feinstein

June 7, 2023

Back Deck Musings

I am sitting on the back deck on a weekday morning and listening to the jazz on the public radio station. I just completed a little yard work and watering the herbs.

Earlier, I had a pleasant visit with Dad at the assisted living center. We watched a clip of Diane Feinstein looking almost incoherent in a wheelchair while trying to function as a US Senator when clearly she cannot. This prompted a discussion about aging and why certain elderly and obviously incapacitated people in positions of power don’t step aside for someone younger and more capable. We discussed the terrible decision of RGB to hang on way too long and the disaster that came from that.. Now look at Feinstein. Why go out this way and become a topic of controversy and split your own party? When I know the time is right for me, it’s Hart’s Cove or Otter Point or just walk into the ocean and start swimming to Asia.

I recently had the good fortune to walk a long way with a dog on one of Oregon’s socialist ocean beaches and was reminded how this particular beach helped rescue me during perilous times seven years ago. I will never stop thanking the Oregon Legislature and Governor Tom McCall for saving our great birthright from privatization and ruination back in1967. Just look at the Oregon Legislature today, or at least the Republican Party. What a disgrace and dishonor. They think they have a First Amendment right not to govern!

Summer approaches. I have zero plans except to attend a Christian Writers Conference in Canby. What you say? I am there on behalf of a new author client—my Mother. More on this later as it develops. I’m actually looking forward to the event because it’s something entirely new to me and I always learn something from other writers when they present workshops.

I’m still considering getting a dog.

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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.