Cosmic Forces?

NSP Meditations

A connection with a lost friend who reached out after she’d suffered a catastrophic personal blow. A phone conversation with a state employee who casually informed me I had pot of gold I had no idea existed. An email exchange from another state employee hinting at possible employment that might send me on yet another teaching journey. An epiphany about a writing project that allowed me to see its end.

These four unexpected developments buoyed me. They energized me. They came from nowhere but of course had to come from somewhere. They were the meandering result of my previous wonderful moments with someone, decades-long hard work in the classroom, terrible mistake, and the death of a beloved relative.

Was this the work of benevolent cosmic forces? Was this my subconscious screaming at the ocean to make something happen to shake out my recent torpor? I don’t know, but something happened, something merged and cohered.

It all reminded me something I have been writing about in earnest the past five years: that face to face conversations and face to face relationships and face to face random encounters can achieve magic in ways unimaginable in the digital world. They require extraordinary, even dogged effort to pursue and maintain, and were largely denied to most of us during the Pandemic. I was fortunate to have few filter into my life during the isolation, none more memorable than one inside a driftwood fort with a soothsayer. I’ll never forget the persistence it took to make that encounter happen.

What ultimately will result with these four recent developments remains to be seen, but they did occur and I never saw them coming. I will keep putting it out there, the writing, the service, the kindness. I will keep walking, exploring, accepting invitations that in my previous life I would have ignored.

Oregon Tavern Age: MIA

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age

I stepped inside the Gladstone Card Room. A cluster of OTAs loudly held court around a round table in the middle of the room. One stood. One was barely standing. The other sat in a wheelchair. They were all hitting it hard with cheap beers and shots of something brown.

It was three in the afternoon on a weekday. I sat on a stool at the bar. A friend was meeting me to catch up on life. A sign over the liquor offerings announced Gina as my bartender.

Gina wasn’t anywhere around.

Music played. Sports played. An OTA played a slot machine.

I waited for five minutes. No Gina. I stood up to see if she was in the kitchen. She wasn’t. I roamed around and inspected the photographs of the joint’s Hall of Fame Dead OTAs and the various fliers promoting the celebrations of life.

Still no Gina.

An OTA man came up behind me and fed a jukebox. Another OTA man, three stools away, sipped a coke. No one said a word to me about Gina’s prolonged absence. They didn’t care.

The Card Room was obviously a fan of Oregon State University because there was a lot of beaver football memorabilia and promotions hanging from the walls. I kind of liked it. I always prefer OSU Beavers-themed dives to UO Ducks-themed dives. Why? I like beavers more than ducks and I loathe Phil Knight and his support of crackpot Oregon politicians.

I got up again to check out the smoke shack, thinking Gina might be out there puffing or vaping away.

No Gina. Just two OTAs and a young couple in OTA training.

Fifteen minutes elapsed. Gina didn’t appear and neither did my friend. I now can’t recall what I thought about as I waited. Most likely nothing interesting.

I left the Card Room. In all my years of hanging out in OTA country, this MIA bartender was a first. I wondered what Gina was all about. Her utter indifference might have been charming. I’ve known a couple of female OTA bartenders like that. Their not-giving-a-shit is delightful.

I sat down on a bench outside the joint. I waited another 15 minutes for my friend. He never showed. I wasn’t upset at all. I didn’t feel like talking anyway.

A Dandelion

NSP Meditations

Dad and I were sitting in chairs on the deck enjoying a spring day. I had just planted my herb garden and poured us a glass of a coconut roasted chocolate porter brewed in Ashland.

We sipped the beer and agreed it was terrible. I think it might have been the worst beer I’ve ever tasted. It came into my possession as a gift from a friend who didn’t like beer but had been given the porter as a present.

Dad looked down to the yard. A single dandelion had somehow survived a thorough mowing earlier that morning by our crack father and son lawn maintenance team.

He asked me if he could quote a poem. I said of course.

He composed his mind for a second and then recited:

Simple and fresh and fair from winter’s close emerging,

As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics, had ever been,

Forth from its sunny nook of shelter’d grass—innocent, golden,
calm as the dawn,

The spring’s first dandelion shows its trustful face.

Who wrote that? I asked.

“Walt Whitman,” he said.

We discussed the poem for a few minutes and then I dumped the glasses of porter onto the lawn, careful to avoid the dandelion.

Denis Johnson and a Writing Methodology for the Homeless Crisis

NSP Meditations, Writing , , ,

Someone had donated three books by Denis Johnson to a street library. I snagged them all. The prize consisted of two novels and a collection of non fiction, Seek: Reports From the Edges of America & Beyond, published in 2001. I’d read several books of fiction by Johnson, but never a word of his non fiction.

I read Seek in two sittings and annotated its pages because it stimulated my thoughts about how to write on the homeless crisis. I keep trying new methods, genres, mixing up methods and genres. I keep changing my mind because I keep walking into new encounters, interactions, or I revisit old ones with fresh insights. Perhaps, ultimately my writing about the New American Diaspora will shape shift and meander. Perhaps, ultimately this is more of a book about writing a book, rather than about the homeless crisis. I hope not! There’s too many of that type already! But sometimes a writer’s conceit overwhelms him.

It feels like every time I pick up a book, (almost always chosen at random from a street library) it shifts or enriches or demolishes certain thinking about writing on this subject.

This is what happened as I read Seek. In this collection of essays, Johnson acts as a kind of journalist, sometimes on contract for a big magazine, sometimes by sheer happenstance (like changing a flat tire). He attends a militia meeting, a Christian biker rally, a Rainbow Gathering. He reports from African civil wars, a gold mine in Alaska and a dive bar in Montana. At one point, he writes about Randy Weaver’s standoff at Ruby Ridge in Idaho before it turned deadly and said he should have visited Weaver’s armed compound and interviewed him because he was basically a neighbor, a mere 60 miles away. Johnson knew that’s where the story was but he didn’t go and blew an incredibly opportunity. He also didn’t have a fat contract to visit and write about Randy Weaver. I suppose that makes a difference to some writers.

I don’t have a fat contract to write about the homeless. Does any writer out there? I’m not attending events related to the crisis, like sweeping an encampment or a press conference at city hall. But wait, perhaps I am! I volunteer at a food pantry and street ministry. Those are regular events. I walk through my local encampments every day. That’s regular attendance at an event, if you want to call it an event.

Johnson engages with certain populations, most that are outright or potentially dangerous. I don’t want to do that. That’s not the place where I want to write from. Johnson does not try and interpret the madness and mayhem he encounters. He hints subtlety here and there but leaves the larger interpretation to the reader.

Is that what I’m doing? Is that the way to go about writing up my encounters with the New American Diaspora? I have opinions and speculations to reveal and have revealed some. Perhaps the answer is to keep probing, assaying, turning up the ground, looking under rocks and RVs and just throw everything I observe, think and write in there, including the kitchens sinks (note plural) because I’ve seen about a half dozen kitchen sinks in a homeless encampments that aren’t being used as kitchen sinks.

What about this method? I find a Magic 8-Ball on the fringes of an encampment. It will show up soon enough. I pick it up, shake it, and ask a question such as: should I write this particular incident up as fiction or essay or memoir or journalism or poetry or polemic or whatever genre pops into my mind? Then I would carry the 8-Ball around me everywhere I go, and use it every single time a new encounter with the New American Diaspora unfolds, which is every single day I live in Oregon.

What a way to write a book!

Oregon Tavern Age: Roz is Gone

NSP Meditations, Oregon Tavern Age , , , ,

I hit the beach at Fort Stevens Stat Park with a kooky mutt and relished in the fact we were the only ones there, if you don’t count the bald eagle. It was a good morning for finding treasures: two fishing floats and a sand dollar.

After our romp, I landed at one of my favorite OTA joints, the South Jetty in Hammond, camp firewood capital of America. Over the years I’d documented dozens of great OTA stories there.

One of the regular bartenders, Meredith, caught me up on various Covid-related matters connected to the South Jetty’s loyal clientele, and I was surprised to learn that no one had died of the virus.

As Meredith talked, I sipped my stout and reckoned I’d written about a hundred thousand words in this joint, but those days were over and the OTA inspiration is fading as a subject of creative interest to me. Perhaps a return to the Oregon Coast my rejuvenate it, but as I have written many times, OTA country is dying out there, at least the OTA country I love and documented for over two decades.

At one point, Meredith walked away to serve another customer and then came back and delivered the shocking news that the other regular bartender I’d interacted with for years, Roz, had recently died from the effects of acute alcoholism. She had visited a doctor and received the diagnosis of three-four weeks to live. No chance of liver and kidney transplant. She died on schedule. Roz was 31. She left behind one small child.

The news hit me hard and was a slap across the face of my occasional glossing over the fact that some people in OTA country are drinking themselves to death, quickly, slowly or at medium pace, right out in the open, and sometimes in entertaining fashion.

In all my hundreds, if not thousands of conversations, eavesdropped on or as a participant in OTA country, this fact had never once been brought up.

I’d briefly mentioned it in print a couple of times, but never discussed it with the OTAs. Maybe you don’t in OTA country. Maybe it’s implicit or better left unsaid.

Roz was a fun and quirky red-haired bartender and put me on to some great OTA area stories. I will miss her and her outstanding gentle rapport with customers, some of them quite cranky, and one downright insane.

The South Jetty is staging a wake/commemoration for Roz soon. I won’t be able to attend, but Meredith said there will be a Go Fund Me page or some kid of giving tree to help with various expenses and the kid.

I’ve seen this sort of fundraiser for decades in OTA country and the locals really come out and spend. Of course it won’t be enough, but it is something they can do.

Final Corona Virus Thoughts

Corona Virus Thoughts, NSP Meditations

No, the Pandemic is not over; it may never be over. I’ll probably have to get another booster or mask up again at some point. I’ll probably even catch a new variant.

But as a subject to write about, this is it, unless it leaks into my fiction or writing about the homeless.

Perusing my specific writing about the Pandemic on this blog. I estimate I produced approximately 20-25,000 words. There’s certainly no book with my real time musings and meanderings, but perhaps in the coming years it might be of interest to someone, particularly since I was living in a remote rural area populated by a majority of people who thought everything one big hoax or conspiracy. It was brutal to endure this kind of stupidity in such proximity, but I am glad I got to experience it first hand. Why? It taught me a lot about fellow Oregonians and what retards growth in rural Oregon.

I remember sitting at the counter of a spacious and soulless sports bar in Port Orford, drinking a noon craft malt liquor after a pleasing morning shift on the construction job, talking to a bartender, when the bartender took a call and shortly thereafter announced everything was shutting down the next day, Friday, for at least three months. I finished my beer in silence and wondered about the future, never thinking so many people would needlessly die and the virus would expose so many terrible realities about American narcissism and American life in general.

It was March 11th or 13th, a Thursday, I think.

Just like that Oregon went into lockdown. My construction job continued for another month or so, before that got shut down. Then came unemployment and stimulus payments and planting trees in former clearcut.

I rode out that first year in an ancient RV named Hey Joe a block or so from the ocean. It was the best possible way to quarantine. I’d been living in self imposed social quarantine the previous few years anyway, so it wasn’t much of a change. The worst part of it all was I was denied access to my upstairs writing table at the great Gold Beach Books and my corner writing table at Sea Star, a truly superb Oregon Tavern Age joint. I built driftwood forts, read more, wrote more, hiked more, and had a wonderful relationship with an old secret flame. Sometimes it felt like the end of the world considering how deserted the small towns were, but I kind of liked it. I also encountered some strange Americans on the frightened move, driving up and down Highway 101 although most of the campgrounds were supposed to be closed. I’ll never understand why parks were closed around the state. I guess officials thought everybody would crowd them in a mad rush, and maybe they were right. I’m glad I didn’t have to make any important decisions and really glad I wasn’t teaching.

About the only good thing to result from the Pandemic in my mind was the cancellation of the event planned to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Vortex I, the only state sponsored rock festival in American history. The less said about what almost happened with that absurd idea, the better. Oh, yeah, one other thing: Biden won the election. Oh and another thing, a Republican legislator got expelled from the Legislature for aiding and abetting madmen (and women, too).

In early 2021 I left the Southern Oregon Coast for good and moved to Portland to care for Dad and experienced the Pandemic in the big city. The contrasts were fascinating but ultimately uninteresting enough to compel consistent writing or a bigger project.

There were many vexing matters related to the Pandemic, Trump of course, but what truly confounded me was people with high school educations claiming to be public health experts because of “a link” to the TRUTH they could share or that they knew “someone” working at a hospital or dental office who knew it was all a fake story invented by some pedophiles operating out of the basement of New York pizza parlor that was secretly run by a resurrected JFK Jr.

Let me put it another way: Americans who couldn’t identify all seven continents on a blank outline map of the world or name the three branches of government were now experts in epidemiology and infectious diseases and just knew, knew, knew (and could prove) that Bill Gates had concocted some vaccine that injected gremlins into your body and enslaved you to the Deep State.

The arrogance and sanctimony of these people was beyond insufferable. They wouldn’t believe in the law of gravity if it countered something Donald Trump or the Internet said. One wonders if basic reasoning will ever return to some 40-percent of Americans, but then again, look how many people believe in God.

I wish Mark Twain were around to write about American behavior during the Pandemic. We needed his wicked humor to smash through corn pone thinking, which Twain defined as “self involved.” For sure. Shaming and stridency and kindness and reason didn’t do a damn thing to change people’s corn pone minds. A few did change their minds right before dying. It was over the news and social media with tears and sympathy. But what we really needed was a Mark Twain to rip them in the afterlife. No even the stand up comedians would touch it.

I suppose it will be interesting to learn in the coming years, decades, what will have shaken out in America due pandemic’s upheaval. Wasn’t everything supposed to change work, schooling, the criminal justice system, the environment, cop shows, respect for front line workers? Nothing really changed at all so far as I can tell, except that far more Americans asserted their true asshole nature.

The federal government didn’t even bother to raise the federal minimum wage and the Democrats were in power as of January 2021! They did raise defense spending.

One of these months, we’ll hit that one million mark of dead Pandemic Americans. It could have been half as many.

My family did its part, that’s for sure. And they’re proud of that. Many families are also proud of how they fought for their freedoms, a word without any substantive and common sense meaning in America anymore.

So this is my final thousand words for this subject category on the Meditations Blog. I wonder how long it will hang out there in cyberspace?

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