Kelp Consciousness

I walked down the beach, piercing a thick morning fog. I walked to unfog myself in a time of a great American fogginess.

The amount of kelp washed ashore astonished me. I’d never seen so many coiled clumps and a foamy tide kept delivering more. It was almost if they represented an invading army repelled by the heroes stationed in an array of driftwood forts built by the true Oregon militia, not the deluded and phony one that needed long guns to protect their right to kill people by their stupidity and ignorance of basic public health precautions.

Kelp. Kelp. Kelp! It was everywhere I walked. I had kelp on the mind and my drifted with the fibrous tentacles of this incredible plant as it stretched itself across the land.

I was thankful for a text message from a friend and former teaching college. She said my writing still mattered to her, that it was opening her mind to consider this and that. I miss our unique personal connection and working beside each other on behalf of the ocean. She is easily one of the greatest teachers I have ever seen teach. The passion is beyond measure, as is the skill.

I read ten copies of the New Yorker back to back . The memoir, reportage, analysis and commentary of Trump, the protests, and the Pandemic were brilliant, the poetry and fiction that appeared alongside it, with one exception, utterly dull, opaque and irrelevant. Why the disconnect? Poetry and fiction should matter just as much as memoir, reportage, analysis and commentary during these terrible times. But in the pages of the New Yorker, they do not, at least for me.

Both my cousins graduated from rehab for alcohol. We’ve had long talks and the one I wrote letters and sent books to said the words helped. He even loved the Westerns!

There is still a role for Westerns in American culture. Let’s just move them away from cowboys, the US Army and the genocide of native Americans.

My Christmas book is at the printer. Launch coming soon. I hope my readers here will support it. It’s quite unlike any collection of Christmas stories I’ve ever read.

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