Nail Shop Meditations (2)

My dad is receiving his regular pedicure via the expert hands of Vicky.

I am sitting a few feet away cranking this out on my AlphaSmart.

Soft synthesizer music is playing.

The salon smells of nail polish and incense, a heady combination.

I just wrote two pages in my journal that said absolutely nothing.

It’s President’s Day and Trump is launching his new social media platform, Truth Social. The Great Huckster is going to beat BIG TECH at their own insidious game.

It was an excellent Perry Mason this morning: greed, arson, murder, intrigue, affairs, excellent vocabulary. It’s always bracing to hear the phrase “illegitimate birth” in old popular entertainment but it was widely used back in the day. I’m sure it still is in some places, although I have no idea where.

I worked on a short story earlier this morning, polishing here and there, deepening. It is sort of experimental, and I might be the only one who gets it. It’s about basketball and the homeless and somehow they merge to form a story. There are two characters: a writer and a coach. I’ll be posting it here soon. One day I hope to publish all my Oregon-themed short stories in book form. Perhaps in 2023 or 24.

The primary election in Oregon loom. Should be interesting this year.

The nearby homeless encampment was almost completely cleaned up the past few days. More on this in the newsletter later. It was shocking to behold. Three years in the making and then some action. Only three RVs and two vehicles left. I would have like to seen it in action, but the city never broadcasts the where and when of this sweeps, and I have a feeling this wasn’t an official sweep because not everything got swept away.

I need a road trip.

I need a dog.

I need my fortune told inside a driftwood fort again.

Tomorrow I have lunch with one my Oregon historical heroes, one of four young people who traveled to Salem in 1970 to pitch Governor Tom McCall the preposterous idea of the state sponsoring a rock festival to avoid potential violence in downtown Portland. Vortex I the festival was later called. And a what a far out story it turned out to be, and one I might add still has lessons to impart today to both political parties, but of course they aren’t paying attention.

I’m reading Denis Johnson’s first novel, Angels, published in 1977. Incredibly raw, brutal, a tale of the truly addled and miserable underclass in white American life from that era. It occurs to me as I read the novel, that these same characters are still with us today, but are now all homeless. Is anyone going to write the Great American Homeless Novel? I suppose a few are attempting it right now. I’m certainly not. I don’t know what kind of book I’m writing about the homeless. It might end up being an entirely knew genre because we are dealing with an entirely new kind of homelessness and Diaspora in American life. It’s a diaspora where people were/are on the move as a result of a variety of known and unknown factors…and then settled into something heretofore never before scene in American history. No, immigrant tenant living in the East Coast cities and the Hoovervilles were nothing like what’s unfolding in downtown Portland or in a wetlands near an amusement park. Hey, ride the Ferris Wheel and see the encampments! Truth is stranger than fiction in this story.

Pedicure almost complete. Time to head out.