my circumstances dramatically changed.

The original lesson unfolded in the slower days before cell phones and a stray dog crossed our path as I drove us to a movie in Portland. Rain fell in walls across the streets. It was one of those Oregon rains where drivers pull over to wait out the deluge.

She told me to stop—now!—but I objected because arriving late to a movie then ranked as my worst pet peeve. She raised her voice, commanding me to stop. I did. She said, “There are three kinds of people in the world: 1) people who help lost dogs when it’s not convenient; 2) people who help lost dogs when it’s not convenient and raining; 3) people who never help lost dogs. I only date the second person.”

The rescue mission was on right there. It required considerable effort, but we corralled the dripping dog in the car, and read a phone number on his tag. We drove for what seemed like forever until we found payphone. She made a call and left a message. A few hours later, we reunited the dog with its overjoyed owner and celebrated by cooking a fancy Italian meal and going bowling.

Ever since that rainy afternoon a quarter century ago, I have made it a point to help lost dogs (and cats) who stray across my path. Naturally, every time I render aid, I am on my way to doing something else: work, an appointment, meeting, grocery shopping, social occasion. Aren’t we always doing something else when we encounter a lost dog?

In 20 years of living at the Oregon Coast, I have encountered 15 dogs that were strays and rescued 11 of them (yes, I keep score.) Sometimes, a lost dog simply won’t come to me and I lose it during the chase. I’ll never forget my failed attempt at tackling a greyhound on a beach; it was never seen by its owners again.

My most recent successful mission occurred a year ago in Astoria. I was driving the hills of the south slope when I saw what appeared to be a discarded stuffed animal in a drainage ditch. But then the stuffed animal moved, so I halted the truck and got out. Moments later I was loading an elderly white lapdog into the back of the truck. A day later, with the help of a friend, we reunited the dog with her owner. I no longer recall where I was going or what I was supposed to be doing when the dog appeared. I got there eventually and did what needed to be done.

As I said, the lesson imparted to me long ago about the importance of attempting to rescue lost dogs has taken on new meaning because of my unexpected immersion into the criminal justice system.

The number of lost human beings I’ve encountered wandering through this system has been staggering, and I partially count myself as one of them, although I sense, with the help of new friends, family and ineffable forces, I am on my way to finding myself. Still, there is a long way to go because I have learned the journey of finding yourself is a life-long endeavor.

Back to rescuing lost dogs. A thought occurs to me: could I apply the lesson when I encounter lost people? I can easily think of a dozen reasons why the analogy falls apart in reality and metaphor. But I can also think of ways it does hold up in both categories.

Twentieth Anniversary of Heaven’s Gate Cult Suicide and its Oregon Coast Roots

NSP Meditations , , ,

On September 14, 1975 approximately 200 people attended a meeting at the Bayshore Inn in Waldport on the Central Oregon Coast in response to a flyer posted around the area. The flyer read:

UFOs—Why they are here. Who they have come for. When they will land. Two individuals say they were sent from the level above human and will return to that level in a spaceship (UFO) within the next three months. This man and woman will discuss how the transition from the human level to the next level is accomplished, and when this may be done. If you have ever entertained the idea that there might be a real physical level in space beyond the Earth’s confines, you will want to attend this meeting.

At the meeting, Marshall Applewhite (Bo) and Bonnie Nettles (Peep) announced the imminent arrival of a spaceship that would transport interested parties to the “next evolutionary level.” Shortly afterward, 23 Waldport-area residents left with Applewhite and Nettles. The incident made national news and prompted CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite to remark during the October 8 broadcast, “A score of persons from a small Oregon town have disappeared. It’s a mystery whether they’ve been taken on a so-called trip to eternity…or simply taken.” Twenty-two years later, on March 26, 1997, coinciding with the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet, 38 members of Applewhite’s Heaven’s Gate cult, including its founder, committed suicide by asphyxiation at the cult’s compound near San Diego. They killed themselves by swallowing a concoction of applesauce, Phenobarbital and vodka while plastic bags were fastened around their heads. All victims wore matching sweat suits and Nike sneakers. Males had been castrated. None of the Waldport people were among the dead.

The New York Post rushed out a book two months after the suicide. I’ve read it and it has some decent reporting here and there. In 2014, a university press published a professor’s book on the Heaven’s Gate cult. From what the online reviews indicated, the book proved a rather uninteresting and broad academic treatment of phenomenon that lacked a human dimension. I haven’t bothered to read it. Just why did these coastal people pack up and leave their lives in a matter of days? Who were they? Who are they now? It’s an existential mystery of the highest order!

Over the years, I’ve heard that some of the original 23 are back in Waldport. Perhaps they are willing to talk. No writer, as far as I can tell, has ever bothered visiting Waldport to seek out this incredible Oregon story. I am still kicking myself for not pursuing it when I lived in the area. I was in Waldport on a regular basis for events or hitting the dive bars and probably interacted with a few of the cult’s refugees.

The more interesting story of Heaven’s Gate is just waiting for someone curious to get on it.

The Keyhole Limpet Magical Necklace

NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches , , , ,

Nestucca Spit Press is excited to join with Astoria-based Sea Creations to produce and distribute The Keyhole Limpet Magical Necklace.

A keyhole limpet is a marine sea snail that has a conical shell. It lives on intertidal rocks and eats algae as it scrapes along the surface. The average keyhole limpet gets hit by 8000 waves a day and can exert up to 80 pounds of pressure on a rock. When keyhole limpets die, many of their shells end up on secret Oregon beaches, where obsessed humans (and some dogs) hunt for them and amass astonishing collections that defy reasoning.

Many collectors swear the shells of keyhole limpets frequently bestow magical powers if worn around the neck. These powers include clairvoyance, clarity, presence, higher math, philanthropy, healing, sagacity, spiritual transformation, incantations, romantic advice, charming eccentricity and creative inspiration. The wearer merely needs to hold the shell aloft, look through the keyhole, open the mind…and keep looking until…something…unlocks…

The Keyhole Limpet Magical Necklace is 100% guaranteed grown and harvested organically on the Oregon Coast. Suitable for humans ages 1-101, dogs, too. The necklaces cost $5.99 each or two for ten bucks. A bulk discount rate is also available for retailers, shamans or other individuals. Just imagine how popular and clairvoyant you’d be if everyone in your workplace or social circle was wearing keyhole limpets around their necks. To order, contact NSP through the web site. We also are willing to donate necklaces for fundraisers.

[themify_col grid=”2-1 first”]Single Keyhole Limpet Shell Necklace
$5.99 (+ $2 shipping)





[/themify_col][themify_col grid=”2-1″]Keyhole Limpet Shell Necklaces
2 for $10 (+ $2 shipping)





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On Detective Fiction and a Writing Workshop in Astoria

NSP Meditations, Writing , , , ,

I came to detective fiction late in life but now love reading it, the classics and new coarse masters, and sometimes writing with that terse, hardboiled tone. Right now, I think contemporary detective fiction is exploring American issues of race, class, political corruption and police brutality in much richer ways than so-called literary fiction, at least in my reading.

In 2015 I published my own detective novel, The Great Birthright, a parody of the genre, and hope to write another one next year. There is something liberating in the writing of fiction with a detective in mind who drives the narrative, investigates this or that. It’s also a good way of investigating one’s self with a bit of detachment and I have certainly been doing a lot of that in recent months.

I am teaching a fiction/nonfiction writing workshop with a detective-based theme on Saturday, April 29 in Astoria. Details are below. Check it out and sign up if interested.

Sherlock Holmes. Nancy Drew. Longmire. Marvel’s Jessica Jones. Shaft. Sam Spade. Nick and Nora. Maigret. Miss Marple. Perry Mason.

The list of famous detectives is endless. Writers create new detectives all the time. All successful stories present unique and compelling protagonists, usually flawed, eccentric, gifted or world weary. The detective almost always reveals some shadow or desire of their creator’s psyche. The writer creates someone he or she wants to be or doesn’t want to be. Sounds like fun, right?

Creating a detective to investigate one’s self, either in the first or third person, is a fascinating exercise in exploration for possible memoir or fiction writing. Who doesn’t remember playing the board game “Clue” and feeling the sheer pleasure of being caught up in becoming a detective and solving a mystery?

On Saturday, April 29 in Astoria, I will teach a writing workshop called, “Finding the Detective Within.” The workshop is a good fit for writers of nonfiction and fiction alike and offers them the rare opportunity to come together, write, collaborate and discuss the role of detecting and investigating in memoir and fiction.

In the workshop, I will present a questionnaire to build a detective, a deduction exercise using physical clues brought by the participants, short readings of real-life mysteries that inspire fictional or personal reflection, and a series of noir prompts that a writer of memoir or fiction can take anywhere they want.

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 12 participants. Participants will pay at the beginning of the workshop. Scholarships are also available. To register, contact me via the Nestucca Spit Press web site or my email address.

Lost and Found in Our Lives; the Beginning of My Journey

Lost and Found, NSP Meditations , , , , , ,

Lost and Found in Our Lives

In January 2017, I pled guilty to a misdemeanor count of “luring a minor.” In my case, there were no allegations of any physical contact, nor any explicit images received or sent. The person involved was one month short of 18. This also didn’t involve someone under my supervision. My written communications were construed by the Clatsop County DA as “creating a sexual narrative.” The quoted phrase is directly from the statute, enacted in 2012. As part of my sentence, I served ten days in the Clatsop County Jail, three more weeks under house arrest, surrendered my teaching license, had to register as a sex offender (for ten years), and will spend two years on probation. Throughout this ongoing experience, I have thought a lot about the theme of “Lost and Found” and in this blog I will occasionally share my journey.

In the aftermath of losing everything that I thought was important in my life, I began finding things—some new, some old. I began noticing the theme of “Lost and Found” everywhere and it became impossible to ignore as I went about finding myself.

Here is a partial list of what I have Lost and Found:

• The incredible essay titled, “Losing Streak” by Kathryn Schulz in the February 13-20th, 2017 edition of the New Yorker. In the essay, which feels like required reading for anyone who has lost anything, she writes: “We lose things because we are flawed; because we are human; because we have things to lose.”
• The novel Dalva by Jim Harrison. I read it for the first time in 25 years and instantly realized how much of its earthy spirit that once imbued and directed my life has been totally lost to me in recent years.
• The three deer in my back yard on a rainy day that helped me find my way back to the importance of rain’s powerful metaphors.
• My sister. I found that I had a really great sister who would not let me drift into a perpetual losing state of mind.
• Meeting a young man recently released from prison living in the woods near Tongue Point who seems almost effortless in his attempt to find himself.
• Listening to a dear friend describe gradually losing the mental ability to perform her job at a high standard. Hearing her relate her fear about finding a different path for her professional life. We made a pact to help one another navigate each other’s state of being lost and fight the fear and dread of traveling in that unknown territory.
• A message in a bottle washed ashore on an Oregon Coast beach that read: “In loving memory of dear GCH on his 78th birthday.”
• Playing a long-lost cassette tape of BB King’s “The Thrill is Gone” and thinking: Isn’t all blues music the story of Lost and Found? And isn’t that also true for virtually every song from the great era of country music as defined by mid-career Merle Haggard and George Jones?
• Reading Rebecca Solnit’s remarkable book, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, where she writes, “Never to get lost is not to live…Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go.”
• A nameless journal discarded in a garbage can on Alameda Street in Astoria. A friend found it several weeks ago and brought it to my attention. The extraordinary journal—all five pages of it—documented a woman’s sense of being lost and trying to find herself after a suicide attempt the previous year. She writes: “Things don’t always make sense even when you want them to. Stories don’t have those endings where all the loose ends and details come together into a resolution that leaves the audience feeling satisfied. This is real life…”

Yes it is real life, I thought to myself when I read this passage. It is the only life where the ongoing art or artlessness of losing and finding represents quite possibly the one universal human process we all experience.

Ask yourself: what have I lost in life? What does it mean to be lost? What do I hope to find? What found me when I least expected it? The figuring out of the Lost and Found takes time. It also requires an open mind, and of course, the willingness to look.

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