dogs

Sonny and the Big Clean-up Day (New e-book released)

NSP Meditations, Writing , , , , , ,

Readers:

I announce the publication of my new e-book about homelessness, Sonny and the Big Clean-up Day, (A Story for Kids and Adults).

In the book, Sonny the husky discovers a homeless encampment destroying a creek in a Portland city park. She alerts her owner and a park ranger and inspires a community clean-up of the damaged riparian area. Neighborhood citizens and residents of the encampment join Sonny to restore a tiny part of a watershed and later celebrate their collaboration.

This book was inspired by my discovery of a children’s Lassie book published in 1970 where Lassie leads a litter clean-up of a national park on Earth Day. I wrote it in similar kid-friendly style, but perhaps with parody also in mind. I have long wondered how parents today talk to their kids about homelessness, since it is all around us. Perhaps this story will help.

Sonny and the Big Clean-up Day is available through Amazon and also through my web site via PayPal at nestuccaspitpress.com and right through this blog.

If you order it through my site you do not need an e-book reader. You will download the story in the E-pub or PDF formats and then easily read it on any device.

Thanks for your support of an independent Pacific Northwest publisher.

Ricky and Cha Cha 2

NSP Meditations

Last spring I met a man, Ricky, and his dog Cha Cha, alongside the road. Ricky told me he and Cha Cha had relocated to the Secret Coast in the winter after bicycling and trotting 1400 miles over the Rockies. He’d left Colorado after being struck by a car and suffering horrific injuries. He had to see the ocean after the accident. It was spiritual need, not religious.

On the journey from Colorado, many people had pulled over and gifted him with new, better bikes, a trailer for Cha Cha, food, and donations to pay vet bills when Cha Cha developed health problems.

Ricky said, “The dog opens doors for me and the dog unlocks people’s hearts.”

Presidents, preachers, pimps and High Tech Zillionares can’t do that. Why do we follow their snake oil instead of the slobber of dogs?

In the intervening months since we’d last talked, Ricky scored a caretaking gig for a clifftop mansion. He got the gig the same way we met. The mansion’s owner saw Ricky and Cha Cha rolling down the road, pulled over, and….well, see where talking to people can lead.

Before we parted, I gave Ricky a couple cans of emergency dog food stored in my car. I told him I’d help with more dog food and had a great bike if his ever broke down. He thanked me and we shook hands. I also shook hands with Cha Cha!

Some four months later, actually a few days ago, I was driving home from my construction job and I noticed a man and dog walking along the road, not far from my domicile. The man walked with a pronounced limp. The dog bounded along without a hitch.

I came closer. It was Ricky and Cha Cha! I stopped the car and powered down the window.

Ricky greeted me like an old friend. I asked about his missing bicycle. It was shot to hell, a busted chain on a custom bike, and he didn’t have a line on another one. He’d suffered a recent hernia and it was all he could do to take Cha Cha out for a walk. He wanted to ride again, bad. He thought it would be easier than walking.

I told him I had a great bike that I hadn’t ridden in seven months. It was all his, although the tires might be low, if not flat. Just follow me, I said, and you can have it.

Ricky and Cha Cha followed and I set him up with a sweet ride. The tires hadn’t lost a pound of pressure and the rig pedaled like a dream. He commented on how nice the bike was, first class, top notch components. I offered to buy Cha Cha some canned food from the nearby convenience store but he told me he was feeding her cooked chicken and steak.

Oh fuck yeah!

I offered to buy him dinner from the store.

“I could really use a beer,” he said, “a clamato kind.”

What was a clamato beer I asked?

He gave me the lowdown and a minute later he was the recipient of two 24-oz cans of some Budweiser picante-flavored clam/tomato concoction packaged in a special tote bag I rigged up for the bike.

Ricky thanked me. We shook hands. Cha Cha came over and shook my hand. Ricky rode away with Cha Cha flanking him to the right. I skipped and cried all the way to my home, utterly joyous.

Have you ever skipped and cried like that? I heartily recommend it.

The Bonnie and Clyde Files Launch (1)

Bonnie and Clyde Files, NSP Meditations , , , , ,

My latest book, The Bonnie and Clyde Files: How Two Senior Dogs Saved a Middle Aged Man is out.

This is book launch week and in the following days I will share some excerpts from the book and other writing related to it.

I invite you to support me and an independent Oregon publisher by purchasing direct from my web site, nestuccaspitpress.com

Only 300 copies of the book were printed. It is not available in bookstores (yet). Your purchase of this special edition will help keep me in the writing and publishing game. I have a lot more stories to tell.

About the book:

“In 2017, at the age of 53, I experienced an extinction of self. For the first time in my life, I could not get a job, I was nearly broke, and I had no freedom of movement or conscience. I was an American outcast trapped in a labyrinth known as probation, desperately engaged in the ultimate struggle to stave off marginalization. There I was, lying on the couch, talking to my dead husky, words echoing through the house that was empty because I had performed terrible hospice care on myself and given away almost everything.

Then I found two senior dogs named Bonnie and Clyde, residents of a senior dog sanctuary along a river. There, walking two dogs, I resurrected as a human being. I read the river, tracked elk, watched birds, slayed blackberries, skipped rocks, cursed clearcuts, walked in rain and went deep into heretofore unknown areas of my creative mind. With Bonnie and Clyde at my side, I learned important lessons of faith, friendship, family, face-to-face encounters and the timeless remedy of nature, lessons I intuit can enlighten others who experience a cataclysmic personal event.

In The Bonnie and Clyde Files, I merge essay, cultural criticism, memoir, streams of consciousness and poetry to create a hybrid of a genre that is unlike any dog book I have ever read. I wrote on instinct, channeled Walt Whitman, and became a dog to better explore humanity, my country and the treatment of men and women at the hands of the state’s criminal justice system. I wrote to understand all the terrible, bizarre and wonderful things that were happening to me.”

Thoughts at the Jetty

NSP Meditations, Oregon Beaches , , , ,

I am playing ball with the dog as we ramble down the beach to the South Jetty.

The clammers have returned and they are clamming away in a thin fog. The more toxic the clams, the less people here. The more toxic the world, the more people should be here.

Great piles of kelp have washed ashore.

I’ve already found three choice cuts of beaverwood and I staked them up for our return. The Beaverwood just keeps coming my way. I find it where it used to never appear. Why is that?

I reunited with my good friend Glen and met his fantastic new friend. We walked and talked down the beach as we played ball with the dog. Glen found a remarkable piece of beaverwood that looked like a sailboat. He said he’s going to make it into a sailboat.

A bit of rain begins to fall.

The dog is running with his usual insane pace.

I can see the fort high up in the dunes. I liken this special fort as an outpost warning against a possible invading army of toxic thoughts.

I am writing a story in my mind as I walk and hurl the ball to the dog. It is a good way to write.

Trucks past us.

I look for the bald eagle that usually appears on this beach. Nothing. No birds at all.

I have so much to do in the coming months. I am hoping I will become more viable as a person and writer if I can accomplish a few things.

The Bonnie and Clyde book is printed. I pick it up in a few days. I would have loved to have read parts of it to Bonnie and Clyde at the river, but that’s not going to happen.

Gus!

NSP Meditations , ,

I was sitting at a table outside my domicile, drinking wine from a paper cup, listening to quail in the hedges, writing the last few pages of my 150th or 155th journal, when a huge black lab/rottweiler mix appeared out of nowhere, bounded toward me, and nearly knocked the table over.

The wine was saved.

This was not a dog I recognized from the neighborhood and I know all the dogs. He had the look of an escapee!

I greeted the beast and rubbed his neck and head. I grabbed his collar and read “Gus” and a phone number. I pulled out my phone and called the number. A man came on the circuit and I explained the situation. He told me Gus had busted down fence and bolted down the road, not too far from where I was sitting. He’d be over 30 minutes. Could I wait? Sure.

Gus and I goofed around and then I used a neighbors leash to secure him to a bumper of a vehicle. I got him some water and treats I have stored in the back my car for just search and emergency purpose.

He wolfed down the treats and buried his head into my lap. He drooled a great dog drool. At last he settled to the ground to rest.

Thirty minutes later, I reunited Gus with his owner. The man gave me $25 in folded cash for my effort. Class. It doesn’t seem like there is all the much class in the country these days. The word never gets used. It was nice to see it on display in such a happy circumstance.

Gus hit the road. I went back to the journal and wrote about Gus. I suspect I’ll see him again. He had that look in his face.

Dogs Raining (Reign) in My Mind (part 14)

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An adolescent Charles Bukowski once baptized a stray dog inside a Catholic church. He sneaked the dog past a priest and sprinkled holy water on its forehead. “He deserves a chance to go to heaven,” said Charles.

In his collection of essays, Frank Conroy writes, “Dog as human observer. I’ve got no problem with that.” He also speculates what the proverb, “Dogs bark, but the caravan rolls on,” possibly Arabian or Proustian in origin, means. Obviously, dogs are stand-ins for humans. According to Conroy, humans love to bark and more humans bark in anger than dogs, (and this was written before social media) but human barkers are soon forgotten and the caravan of life, if a person has one, moves on. My caravan is moving again, thanks to dogs and humans who don’t bark. Aren’t we all tired of barking in our culture?

The television documentary that broke my heart is about American servicemen who trained and handled dogs in the Vietnam War. Once their tour of duty ended, soldiers weren’t allowed to bring their dogs home and had to have them destroyed. Many servicemen were destroyed by this. You can see it on camera when they talk about their dogs and how many lives they saved.

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