portland short fiction

Yet Another Short Story from the City

Fiction, NSP Meditations , , , , , , , ,

Tattooed love boys and girls fiddle on their phones and deign to converse with one another.

Stevie Wonder plays—the double and triple album era. He once recorded a triple album called The Secret Life of Plants. That needs to be playing in here. I’ll alert the management. I know someone who works here who loves plants. In fact, the cafe has plants.

A barista cleans the windows without purposeful intent. DH Lawrence once wrote that if you’re going to make a stool or make pudding, make it well.

I don’t understand why people reappear in my life and then turn around and disappear.

Great high ceilings in here.

“When you can’t get in traction,” wrote Henry Miller, “Reverse and get unstuck.” That seems to be good advice for writing and life.

I interviewed with the Chinese for an English teaching position. I’m not sanguine about my chances. Will anyone hire me? I need a dog as a boss.

Who are these people in the cafe and their work? Do they use their hands besides touching screens? Are they handless jobs?

I see some cultural magazines from The City on a counter. I used to read them. I’d rather read a user agreement these days. More relevance.

Not far from here I once paid $40 a month in rent to live in a house with four other people while attending grad school. That City is long gone.

This cafe needs a micro lending library. Get some literature cross-pollination going in and around here.

I always do a double take when I see someone reading in public anymore. No one is reading in the cafe.

My great collaborator arrives soon. A strategy of rapprochement succeeded. We’ll hash out ideas to reinvent micro publishing. I relish these moments of hashing between us.

What is the meaning of the verb “to hash?” I don’t know. I’m not going to look it up.

I’ve spent more on coffee in the last six hours than a can of Yuban costs.

Strawberries are out of season but a strawberry mind is on my mind.

I wrote a sonnet channeling Rilke and Prince. I write a sonnet about every decade.

Where are dogs taking me in my writing?

I met sincere kindness in this cafe a couple of months ago. It is changing my life.

Does one have to become a dog to write more authentically about humans? There is an extensive literature in this approach that indicates the best dog books are books written by dogs and they are about humans.

I’ve prepared several versions of my “blasting-to-smithereens” statement that I’m considering sending to someone who needs to hear it and start over. But how do you know if you should send such a statement? You don’t. By not sending it, am I taking the high road? It doesn’t feel like it. But sometimes when contemplating an action or inaction, the high road can’t be seen. You can always see the gutter.

My father quoted Emily Dickinson the other day: “The soul selects her own society, then shuts the door.” Is that soul sick? Many experts on therapy think so. I don’t. I think that soul thrives. The shut door doesn’t mean it’s permanently shut. It can be opened by the shutter at any time, and someone can also knock. It might even be an unsolicited knock. I’ve recently discovered that can still happen.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

Short Story from the City of Rain

Fiction, NSP Meditations, Of Walking in Rain , , , , , , ,

Not a single person is doing anything else in the cafe but interacting with a computer, tablet or phone. I am writing in longhand on paper rescued from a fire, a fire doused by rain.

Dreamy dreamless lite indie pop plays on the speakers. Real human beings didn’t make this music. All in the ones and zeroes.

My coffee is expensive, fried. I miss Yuban, fresh.

I miss the poet of dandelions and hummingbird who works here. We once talked of Alphasmarts and the phony empathy of writers of published empathy. She got it. She won’t be like that.

Rain works its way here and there. No one pays attention to it. It’s not even an abstraction.

A man with a red, white and blue beard walks in carrying a fat book. So much for my theory. Theories are useless, particularly in poetry and therapy. Rivers and oceans don’t need theories. Neither do birds and otters.

Two Californians, the bearded man and the bearded barista discuss their California exodus stories. Everyone is coming to the City of Rain. It is rapidly becoming the City of Umbrella, something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime. Things change. Things fall apart. Things cohere. I love the word cohere. No one uses it anymore. Just incoherent. Rain is coherent if you watch it, feel it, rub it in. An umbrella is a chastity belt. (I just ripped off from my rain book.)

I anticipate a meeting later today with a long lost friend, one of the most important friendships of my life, severed in recent years. Can we reattach what was severed between us, and pump some fresh plasma (saltwater) through it, hook it up to a rain IV solution, and let the collaboration function again? It won’t be the same, of course. There will be different circulations and movements. I’m nervous to meet this person. I feel like a different human being since I last saw her. I hope it’s raining when we meet. I’ll throw a little salt into the rain and pray for plasma for the transfusion.

Traffic, traffic, traffic. How it acts like a dark lord upon your soul. It is changing the City of Rain. It already has. I need a new map for the city I grew up in. The old one is gone. Chrissie Hynde wrote something about that. Did the Pretenders have a rain song? “Message of Rain” would have been a great title.

I just heard the word fiance from the bearded barista. It’s been a long time since I heard it. I thought it was dead.

My beard is the heaviest its ever been. I’m becoming a sea level mountain man. Give me some wood to chop or trail to clear. Give me some rain to drink.

Time to move out of the cafe and into the arid requirements wrought by people who are utterly bereft of all the clarifying benefits of rain and have no idea what plasma really is. These are the people who also press their jeans and hashtag for social justice.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)