coffee shop writing

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.

Conspiracy Coffee Shop

NSP Meditations , ,

I’m drinking drip coffee and writing a tale about a chipmunk that eats magic mushrooms.

Log trucks are ripping by.

It’s a little after 6:30 a.m. I stopped in the 101 coffee shop before my construction job.

Two old men sit across the room from me and engage in conspiracy conversation. There isn’t a shred of doubt in their words.

“The Clintons murdered someone else. The hit list has been updated. They killed his brother, you know. And Foster.”

“The CIA owns Google or Google owns the CIA.”

And so on. They just know it’s all true because it’s right there on the Internet.

Their conversation turns to the upcoming 4th of July celebration and how it’s been ruined by the local liberals. “Too many self righteous liberals! They can’t keep politics out of the 4th of July.”

“You mark my words, they’ll be banning fireworks next, because of pollution.”

They bemoan the changing softening nature of the celebration. They didn’t want hayrides and petting zoos. They want the famous Indian massacre reenacted, like it was years ago. Why not celebrate genocide? It got us where we are.

I decide not to tell them I am going to give a hundred chipmunks magic mushrooms before the big parade and turn them loose on the town. They would find out for themselves and make a conspiracy out of it. Somehow, though, the Clintons and Barak would find their way into the blame.

101 Coffee Shop (Another Morning)

NSP Meditations , ,

An elderly man exits the shop in an old fashioned wheelchair. I interrupt my writing of a kink modern Western to watch him wheel down 101. Another patron says the old man just moved from Portland and is gold mining in the area. Mining gold from a wheelchair? Got to work that in the Western.

On my way to the shop, at approximately 6:45 in the morning, near the turnout off 101 where all the surfers park, in the shoulder of the road, stood a figure with long straight brown hair past the shoulders, wearing a fur coat of some kind, and tight yellow terrycloth shorts with white piping. I didn’t see any baggage around the figure. As I drove past, I saw the face of the figure—it was a man in his 60s or 70s, clean shaven, looking a little spent.

What in the world could he (she?) be doing there at that hour on the Oregon Coast. I could only surmise he was waiting to get picked up by a trucker. I’ve got to work this character in the Western.

After the wheelchair man left, an older man enters the shop with his ukulele. He often bikes in from a nearby campground and plays for his breakfast.

He is just settling in when an older woman wearing pink yoga pants, black leg warmers, some kind of Flashdance cut sweatshirt bolts into the shop. Her hair is white and spiked in Mohawk fashion.

She strikes up a conversation with ukulele man and I learn she is driving her trailer up and down the Oregon and California coasts and serving as a mobile minister to women suffering from sexual abuse. I take a gander at her trailer parked outside and it’s stickered and painted with all manner of healing statements, affirmations and scriptures. Apparently, she pulls over in turnout with a grand view of the ocean or sets up shop in a campground, and, well, starts preaching.

She sees the man’s ukulele and said she has one her in trailer. She rushes out to get it, and a few minutes later after coffee, saying grace, and a breakfast burrito, the two are playing and singing Amazing Grace six feet away from me.

This scene will somehow make it into the Western, but it could go either way—dark or redemptive. I’m thinking the former is better for kink.

101 Coffee Shop

NSP Meditations

Early morning, before my construction job. Drip coffee. Mugs. Creamer.

A man is singing a Jerry Jeff Walker song with a line about waves. Another man is heading out, his tan lab waiting for him outside. He greets his dog and they walk out into the drizzle. They are on the move, living out of cars, rigs or in the willows or woods.

The Grapes of Wrath, which I am reading again for the first time in 30 years (or is 35?) was written for them. We are there again, albeit in a different way, and with a much lower employment rate. I am diving deep into Wrath and I see the striking similarities from the Depression era to the New American diaspora underway today. No one drives jalopies today…wait they do…they’re called old RVS…and the members of the contemporary diaspora jalopy around in them, (or on foot or bicycle) and they aren’t looking for work like the Joads and tens of thousands of other were back then; they are looking to check out in protest or indifference or delusion or depression or depravity or defeat.

I see members of this diaspora every day. I often talk to them. I pet their dogs.

American politicians are oblivious to these people.

They are on the move but going nowhere except down the opposite path of what they are expected to do as Americans.

I want to know more about these people. I want to hear their stories.

Truck Stop Diner Coffee

NSP Meditations

Off a highway. Foggy. Drizzle. Open 24 hours. No neon. Parking lot full of long haul rigs, work pickups, battered RVs.

I walk in and I feel like I’ve walked into a modern Western, all except for the faux wood flooring. I don’t think blood will pool and flow the same way as real wood. Too slick and shiny.

Wranglers and knives. Boots and Trump ball caps. Thirty different pies on the menu and oceans of drip coffee.

Pay at the counter and they bring it out.

I grab a corner table that’s out of the way of gunfire, should it all go down.

I started writing my modern Western the other day. It’s getting darker than I imagined. Kinkier, too. I should write some of it here.

Three old Trumpian men in the booth next to me yuck it up about their winning hand. They are the type of rough men who made a living with their hands who should disdain everything phony about Trump and his working class rhetoric. Oh well. The working class man voted for Reagan, too. Look what that got them.

Orders of biscuits and gravy. An old man falls asleep at the counter. A vintage Ford roadster pulls up outside.

A phone rings. The old man wakes up and takes the call. He’s barking out his conversation. He ends the call and limps out of the diner with a cane.

I’ve got lots of driving today. My mind is filled with the Western. I will write when I drive. I’ll be wearing the threadbare corduroy coat while driving. That coat was born in Yugoslavia and born to write a Western. It will figure in the novel.

Rain Coffee Shop

NSP Meditations, Of Walking in Rain , , ,

Rain falls on a Sunday afternoon and I sip coffee spiked with whiskey. It is that kind of afternoon.

I’m reading a dud from Hammett, a rare occurrence. I may switch over to Grapes of Wrath. I decided to read it again. Thirty five years between readings is a long time for a classic and I was nervous when I began because East of Eden did not hold up at all. But the first two chapters of Wrath astounded me and I was relieved and overjoyed. The book is about an American diaspora and I want to write about the new American diaspora because I am part of it.

I am thinking about a Kat. I am thinking about my dogs. I am thinking about finding a job, if I can find one.

Wind whips the hemlocks outside the coffee shop. A crow wants to land but can’t.

I have started yet another elk-themed piece of writing. There may be a mini-book in my collected elk writings.

Why is it the Elks and not Elk fraternal order? Elk has no plural!

Once I start writing about something, it always seems as if that subject begins appearing everywhere. Rain was like that. Dogs. Beavers. Now elk. I bet I will find an elk t-shirt soon.

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