{"id":5212,"date":"2019-07-04T07:39:40","date_gmt":"2019-07-04T14:39:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/?p=5212"},"modified":"2019-07-04T07:39:42","modified_gmt":"2019-07-04T14:39:42","slug":"oregon-tavern-age-an-attempt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/meditations\/oregon-tavern-age-an-attempt\/","title":{"rendered":"Oregon Tavern Age: An Attempt"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n

I set my notebook down on a lacquered\ntable top fashioned from an enormous slab of wood. Ten people could\nsit around it, but I was the only one sitting there on a June\nafternoon in the Salty Dawg, in Port Orford, a town where Jack London\nonce stayed in a hotel, got drunk, laid, and wrote part of a novel,\nThe Valley of the Moon<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jack London got laid in Port Orford! I\ndo love writing that sentence! \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was bushed after a hot day on a\nconstruction job where I sanded, painted, and wrote another chapter\nof a kink modern Western in my mind. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A tidbit of talk behind me drilled into\nmy ear. An old man who lived up a nearby creek said descendants of \nKen Kesey’s band of Merry Pranksters lived on 140 acres near him. He\nnamed a few names and they corresponded with Kesey lore. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The man was trying to explain the\nPranksters, the Acid Test, Ken Kesey and Further. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNever heard of him,\u201d said the old\nman’s drinking buddy. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The table top’s wood intrigued me and I\nasked a regular if he knew its type. Spruce? Doug fir? Cedar? He did\nnot. But he did explain the thick, black steel pole spiked through\nthe middle of the table and bolted to the ceiling beam. He told me it\nheld up the roof and occasionally served as a handy-dandy stripper\npole when shit got crazy in the joint. A woman would hop on the\ntable, work the pole, and well…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I didn’t know if I wanted to see that\ncraziness, but certainly not late at night. If it occurred in the\nafternoon, then yes, I might watch and throw down some bills. It\nmight depend on the music the stripper chose. Tom Petty yes. Def\nLeppard no. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A raised conversation at the bar\ninterrupted my stripper pole ruminations. I turned toward it. The\nfemale bartender, wearing a white top over a black undergarment of\nsome kind arrested my attention. She was explaining to some regulars\nthe federal sanctuary law that invited people from Central America to\nmake their way to America for political asylum. Well, people took up\nthat invitation and now were being held in detention centers\n(concentration camps) run by private contractors for a considerable\nprofit, and the American government was separating small children\nfrom their parents and dosing them with pills. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At one point, the bartender gave up,\nsaid she was done, and walked into the kitchen to check on a chicken\nwings order. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I admired her for the attempt at\nexplanation. That took energy and pluck. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If we quit talking to one another as\nAmericans, and that time is getting close, we are done as a nation. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was a hero for trying and I told\nher exactly that as I left the bar. \n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I set my notebook down on a lacquered table top fashioned from an enormous slab of wood. Ten people could sit around it, but I was the only one sitting there on a June afternoon in the Salty Dawg, in Port Orford, a town where Jack London once stayed in a hotel, got drunk, laid, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5213,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5212","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-meditations","category-oregon-tavern-age","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5212"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5212\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5215,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5212\/revisions\/5215"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5213"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5212"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5212"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}