For the Good of the Writing Order

NSP Meditations, Writing

Over the weekend I taught my first writing workshop in almost two years. I was nervous before it began but after we got it going, found the groove. What a fantastic and eclectic group of writers! I met some incredible new people and I believe our exercises and discussions energized all of us to fire up our passions for our current projects. I know it did for my writing about the homeless and that came to me in the form of one sentence. Sometimes that’s all it takes. Below is a list of thoughts I shared to conclude the workshop.

Some final thoughts to conclude the writing workshop:

Support local writers by reading their print and digital publications.

If a writer’s words move you, let the writer know.

Stock your local street library. Choose something to read from a street library that you might otherwise never read.

As a writer, look where no one is looking on a subject.

Consider naming a theme song for your current writing project.

Don’t rarefy the act of writing. Keep it grounded.

Go back through your old writing. Something new will emerge with this material.

Support open mics in the best manner you see fit.

Try writing in long hand every now and then.

Challenge your own assumptions or dynamite them to smithereens and then start writing from there.

Lurking inside every dilapidated local history museum is a great story ready to be discovered.

Go to the beaver for a model of writing industry and architecture.

Publish your ideas in print in interesting publications and distribute them in street libraries, laundromats, community gardens and homeless encampments.

Support your local bookstores.

Submit writing to trade publications and local newspapers and newsletters.

Ass to chair is the only way to get the work done.

Oregon Tavern Age: Trails Inn

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age , , ,

Downtown Estacada. A weekday. Noon.

I was sitting in OTA country, the Trails Inn, to be precise, and my mind drifted to some 35 years ago when I last visited an earlier version of this joint, the Timber Room.

It was tiny and dark then, not expanded, lightened up, remodeled like now. No video slots and poker. No liquor. A tavern with a jukebox. No craft malt liquors brewed in the commie cities by socialists.

What’s left of the old Timber Room is now full of machines collecting tax revenue for the state.

I was so hoping this joint had remained the same, but…joints adapt in OTA country or they die. Wait, didn’t I recently declare the death of OTA country because Donald Trump killed it? Yes, I did. I suppose now I was sitting in former OTA country. Really, if I think about, there may be a dozen real OTA joints left. They are going the way of the circus and canasta.

Fantastic old logging photos dominated the decor and that’s all to write about that. At least the new joint honored its past.

But 35 years ago my friends bicycled up to this joint for a round of 59-cent drafts of Hamm’s or Oly or Heidelberg or Rainier, before bicycling another 15 miles east of Estacada into the foothills of the Cascade Range to camp and drink along Fish Creek in a Mt Hood National Forest campground that was primitive to say the least, which always attracts a strange breed, even today. (Just check out the primitive campgrounds along Elk River on the Southern Oregon Coast. Who these campers are is impossible to discern.)

Prior to my reunion with the Trails Inn I drove up to the campground on a story mission. The campground as I remembered was gone because of the hellacious forest fire that ravaged the area in the summer of 2020. But the story mission became a lot more interesting as a result and I hope to take it on soon. I think it has the potential to be a truly original work of fiction. Or it could be, to quote Professor Jennings on the potential of his novel in Animal House…a piece of shit. You never really know until you get into it.

But back to Timber Room during the Reagan years: packed full of rural degenerates drinking hard in the late morning, (while waiting for the liquor store to open) including a one-armed man playing pool who had recently been released from prison and spoke with the most profane and awful grammar I have ever heard. The Timber Room was one of my first OTA experiences, although I didn’t call it OTA for decades afterward. Really, if I think about, OTA country is what really inspired me to become a writer and I suppose I’ll document it until the end of my writing life or OTA country finally goes extinct.

After the memorable encounter in the Timber Room, we would meet several of these degenerates back at the campground, a shared girlfriend, a kid named Billy, and a man soaring on something who introduced himself by wildly exclaiming, “Hi! My name’s Todd. I was born by Todd Lake, Oregon! I live in Oregon City and I love Oregon! Don’t get no more Oregon than that!”

At the time I thought, “No Todd, it don’t.”

But this new Fish Creek story, oh yeah Todd, it will get more Oregon than you, brother.

Hummingbirds in the Apple Tree

NSP Meditations

I was writing a ridiculous Hallmark Christmas story about a hot homeless man and a foxy social worker when I looked up to the towering apple tree in the neighbor’s yard and noticed several hummingbirds feeding on the blossoms. I stopped writing my drivel and watched.

The scene reminded me of the poem “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver that I had read earlier that morning posted in one of the poetry kiosks around my neighborhood.

Yes, the hummingbirds reminded me I am not alone in this terrible American society of consumption, anger, insanity and judgment. There are trees and beavers and flowers and there are the cackling geese overhead Oliver so memorably recounts, and inspired me to recount my helping to save a rare sub species of Alaska Canadian Goose from the Aleutian Islands from extinction. That will always rate as some of the greatest work of my life, perhaps topping the planting of 15,000 trees in Oregon’s denuded coastal watersheds and certainly all the days teaching high school, which feels more like dust in the wind with each passing year. I hate that song but that about sums up my teaching career compared to geese and trees.

But back to the hummingbirds. I read not too long ago in a massive history of humankind how one PNW Indian tribe used hummingbird skulls as a type of monetary unit, but one that was never traded but simply accumulated and admired.

Hummingbird skulls as currency!

I was both repelled and electrified by this. You just know the tribal members didn’t trap and kill hummingbirds for their skulls. They found them in the wild.

How do you find a a hummingbird’s skull in nature. I have found nests and a couple hummingbirds knocked out by collisions with my windows. I have also seen a hummingbird fly through a bonfire and read a magazine article written almost 75 years ago about a strange Oregon man who invented a device that he wore over his head, similar in appearance to a diving bell, that was a hummingbird feeder that could feed up to 20-30 hummingbirds at a time as he walked around his yard. I am not making this up.

I watched the show in the apple tree for a good half hour and then went back to writing the drivel, and just knew I would put a hummingbird in the Christmas story, perhaps having one visit a feeder in an encampment, which I have actually seen more than once.

Sunday Morning Walk

NSP Meditations, Poetry

A crow rips apart a smashed squirrel.

New graffiti on the hair salon window, something about vodka.

Shattered bricks on the sidewalk.

Record April showers have brought May flowers.

Upturned flowers in barkdusted beds.

Who pulls up flowers?

A woman sleeps in a sleeping bag near a real estate office.

I am about to pour my convenience store coffee and a homeless woman darts inside and cuts in front of me. She pours herself hot water and dashes out.

My mind meanders to my future.

My mind writes dialogue for a novel I might never write.

I admire massive deciduous trees.

Dogs bark.

Chickens cackle.

I arrive at the ATM. A sign says it doesn’t work because of vandalism.

The big news in the neighborhood. The farmer’s market finally found a new home! Right next to the homeless encampment!

I’ll be there, of course.

More Nail Shop Meditations

NSP Meditations

Dad is getting his bi-monthly pedicure and manicure from the nail shop.

Innocuous pop music plays.

I hear a fountain gurgling.

I just finished writing a piece about filberts.

A fire truck just drove by with all the lights flashing but with no sirens wailing. That about sums up the state of America.

It’s primary season in Oregon and I read the entire voter’s pamphlet. Thank god they still print and mail these relics. Someone should write a novel in the form of a voter’s pamphlet. Maybe someone has, somewhere. There are such weird personal nuggets and asides in some of the fringe candidates, and in the case of the Republicans running for Governor, the mainstream,. Their fringe is the mainstream and that is never going to reverse in my lifetime.

Soon, I’ll be launching the independent gubernatorial campaign of a true Oregonian. His name his Frank Beavers. He doesn’t take money from Big Timber or Phil Knight or crypto currency ciphers. You’ll learn more about Frank and his vision for Oregon soon.

I continue to discover literary treasures in the street libraries. One such book is called Subways are for Sleeping by a writer with the last name of Love, published in 1957. It’s a collection of profiles of homeless people in New York city from that era, and their ingenious and almost unbelievable ways of surviving under the radar.

Not so much of that under the radar going on these days with the homeless and that should tell us everything.

Here I am writing about the homeless over 60 years later and there this tiny paperback was. Why does that keep happening?

The stories in the book have some relevance to today’s homeless crisis, but they are also as far removed as the Ice Age is from 2022. What was once found in the big cities, now has found its way to places like Sweet Home and Gold Beach and the bums and drifters and hobos aren’t called that anymore because the descriptions are totally lacking.

The blog passed five years this month. Most last three months. Blogs are so old school now. They’re like writing on papyrus as far as the Internet goes. Still, I keep writing up my meditations and thank you readers, whoever you are, for reading them.

Fast Break (Part 5)

Fiction, NSP Meditations, Sports

The buzzer sounds and the final score blinks red: Elks 102, Loggers 51.

Fans clap and cheer, and when the Elks run off the floor after the ceremonial handshakes with the nonchalant Loggers, the writer notices they all sneakingly half salute the mural as they dash out of the gym and into their musty locker room. The coach does the same! He’s probably a secret Fifth Columnist socialist and the fiery union rep for the teacher’s union. The school board doesn’t fire him because he keeps winning state titles and gives the dying town something to live for every winter and spring. The writer wonders: how in the hell did this guy ever end up in this town? Who is he? The writer desperately wants to know because he intuits that the answer might unlock deeper insights. If the writer decides to relocate to the town and write a non fiction book about the homeless or a fairy tale novel about the socialist coach and his fast break offense, he might discover there are more people like the coach living in rural Oregon than most people can ever imagine, and in the coming years, there might a lot more.

The writer stands up from the bleachers and his body shakes with pain. He’ll have to walk a couple miles to loosen up. Oh well, it’s a fine winter evening and he can meander around the downtown of four blocks, maybe get a beer at the reactionary dive bar, Turkey’s, then take the bridge that crosses the river. He can stop on the bridge and listen to the Friday night shenanigans acted out by the residents of the homeless encampment. Is Friday night different for them? Is there such a concept of a weekend in their lives?

Maybe the writer’s fast break metaphor will collapse or simply whither away. Or maybe, if he can promulgate it to the people, (by any means necessary) it could inspire one or several or a thousand people to run the offense in the pursuit of a solution for the homeless crisis. Perhaps not the ultimate state-wide solution, or even in the big city, but at least one in a given area, down by a river for example, where they’re playing foos ball and darts and being turned into the steaming compost of 21st century star spangled banner capitalism.

The writer sure would love the coach to take up that responsibility. He’s won enough state championships, trained enough closet socialists, and taught enough lessons about Walden. He may not know it, but he’s ready for something bigger, much bigger, to execute the perfect fast breaks for people who need to start scoring easy but hard earned buckets, then get their ass back up the floor, defend. That’s part of fast break basketball, too. Defense.

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