starbuckslogocuo

April 24, 2018

Notes From Corporate Coffee

Soft rockless rock plays. Hello, who are you, let me know your name? The Doors aren’t playing.

Always something new being advertised: the newest thing in coffee (that will change your life). I’ve been drinking Cold Brew for years. Stagnant, three-day Yuban leftover in the pot. Sometimes I even ice it up.

The to and fro of a weekday morning in America is underway. They are strange movements to me.

A mother drops $22 on herself and two toddlers.

I await another client. She’s writing her incredible story of educational service in a remote American wilderness. I feel like I am gaining new energy from working with all these aspiring writers, one not even alive. I get to lose myself in their stories and somehow it enhances my storytelling.

My coffee cup is all white, even the embossed corporate logo. I remember when tennis players wore nothing but white in the Grand Slam tournaments. The balls were all white, too. The players however, were not all white. The white apparel was all so classy and probably the last thing in American history where all white was classy. I am dying to start playing tennis again. I can feel it’s going to be a major part of the new life I am forging. Is forging the right metaphor for what is happening? Constructing? Fashioning? Winging? Coaxing? Conjuring? Kneading? Jury rigging?

Planning for the new life is over. It will simply unfold. I have no expectations anymore. But people continue to reach out and begin rapprochement.

Customers stream in. The ubiquity of phones. There are more laptops in use than human beings. That’s a first in my observations and portends something I don’t want to contemplate at the moment.

I have many meeting with friends today. We are gaining strength together in our meetings and moving along with purposeful, strong and good work, mostly done in stealth. Join me.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

Support Meditations Blog

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.