beaverlogo3

August 21, 2023

Oregon On My Mind (Part 3)

Let me now turn to Portland, and the famous downtown fountain/statue of an elk that miscreants inexplicably vandalized during the summer 2020 BLM protests that quickly devolved into something else but Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler was too chickenshit to do anything about it, as was then Governor Kate Brown.

I can see tearing down or spray painting Harvey Scott or Teddy Roosevelt, but an elk! The elk of of Oregon! My favorite statue in Oregon! It really was the last straw for many progressive Oregonians.

So city officials whisked the defaced statue away, put it in storage,

and

…

…

Three years later, nothing. Nothing. Nothing. I’ll spare you the details of this colossal administrative incompetence. The elk should have been put back up in its original fucking position, with the same fucking fountain, on the same fucking street grid, within a month after the protests ended! One fucking month! It wasn’t that fucking hard!

That the elk is still in storage and Portland bureaucrats do whatever it is they do in Portland these days, is the perfect shitty symbol of the total ineptitude of Portland and Multnomah County governing, and this comes from someone who believes in progressive governing. But like so many Oregonians today, there is no confidence in completing even a singular task like re-erecting a statue that wasn’t even all that damaged, just spray painted. Christ, five Eagle scouts from Molalla could have it back on line in a days!

Who is the one city commissioner charged with getting the elk back out there? They should be harangued non-stop and made to suffer the political consequences. Just an elk you say?

No, no, no. So much more. Erect the elk and invite Portlanders to rejoice. Throw a party with music and juggling and beer and weed. You want to bring back downtown, go full on elk! It’s so obvious a way to create dynamic energy for restoring the area.

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.