IMG_20200222_122605584 (2)

February 27, 2020

Rain Thoughts

Rain falls outside an Oregon tavern. A large flock of geese just flew by in full glory and I realize it’s the first time I’ve ever seen geese fly from inside a dive bar. I liked it a lot.

I am drinking the local porter. Regulars are playing pool and philosophizing about pool.

Thirty minutes ago I finished Anna Karenina, suicide-by-train and all, 820 pages in tiny print. I had forgotten about the big rainstorm and lightning strike near the end, the scene that opens Levin’s mind to other spiritual possibilities besides Christianity. It’s a damn fine rain scene, cosmic, but it was merely a summer squall that lasted 30 seconds or so and then the sun came out. Rain epiphanies in Western Oregon emerge from longer lasting moments.

I am about ready to write a letter to a great friend. Her loyalty to me in recent years has uplifted my life.

The Oregon City memoir is finished.

I had the blues the other day and went to the beach to arrest them. It took all of five minutes and encountering five choice cuts of fresh beaverwood to not only arrest the blues, but to obliterate them. What is it about these pieces of gnawed wood from way up in the watersheds that delight me so. My collection now pushes 1000. I carry a three-inch piece in the pocket of mycorduroy coat as a lucky charm, surely the only one of its kind in the Oregon, or all of the world for that matter.

I got to babysit my neighbor’s dog the other night. What joy!

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.