tramp

December 2, 2022

The Productivity Company

A new weird vehicle serving as a domicile in the New American Diaspora appeared in the neighborhood not too long ago. Its weirdness factor easily topped the old Madras High School White Buffaloes booster/athletic bus that showed up around the same time. How in the world that 40-50-year-old bus came to housing people instead of transporting football players and cheerleaders to games in Central Oregon is a story I’d love to know but will never know.

The current leader in the weird vehicular domicile in my neighborhood is some kind of former service or delivery truck. It’s colored white, red, yellow and black. Emblazoned across one side in a commanding font is The Productivity Company. The other text that presumably defined the company’s business has been removed. A black and white checkered flag is present on one side of the truck so it suggests the business was automotive/racing related.

Do the inhabitants of this truck ever remark on the irony of the slogan and their non productive mobile existence? Maybe they don’t even recognize the irony. In a way, they are incredibly productive at not being productive. And for their conspicuous non production, many Americans despise them.

I don’t. I want to know the reasons for their current state of existence. I want to know how they acquired the truck and service it, pay for the gasoline. I want to know why they are moving around the neighborhood. What radio station are they listening to while driving? And why all the wood paneling strapped to the back of the rig? Are you paneling the interior? If so, that’s pretty damn productive and making sensible use of a gutted 70s-styled den that some homeowner dumped on the sidewalk in act of benevolent littering. Oh to see the carpet inside The Productivity Company!

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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.