It only took two plus decades!
When was the last time you went home? I mean home home. The place your parents raised you home. I don’t do it often enough and blame a burning rage in my childhood heart. I’ve written about this before, and don’t mean to bore, but I was raised in the state of Oregon in a depressed coastal ex-logging town named Coos Bay.
I hated it.
I hated the grey skies, the rain, the people, the oppressively green trees, the rain and also the people who smelled like mint flavored Skoal. It drove me crazy that I didn’t get to be from California, just to the south, with its warm surf and its Gotcha and its sun.
California was everything to me. It was surfing and I conflated the two, dreaming only California dreams and hating Oregon. I vowed that if I ever struck gold that I’d use some of the money to buy an old airplane, fly north and unload a payload of Vietnam-era warheads all the way from Medford in the south (where my cousins lived) to Seattle (not in Oregon but still Pacific Northwest and where my grandparents lived).
Time has mellowed my ambitions and age has made me fond of my Oregonian roots. I am a forever outsider thanks to them. A man still wildly in love with surfing, with what surfing means and more importantly what surfing should mean, precisely because he never belonged.
I’m headed home, anyhow, today to read about Cocaine + Surfing in:
Eugene on August 24th at Barnes & Noble (7:00 pm)
Portland on August 27th at Powells Books (7:30 pm)
Seattle on August 28th at University Bookstore (7:00 pm)
Bellingham on August 29th at Village Books (7:00 pm)
If you are anywhere around please come. I no longer want to bomb my fellow Pacific Northwesterners. I want to hug them all.
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More than ever the joint needs a good torching, Chas.
What’s not to like about having to surf in a 5/4 with hood, gloves and booties all winter…err and summer
Oregon= the goonies ,can’t be more Epic than that
I bet if you did a Seven Devils signing/ reading, your former home town would really dig it…. come on the Bachelor’s Inn is calling
Nice segway. Isn’t California pretty fucked in a lot of parts too? From my experience…
Yes, everywhere, but the weather is better.
I really loved the Columbia river gorge! At least, Oregon can be proud of such a place!
I think Washington will claim half of that for themselves. The good stuff is on the Oregon Side, well except the wineries.
This is kind of like the emails that I get from my cellphone carrier offering a good deal on their satellite tv service for the last two years. Good luck with the book tour though.
When I was a young schoolboy in Astoria, I was forced to mow the backyard with an unmotorized reel mower. I’d get some momentum and finally be moving along at a good clip when i’d hit a moist pile of dog turd. The mower would send a stream of chopped dogshit, about the consistency of ground beef, straight into the air, striking me in the face and upper body.
Nowadays I get shitfaced on cheap whiskey and prescription drugs.
Life comes at you fast don’t it?
No one can ever really go home again.
You should customize the name and cover of your book for this tour.
Meth and Surfing
Now we’re talking Oregon.
Throwing us off the scent; I think Oregon probably frickin cranks and CS wants to keep it all to himself, like a true grumpy local!
Bomb Torquay for me then lazy cunt.
Man I will tell you what… Torquay feels exactly like Coos Bay so… ok!
Going to be smokey…bring some raw honey for the throat and Himalayan salt wash for the eyes.
If you bombed Seattle now you’d only be taking out Californians anyway.
I’m very suspicious of people who didn’t grow up hating where they’re from.
hard not to hate the Goldie. very hard
I’m sure. But I’m also not from the Goldie, you lucky bastard.
Born with a heavy haulage ticket and a chainsaw in each hand !
Way to go woodsman !
You’ve changed.
Not always a bad thing.