jessie girl

April 7, 2021

Oregon Tavern Age: Audition

It was noon on a Friday and I was reading a manuscript in a joint auditioning for OTA status. The audition wasn’t going well. Why? $7 drafts of craft malt liquor answered that question. Still, the joint was trying.

An OTA man shuffled in wearing shorts and a gut. He ordered a vodka cranberry and headed to the video lottery games, which aren’t really games at all. More like costly hypnosis sessions.

“Jessie’s Girl” by Rick Springfield came on.

I want to tell her that I love her

But the point is probably moot

Moot! Moot! Moot! Hot damn vocabulary in a pop/rock song!

However, I must state for the record: it is never moot to tell someone you love her.

Moments later, an elderly Asian woman entered and started ordering the bar staff around to disinfect the gambling machines. Finally satisfied with their cleanliness after multiple wipings, she started playing two machines at once with astonishing alacrity. She wasn’t drinking.

“What I Like About You” by the Romantics came on. I saw the band one time at Starry Night in Portland. A ripping show.

In walked a large, very large OTA man wearing black sweats, a black t-shirt, and a trucker hat. Tattoos of spiderwebs covered his arms and neck. Somewhere in the unknown universe, this looked cool.

He ordered a beer and went to the machines and was soon whooping and hollering while playing Flush Fever.

Willie Nelson came on, a nugget from the 70s. I instantly became sad in the unique way only Willie’s songs from that era can make me sad. Not a bad sad. A good feeling of sadness if there is such a thing.

It was time to leave.

The joint was still auditioning as I walked out the door.

I’ll inform them later if they make the cut. At the moment it was looking pretty good —spiderweb tattoos and Willie, you know?

Support Meditations Blog

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.