Fire Pit Meditations

I’ve got a fire going in the new fire pit I built. So long burn barrel!

The pit is a new addition to a back yard I have totally overhauled since moving into the house last May. It really feels like my home in a way I never felt about the Sellwood house in Portland.

It’s a weekday afternoon. Classic rock playing on the locally-owned radio station with all their cornball jingles.

Elmer is snoozed out in the grass after two long beach romps in the morning.

Later I’m whipping up a scallop pasta dish with scallops from Coos Bay.

I’ve started reading Shakespeare by the fire pit. There is always something new in reading the plays and sonnets.

I hear the ice cream truck in the neighborhood. It’s call song is “Dixie.” Yeah, I live in a neighborhood whose ice cream truck plays the anthem of the Confederacy while driven by a Latino man. How do you work that into a novel?

I’m polishing two of my manuscripts at the moment: the poetry volume and collection of essays about homelessness. Both are going to be thick.

The garden is doing great. I ate my first peas not too long ago.

One of the joys of this new house is getting my old art and memorabilia out of plastic totes and in sight again. I miss some of my old art, given away in panic a decade ago. I sure would love my Henk Pender and Rick Bartow pieces back.

I’m reading four books at the moment: a history of Marxism in America, a guide to geology in Oregon, Exodus by Leon Uris, and a history of the Baltic Crusades.

I don’t really think about American current political events. I want a deeper plunge into vulgarity, incompetence and graft. We have a lot farther to go to destroy the Constitution and I want it destroyed. I am in favor of the PNW becoming its own country once there is a provision for states to leave the Union. Lincoln said states can’t leave. We need legal language so they can. I have very little allegiance to the United States of America. I have a lot for my region.