Empire Meditations

I am beginning my seventh month in Coos Bay, in a neighborhood known as Empire, which used to be a city until 1965 when residents voted to join Coos Bay. Sixty years later, that might have been a mistake,

Empire continues to fascinate me. There exists a level of miscreant behavior by some of the people in the neighborhood that defies everything I thought I knew about rural Oregon miscreant behavior.

A stray dog has started appearing at the back fence. He’s a husky/shepherd mix wearing a collar. He looks healthy. I’ve fed him a couple of times and he and Elmer bark and howl at each other through the boards. If he returns regularly I’m cutting a hole in the fence and inviting him over. If Elmer and the stray get along, I may have a new dog.

My one significant New Year’s resolution is to better avail myself of what Coos Bay has to offer as far as culture goes. I’ve got to see more of what’s out there: art shows, live music, new restaurants. To that point, I will be attending a production of Hamlet staged in a nearby bakery/restaurant/gift shop. I haven’t seen a live Shakespearean play in over 30 years.

I dearly wish there was an open mic poetry scene in town. It still surprises me one doesn’t exist.

An idea for a book about Empire has started to coalesce in my mind. It involves a tremendous amount of research (not online), which I love doing, but I would like to hire a researcher for $25 an hour. Working title: Juxtaposition of Empires.

I plan on putting in a large garden this spring and sharing the bounty with the non miscreant neighbors.

The terrible physical condition of many Coos Bay residents continues to shock me. I’ve seen broken bodies that I’ve never seen before or thought possible to break in such a grotesque manner. This place is nothing less than a public health and public education disaster with no end in sight. I write this with the utmost sympathy for these people. They must be suffering.

An entrepreneur opened a tiny video store in Empire that sells used DVDs and games. A video store! This is the only new business that has opened since I moved here in May.

Every weekday morning, Elmer and I walk past kids waiting in the darkness for the school bus. They are always on their phones. Will these kids ever develop an interior life outside of phone and the internet as they grow up? I saw the same thing in Portland, too. At those bus stops, a half dozen kids would be waiting for the bus and every one of them was using a phone. They never talked to one another. They never had a moment to think outside what was playing on their phones. And every second they are fiddling on their phones, their lives are being commercialized for obscene profit by the most powerful and amoral corporations in American history, and that’s saying something.

But…there is perhaps a ray of hope in Empire. Elmer and I often take different routes on our morning walks. There is one kid, a boy probably in eighth grade or so, a little portly, who is waiting for the bus AND IS NEVER ON HIS PHONE. He always greets me and says what a great looking dog Elmer is. He wears a fedora (!) and something like a man’s wool Pendleton jacket from the 70s. That makes me smile. I wish a good day at school and leave him to stand there, thinking. I wonder how he’ll turn out.