Here are four things I suggest may be worth several minutes of your hard-earned life-force, when the thought arises that you could use a break to think about something other than what you've been thinking about.
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Take a break from worrying about the fate of the Republic, beyond the locked gates of a forested park where the pine trees offer fine company and conversation and the view from on high poses some good questions.
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I toil mostly in obscurity. But which writer does not? / Except for those few who are feted, adored, and / lifted so high. Until they pass from favor & are knocked / back to the second-rank, never to return to / the heights from which they sipped / the better champagnes ...
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If you make sure to buy your pants with cellphone pockets, you can more easily capture the moment when the Sour Gum tree beside your house catches fire.
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There is much to rue about living in West Virginia, run, as it is, by empty suits and chuckleheads. But every time I think of leaving for a bluer state, this one floors me with the views from being way the heck out in the Mountain State.
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There are many days it seems to me music is helpless against the daily worldwide onslaught of human beings acting like cruel demons. Yet the promise of coming together to experience the communion of shared and transporting musicality is certainly not nothing.
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I could be the man the boy / dreamed of being. I could be the / boy the man dreams of remembering. / I could be the man who saved his mother. / I could be the man who fought his father, / who finally and everlastingly / thrummed some sense into / that thick Latinate, hot-blooded, / black-haired head…
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As David Byrne cries in "Born Under Punches": 'I'm catching up with myself!' Below are some things I am catching up on, myself, after recently launching a world premiere in West Virginia's capital city which was fabulous and exhausting to birth.
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Looking back more than fifty years after my first encounter with "100 Years of Solitude," after a bookshelf encounter stirs some strong family memories.
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Here are some snapshots, hipshots and night shots, from wandering the highways, byways, and lifeways of the world through which my iPhone moves, in the small towns, small cities and hills of West Virginia.
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A couple of eightysomething artists refuse to stop being wonderful, while the capital city of West Virginia pays colorful homage to the passing of another master artist.
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So, I'm on my front porch yesterday, taking a Nicaraguan cigar break, as one does. I look up and there's my 92-year-old neighbor Earl, trundling my way with his black wheeled walker, three small photo books stacked on the seat. What was up with that?
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On the way to a jam in the Appalachian outback, I pass the House of Prayer Full Gospel Church. Wait—are there 'partial gospel' churches out there?
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One apartment complexity; one bridge I once ascended; one very black Tuxedo Cat; one father-son rolling encounter; one dulcimer dude; and one fencing match in the green, green hills of Earth.
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The only sounds I hear while standing at the foot of the silos is the whip and whoosh of occasional traffic on W.Va. 2, a trail mix of various birds charting out their personal space in song, and now and again the wind whistling through the portals of these abandoned legacies of a pre-industrial rural heartland.
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