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By Jack Joseph Smith

JO-- WE had told the town we were going Why all this violence? MIKE "THERE ARE SOME THAT WANT TO DISTROY MY MEMORY." Through I am at the end of something at the beginning of this book, I am well fit. One week ago I had my hair cut which was in a brade, put on a suit sent to me by way of my wife Bonnie from a Hollywood camera man who enjoyed the suit during the forties, and went to a party at the Long Branch Tavern in Monroe, Oregon. Soon I was the subject of a beating, until the fight moved outside and I took the instrument of my bloodletting by his ears to his knees. Actually I really wasn't going to tear them off, because of the law, a long journey forthcoming, and just plain weak fear, so I wasn't upset when he quit. But a few of the townsfolk I knew had welted the back of my head with their sticks and fists. At first this confused me, then it bothered me, then it sadened me. I would learn that this brief brawl was a very important message about the journey I had made a commitment to make. There is a river that runs through this property I have controled these last years, or what seem like many. The Willamette Valley is beautiful, and the Willimatte River is beautiful. But this is just the Long Tom River; up and slow and loam some five hundred years onwards from the costal range. It is where I walked my now dead dog Beefheart who sailed as good as the geese when the ponds were steep and smooth. It is autum time. And the land and the air and what has happened in the fields and in the gardens and across the orchards running up into the Oak and Madrone hills is filled with the basic colors that make life a wine glass that won't tip in the crisp stillness while the clouds shift and change to let light deliver its finest perceptions. CLARITY OF THE AIR (STICKS & FISTS) IT was only a matter of sticks + hands but I suppose it could have been worse.

Original Scan

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AI Interpretation

GPT

A revised opening draft links the Monroe tavern fight, the Long Tom River, Beefheart, and autumn valley imagery to the book's larger journey.

The page explicitly frames the book as beginning at an ending. The tavern violence is not only an incident but a message that sends the speaker back through place, memory, and self-restraint. The handwritten edits make the page feel actively composed around whether violence will distort or destroy memory.

Claude

Another version of the book's opening frames it explicitly as beginning 'at the end of something': the narrator cut his braid, put on the forties suit, attended the Long Branch party, was beaten, and now stands in the Willamette Valley preparing to write.

This page is a metacommentary on the book itself - the narrator aware that beginning at the end is structurally risky but meaningful. The handwritten additions visible as OCR noise suggest active revision. The final return to the Long Tom River and Beefheart 'who sailed as good as the geese' reinforces the dog as the collection's emotional anchor, more stable than the human relationships around it.