scooter

August 23, 2021

Scooter Woman

I walked down a sloped sidewalk on a weekday morning. The sun was out and heating up the big city.

Something above me, in the parking lot of a sushi restaurant, arrested my attention. I stopped and looked up and saw a young woman atop a dumpster emptying the contents of a coffee carafe. Then she dropped the carafe in the dumpster and jumped off into some shrubbery. A seconds later she materialized onto the sidewalk a few feet away from me.

She dressed in a black sports bra, black yoga pants and black boots. Her black hair was covered with a green and white paisley bandanna. She wore heart-shaped, rose-tinted sunglasses. She twitched the unmistakable vibe of a meth miscreant happy with the prospect of potential mayhem.

The woman paid me no mind. She hustled over to a public electric scooter that was laden with an astonishing amount of gear ingeniously strapped to the scooter with rope and bungee cords. She strapped on a backpack, fired up the scooter, and also fired on some audio device because music instantly blasted out of speaker stashed somewhere in her gear.

I heard a rapper rap: My dick is hard as an elephant’s ivory tusk.

The woman rapped along with the song and rocketed the scooter out into the street. I watched her zig and zag and weave and wind behind a car. I heard her rap about a hard dick as she zoomed away out of sight.

I laughed. How could I not? Wherever she was going, she appeared a lot happier than I felt, but I was now just a bit happier. Elephants are like that.

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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.