ocdump

September 11, 2018

Meditations on a Dump Run (Part 2)

I rented a U-Haul truck and my friend walked over to help me load it up for a run to the dump. It had been well over five years since my last big run and I was a bit giddy at the prospect. That wonderful purgative feeling of purging and starting anew. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the best objects to throw away. Most of them weren’t even breakable! Still, there was one desk already somewhat unraveling. I figured it would make a pleasing sound when it completely shattered and mentioned this to my friend to plant some anticipation.

The Astoria dump is easily the worst dump I’ve ever patronized. There is a preposterous bottleneck at the entrance and it is designed in such a way that users can’t throw shit down, down, down…to break apart. Rather, users toss their items onto a flat concrete surface and actually have to throw them upward! It reduces the breakage potential by 98-percent. Every so often, a piece of machinery comes along to push the debris over a precipice and into containers that will be trucked away to a landfill. Virtually every sight and sound of glorious breakage has been eliminated at the Astoria dump. The machines get all the fun. Well, the gulls, too.

We waited in line, discussed his educational future and my existential one, and then got the signal to proceed. As I backed up the rig, I noticed all all the TVs, monitors, computers and appliances waiting to be for recycled. I winced. What a waste! (I’ve never shattered a computer, but know I want to. Doesn’t everyone?)

Can’t you shatter something at the dump and still recycle it? Why not? Should I open a dump and let people shatter computers? It would be a huge hit, I’m positive. It’s our only revenge against what they’ve done to us.

They don’t even call them dumps anymore. Recycling or transfer or waste management centers. Dump is a great word. I hate seeing it going away in this context and relegated to a bowel movement or break-up.

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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.