Rainy Day Ruminations

I sit on the couch and stare out the window. Rain falls. Homeless men and women pass by.

At precisely the same moment, another Republican member of the US House of Representatives has dropped out of the race for Speaker. I wonder when the Whigs knew when they were about to become extinct?

I’m reading The Thorn Birds and marveling at how great the writing is and how a book like this would never be written today.

A dog is coming into my life soon.

Elements of the neighborhood seem to be turning against my homeless friend Mark. Apparently his presence in front of the grocery story is causing distress to customers. I’d like to remind these people that Mark has tried to find housing for the past 18 months and failed through no fault of his own.

As much as I love rain, I can’t imagine how hard it is on homeless people. That’s something I never mentioned in the rain book because the thought never entered my mind.

I’ve decided that I want to visit my old Church of Christ church in Oregon City for a Sunday morning service and see how it’s changed since my last one in the mid 70s.

The incurious nature of some people baffles me. The inability of people to follow up on their curiosity is also baffling to me.

I started writing a Christmas story. Naturally it involves a homeless person. It’s based on a true story.

An old friend texted me she liked reading the blog. That was nice to hear.

I recently heard the greatest beaver story in Oregon history. I’ve got to recount it soon.

I hit some golf balls in the park the other afternoon. I was surrounded by homeless people. What a weird sensation that was. I was doing something frivolous and they were doing something serious.

More friends from my special RV park on the Southern Oregon Coast have died. I wish I could have honored them in some way. I suspect that place will be sold and then disbanded and the residents displaced. Some might end up homeless.

I miss my former graphic designer. She vanished six months ago and I fear the worse.

A few weeks ago I completed a piece about a former student of mine who is homeless and schizophrenic on the streets of Las Vegas. It was the hardest and most painful writing I have ever written and it won’t do a damn thing to help her.

I have but one trivial wish this fall: Oregon State crushes Oregon in football and I can see the expression of the highest paid and perhaps dumbest state employee in the state, Oregon’s head football coach. Have you heard this man speak or read any interviews with him?

I read an interesting essay about Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible. Apparently, there are two new plays that rebut it historically and thematically. One of them places all the blame on the witch hunt on John Proctor, not the girls. It was Proctor who seduced Abigail, not the other way around, and her reaction to being abused and discarded led to a kind of justified revenge. That’s an interesting modern take.