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We took the Friday Lunch Jam to a new level where no school has gone before. There is no map. They can’t go. We can. We are number one.

See for yourself:

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http://www.youtube.com/user/NHSFridayLunchJam#p/u

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If anyone else is doing this in America on a weekly basis in a rural area, I would like to know! We will outrock you.

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I sang my Twilight song.

One kid covered Radiohead and played keyboard, guitar and drums. And sang.

Another covered “Day Tripper.”

We heard beatnik poetry complete with bongos and trumpet. Performed by two teachers.

One student played an original folk rocker called “Arms.”

We had spoken word about Lady GaGa.

And much, much more.

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After the gig, a couple of us tore down the set and relaxed with tea. We deconstructed the show and wondered how we’re going to top it next Wed., before the break.

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We will. Something about drinking gravy from a jar.

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The movie's debuting tonight and the kids are going crazy. I'll be playing this original song at the Friday Lunch Jam tomorrow. It's an angst ridden folk rocker. A student will join my on piano.

I Don’t Wanna be a Vampire Anymore....

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My name is Robert Pattison, but everyone knows me as Edward

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I’m a walking, talking, bloodthirsty, tabloid sensation

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All the little girls, screaming, crying, going crazy

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Just want some snuggle time alone with my Kristin

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(Chorus)

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And I don’t wanna be a vampire anymore

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And I don’t wanna be a vampire anymore

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I’m so tired of all the glare, all the hype, it’s all such a bore

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I don’t even know who I am or what my acting’s for

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I hate my obsessed fans, I hate Forks, I hate Stephanie Meyer

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And I really, really hate that corporate whore known as Twilight!

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(Chorus)

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You should know something about Edward, he’s not as cool as Count Dracula

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How can I win an Academy Award wearing white makeup?

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I want to play Richard, Macbeth, Lear, Romeo and Hamlet!

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I’m not Edward Cullen, my name is Robert Pattison…Dammit!

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(Chorus)

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I just want to play Shakespeare in the park

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I just want to walk anonymously after dark

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I nearly lost it at school yesterday.

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I cued up my first period to write about Oregon and I couldn’t find my journal. What the hell? I had just written in it the day before and never take it out of the classroom. I looked all over and couldn’t find it. Panic struck.

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Second period. I still hadn’t found the journal and had torn the room apart! Would a student steal it? Theft had to be the only possible answer to the journal’s disappearance. Luckily no one can read my handwriting so I wasn’t worried about all my secrets being revealed.

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But still, I felt naked without it. This was my history of this school year. I have over 100 journals dating back to my sophomore year in high school and have never lost one. They are the most important thing in my life besides my dogs even though no one will ever read them except me. They are the only thing specifically mentioned in my will.

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Where the hell was it? Panic turned to rage. Then desperation.

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The students were writing and I wasn’t. I kept openly speculating about its disappearance and tried to retrace my steps from yesterday. Nothing was working.

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Third period. Still no journal. I announced to the class I’m offering a $20 reward for the journal’s return. No, make it $50! Spread the word! Find my lost child!!!!!!!!! A few students fanned out to type up stories or work on their ad selling projects. A few fanned out to look around the room, which was totally pointless because I’d already searched the room a dozen times.

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About a minute later, Jessica called from across the room. She held something aloft. “Is this it?”

I zoomed into the picture of Paul Newman on the back.

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“You found it! Where was it?”

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“Right here.”

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She pointed to a metallic file where ad invoices for the school news magazine were kept. The journal had been in plain view.

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A few seconds later I was kissing the journal and then peeling out two crisp twenties and a ten for Jessica. At first she didn’t want to accept the reward. I insisted.

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Another Friday Lunch Jam tomorrow. I practiced Hard Day’s Night with a student and we’ll roll it out. She sings; I bash the guitar and call it strumming. Together, they call it Rock and Roll.

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I’ve been unearthing some songs I might play at future Jams: Have Love Will Travel, The Kids Are All Right, Sympathy for the Devil, Let it Bleed, Here Comes the Sun, Twist and Shout, Cherry, Cherry, Rockin’ in The USA, Cadillac Ranch, Honky Tonk Woman, Proud Mary, Sweet Jane, and a couple of Gravy closet classics.

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I really can’t play the guitar for shit but no one really seems to mind.

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I took the dogs to Ona Beach after school and we romped. Two men waded in Beaver Creek and appeared to be looking for something. Gold?

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The Pelicans apparently have left the area, south to Mexico. Most of the shorebirds seem to have joined them.

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I’ve found a new great writer: Jess Walter. He writes novels and I’m currently reading The Zero. Check him out.

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I wonder if I’ll ever write the teaching novel? Or should I say finish it? I have 10,000 words in the can. Whenever I look at it, my mind goes to the immortal line by Donald Sutherland’s Professor Jennings in “Animal House” in response to the statement by Tom Hulce that the novel “must be very good.”

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“It’s a piece of shit.”

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I do have a working title: “Teacher of the Year.”

When a fry cook slaving away in an Oregon tavern comes out from his greasy hell and tells you he can't wait to read your Sometimes a Great Notion book, then you better fucking write the book! That dude really lit a fire under my ass.

It all happened today in the Sportsman Tavern in Pacific City. I was hunting Oregon stories with a groovy storytelling friend, back on my old turf, and I felt positively charged. This murder story is hot. All the players are still around. The file hasn't been cracked in 20 years. I just need a little time and luck and I might break this wide open.

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I just finished a three-hour interview about Vortex with a television crew from Oregon Public Broadcasting producing an episode for the Oregon Experience show. They traveled from Portland and shot the interview in the house with the dogs lounging in the background and the rain pounding on the skylights. At one point, the rain made so much noise that the sound man ordered a halt. We broke for a few minutes and then started filming again until Sonny began talking her special husky voice and I had to put both her and Ray in the truck.

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It was all sort of comical and quintessential Oregon.

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I haven’t thought about Vortex in a long time and it felt strangely exciting to talk about it again. I’ll never really get a handle on that far out story but it is nice to assist others make sense of it. Since the book sold out in 2006 I have been tempted to bring out a second edition, but never got around to it. I now doubt I ever will even though I have hundreds of new photos and anecdotes. Sometimes it is best to move. Citadel was like that too.

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I plan on releasing the refuge book in the spring and try to complete the Notion manuscript by next fall.  Sometimes I wonder if maintaining this pace is healthy. Five books in five years and the Neverending Tour might be too much. But I also know that one day I could wake up and suddenly have no energy or inspiration to put out another book. So I want to keep pushing it as hard as possible while the energy and inspiration are there.

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Day off tomorrow. Veteran’s Day. I’ll call the Old Man and thank him for his service in Korea. Then I’ll head north with the dogs to investigate an old unsolved murder. Twenty-one years ago a French bicyclist was murdered in a campground near Neskowin. Two local moss pickers are rumored to have done it. The story is right there, hanging around, unsettled, waiting for someone to breathe life in it.

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In Manzanita a few minutes before a gig for Super Sunday.  Lots of good and terrible memories from this town. Good—Romalyn. Terrible—Yvonne.

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Oregon is getting waxed by Stanford on the boob tube. I am writing this from the San Dune Tavern. I don’t care if Oregon wins but many others around me do.

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On the way north I swung by Nestucca Spit and the dogs and I rambled there for the first time in nearly two years. When I lived in the area, I rambled this beach a thousand times. It felt good to be back. There was no one there.

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I blew right by the refuge. I still can’t go up there. I may never go up there. What’s wrong with me?

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Got the dogs with me. They’re back at the motel crashed on the bed.

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Rockin’ storms at the coast the past few days. Storms that make you want to stay in all day and night and read and drink wine and….

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Prediction on the gig tonight: 20 people. I need to sell 10 books to break even. That could prove problematic.

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Okay, time to roll and get the literary game face on. Is there such a thing?

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After the gig:

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About 80 people showed up and I turned out to be one of my best gigs in a long, long time. The audience seemed to enjoy it and the Newman/Notion riff at the end always electrifies a crowd. Now I need to write the book, get the book deal, and live happily ever after.

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Interestingly enough, I feel more inclined to write about my year teaching in Turkey or more Pinto stories than the Notion book.

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I sold close to 20 books.

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After the show, a bunch of people took it over to the San Dune Tavern where sheer madness unfolded. I mean drunken tourists of course. Really loaded. In the Rock Zone for sure. A three-piece cover band belted out the classics. Tom Petty’s “Listen to Your Heart” never sounded so good. Two quasi frat boy/hip hop/meth freaks in sweat suits intrigued me. During the breaks they danced together in a not-thinly disguised homo erotic fashion. They exaggerated and choreographed their movements while the whole bar looked on. It was funny at first, I think. Then the spectacle drifted into something bizarre that I am at a loss to explain.

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I met some fascinating people in Manzanita. I hadn’t really gone out like this in a long time.

I blew all my book money at the tavern buying beer for the group.

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I was up early, on the beach with the dogs to watch the sun rise. No one there.

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Next gig: Cannon Beach.

Today might have been one of the best of my long, eccentric, start and stop teaching career. Writing from the heart with first period. Saving the world with second period. Posting reviews on Rollingstone.com with third. Pizza and reporting with fourth. Then the Friday Lunch Jam opne mic: rock, folk, poetry, rawk, Japanese ballads, emo, thrash metal, indie angst, GLORIA, and....a....rave.

Check out it out.

http://www.youtube.com/user/NHSFridayLunchJam#p/u/9/Iqp8EVLWlnw

And I get paid to do this?

A 91-year old woman disappeared from my neighborhood in January. The never found her body. She told her caregivers that if anyone tried to remove her from her beachfront home (where she had lived for 40 years), she would walk into the ocean.

I think she walked into the ocean. I've talked to her friends and the cop who supervised the search. I've retraced her possible path. I've taken photographs and checked on the weather and the tides and the moon on the morning she vanished. I need to talk with the nephew who lived with her when she disappeared.

He passed a polygraph.

No note. No body. I feel like I am on to the greatest beach story of all time.

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I've been thinking a lot about Oregon City these days, and my youth. Here's a piece that follows up the Halloween deflowering story.

The Coin Toss

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We always went to the bowling alley on our dates although we never bowled a single frame.

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Tricia always drove us in her brown Pinto and we kept the sound of the AM radio low because we loved to talk.

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I always flipped a quarter and she always called it in the air.

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If I lost, I had to sneak into the bowling alley, sneak into its fetid men’s restroom, fit the quarter into a condom machine, and turn a silver knob until a little wrapped package plopped out in a tray below. If Tricia lost, she had to sneak into the women’s restroom and do something similar although she never gave me a description of its décor.

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I can’t remember the brand, color, state of lubrication or texture of the condoms we each purchased, but we never went without one.

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In 1981, the Oregon City Bowling Alley was the only business in town an underage and responsible couple could buy condoms after hours. This was also the same year the NY Times first reported on a “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.”

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After the purchase, Tricia would fire up the Pinto and we would drive Molalla Avenue toward Singer Hill and explore Oregon City’s historic area east of the bluff overlooking the Willamette River and the paper mills. We always searched for a vacant and unlit place to hide the car and have sex in the back seat. The Pinto probably deserved its reputation as a terrible, even murderous American compact car, but the Hatchback model Tricia owned was incredibly spacious with a huge curved rear window that allowed for scenic views and plenty of maneuvering.

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The parking lot of a huge stone church near the John McLoughlin House was our most frequent and preferred spot.

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We never drank alcohol during these Pinto moments. We never smoked cigarettes, let alone pot.  Neither one of us had a curfew to obey.

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The police never rousted us.