These are the Days of the Old Crow Book Club Lives

Summer cooks the concrete. Smoke from wildfires drifts here and there. Socialist squirrels dart around manicured lawns freeloading off the wealthy bourgeois who never pulled up a bootstrap in their lives. City, county and nonprofit bureaucracies tasked with addressing the homeless crisis in Multnomah County compete for the title of The Most Inept Provider. The Governor holds a press conference in Portland with an insurance industry big shot about improving the downtown core and making it better for business. There will be five committees and they will make recommendations and blah, blah, blah. Interestingly enough, Portland's Mayor and the Chair of the County Commission were not at the press conference and that tells all you need to know about the utter dysfunction when it comes to solving the homeless crisis in the city and elsewhere, for that matter.

As this unfolds, so do the lives of the Old Crow Book Club...

Mark is halfway through Moby Dick and awaits his appointment to see his cardiologist. We discuss the dense passages where Melville gives us pages and pages on the biology of the sperm whale. I remark that no one had done anything like that in the history of world literature before Moby Dick. Mark speculates that Melville did this to anthropomorphize the White Whale and make him more than simply a mad Leviathan. I agreed. And I also said Melville might have written the first environmental novel of all time and didn't even know it. Ahab and his ilk were hunting sperm whales to certain extinction and then PRESTO!, oil was discovered and they didn't need sperm oil to light Eastern seaboard cities and London and Paris.

Sean is nowhere to be found. We fear he is lost forever in a tornado of fentanyl. You can't say cloud because that drug doesn't lend itself to that gentle metaphor.

Jamie is living in the willows down by Johnson Creek, either with or without her abusive boyfriend. Her pitbull named Priest took a chunk out of a local homeless man. Why? I asked Mark. “Because dogs don't speak tweak,” which I told Mark was about the best line I'd heard in a long time and that I was going to rip it off. He was fine with that.

Jacob is house sitting for his sister so at least he has a reprieve from the streets for a week. I wonder if he considers it a vacation from being homeless. He also wants to start a social media campaign for the Old Crow Book Club.

Every day I am out and about, I see a new homeless person in the neighborhood, then I never see them again. So many are on the move but this type of homeless person is rarely written about. The stationary ones in encampments or RVs or in tents blocking sidewalks typically receive the most attention and seem to have the most problems.

Anya is nowhere to be found.

Mark's on and off girlfriend has disappeared. He said she's probably at the bottom of the Willamette River.

Mark's social worker continues to update several of us on her ongoing and futile efforts to find him housing. She's apparently trying hard but running into walls of molasses mixed with mayonnaise. I know them well. I swam into them last summer and never found a way through.

Donnie is back on the sauce.

I think we need to bring Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler in on Mark's situation. Have him meet Mark, read the Old Crow book. Hell he lives in the neighborhood. See IF HE CAN GET ONE PERSON IN HIS CITY INTO HOUSING. ON HIS OWN. NO AIDES. HE TAKES FULL RESPOSBILITY FOR THIS. IT'S ALL HE DOES UNTIL HE SUCCEEDS OR QUITS.

He'll quit.