The concept of maintenance occupies my mind, the constant attention and labor it requires. All around me I see signs of need for routine or critical maintenance. Much of what I see cries out for immediate action or something will be beyond repair—a person, a building, a neighborhood, a Camaro.

That rusted, molding and colorless Camaro with flat tires and blackberries growing out from underneath its hood and front seat in the driveway of a home clearly listing…that’s what prompted these words. The decay of that Camaro truly breaks my heart. I don’t want to drive it, but somebody should be.

The need for maintenance manifests itself every morning on my walk through the neighborhood: houses, roofs, yards, basketball hoops, porches, gardens, shrubs, trees, garages, business facades, sidewalks, newspaper racks, dumpsters and human beings. Some of the necessary maintenance eventually gets performed because I see it underway in the moment or afterward. Some of it will never be performed for a variety of reasons: money, time, death, disinterest, mental health, addiction, infirmity, indifference, inattention, incompetence, laziness.

I often think about something I read decades ago by the philosopher/longshoreman Eric Hoffer. I am paraphrasing very loosely here: “Societies can easily galvanize the energy to implement bold new initiatives, but the hard work is mainlining them.”

Many of Oregon’s governing entities come to mind when I think of that paraphrased quote. A new creative initiative to solve some problem or enhance our lives is launched with great fanfare, and then sort of gets implemented by the bureaucracy, and then goes to seed because no one wants or knows how to maintain it. Certainly addressing the homelessness crisis is following this dreary path.

I have read multiple reports where homeless people say they are contacted by outreach workers about services, and then they never see the worker again. I know in my own various attempts to obtain services for my homeless friends, maintenance of the system to help them is terrible, unacceptably incompetent. I don’t see enough reporting about that.

The biggest challenge in making any significant difference on homelessness is expert maintenance of all the various projects that have been launched or are about to be launched. But that is such a difficult story to track and takes anyone interested in such things a lot of time and energy to follow.

I look at my own life and all the calls for maintenance: the back yard, back deck, my father’s care, my own physical and spiritual fitness, my website, my publishing company, the herb garden, my teeth, my father’s estate, friendships. It is all hard work usually done without any recognition, let alone congratulations. No one congratulates you if you keep your gutters clean. They only notice if you don’t and they begin to sag and leak.

Every week some new need for maintenance surfaces and I try to address it with swift action.

Caulking is one of the supreme acts of maintenance. It’s easy to do, cheap and incredibly effective. It wasn’t until I lived in an old RV that I really understood the importance of caulking. Caulking is also a good metaphor for life.

As for my nation’s ability to conduct maintenance on important matters such as policy, programs, ideals and infrastructure, it seems almost incapacitated. The maintenance of National Parks and Forest Service campgrounds? No. Bridges? No. Drinking water quality? No. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid? No. National Defense? Of course! Build yet another useless aircraft carrier when that expenditure could fund child care for five million struggling single mothers for a long, long time.

In recent years I have been so much better at maintaining personal relationships. In fact, I reinvented myself because of this new-found ability and the act led to better writing as well.

I am writing this from a coffee shop that is good at maintenance of its interior and exterior. My only complaint is that some of the tables wobble when I am writing. But don’t all tables in coffee shops eventually wobble?

The beaver is the most excellent creature of initiative and maintenance in the world. They never stop maintaining their dams and lodges. Never!

How do you prioritize maintenance needs? You obviously can’t do everything all at once. It’s a good question and I don’t have a clear answer for it. If I did, I could write a self help book on maintenance and become a guru who ends up on TV and radio and social media telling everyone how to conduct proper maintenance in their lives.

That’s not my role. I write this essay to remind myself of the importance of maintenance and as a reminder I need to vacuum the car’s interior.

It would be interesting to see a politician run on a platform of maintenance. It would seem to be a winning message if framed vigorously with vivid examples.

Some people perform perfunctory or half ass maintenance. I suppose that’s better than nothing. It might keep the roof from leaking for another year.

There is only one thing in my life where I desire no maintenance. NONE! That is in the Oregon Tavern Age joints I patronize. I don’t want new lighting or new fixtures or updated this or that. I want steady erosion. I want torpor. I want dust and old sexist beer posters. I certainly don’t want any University of Oregon neon.

Hard and relentless rain smashed Portland. Everything was heavy and gray on a Saturday morning in January.

I was determined to get off my ass and do something rather than read more about the most mysterious person in American history—Emily Dickinson. The more you read her poetry and biographies, the more opaque and complicated she becomes. Bob Dylan is as easy to read as a phone book compared to her.

My destination—the Japanese American Museum of Oregon in the corroded heart of Old Town, the epicenter of Portland’s homeless disaster.

The last visit to Old Town of six months ago on behalf of my homeless friend Mark had left me shattered and disillusioned as a human being and Oregonian. And that was on sunny day with roses blooming. Today I would venture into the abyss (AKA Apocalypse Now) during a deluge on a winter day to avail myself of a cultural offering.

The forced relocation of Japanese Americans into concentration camps in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor has fascinated me since I was a kid and still feels inadequately explored by novelists, historians, journalists and filmmakers. For one reason, the story is still going on and reparations to those Americans dispossessed of life, liberty and property in places such as Hood River have been pitiful. Those Oregon families that prospered by cheating and robbing their former neighbors have never been properly called out.

Portland’s Old Town has a unique history related to the Japanese-American concentration camp story. The Naito Family of Portland gave up everything in the round-up hysteria and moved to Utah and somehow evaded internment. After the war they returned and two Naito Brothers, Bill and Sam, slowly built a business empire in Old Town (and downtown) and created among other enterprises, Import Plaza, Made in Oregon stores and a place I used to grade papers when I taught in Portland, The Galleria. They also helped establish the Japanese American Historic Plaza and the very museum I was about to visit. They were were easily two of the finest and hardworking people in the history of modern Portland. My Portland life was certainly enhanced by their entrepreneurship and I feel embarrassed for leaving out their voices in my anthology of Oregon history commemorating the state’s sesquicentennial in 2009.

The Naito Brothers helped rescue Old Tow from blight and obscurity in the 70s and 80s and became civic leaders. One wonders what they would have thought of the abyss of Old Town today. One wonders what they would have done to address the crisis. I can’t believe they wouldn’t have taken direct action to house people and keep them from disintegrating on the streets in abject debasement. Surely, they wouldn’t have left it to the non profits, the city, the county. They were not men of dithering or excuse-making or the jargon of advocacy gobbledygook. They got shit done and done right.

We’ll never know.

I parked my car. Incredibly, the City expected me to pay for parking in a semi combat zone. I went to pay and the machine was shattered and dead. Across the street a young man with a blanket over his head was stationary and screaming in anger. Another man wearing a sleeping bag was silent and on the move.

The museum was a block away. During my walk, I determined that four of the ten vehicles parked on one street were serving as domiciles: three sedans, one van. Two had dogs inside.

An Oregon Homeless Age (OHA) man sat on the sidewalk in front of the entrance to the museum. He was gesticulating, twitching and speaking in tongues.

I paid my $8 admission fee and toured the tiny excellent museum and had the whole place to myself. My mind filled with new information, ideas and insights and I signed up for a zine workshop the museum was holding in a couple weeks, so yes there would be another visit to Old Town.

The OHA man had vanished from the entrance and I stepped outside into rain. Across the street, an abandoned lot hosted several tents and various piles of strange refuse. Several men were pushing shopping carts full of cans and bottles. A few OHA men and women rode kids bicycles in the distance.

On the walk to my car, I noticed yellow parking tickets on the windshields of all the vehicles that weren’t serving as domiciles. It was totally absurd but made perfect sense. Why expend any effort to collect fines from people who have no driver’s licenses, addresses, registrations, and no means to pay fines? What really is there to be done?

Interestingly enough, I didn’t get a ticket. Must have been my lucky rainy day.

I saw Gus the Beaver recently, along with a baby otter and a muskrat. These glimpses of wildlife in the city excite and relax me at the same time.

I sat in a table of an OTA joint the other day and in walked in former Oregon Governor Barbara Roberts. I was working on my book about the homeless in my neighborhood, looked up, and there she was. She was headed toward a video poker/slot machine five feet where I was sitting. Before she sat down and started playing, I introduced myself and thanked her for her distinguished tenure of service as Governor. We then discussed the passage of Measure 5, a property tax limitation measure that ended up crippling local and state services , which occurred during her one term. I reminded her of something she said at the time—that this law would kill Oregonians. Governor Roberts looked straight at me and said, “I was right.”

I wanted to chat more Oregon political history with her, but she was ready to gamble. I said goodbye and she sat down and went to work supporting state services while Nike, Google, Intel and Facebook don’t because counties and cities gave them all these absurd property tax breaks.

Temperatures plunged into the low 20s the other week and I thought about my homeless friends in the neighborhood. I went looking for them in the afternoons to see if could render some kind of assistance. They were nowhere to be found.

I’m completed a strange short story about my relationship to Steve Prefontaine. It’s the last one from my forthcoming collection of short stories that should be out this spring. I really don’t know what I’m doing with the unconventional structure of this story, but I’m just running with it and trying to convey Pre’s unique influence on people.

One of the great joys in my recent life is working with two octogenarian women to publish their memoirs. It’s such rewarding work and I get to employ others in the production of the books.

I started writing an essay on the concept of maintenance.

I had Pearl Jam’s Ten CD in my hand for a quarter. It was for sale in a tiny hospice thrift store. Did I really want to revisit that album? No. I did, however later buy a two-disc CD of Willie Dixon for a buck. Rock has absolutely nothing left to say to me anymore. It once did.

My dad told me a great story from a recent lunch at his assisted living center. Three ladies had joined him at this table and they were discussing some item from a magazine that referenced a line from The Merchant of Venice without sourcing it. The ladies weren’t sure of its origin. Dad filled them in and then quoted Shylock’s famous soliloquy. I asked if he then recited Portia’s famous soliloquy. He did not. Then I asked him to recite and he did. I think Portia’s The Quality of Mercy soliloquy constitutes the most beautiful and just words ever written in the English language. Mercy. Mercy. Mercy. We don’t seem capable of it anymore as a collective society. There is too much anger, judgment, self righteousness, stupidity—on both ends of the political spectrum. People can’t seem to listen anymore, either.