Oregon Tavern Age: Camping Plans

Two non-OTA men with sideburns wearing stylish attire sat at a table on the sidewalk outside an OTA joint. One was drinking whiskey, the other vodka. The good shit.

I was sitting near them drinking a pilsener named after Merle Haggard, as if Merle Haggard would ever drink a pilsener. He’d drink piss and vinegar first. Speaking of Merle, I wonder what he would have thought of Trump. He was a self-proclaimed redneck in statement and song. I suppose all the lines are blurred today, which interestingly enough, creates unique opportunities for rapprochement and storytelling.

Still, would Merle have believed pedophiles in the basement of a pizza parlor were running the Deep State or that Joe Biden had a secret weather machine in the White House that he could activate in the Red states to make them suffer and believe in climate change?

No. Hell no. He was an Okie from Muskogee not a lunatic from Roseburg, meaning the current Republican Oregon State Senator from Roseburg, the very city I once gigged in at the same venue Ted Nugent played the following weekend.

City traffic rolled by. I sipped the pilsener. I started writing a letter.

Farther down the sidewalk, a gray-haired man in aviator sunglasses vaped while also sipping from a can of Rainier and reading a book by Thích Nhất Hạnh.

Seeing someone reading Hanh in OTA country was a first for me, but it would have been even more memorable if the reader had been an OTA.

A man who resembled Confucius bicycled past me pulling a little trailer full of cans and bottles.

I stopped writing the letter and eavesdropped. The whiskey and vodka men were arranging a camping trip of some kind. They were talking and making lists of supplies on their phones and then locating places to purchase the supplies.

Their list included:

Heater

Twinkle lights

A chainsaw (which I speculated they’d never wielded in their lives)

Firewood

Glow-in-the-dark inflatable pool

The latter was available at Wal-Mart, or so the phone told them.

Glow-in-the-dark pool for camping?

I tried imagining that in any Oregon camping of my experience and failed.

Then it hit me. They would fill the pool with ice and stock it with a cheap Pacific Northwest lager formerly brewed in the Pacific Northwest by union men and women and camp like it was 1979.

No they would not!

I didn’t know how they would camp but at least they were going to the woods. With the way things are going with the Oregon woods in the era of climate change, and because so many Americans are so stupid and selfish and won’t follow the campfire rules, no one will be camping there in the coming years and the Age of Olympia will be over.