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August 13, 2020

They’re Watering the Football Field

The high school is still watering the football field. Is that optimism or delusion. Fall sports in Oregon were postponed but the watering goes on. Why? High school football isn’t coming back next year. It might be years. It might never come back to this tiny high school situated near a sewage treatment plant.

There is a great American poem in the watering of a football field that no one is going to play on for a long time, if ever. I am not the poet to write that poem. I don’t have the talent. If I did, I would title it “No Football in America.” Why be clever or nuanced with the title? Don’t tell it slant. Write the whole damn poem as simple as a give to the fullback for a plunge up the middle. You don’t throw the bomb on a poem like this. You grind it out. You mention that many of today’s Americans no longer had the ability to grind it out when it came to giving a damn about others. They gave up. Then they partied hard to congratulate themselves for giving up and killing many of their teammates in American life who kept grinding for the TEAM, not individual moronic glory in the guise of taking a stand for the Bill of Rights. Football coaches espouse a lot of bullshit about the importance of TEAM. I heard it for years. Playing this kind of selfish football (that’s a metaphor) in America right now isn’t about TEAM. It’s about ME. It’s about how football players today routinely celebrate special teams tackles and quarterback sacks in the second quarter of a game when their team is 2-9 and trailing be 30 points. That’s what we became as a nation and you can watch this unfold every single second in public during the pandemic.

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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.