A Crackpot Book

Copyright 2023 James LaFond

Lynn Lockhart: Publisher

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Dust Cover

An exercise in minimal migratory journalism by a homeless novelist and conspiracy curator.

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Quote

“You have made an impression in Portland, James. We don’t want you to leave... and hope you return.”

-Swan

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Dedication

For Luke LaFond, my youngest Grandson

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I did not realize that being homeless would increase my writing time, as kind souls host me and then go to work and all I need to is a couple hours of chores to not feel like a free loader and then write until my eyes burst. Portland, Oregon, for the first four winters I stayed here, was like that: me alone writing in the garage and then when a book was finished going to a bar and getting drunk.

Now, this fifth year, on this first day of spring, having spent more months per year in Portland than any other human driftwood location, it has become my home. The few months I spend back east a year, I am a wisp of a ghost, rarely sleeping on the same couch or bed for more than two nights before moving. Yet here, in Portland, invited to serve as a live in boxing coach for my hosts two sons five years ago, I find myself at home.

Two additional households have asked me to stay at their home.

This is an odd blessing that threatens my writing output, in large measure by threatening to admit me back into human society as something other than a migrating—for I do not wander, not being bold enough for wandering—curator.

I had a training session planned today with Portland Joe, but was informed by Dove that I have a birthday party to attend on this my birthday. When it was not believed last year that I ever used to be fat or that I was from Baltimore, I thought it a healthy mark of low trust that I was carded by a lady bar goer. No, it was a ruse by a darling to get my Birthday. Last year, at this time a cake and free drinks and a meal bought for me, awaited this hoodrat at the Dive Bar.

This past Friday, I arrived at the bar and was told that I was ill dressed for Saint Patrick’s Day. Swan dressed me up in yellow hat, green beads, wanted to put a green bow tie on my neck, but the beard preventing caused an impasse. A Fashion Police debate among tall blond and short Amerindian women over how I should wear the bow, took a full minute. The eye patch replacement was overruled for a hat band. I was then asked to take off my shirt and declined…

I never guessed that as a man literally hunted out of his own hometown by the black and the blue, that I would end up in an analogue city 3,000 miles away facing downriver to the Pacific instead of across the bay towards the Atlantic, in a city that liked me. I’m the strange little man with the white beard who boxes with young men at the park at 64th and Center.

I focus now to write as little of this journal as possible while remaining for the next month in Portland. The RPG source book Crag Mouth, with a rogues gallery of real Dive Bar denizens and American Dog, a novel, are two works in progress that I must complete before this time next month—so says the broad monkey on my narrow back.

The plan is, that, the novel Slave, which I began in the Cascades a month ago, will be rejoined a month from now as I migrate across the country the last weeks of April and the first days of May.

With a beautiful warm, spring day couplet at the end of winter, this past Friday and Saturday, the sunny souls of this overcast port town smiled at the sky and hoped—that the gray skates of underheaven would not return. But the misty norns of the north have descended, chilling feet that had just put off wool socks and whispering mistily that winter has grown jealous of his annual successor.

I will travel south and east with special attention to the weather, in part out of curiosity about the fate of runaway, man-made global warming, and as well the migratory habits of our ancestors that peopled the world most extensively during climate cooling events.

The Beastly East has her hideous allure to which I am not immune.

I bought tickets to San Jose to meet with Vaxx Zombie DeGualle and SaySay, possibly Michael Collins as well. April 22 I leave Union Station PDX, on a route which should bring me to Joliet, Illinois by way of Chicongo on April 29, with un-arranged intentions of landing in Pittsburgh on May 2. Young Richard Barrett intends to meet me in Joliet whwre I am bound to train with Electric Dan…

I do not know what this spring will bring. Other than the above dates, I have two other Hard Stops: Baltimore May 8 for a Physical and Tennessee, May 18th for my final boxing and stick fighting bouts.

I harbor a goal of returning to Portland in early August for two weeks and arriving in Utah mid August. Those dates seem a life away.

In the meantime, before the dizzy east drinks me by stages alive, I need to focus on getting some odd work done. With my luck, the talking dog novel will be the one that survives the fall of Western Civilization to yip down the unkind stairs of Time.

And, yes, I know that Summer begins sometime in June—but I never bought that convention. Socially, the beginning of Summer has been for these 59 years of odd ball existence, Memorial Day Weekend.

May Daylight Savings Time remain within its phony tomb.

If all goes as planned, this will be my last entry until April 20.