pandaexpress

June 16, 2017

Unopened Fortune Cookies

A great Astoria friend of mine, who is assuredly the greatest repurposer of abandoned items and people in the entire Pacific Northwest, recently presented me with a fortune cookie courtesy of Panda Express, and courtesy of some Astoria High school student who discarded a bag containing three unopened fortune cookies in a garbage can on campus. My friend had dug the cookies out and rescued them from a fortune-telling-less future.

My friend told me it wasn’t the first time she’d come across unopened fortune cookies in the campus trash.

Think for a moment: what does is say about American teenagers who drive across a bay with bald eagles and blue herons hunting in the mudflats to get Chinese-themed fast food for lunch, eat the meal, yet do not bother to open the fortune cookies that accompany the order? They throw them away! I want someone to explain this to me, this utter lack of curiosity. Has anyone reading this ever not opened a fortune cookie when it was in hand? Is it possible these teenagers don’t know what a fortune cookie is?

If I was teaching, I would have made this scenario the supreme American cultural study of the week. I probably would have structured a literary review around the inquiry.

Help me out, please. The best response wins an envelope of surrealism. I’m not kidding. Wait until you open it and dump the contents onto a table.

My fortune from the rescued cookie was: “Kindness makes for happiness.” I’ll try to make it come true this weekend.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

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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.