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April 26, 2020

Corona Virus Thoughts #3

A breeze blows through the area where I live. It mixes with wood smoke.

I just woke up from a nap in a chair.

An American flag ripples in the distance. It should be turned upside down.

I hear birds and power tools.

I wrapped up the tree planting gig: around 1200 total in some of the most physically demanding work of my life. I wish it could go on. The landowner tipped me a hundred smackers for my effort. I’d never received a tip for labor in my life and I taught my ass off for 25 years in schools. It felt wonderful. Shouldn’t good teachers be tipped?

Strange people pass by.

A large man is dying not far from me.

I sense many people are ready to create monumental change in their lives. The quarantine exposed something. But will they act?

Many Americans have learned the hard way that the lives they had at home were utterly meaninglessness, and in fact, awful. They could stand it because they could leave. They could survive it because they had distractions. The facade has now been pulverized.

One can only hope after this that unnecessary air travel will finally end (like flying to Africa and Antarctica to run marathons). And it appears the virus may have killed the cruise ship industry for all time. Thank the Oceans!

An elderly woman pulls up in a 90s Lincoln Continental to meet a neighbor. She is wearing a side arm and carrying a box of wine.

I see a lonely tether ball pole with molding rope and a molding ball. I want to pound the ball like the old school yard days.

Lots of conspiracy theories floating around. They attach to the weak of mind.

I saw a video of a Southern woman defying at stay at home order yelling at a health care worker wearing a mask who stood in front of her. She told the worker to go back to China, you commie.

How did Americans get this dumb?

Of course Ronald Reagan was elected twice in landslides, so really, is nothing new in modern America?

Never forget this: the doctor who invented the lobotomy was given the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Henry Kissinger was given the Nobel Prize for Peace. Hillary Clinton got three million more votes than Donald Trump.

An oil executive said on TV that “we have to get back to way things were.” No we don’t. That way was exploitation, destruction and drivel.

I keep building driftwood forts to preserve my sanity. It’s working.

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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.