Oregon Tavern Age: Wellness

I drank a local porter and wrote about beavers. Beavers are my friends. We are also collaborators.

A country song I didn’t recognize played on satellite radio.

Crows cawed outside. The stuffed ones inside didn’t.

The tattooed OTA bartender said she needed a smoke break and to let the dog out of her rig to piss. Her man was coming home after eight weeks on a job far away. She was horny as hell.

“Friend of the Devil” by the Grateful Dead came on.

I caught snippets of three conversations behind me: 1) the pawn shop owner in town died last night after a fall. He tripped in his living room and cracked his skull open after hitting a coffee table. The coffee table survived; 2) a doctor told a regular he had to stop drinking Rock Stars with booze. If he didn’t he was a dead man; 3) a high school teacher in a nearby city blew his brains out with a shotgun right before Christmas Break. The kids would be all right. They didn’t like him anyway.

A Mark Knopfler country song came on. Good warm pickin.’

I wanted a dog, but the timing wasn’t right yet.

I finished my porter and left. I had said exactly three words on this visit to OTA country. “Porter” and “thank you.”