I started out the door with a simple idea- “Find a place with food and a beer, sit down, do some writing, come home and hide from the sun to edit.” That’s always the plan for at least one of my days off. Brilliant blog posts, scintillating wit, and scathing social criticism don’t just fall out of the sky, you know.

I love my wife, my cat, and my friends very much, but I’ve also had a lot of time (and put a lot of work into) enjoying my own company. That’s why, at some point every weekend and even on vacation, I try to make a point of getting out on my own and putting some pavement under my shoes.

What looks interesting?
What are people talking about?
Where are the workers going on their breaks?
Where are the old men drinking?
Are there cooks out and about? Where are they?

That’s how you hear about the best stuff in any given city. You have to go find it.

Northeast Portland feels way more urban than my neck of Southeast, only a 40-minute walk down two straight streets. The diagonal artery of Sandy Boulevard is wide, fast, and feels emptier than it is. Starting in the pseudo-industrial nexus of “Central Eastside” and the 100-year-old “Sandy Hut” dive bar, it cuts a clean straight swathe south of the Lloyd District and its “just die already” husk of a mall. Up, up, up, north and east through the Hollywood District and Rose City Park. The businesses along its length change with the neighborhood, but they have the same vibe of “Business On The Main Road to Other Places.” The feeling of “You’re gonna go past us on the way to wherever you’re going. That’s fine- we’re here for the people who ARE here and STAY here.”

“Locals Joint? Um… sure. Shut up and keep moving.”

It’s Sunday afternoon and my wandering took me from my usual stomping grounds of Belmont-Sunnyside and Laurelhurst up Sandy to see what I may have been missing all this time. Heading farther up and east, there were a few places that could be worth investigating.

I had the Plan to work on though… and I needed a piss. So I’m tucked against a wall in a “sports” bar called “The GOAT.” This is an Old Man sports bar- screens aplenty showing games, but comparatively little seating for the amount of floor space- like the bar will be “Standing Room Only” on game days. Maybe it will be, I wouldn’t know. What I know is that it’s nearly empty and quiet on a Sunday, I’m the youngest person in here by at least a decade (except for the bartender, a young woman who mispronounced a local brewery when pouring me a beer) and I have a four-top to myself to sit and write at.

No one’s bothering me. I’m a new face doing my thing. Not a hostile presence or an interloper– just A Guy Doing His Thing.

The problem with following The Plan in my own part of Portland is that, after nearly 10 years, I’m known. If I don’t get distracted by running into people I know and chatting the day away, I run into local strangers and wind up distracting myself just as badly.

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

– Ernest Hemingway

I tried joining writing groups and communities before. “A La Carte” was largely written during group sessions, but while we followed the Pomodoro Method and chatted during our breaks, I don’t remember those conversations ever necessarily being about our work itself. We talked about just about anything and everything else. Even among other writers, talking about our projects is a bit like being asked what you look like asleep and naked. “Tell me, a person who has the context but still may or may not judge you for it, what you spend your private time and thought energy fantasizing about.”

Nonfiction writers like myself can sometimes skirt this with just a quick description of the subject until we can guess it won’t be too fucked up for a Normal Person Writing Normal Things Because Those Totally Exist. Fiction writers have no plumblines like that at their disposal. “Just a novel” leads to the inevitable “Oh about what?”… and then the choice is to either be rude and cry off somehow or take a two-footed plunge straight into their world.

Honestly, I admire the stones it takes to have conversations like that- let alone write the associated fiction with faith and conviction.

For me, I tell my stories as I see them from the side tables of my old-man bars. Just A Guy Doing His Thing, telling as Hunter Thompson put it “not factual stories, but true ones.”

Stay Classy,