hops

February 5, 2024

Friday Coffee Shop Musings

Fancy coffee shop. Seven dollar drinks and five dollar pastries.

A mom plays on her phone with her kid.

A lot of people work remotely from here. I often see their screens and eavesdrop on their calls and wonder what in the world they really do for a living. At the moment, one guy is talking on his phone to someone far away and I catch, “We need more voices for the program about the daily lives of billionaires.” I’m not making that up. I hear it while I am writing about the homeless and seeing a homeless man outside the coffee shop doing something inexplicable in a hedge.

I’ve lost seven pounds since adopting Elmer, the crazy husky. My metabolism is changing.

I recently read in the Oregonian, an editorial from a Beaverton elected official asking the Oregon Legislature to allocate $15 million during the current special session to fund part of $115 million ballpark for the Hillsboro Hops single A baseball team. He quoted the usual bogus statistics about how that allocation would be a boon to taxpayers, yeah even the ones in Burns and Brookings. No. No. No. A thousand economic studies have disproved the myth of economic befits to the public for taxpayer support of professional sports teams. If Hillsboro wants a ballpark, tax the people of Washington County and better yet, let them vote on it.

Oregon State University also wants the Oregon Legislature to bail them out for construction costs to the absurd and lavish remodeling of Reser’s Stadium. Their expected television revenue from a PAC 12 media deal vanished with the collapse of the PAC 12 and now the athletic department can’t service the debt. Hell no. Fuck no. Cut the athletic budget’s bloated budget by 90 percent and pay it off yourself.

A homeless man rides by on bicycle. He looks deranged.

I sure miss my construction job sometimes. It changed my life. It made me look at buildings differently, especially ones under constriction, like the ones I saw on my way over to the coffee shop.

I’m taking Elmer to the beach soon. I’ve got to see my husky run beside the ocean.

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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.