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March 19, 2021

Ruminations From a Deck

I am alternately writing what comes to mind as I toss peanuts to squirrels.

Did you know that an assistant football coach at the University of Oregon will make $500,000 for the upcoming irrelevant season. His job? He coaches the safeties in the secondary. The secondary coach makes about a million a year. This is cheap in comparison to other Big Time College Programs. How did we ever come to this?

I just commissioned an artist to produce a hundred mini portraits of squirrels for an interior decorating upgrade of my new office. The squirrels will cover golf-themed wallpaper.

I was reading a review of yet another Abraham Lincoln biography, this one 1100 pages long! According to the reviewer, over 16,000 books about the Civil War have been published. That’s approximately two a week since the war ended. Consider that. And the damn war is still going on in a low-grade way and not all the statues to the losers and traitors have been pulled down yet.

I was reading a book about Neanderthals and learned that were once 20 types of human and the one ruining the planet today is the one that made it through the evolutionary process. How might the planet be today if another line had ascended?

An article in the New Yorker reported that the Catholic church owns 200 million acres of land worldwide. That is a staggering number. Why haven’t they sold most of the undeveloped land or land gone to seed and helped the poor, unhoused and sick with the proceeds? Why haven’t they managed their holdings in such a way to fight climate change? (This was the point of the article.) What would Jesus have done with 200 millions acres of land?

I am considering teaching a writing workshop on this deck once people get vaccinated. It would feel good to teach again. This would be an excellent place to hear words from interesting writers.

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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.