Vodka Soda Meditations
It is a weekday afternoon and I am sitting on the back deck drinking a vodka soda. A breeze is whipping through the sprawling apple tree and a lone squirrel just harassed me for peanuts. The jazz station is playing on a radio I’ve owned for almost 40 years.
Why vodka soda? I have no idea. I just went to the liquor store and said to myself: “I want a vodka soda on an 85-degree day.” There you have it.
On my walk through the neighborhood to the liquor store, I came across a box of mostly CDs. I inspected them. Almost all were death/gore metal from the 90s. Someone was giving up their youth right there on the sidewalk. Nothing interested me in the collection.
I recently bought a CD compilation of mostly hair metal songs from the 80s for 99 cents. I never listened to this music during its heyday or now. But listening to these songs the other day as I drove around running errands, I was struck by its amusing debauchery, massive guitars and keyboards, and (now) cartoonish misogyny. I was actually laughing aloud at some of the lyrics, which were written in all seriousness back then. Ratt’s “Lay Me Out” is so over the top sexist and degrading that you wonder about the young men who wrote it 35-40 years ago. That kind of young man is on the internet today. Not in the 80s. Some of them were playing metal and loving every minute it.
I’ve been thinking more about my post Portland life when that day comes. I see the Coast but I also see a creek. I have a certain gritty town in mind but maybe it won’t be viable when I do leave the city.
I’m currently reading three books I discovered in street libraries: The Anchor Book of Chinese Poetry, The Norton Book of Modern Fairy Tales and Burr by Gore Vidal. The ancient Chinese poetry is so wonderfully sparse and loaded with crystal clear images because their written language is comprised of visual images. Very little of what I have read so far of these ancient poems contain disguised interior digressions because the poets were looking at the visuals in their world for meanings and metaphors. Virtually every poem I read opens the door to me from the first line. No opacity. No legerdemain. When the poet makes statements or ask questions, you know it.
An old girlfriend of 30 years ago reached out the other day via email. She said she’d been reading the blog and found my writings about the homeless compelling. She also described herself as having some kind of midlife crisis. I responded and she wrote back one more time and then disappeared. I wrote a couple more times and heard nothing so I took the hint. I wonder what was going on there? Why don’t more people follow up when they reach out? I don’t understand this.
Speaking of the blog, I’ve written before that it might be coming to the end of the line, and then it doesn’t. Lately, I’ve begun to feel that way again. Six years is a long time to maintain a blog when a blog is almost an ancient media platform. We’ll see. Perhaps it’s time to admit that the blog served a useful purpose, move on, and concentrate exclusively on the Substack newsletter about Oregon’s homeless crisis, which you can subscribe for free at:
Please do.
I have decided to continue playing golf. I picked up a few more clubs at the thrift store to round out a set and plan on playing a few courses from my youth this fall and report back to Dad.
The stories involving members of The Old Crow Book Club continue. They are becoming vastly richer than the ones from the original book. If you haven’t purchased a copy, I strongly urge you to do so, via this blog, read it, and distribute in a street library near your home. This is the main way the book is being distributed and the results have been absolutely wondrous. Don’t you want to be a part of that? And support this unique literary social service project that has brought me more joy than anything I’ve ever written and that includes the book about Vortex I?