Oregon Tavern Age: Birthday

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It was my 58th birthday and what better way to celebrate than having a beer in an OTA joint I’d never visited.

So there I was in the Spot Again Tavern in Molalla after hiking around Silver Falls State Park, one of the crown jewels of Oregon socialism.

I ordered a craft malt liquor from the bespectacled, goateed and tattooed bartender, who wore a well-worn cowboy hat. He served up my beer and I retired to a back table and surveyed the spacious joint: antlers everywhere, piano, three pool tables, dartboards, slot machines, foos ball table and lending library.

Someone called from the freezer that all the steaks were frozen. Two men silently left the tavern after losing at slots. It was just before noon on a Thursday. Over the bar, a white board advertised a steak and eggs breakfast special for $9.95 (with hash browns and toast!). It was accompanied by an exquisite drawing of Elmer Fudd holding a shotgun.

If truth be told, I lived in Molalla for one year, in 1970, after my family had returned from missionary service in Brazil. I remember almost nothing about Molalla except the family that lived next door in the other side of a our duplex. It was a Vietnam vet, his Vietnamese wife, and their toddler son. I suspect that was pretty brave in Molalla circa 1970. The war wasn’t winding down at all by then.

A rotund OTA man walked into the joint and ordered a coffee. He took a seat at the bar and then launched into a profanity-laced tirade against Biden, liberals and John Kerry (!?!?). He praised the fighting spirit of the Ukrainians and said if Molalla was invaded, he’d fight to the death and post the living shit out of it on social media.

And then he doused more vitriol on Biden and lit him on fire. As I have written and lamented before, Donald Trump killed OTA storytelling for all time. It will never return. Thanks Trump, you son-of-a-bitch! It takes a special kind of evil to kill stories.

Maybe I should just give up on these joints altogether. But dammit, you can’t find any decent stories in brew pubs or wine bars! No one in these joints has ever barbecued an eel some osprey dropped from the sky or drank so much Jagermeister that he shit himself in the bathtub.

I tuned out the madman and his now obnoxious phone conversation about his pickup and driving a dump truck.

Oh I pine for the days when OTA men talked about logging, fishing and degeneracy and not insane conspiracy theories and YouTube videos confirming their truth displayed on phones.

Fifty-eight! I’ll soon start collecting a modest pension from my itinerant teaching career that seems as far away to me as the Ice Age or Tom McCall Republicans.

The bartender fired up the deep fryer and grease gurgled to life like the witches’ cauldron in Macbeth. I’m sure deep fried spotted owl and roadkill Portland hippie taste delicious!

I wrote some drivel in a notebook. I reflected on my time in Silver Falls State Park. The OTA man then told the bartender his vintage Corvette was parked outside. In other words, he’d driven his fancy sports car to the Spot Again Tavern in Molalla to drink a coffee on a late weekday morning and bitch about Joe Biden. That was his recreation. I wonder what he used to do for fun. Maybe he wasn’t even angry then.

He’s never coming back from the abyss and for that I am truly sad.

Twenty Years of Nestucca Spit Press

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Twenty years ago this spring I launched Nestucca Spit Press to publish/present Let It Pour, a web site chronicling dive tavern and bars on the Oregon Coast. It finally left this world a year ago after I decided not to renew the domain name. Most of the joints were gone or gentrified anyway.

At the time, I never dreamed that two decades later NSP would have published almost 30 books/publications ranging from poetry to fiction to memoir to history to pamphlets to magazines and sold/distributed almost 40,000 literary items across the region and beyond.

I want to thank all the purchasers and readers of NSP publications. You kept an independent Oregon publisher going, and it was especially important to me as a person during a dark and dangerous time not that long ago. I never stopped writing and the writing took on a different, better path.

In 2022, NSP will publish a fantastic and groundbreaking book of non fiction written by Drew Kaza called High Contrast, set in 1972, about Jefferson High School’s remarkable basketball championship season featuring an all Black team victory over an all white Baker City squad. It was a cultural landmark and a story of racial relations more relevant today than it was 50 years ago.

I have a favor to ask. To support NSP and its unique editorial mission, will you consider purchasing a title through the web site/blog, or make a contribution in support of the blog, or purchase some of the new print and e-book titles available on Amazon. Link here:

https://www.amazon.com/Matt-Love/e/B01MFFK8XS?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1&qid=1647207679&sr=1-1

Thanks for considering. I look forward to leading NSP into its third decade.

A special thanks to Lena, Amira, Cindy, Shannon, Erin, Pioneer Printing and Brandy for all the help over the years. It always has been, and always will be, a collaborative effort.

Sartre on My Writing Mind

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Over the years, I’ve used some lines by Jean-Paul Sartre on writing in my workshops to stimulate thinking on a subject a writer wants to write about. I’ve found the exercise helps writers determine and/or clarify the purpose of a project and create a conversation with it. As I write about the New American Diaspora, I frequently have struggled to define a particular voice or format to express and make sense of my experiences observing and interacting with the homeless. Perhaps this confusion results from the mind-boggling non-linear confusion of this issue. Perhaps this project will end up being one big meandering question mark of a book. I don’t know. I may never know. I may never compile the pieces of the newsletter into a book.

I was thinking about my Sartre writing exercise the other Sunday morning as I walked in dense fog to the river to observe the pirate fleet. (One new boat.) I thought it time I respond to his statements to engage my mind on what I have done with this project and where I might be going.

Words are loaded pistols.

I do not want to fire my words at those charged with solving the homeless crisis. I do not want to write about abject failure. There is enough of that going around in the journalism business and I wonder if it is doing any good. (I think so.) I also don’t want to write about general successes carried out by bureaucracies because I don’t want to write press releases laden with statistics. Perhaps I want to fire away at American culture and its debasement and destruction of so many people and watersheds and how it relates to the homeless crisis. That would require taking the larger view. But is that the right path? Maybe going small, one neighborhood, one encampment, several individuals, is the editorial path to pursue. Can you take two paths in a literary project? What about 17?

New problems demand new writing styles.

I agree. I must find one. I did once, when I wrote about rain and then later, the carved-up and carved-out men and women on probation. How does a style come to you? Can you discover or invent one? Can you experiment with several and then distill one into reality? Can you copy one? And what if a discernible one never consciously emerges?

Writing is certain way of wanting freedom.

The freedom to write anything I want on the homeless crisis is an editorial freedom many writers engaged with the issue don’t have. I can take the writing any direction I want. I can change my mind. I can challenge orthodoxy on the Left and Right. I have no agenda to debunk or uphold. I have no managing editor or publisher or head of a non profit or elected official coordinating my coverage or opinions. I have no deadlines or word counts to meet. I don’t have to use official jargon that obfuscates the subject, such as using a word like obfuscate. I have no book contract. I have no agent. I can range and roam. Perhaps the unique and self appointed freedom I have in writing on this subject is my greatest asset. It is the jolt of electricity into my storytelling. Or maybe it is my own tiny periscope.

What do you want to disclose about the world through your writing?

I offer some opening lines from a poem by William Blake to help answer this question:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,

And Eternity in an hour.

A Robin Redbreast in a Cage

Puts all Heaven in a Rage.

A dove-house fill’d with Doves and Pigeons

Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions.

A dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate

Predicts the ruin of the State

An American with a healthy dog, but he himself starved and emaciated in reality and metaphor, an American outside (or inside!) our decorative or barb-wired gates, living on the streets or in the willows, does not predict the ruin of the American state, it guarantees it.

What change do you want to bring to the world with your writing?

To paraphrase the poet William Stafford, I want my writing to inspire daily one or two or a million intricate or simple moves for justice and kindness. That might be a sobriety check on a man splayed on a sidewalk, writing a grant to fund an entirely new idea, holding a book club and serving Old Crow, asking a people camping in a wetlands to leave and helping the move, writing a zine about the death of a homeless man, buying a distressed property and getting a homeless family out of a car and into a house or going to a church and asking Christians to start acting like Jesus.

What would happen if everyone in the world read your writing?

People with significant means might consider consuming less and regard watersheds as our critical allies and thus quit destroying them in the name of profit.

My American readers might consider their culture as shattered beyond repair, (thankfully so) and thus, it must be completely rebuilt with new materials and a different kind of labor. Think of barn raising as the model. Think of that incredible scene in the movie Witness.

What will you commit to in your writing?

I will commit to putting my ass in the chair and writing up what I experience in connection to the homeless issue. I will also commit to changing editorial direction on this project any time I see fit or can’t help myself.

What will you do to be read?

I will publish this book myself and attempt to find a national publisher for it. I will be willing to gig again to disseminate this book and expose myself to harassment.

Why write?

Because the story is right in front of me and I encounter it daily, sometimes two or three times a day, and I’m not even looking for it, let alone want to confront it. It’s a calling like I’ve never felt before as a writer, and I am beginning to grasp where it all began, in a probation office, with that one man’s face. He was fresh out of prison and had no social security number. He didn’t know his last name, which is supposed to be impossible in America. But there he was, addled, confused, wrecked, and he was about to become homeless, then vanished, then dead. I had a chance to help him, with a written document he couldn’t write, and I did not help. I will never forget that moment when I shirked my duty as a human being, not to mention as a writer.

Oregon Tavern Age: Blow Job (the drink)

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Four OTA women sat at the bar of an OTA joint in the city. They were all drinking vodka cranberries and drinking them hard. It was a Sunday afternoon.

I sat ten feet away at a table near the only window with a craft malt liquor and my writing materials.

One topic dominated their loud conversation that easily drifted to every corner of this smallish rectangular joint. That topic was men, asshole men, asshole men to be divorced or cuckolded yet also to still be fucked while getting the divorce or being cuckolded.

Terrible music from the 80s played through the speakers. Toto must die!

Outside on the sidewalks, homeless men and women carrying bags like Santa Claus or pushing wheelbarrows and baby strollers full of returnable cans and bottles passed by on their way to the machines that provided their daily wage.

The conversation at the bar shifted to blow jobs—the drink, not the act of fellatio.

One of the OTA women ordered a blow job and the bartender concocted it in a flash. The woman then drank it like she was giving a blow job.

Readers, I must restate for the record: I never make up OTA stories. I have no need.

At some point, I must have chuckled and the bartender saw me smiling and laughed. Then the four OTAs all turned toward me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I couldn’t help bu eavesdropping on you. How could I not?”

They roared with laughter and approval.

One of them, the blow job queen, asked if I was writing it down for a book.

I told them I was writing a letter.

It was a lie. I was writing about them. If they wanted to check for themselves, they were welcome to come over and peruse my writing. I wasn’t at all worried because no one can read my handwriting generated in an OTA joint. After a couple weeks, even I can’t!

I’ve used this ploy at least a half dozen times in 25 years of writing about OTA life in OTA country. Only once has anyone taken me up on my offer. It was inside the Triangle Tavern in Astoria. A crazed football fan and OTA degenerate wanted to see my notebook. He was sure I was writing vile things about him, which I was. I showed it to him. He “read” it. He approved of my writing a letter to an ex girlfriend.

The porter was kicking my ass.

The blow job queen ordered another blow job, but this time with extra whipping cream. The bartender fixed the drink in record time and topped it off with a swirl of whipping cream delivered with real panache.

The OTA woman gulped it on one great gulp. She really knew how to swallow!

Walking in Snow

NSP Meditations

Light snow fell. It was seven in the morning on a Thursday.

Half a world away, Russian paratroopers were dropping into Ukraine and most likely in the snow. The invasion was on. Paratroopers? Was it 1944?

I wanted to get out in the snow. You don’t get all that many chances in a lifetime of living in Western Oregon to walk leisurely in falling snow. I remember almost all of them. The ones on the beaches remain the most memorable because there is simply no word to describe accurately the experience of seeing snow land on the ocean and disappear.

Sometimes I think that might be a good way to leave this life, when the time comes.

I donned the trusty pea coat and 50-year old stocking cap from my junior high days that I’d recently entombed. I felt alive. My mind shook with vigorous creative imagination. I started thinking about an idea for next season’s Christmas tale. Something about a sanctimonious man who loses it all via a scandal of some kind and heads to the Oregon Coast to escape the stoning on social media. There, he rents a house for a week to get it together and meets….? Maybe some men living down by a river and ready to cook a Christmas Day turkey in a garbage can in hole in the ground.

An older man across the street captured my attention. He lifted the the door of the canopy on his mid 90s Chevy pickup, took out a green bottle of something from the bed and started belting it down. It was either beer or wine or Pernod. He just stood there in the snow and drank.

It didn’t surprise me. I’d seen the same old man drinking from the back of his pickup in the morning at least a dozen times over the last year. Then I’d watch him walk up the stairs into his home that’s probably worth $750,000 but also has a 200-year old orange Camaro with flat tires in his driveway.

I kept moving. I picked up the pace. I paralleled the creek and admired the ducks. The homeless encampment was dead ahead. I cruised through it and saw a man emerge from a RV wearing a backpack and wielding a flashlight. A woman near him was inside a shattered sedan and trying to move things around. On the hood of the sedan rested four full 24-ounce bottles of Coke.

The noise of heavy traffic from a nearby boulevard filled the air. I hit the park and took the path among the oaks and conifers that bordered the boulevard. A train passed. Then another.

Down the path, a hundred or so yards away, I saw a man bundled up in a heavy coat walking his bicycle. He wore a backpack. It all evinced the unmistakable aura of a homeless man walking in the snow.

I figured I’d catch up to the man and we might have an opportunity to talk. A few seconds later, the man stopped near a stately oak tree, took off his backpack, leaned his bike against the trunk and sat down.

A minute or so later I would meet the man and we would talk, for almost half an hour. And what a conversation we had. Certainly the most fascinating one of my life that occurred while snow fell.

And you can read what happened at https://mattlove.substack.com/

Signature Gatherer

NSP Meditations

I was sitting in a coffee shop writing a weird piece about Oscar Wilde when I looked out the window and saw something that startled me. At first I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, then I recognized did.

Joy! A young man was gathering signatures for a ballot initiative. I hadn’t seen such a quintessential Oregon sight for over 25 years! And in fact, gathering signatures to qualify an initiative for the ballot was something almost disappeared from Oregon political life.

Remember the 80s-90s when we voted on dozens of such successful petition drives? It was the bane and beauty of our elections. It gave us medical marijuana and Lon Mabon’s evil OCA anti-gay measures. Back in those days, almost all petition gatherers were unpaid, unlike today, which might be a metaphor of some kind.

The signature gatherer was jaunty as he worked. He practically skipped. He had long blonde hair tied off in a ponytail and wore tan slacks, a shiny brown leather jacket from the 70s and patent loafers. What an ensemble to promote democracy! I dug it. He was clearly digging his duty and I dug that, too.

His gathering technique intrigued me Every other gatherer I’d seen over the decades stood stationary in front of a busy retail outlet or post office. Sometimes they even sat at tables. Most looked bored or dour.

Not this dude! He was on the move, smiling, waving, chatty, coming up to people walking or sitting at tables outside restaurants and cafes. He even accompanied people across crosswalks. He talked to people’s dogs! He probably fed them treats!

I simply had to sign the petition. I knew it wasn’t going to be some reactionary proposal such as banning the teaching of slavery because it hurts certain students’ feelings. This was Portland after all. It would probably be an initiative to legalize magic mushrooms for medicinal use. Wait, Oregon voters already passed that one!

It was time to go. The gatherer might disappear any second. I finished my coffee and went out to sign a petition and advance direct democracy. I even caught myself jogging a bit. Jesus, I was really into democracy probably because it’s dying around Oregon and elsewhere in America. Perhaps dying is the wrong word, perhaps murdered is the right one. There is a difference.

The search was on. It took five minutes but I found him. He was just finishing up with a glazier repairing a window busted out by drug deranged hooligans. He was overjoyed to see me. I had tracked him down after all. Who does that in Oregon anymore? I do!

The initiative sought to discourage lawmakers (meaning rural Republicans) from walking out of legislative session by making them forfeit their seat if they were absent without permission from the House Speaker or Senate Leader for more than 12 days in a row. Or something to that effect. I didn’t read the fine print. I just wanted to sign it and compel those elected to a legislative body to actually govern when they’re in the minority. That’s the way it’s done in America. And if you don’t want to remain in the minority, then you change.

I signed it. He thanked me. And that was my good democratic duty for the day.

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