coffee shop novel

Oregon City Coffee Shop

NSP Meditations, Pioneer Pride , , , , , , , ,

Early morning in my hometown. This building was boarded up in my youth, but has since been put to distinguished use as a great coffee shop. Across the street, Oregon City’s theater once stood. I can’t believe I’ve forgotten its name.

Also across the street, the Oregon City Library stands, a Carnegie gem, lovingly restored and expanded a few years ago, a project financed by the voters when the government asked them to finance it. Who votes no on libraries?

I spent long, long, hours in this library, reading books and magazines and checking out records. I think I still owe a fine for a lost Stevie Wonder album. I always went to the library alone, on foot or bicycle. My mother never once dropped me off or picked me up.

Oregon City sure has changed a lot in recent years. The downtown finally resurrected itself. I like the changes. The Grand Ronde Tribe wants to buy the old mill site on Oregon City’s side of the Willamette River. I hope they get it. It was theirs once. But please film a war movie there and blow up some of the machinery. But, please leave a few traces standing to remind people that OC was once a three whistle mill union town and supported a vibrant middle class.

I’ve got about 20,000 words on a memoir about growing up in OC in the 70s and 80s, tentatively titled Pioneer Pride. I hope to release it in 2020 if the zeitgeist is right, perhaps release it only in Oregon City, in bars, libraries and street libraries, thrift stores, the Elevator, one old news rack. Who knows? That’s the way I publish these days. I hope my old Oregon City friends will support it. It’s not going anywhere without them.

I stash a few of my books in the lending library here. They always manage to disappear by the time I return.

Someone very special to me still lives in Oregon City. I so wish we could reunite, preferably in Howell’s or Coney Island or the Fall’s View. OC still has three great Oregon Tavern Age joints left!

LA Woman plays. The Doors just don’t seem to garner the attention from current media and listeners other bands from that classic era do. Today, I find myself much more interested in their music.

Yard work for my Old Man later this morning. Also, a possible meeting with important people about the most far out cultural event in Oregon history—Vortex I. Naturally it has a far out Oregon City connection and his name was Dr. Cameron Bangs. He used to practice medicine not too far away from where I am writing this.

Rain Coffee Shop Notes

NSP Meditations , , ,

Rain threatens outside the Christian coffee shop. It’s a hip Christian coffee shop—Aerosmith is playing.

Three college students sip fancy drinks and discuss their recent failures in class.

World Series highlights play silently on television. Baseball seems to be dying before our eyes. Computers are murdering it, making it inhumane. As a kid, I never much liked playing it. Too static. Too much standing around.

The shop has a set of World Books, the sort of Google of its day. Every family owned a set and every kid used it for school reports. My mom still displays the red-colored set from my youth. It’s so old that Robert F. Kennedy isn’t even dead.

A few tables away, a female pastor counsels a female parishioner. She uses her phone to read soothing scriptures.

A novel was recently published. It’s about how nobody reads anymore and everyone plays video games. It will be a novel nobody reads because its intended readership doesn’t read—it plays video games.

Rain is picking up. I long for a cozy place to read a World Book encyclopedia at random and learn something old. In my next home, I want a set from the 1970s. I want Nixon out of office and the Democrats in control of all three branches of government. They used to be able to do that.

More Notes for the Coffee Shop Novel

NSP Meditations ,

I feel out of place, unnerved. I’m drinking coffee in a beautifully appointed coffee shop populated with beautiful people, including the baristas. I haven’t shaved in months, where threadbare clothes, ripped sneakers, and…when was that last shower?

Everything is perfect here: marble floors, black beams, industrial lighting and exposed silver HVAC, wooden tables. A glass garage door opens to a patio with a fire pit!

Can you write a novel in a beautiful coffee shop surrounded by beautiful people? Where is the friction? I don’t think I can. I contrast my writing spirit here with Oregon Tavern Age country and the decidedly non-beautiful people who inhabit that landscape.

Wait, I think I’m getting it all wrong. Bob Seger wrote a beautifully poignant song, almost an anthem, called “Beautiful Losers.” That’s where the novel is for me. That’s where my journalism is.

A young man walks in wearing a blue suit and blue tie. He doesn’t wear this ensemble well. It hangs all wrong. I can use that.

A barista looks at me and smiles as I write on my Alphasmart. I think she thinks I’m a transient. Perhaps I am.

A Down’s Syndrome couple walk in. They appear to be the happiest couple in the world. They are not part of Bob Seger’s world. They need some songs of their own. I used to write songs, but that was a different me. I’m writing Walt Whitman-kind-of-songs now. I need a collaborator to put them to music and sing them for America.

Time to go. I leave a tip for the barista. That might change her mind about me.

More Notes for the Christian Coffee Shop Novel

Fiction, NSP Meditations , ,

A tall woman with dark skin and straight black hair well past her shoulders walked into the Christian coffee shop. She wore tight white jeans, a loose black top and black and white sneakers. Quite the look.

The one-armed barista greeted her and began preparing her order: white chocolate mocha.

Christian rock played softly on the PA.

I sat near the window and dreamed of a reunion with an old friend. I picked up and perused a handout with the title “Relational Vampires.”

The woman launched into a story about her recent attendance at a Pentecostal service that went full tilt with touching, speaking in tongues, wrapping up a sinner in blanket, the works. There was a rock band playing, too! “Sympathy for the Devil” no doubt. No, probably Otis Redding.

The woman wrapped up her story and then gathered up the returnable cans and bottles from the recycling bin. She left the shop and I saw her mount a bicycle with a little trailer full of cans and bottles and ride away. How could I not?

The barista came out from behind the counter with a phone book! He started looking up something. I hadn’t seen anyone use a phone book in 20 years. It was bracing. It was out of time. (Story idea: high tech private detective has to consult a phone book to solve a murder. He’s utterly baffled by the book. It confounds him. He hates it, but the murderer keeps leaving them next to the bodies with exactly one listing circled.)

I took out an Oregon map. Where would I go in 2019? Where had I never been? Where were the compelling and crazy untold stories lurking? I always seem to find them.

I drank my coffee and looked around the coffee shop. My mind drifted back to the possible reunion. It probably wasn’t going to happen.

Random Coffee Shop Novel Notes

NSP Meditations

The barista compliments me on my 99-cent corduroy coat. “Made in Yugoslavia,” I tell her. It’s not clear to she knew what Yugoslavia was or had ever heard the word spoken.

I am in faceless coffee shop in a totalitarian city. Everyone is paying handsomely to be monitored.

The coffee shop novel is starting to cohere into something utterly unpublishable.

A jogger jogs by. Bad form. Hands too high.

The road beckons. Klamath Falls sounds good. I’ve never seen it. What do people do there? Is their joy or seething in the populace?

Reunions are afoot. I relish them.

A reader of the rain book reached out to me and called me a “translator” of rain. I love it when readers reach out. It does take effort. I am fortified when I learn that my writing still connects to people. The stories of how they come to find my books are equally inspiring.

A woman wearing a black tennis skirt walks in and I do a doubletake. She is clearly a player; I can tell by the sturdy quads. She’s not wearing the skirt out of some urban irony.

Someone walks in with a spiral notebook. Then another. And another! It’s a spiral notebook revolution. I am writing this in a spiral notebook. Will they one day go extinct?

The OTA manuscript is completed. Now what? I think this book has unique Oregon value.

I miss my husky. I had another dream about her the other night. I miss our maniacal runs down the beach in rain.

Two men behind me are discussing their tech high jinks.

A recent graduate from college is interviewing for some progressive internet job, assuming there is such a job.

I’m making all this up from the coffee shop. I have a strong proclivity for fiction in these joints.

The Coffee Shop Novel Continues

Fiction, NSP Meditations , , ,

I sit down at a plastic table under and ancient wooden awning of a nearly century-old market that also doubles as a quasi coffee shop. This table is the coffee shop’s only seating.

I am drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup. It is as thin as a Dickens gruel.

A lithe woman with pink hair and wearing yoga pants walks into the coffee shop. More like jaunts than walks. Her left arm is broken and she has a pink cast. Her story intrigues me and I don’t even know what it is.

I waited for my coffee shop to open after a five-mile walk on a deserted beach in a dense fog. The tide was so far out it practically invited me to walk to Asia. I started and then detoured, wandering among the tidepools and exposed rocks. What exciting life abounds there! I may become a sea star man one of these mornings and break up with the limpets. Sea stars devour limpets.

I recall a moment 15 years ago when I saw a kid on a beach detach a sea star from a rock with a stick. His parents watched and egged him on. I let the kind have it, called him a murderer, made him cry. The parents stood their speechless. They’d raised a killer.

A crow is pecking at a street light.

I am eating my yogurt with blackberries I picked on the way back from the beach. I am supplementing this breakfast with a couple of leftover pancakes a poet made me from buckwheat, walnuts and cranberries.

There is bustle in the coffee shop. A carload of jangly tourists invaded and are ordering energy drinks and chips for breakfast.

I met a man recently who divined the secrets of the comings-and-goings of the otters on the local beach. I now possess that secret knowledge and can regulate my life accordingly to watch them. How many Americans can say they have a daily or weekly presence of otters in their lives? I should conduct a research study into that question.

A large woman is walking up wearing a purple bathrobe. I just heard her order a pack of Marlboros for breakfast.

Morning doves mass on the power line. The quail are loose!

I have much to write today, absolutely none of it with any prospect for commercial success. Maybe I won’t write a thing.

1 2