Rainy Day Ruminations

NSP Meditations, Of Walking in Rain

I sit on the couch and stare out the window. Rain falls. Homeless men and women pass by.

At precisely the same moment, another Republican member of the US House of Representatives has dropped out of the race for Speaker. I wonder when the Whigs knew when they were about to become extinct?

I’m reading The Thorn Birds and marveling at how great the writing is and how a book like this would never be written today.

A dog is coming into my life soon.

Elements of the neighborhood seem to be turning against my homeless friend Mark. Apparently his presence in front of the grocery story is causing distress to customers. I’d like to remind these people that Mark has tried to find housing for the past 18 months and failed through no fault of his own.

As much as I love rain, I can’t imagine how hard it is on homeless people. That’s something I never mentioned in the rain book because the thought never entered my mind.

I’ve decided that I want to visit my old Church of Christ church in Oregon City for a Sunday morning service and see how it’s changed since my last one in the mid 70s.

The incurious nature of some people baffles me. The inability of people to follow up on their curiosity is also baffling to me.

I started writing a Christmas story. Naturally it involves a homeless person. It’s based on a true story.

An old friend texted me she liked reading the blog. That was nice to hear.

I recently heard the greatest beaver story in Oregon history. I’ve got to recount it soon.

I hit some golf balls in the park the other afternoon. I was surrounded by homeless people. What a weird sensation that was. I was doing something frivolous and they were doing something serious.

More friends from my special RV park on the Southern Oregon Coast have died. I wish I could have honored them in some way. I suspect that place will be sold and then disbanded and the residents displaced. Some might end up homeless.

I miss my former graphic designer. She vanished six months ago and I fear the worse.

A few weeks ago I completed a piece about a former student of mine who is homeless and schizophrenic on the streets of Las Vegas. It was the hardest and most painful writing I have ever written and it won’t do a damn thing to help her.

I have but one trivial wish this fall: Oregon State crushes Oregon in football and I can see the expression of the highest paid and perhaps dumbest state employee in the state, Oregon’s head football coach. Have you heard this man speak or read any interviews with him?

I read an interesting essay about Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible. Apparently, there are two new plays that rebut it historically and thematically. One of them places all the blame on the witch hunt on John Proctor, not the girls. It was Proctor who seduced Abigail, not the other way around, and her reaction to being abused and discarded led to a kind of justified revenge. That’s an interesting modern take.

The Joy of Reedsport

NSP Meditations, Oregon Coast_History

Why in the hell does spending time in Reedsport, Oregon bring me such joy? To the untrained eye, it looks like a dismal and dying coastal town that once boasted a heyday of fishing and logging.

I mean, visitors drive into town from Highway 38 and there are a dozen Donald Trumps carved with chainsaws to greet them. That’s the antithesis of joy to anyone who actually cultivates or recognizes joy in their lives.

Despite that ominous entrance, Reedsport has the House of Dank pot shop in a former bank and a cinder block bowling alley where I found the greatest and unwritten forbidden love story in modern Oregon history. Oh, I must mention the socialist golf course owned by its Trumpiam members and the great dive bar The Tide’s Inn, where every Thanksgiving the regulars hang frozen Butterball turkeys in the trees and hold some kind of target shooting contest, drunk of course. And how about a fantastic thrift store and a public library that launched a program to build and stock street libraries in places outside of town, such as Ash Valley, Scottsburg and Winchester Bay, that have no libraries but plenty of people who still read books? I’ve been all over Oregon and never seen another library do that.

One day I may try living in Reedsport.

Darrel

NSP Meditations

A Black man of indeterminate age sat at a picnic table outside of Jake’s Place, a favorite neighborhood dive of mine. I often write about the homeless in this joint because homeless men and women often patronize Jake’s, and when they do, invariably a story unfolds.

The dude was lookin’ sharp! Panama hat, black t-shirt, black jeans and tan wing-tip shoes studded with green rhinestones. No socks! He held an acoustic guitar with a leopard-print strap. A tiny battery powered amplifier rested on the table.

He had busker written all over him. He also exuded the unmistakable vibe of being homeless.

I’d seen this hep cat multiple times in and around Jake’s but had yet to meet him or hear him perform.

This was the time. I went inside, bought a beer, and took it outside. I sat at a table next to his and offered him $5 for a set.

He said “right on,” stashed the dough, and began tuning up. He asked what I wanted to hear. I said his best songs.

He seemed satisfied with the tuning, strummed a few times, adjusted his capo, and started playing and singing a song.

It was something unknown to me and vibrated a pronounced hippie soul sound.

After he finished, I said the song was unfamiliar to me. He said it was a newer hip hop tune he’d discovered through an algorithm on YouTube. We discussed the pros and cons of algorithms in our lives and we both said we missed the glory days of choosing music based on the album’s cover. (Hello Ohio Players and The Bangles!)

Next he launched into what he said was an original. He didn’t write many songs of his own anymore. In fact, it had been years, but recently he’d thought about writing some new ones.

By now a small crowd of Jake’s Oregon Tavern Age regulars had gathered around us for the show. They all seemed to know the musician.

After winding down the original, he noodled a few country blues licks and then we struck up a conversation.

His name is Darrel. He gigged the patio of a nearby Italian restaurant on a little stage he constructed from scrapwood. He played for tips and meals. This was how he survived. The wingtips made quite an impression on diners; he’d studded the rhinestones himself.

Everything you needed to know in life, according to Darrel, was contained within the 12-bar blues progression (true).

Someone said Darrel was quite the midnight mover, strolling the neighbor late at night, guitar around his neck, lit up on Dago red, and playing.

Darrel laughed when he heard that.

Our conversation drifted to his musical history. He’d always played solo but recently wanted to form a band. I said being in a band of any musical genre is one of the hardest things a creative person can attempt (and I would know!). That’s why thousands of them die every week in America and why the Rolling Stones are not of this Earth.

Darrel agreed about the difficulty of being in a band but said, “Really, aren’t we all in a band one way or another whether we know it or not?”

What a line! I said I hadn’t heard anything that profound in a years. He should write a song about it.

He smiled and coaxed up a little blues run on the guitar. “Maybe I will.”

Darrel provided more of his background. He was born back East and, “When I came to Oregon, I stopped getting into trouble.”

“Oh shit!” I said. “That’s a great subject for a song.”

“I agree,” he said.

A few minutes later I was standing at the bar with Darrel buying him a drink. Anything he wanted. He’d made my month!

He ordered a PBR.

I believe it is worth stating these moments never occur in brew pubs or wine bars.

Oregon Tavern Age: Jack Off

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age

My associate and I sat at the bar of the Card Room in Gladstone. We ordered amber ales and watched General Hospital play silently on television. It was something of a comfort to me as the world and America continue to go to absolute shit that the character of Laura was still on the show, some 45 years after her heyday with Luke. Jesus, I watched them in the late 70s! They were on the cover of Time and here she was now, a kind and horny grandmother who had definitely eschewed Botox! Yeah, that was a comfort all right.

It was around noon on a weekday in this very solid OTA joint. Crap Halloween decorations made by child slaves in China gave the place a festive gulag vibe. Two OTA women sat at the far end of the bar, drinking and chewing the fat. Another OTA worked a slot machine that featured dancing dragons. A six-foot skeleton spoke with an English accent about murdering people with panache.

A pleasant, bespectacled, young female bartender presided over this mise-en-scene with a detached coolness.

Stillness reigned. I liked it.

A rather portly OTA man wearing a black Harley Davidson leather jacket stood to my left. He opened up his jacket to the ladies and said something about jacking off.

What? Was I going to observe masturbation by an elderly man in an OTA joint after all these decades? The prospect didn’t alarm me at all.

I said something to my associate about it and we laughed. Then, the bartender remarked to the man and he turned around and showed us a t-shirt that read, “I was a Jack Off in the Card Room” across the front. The t-shirt’s back design sported a black jack and four other cards that signified the hand was a jack off away from a full house.

I realize my description of the t-shirt will make very little sense to the reader because it made very little sense to me when I wrote it. I must say, however, the t-shirt did warm my heart because it meant someone connected to the Card Room had designed and produced a unique piece of OTA apparel. Christ, they might have screen printed it themselves in a garage while loaded on Cutty Sark!

After displaying the t-shirt, the man ordered his third shot of Dewar’s. Dewar’s! That an OTA man drank Dewar’s straight in such quantities, wore such an outlandish t-shirt, and flashed the ladies with it, well, that was a comfort, too.

I asked the bartender about the t-shirt. It cost $25! My skinflint associate didn’t want one!

We drank our ales and heard the OTA Jack Off Man behind us, now losing money at the slots, say to a woman, “Are you getting off my machine?”

She laughed, and said, with coy insinuation, “You want me to get off your machine?”

He yukked it up.

It was a wicked jest and I relished every minute of its lewd content. It made me chuckle and we all need more of that considering the current state of world affairs.

Dad Contracts Covid

Corona Virus Thoughts, NSP Meditations

Word arrived Dad had contracted covid. Several other residents in his assisted living center did as well. Everything was shut down and Dad had to quarantine in his room for a week. He took the news very hard. I tried reassuring him over the phone but it didn’t seem to help.

A day after the positive test, Dad showed symptoms and the center’s care staff recommended he consult with his primary care physician about taking the drug that treated symptoms of covid. I arranged a video appointment through his Kaiser health portal, but the earliest one available one was in three days.

So we had to wait it out. I called him and dropped off newspapers and donuts.

On the morning of his appointment, I came over with my laptop and rigged everything up for the call. I ran him through how it worked. His symptoms had almost totally disappeared and he was in good spirits despite the terrible events unfolding in the world. Whenever there is news of war, Dad, a Korean War combat veteran, always goes into a brief funk.

The video call was right on time. The connection was excellent. I basically had to translate for Dad because of his poor hearing. The doctor was kind and efficient. The appointment lasted 15 minutes and concluded with Dad turning down the drug. He said he was feeling much better and was just anxious to get out of his room and back into the dining hall.

I packed up the laptop and prepared to leave for home.

But not before I poured us a mini, mini shot of Wild Turkey each and we toasted to his health and drank the kickin’ chicken down. Hellfire it burned!

“Now that’s the medicine I need,” said Dad.

I laughed and agreed.

Oregon Tavern Age: The Great Escape

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age

After building a driftwood fort near the south jetty of the Umpqua River, I repaired to the glorious Tide’s Inn in Reedsport. It’s one of the last great OTA joints on the Oregon Coast. They are going extinct so I try to savor these last moments in OTA country.

I walked in and surveyed the joint. OTAs played pool and slots. One man sat at the bar and ate a meal. I ordered a hippie IPA from the female soon-to-be OTA bartender and took up residence at my favorite table, the one where I typically read the Eugene Register Guard. The Tide’s Inn had a subscription. Not anymore because that once former excellent newspaper was dead, dead, dead, a murder victim of an investment equity firm.

Snippets of conversation floated through the air and I snagged them like reeling in a coho lurking in the depths of a coastal river.

One OTA man said he couldn’t sell his truck because it smelled like him. I get it; I’ve been there.

I was writing in my journal about my affinity for Reedsport and its utterly disheveled nature smack dab in Trump territory.

The classic movie The Great Escape played silently on television. Crap modern country with its phony American narratives played on the jukebox. Give me Waylon and Dolly and reality or give me silence.

I noticed the bartender eating what appeared to be a salmon dinner. Of course! Some OTA had landed a Chinook in the Umpqua and shared it with the regulars. Happens all the time in OTA country. I’ve tasted fresh crab, trout, octopus, oysters, foraged mushrooms and the best tomatoes I’ve ever consumed in OTA joints. All off the menu. Some regular just brought in the bounty.

Two OTAs losing at the slots began discussing the finer points of movie. One of them drank two Crown Royals neat at the same time.

God these dudes loved The Great Escape! I get it: I’m there.

The bartender interrupted my writing and asked what I was doing in the Tide’s Inn. I told her of my love for this joint and frequent visits during various coastal travels. I asked her how she came to tend bar in here. She told me the story. Being the way things are these days in my writing life, her story involved homelessness, or in her case, almost homelessness.

It went like this:

She had lost her rental home in a fire in Albany. She and her two toddlers were unharmed but had nowhere to live. With an insurance settlement, she was able to purchase a 1987 RV. That was all she could afford. For weeks she drove around the Willamette Valley from Salem to Eugene searching for an RV park that allowed older model RVs. She didn’t find one. She was almost ready to give up and go live in the woods. Then she discovered a disheveled RV park near Scottsburg on Highway 38 with a view of the Umpqua River. The owner allowed older RVs and cultivated a senior, poorer set of tenants that had nowhere else to go because of their similarly older rigs. She lived in the park, somehow found child care, scored a bar tending job with Tide’s Inn, saved some money, then moved to town and into a rental home with two other people, including a new boyfriend. Her rent in Reedsport was $1100 a month. She was never leaving Reedsport. People in the area had treated her so well. If they hadn’t, she would have been homeless and probably lost her kids to the state.

A disheveled RV park made the difference.

I know a lot about that. Once, a disheveled RV park on the Southern Oregon Coast helped save me.

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