pizzabox

July 14, 2017

Agendas Delivered

Imagine a knock on your door at 6:30 a.m. Or midnight. You answer. It’s a pizza delivery.

But you didn’t order a pizza. In fact, you’ve never heard of the joint whose faceless employee is standing on your front step holding open the box containing the largest pizza you’ve ever seen. She say’s the pizza is free. You ask who ordered it. She says she doesn’t know.

So the question is: do you accept delivery? The pizza is right there! You could eat it for the rest of your life!

Now imagine receiving pizza deliveries of personal agendas from people, most of whom you do not know, in exactly the same manner as the scenario described above. Do you accept them?

The last year has seen me receive delivery of dozens of personal agendas, some of them truly bizarre and delusional. I never thought my fellow Americans were so disturbed and disconnected. It’s one of the many things I’ve learned the past 12 months.

I’ve never delivered a personal agenda to anyone in my life. I was too busy implementing selfish ones for myself!

The agendas typically come through the internet. Text message ones appear at the oddest of times. A few agendas have arrived through the mail, or left on my doorstep. A couple came via straw man proxy. I’m still waiting for a drone delivery or an agenda written in the sky.

I would estimate half the deliveries are from people I know or used to know. The other half are from complete strangers. Half are well-written. The other half are not. Some are laborious. Most are curt. The gender split is 50/50.

Not one agenda has been delivered in person.

I have compiled a list of all the personal agendas delivered to me during the past year. It’s a remarkable catalog of American neuroses and busy bodies. It will make for fascinating reading if I ever choose to reveal the list in print. Perhaps in the book. Perhaps in a broadsheet. Not here.

I would like to say that I’ve never engaged with any of these agendas, but the temptation exists.

No doubt, a knock on the door from the pizza deliverer will come again.

Just wait for it…

There’s one now, a little tap. There’s another. It sounds like a battering ram!

I don’t get up from the couch. I don’t stop reading my crime novel.

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The Old Crow

Book Club

$11.99 + $3 Shipping

In December of 2020, author Matt Love moved to Portland to care for his elderly father.

Returning to the Rose City jolted Love after 23 years residing on the Oregon Coast. In the Sellwood neighborhood where he lived, Love met a homeless man named Mark. They formed a friendship over literature and the unforeseen magical discoveries in street libraries. They created The Old Crow Book Club, and yes, sometimes that involved drinking Old Crow on a sidewalk.

The club also included several other Sellwood homeless men and women cut from John Steinbeck's Cannery Row cloth.

In due course, Love learned the members' stories of homelessness and how they survived. He wondered what happened to his beloved state of Oregon and attempted to help Mark get off the streets only to run up against the seemingly futile policies to address the crisis.

Along the way, he had the best conversations about books in his life and wrote The Old Crow Book Club, where he recounts his interactions with the homeless people in his neighborhood and offers some suggestions how to alleviate what he considers the greatest man-made American humanitarian disaster of his adult life.

The Old Crow Book Club is available for purchase here and select independent bookstores in Oregon.

Choice Cuts

of Oregon Fiction

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Choice Cuts of Oregon Fiction by Matt Love contains 20 stories, all set in Oregon. The cast of characters includes a depressed Santa Claus, Steve Prefontaine, Jack Ramsay's fast break offense, socialist squirrels, a clearcut, a dead deer, a junior high football team, a high school tennis player, a dissipated teacher, a man who evolves into a beaver, a homeless vet, a jilted preacher, a double date to a prom, rural degenerates, a wily caterer, and much more.

The publication of the collection culminates a quarter century of the author's writing about Oregon and rambling around the state.

Choice Cuts is available for purchase here, through Amazon, or select independent bookstores in Oregon.

The Savage

of State Street

Nestucca Spit Press is proud to present The Savage of State Street: The Thieving and Literary Lives of Smoky Epley. He is the greatest unheralded writer in Oregon history and also one of its more mediocre, colorful and persistent thieves.

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In 1973, Oregon State University Press published Men in Exile: An Anthology of Creative Writing by Inmates of the Oregon State Penitentiary. Twenty-two of Smoky Epley's pieces appeared in the book.

Smoky spent most of his adult life in state and federal prisons for robbery. In 2008, during one of his brief stints of freedom, Smoky became friends with Matt Love, an Oregon author and publisher. They met after Love discovered Men in Exile and wrote a newspaper column about the landmark book. Smoky read the column and reached out.

He returned to prison in 2009 after forging a check. Upon his release in 2011, Love encouraged Smoky to write a memoir. He completed half of Auto before dying in February of 2013.