hunter

October 29, 2020

Oregon Tavern Age: Hunter Biden

The country was drowning deep in shit, people were dying of the virus, losing their homes in the wake of financial catastrophe, whipping up absurd conspiracy after absurd conspiracy, a toxic campaign of historic proportions was underway, the Republicans were scheming to block citizens from voting and ramming a religious nut through to a seat on the Supreme Court, and an Oregon Tavern Age man in Oregon Tavern Age country was railing against Hunter Biden’s and his laptop that undoubtedly contained secrets that would bring down his old man’s campaign. Hunter Biden! Hunter Biden! The OTA man went from railing to frothing and then beyond frothing to wherever this is, most likely to an institution.

I watched his performance from a table while I sipped a local IPA. Nothing like an IPA to watch a farce of a human mind parroting exactly what he had seen earlier that morning on Fox News. Not even a couple beers could slow him down. This is what passes for conservative intellectual thought these days. It didn’t used to be that way.

I know the OTA man. He’s a nice guy and a kindly pool shark. We’ve infrequently talked politics. We agreed on the bipartisanship nature or protecting the right to vote and making it easier to vote. We agreed until later he said the mail balloting he’d used the past 30 years in Oregon suddenly was riddled with fraud because it was all over the news. Everything he knows is derived from Fox News which means he knows less than nothing. It was so easy to be filled up with gas.

I was about ready to ask him if they should reopen the investigation into Hilary’s server and Benghazi before the election, but I didn’t. I was about ready to ask him about Trump’s corruption connected to the Teapot Dome scandal. There is one you know, I can send you a link to it that proves the connection.

Hunter Biden! Hunter Biden! I couldn’t take his ravings anymore and left. I walked out of the joint and saw my friend Tupac riding his unicycle and smoking the world’s largest blunt right out there in public. No one cared because America was falling apart and it was all Hunter Biden’s fault.

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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.