Random Rainy Thoughts

Rain seeps into my docile. It tickles and trickles in through invisible seams. I need to caulk and recaulk. I write this while sipping a black beer. I wish I had some good old country music playing. I am living a good country song right about now. I am wearing a Western shirt as I write this. Can you have a black beer in a country song?

There are so many things I should be writing about but in recent weeks I haven’t been writing about them. The plan was to sequester myself in a remote place in my mind and write something that could potentially earn me a living. Writing to fend off starvation was the working editorial urgency.

Instead I am writing on: biscuits and gravy, dogs, old dogs, rain, Christmas craft fairs, clearcuts, culverts, Oregon tavern age life, ferns, watersheds, Port Orford, books no one reads, Sometimes a Great Notion, poetry, love, rivers, rain, RV parks, firewood. I can’t seem to commit to what should be written and perhaps therein lies the key to what is important to write.

I am also reading books and pamphlets that no one reads anymore. I find them everywhere, abandoned, bargain bins, street libraries, dive bars, trash cans.

Strangers come out in the rain: a man hauling firewood; a woman running down the beach in absurd fashion; an old timer mining for gold; a bartender reading self-books written where the sun perpetually shines, written by authors who all sport tans; a woman selling wood burnings for Christmas tree decorations made from wood scavenged from construction sites; a man playing pool with a hustler’s past mindset, but not the skill; two men who knock off from roofing to drink in the afternoon.

I walked a dog in rain the other day, a crazy mutt the color of apple brandy. He was more Mexican jumping bean than dog and he delighted me with his antics and the little break of skin on my hand from his treat-eating savagery.

It is hard to believe that Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann both wrote long short stories about dogs that barked with so much existentialism (human, not canine) that they often proved difficult to read.

But at least the dogs didn’t die at the end! (I think.) I can’t say the stories had happy endings, either. They just ended.

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