jack

November 3, 2020

Corona Virus Election Thoughts

What will happen? How many people will die as a result of maskless people attending a Trump rally?

Jack Nicklaus came out the other day with his opinion that the number of covid deaths was over-counted for political reasons. He didn’t comment on cancer treatments or how to set a broken leg.

Record voting. Record and wily voter suppression by Republican officials at all levels of government. Republican officials making people wait in long lines to vote, trying to kill people who want to vote by forcing them into inclement weather and/or expose themselves to the virus.

The Pandemic is worse than ever but here we are playing football and letting people in the stadiums. I mean, they did that sort of thing in Rome! Wait, they didn’t! They shut down the games when cholera or typhus hit. We’re dumber than Rome!

After this botched election (yet another one) will we finally get some national reform? A universal ballot and method for voting for federal offices? It is time.

I read a story in the NY Times that pastors were training to defuse potential violence at the polls. People will be carrying rifles and pistols at the polling places. Someone is going to get shot.

You wonder if Trump voted for himself. You know his wife didn’t. They voted by mail.

More rap moguls have come out for Trump. I cannot fathom why.

I’ve never missed voting in a federal election.

Many people are considering getting off the grid if Trump is elected. I would consider this if I had a partner. I have some resources.

I watched The Charge of the Light Brigade film from 1968 on election eve. It occurred to me that the history and metaphor of that blundering, blind incompetence is exactly like what has happened to Trump and his supporters. They charge right into the Valley and well…you know how it ended. And not at all poignant like the poem.

My one real wish for a Biden win is that it will help drain the poison injected into my mother by the Presidency of Trump. I know she can regain her faith and optimism once he leaves office.

I may build an election day driftwood fort for no other reason that it will help clear my mind.

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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

$22.99 + $3 Shipping

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.

$19.99 + $3 Shipping

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.