WestVirginiaVille

The well-heeled partners cruise by the brewpub window in their dark-blue sharkskin suits, or at least, suits I cannot afford. I’ve long admired their well-oiled hairdos. They must cost $500 an hour, these guys, what do I know. What do I cost?

I read the national award-winning poet to juice my cadences. Maybe to steal his stately, nutritious, languorous lines. For it has been months since a pen, a real ink pen, touched down upon the snowy lined plains of my journal.

We moved onward, into the hills. There are very many hills in West Virginia and within their folds are secrets. And horses. And horsedogs.

Actor, musician and West Virginia native Lou Myers died Feb. 19 at the age of 76 . A 2011 Gazette profile captures some of the wide range of a man who was much more than just Vernon Gaines on “A Different World.”

It is hazardous to write poetry when you are tired, horny, disgruntled, lonely, in need of a lover’s ministrations or even just a session of kisses. This may be, of course, the only time, even the best, to write poetry.

It was his fourth fourth death. Not that he was counting. But he thought about it later. ‘Keep yourself in the room,’ some oracle of wise practice — was it the Zen Hospice Project? — had said. How did you do that?

Fragments stop me in my tracks — Charles Wright, Taiga’s Zen, T.S Elliot. Wait, one more check, there is the number (2) atop my Facebook page. One more fragment of attention before bed.

I think if I did not have the woods to get off to I might be a madman. I know that sounds an exaggeration. But there comes a time when nothing else will do and if nothing else would do, could I do without?

In the first part of a series of reprinted articles from 2012, a profile of Trappist monk Thomas Merton, on the occasion of the founding of a Merton study group in Charleston, West Virginia.

So, you’ve taken part in National Write Like a Son of a B*tch Month this past Novermber. Now what! Set down to your pencils! It’s time to Mail & Deliver.

Please note these important addendums to National Write Like a Son of a B*tch Month in order to further your success and rescue your so-called self-esteem as a writer who, like, actually writes.

Writers need deadlines. Writers need motivation. Writers need a sharp kick in the keister to get up from the sofa where you’ve been hypnotized by a “Big Bang Theory” marathon. Hence, the need for ‘Write Like a Son of a Bitch Month’ Join today.

What happens when you find the monk’s old outhouse has not been used for years in the West Virginia woods? A new chapter of ‘Monastery Nights.’

It serves no fruitful purpose to wax melancholic in your late middle years as rust-colored leaves drop, one by one by one by one, from the sycamores, the oaks and maples, and whatnot trees on this cold October morning.

So, it is Day 5 of my Facebook Fast for the month of September. And I can claim no high moral seriousness or report any breakthroughs. But I do see into my neighbor’s window.

Life after deactivating Facebook. It’s kind of quiet here in the barren fields of minor league blogging. Hello? Is anyone out there?

Friends, frenemies, followers: What happens when you announce you are taking a Facebook Fast? A lively exchange on the politics, both personal and national, of turning off Facebook for awhile.

In sweet coffeehouse sadness, we sit. We bemoaners and conjoiners, we well-outfitted outcasts of the digi-age. We brow-knitted worriers and patron saints of cappuccino.

There are cougars in these hills, high on slanted slopes, ranged with forests of matchstick-straight lodgepole pines. Places where few men and women, much less boys and girls, have been of late, if ever.