I should be meditating. I should be writing a new chapter in my 'sorta memoir.' Or polishing an old one. I should not be eating pretzels & pepper jack cheese after 10 p.m. I should be sleeping. I should not be posting yet another black-and-white Instagram photo ...
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Taking a stroll through some definitive black-and-white moods, from across a couple of states and several states of mind.
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I wish I might resent you, or Fate or / my itinerant Guardian Angel. Yet who / indeed might I blame? / Your world has failed, I say. / But it goes on, rotating beneath / the feet of that gesticulating man ...
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I was up early at 5 a.m. I stood, barefoot, just outside the doorframe to the house where I was staying, deep in the West Virginia hills. No traffic noise since this was the heart of the heart of the country. Only a rural road curved around the house ...
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While "VAN GOGH: The Immersive Experience" wows you with its flash, such as a 7,000-square-foot Immersive Gallery animating his work and a must-experience virtual reality fly-through of Arles, I came away just as intrigued and moved by the more intimate details.
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I claim no grand comprehension of the challenge of life there. But Cuba is … well, Cuba. A confounding, transformative, depressing, challenging, intoxicating place.
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The email arrived one day recently in my in-box from Glasgow, Scotland: Did you know, it said, that a letter your friend Sister Mary Pellicane sent to Charles de Gaulle is on sale on eBay in London? Um ... no. What?
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Dots of satellites, / slow-moving stars / high high overhead, / always circling the / marble of the earth, / pass by well past / midnight, far above / the push-up Appalachians ...
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Venice is sinking, Venice is faded. The sea is rising and Venice may be dying. But, as Lord Byron sings in 'Child Harold's Pilgrimage,' even in her dotage she remains a glorious wonder.
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'Hey, here you go. What's your name? Where'd you serve?' He nods in thanks. Stuffs the bag into a pocket. Tom. That's his name. He takes off his black knit cap. Syria. Iraq. 'A shell took off part of the top of my head.' I wince. He points to a jagged line. 'The Med Evac was the best. Saved my…
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Heading to the local mall used to be one of the social highlights of the week even ten years ago, much less 20. A recent visit to the Town Center Mall in West Virginia's capital city reveals how much the idea of the mall has faded.
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Do auspicious omens from a deer encounter extend to the semi-suburbs? I have zilch expertise in gauging their racks, but this 2-, 3- or 4-point young buck showed up recently in my backyard, which butts up against a narrow spit of woods. I got a closer look at him last night upon returning home from an outing ...
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Let's not talk about the moon anymore, but instead Solzhenitsyn's idea of 'political horror,' how to write a 'sorta memoir,' and breaking up with Twitter until the perp walk.
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How hard it is to dream, / to dream well. Besieged by / wants, missing what’s not / there. Wanting what we / cannot have, or could, at a / high cost of misery ...
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Hoeft Marsh in Greenbottom WV is where I get off to when I want to get off the timeline of the world's news. Here's a short musical visit there. It's a little fishy, too.
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