WestVirginiaVille

I hear a harp playing. A lovely harp-tastic chord strummed over and over again. Have I died in the night? Is there indeed an angelic host, a Top 40 Angelic Harp Band, which greets you at the gates of Heaven?

A video of a stirring murmuration, a map that shows there are no nuclear warheads in my backyard and why the number 88 is important to Neo-Nazis: Things Learned on the Web last week.

So, there I was, walking across the Krogers parking lot toward the opening when Zeus in his heaven shafted me with a lightning bolt.

TheWebTheater of WestVirginiaVille.com, presents “Saint Stephen’s Dream: a Space Opera.” Coming Soon To A Computer Near You. Spring, say. Or maybe Summer.

There’s nothing special about this tale of a parent with Alzheimer’s except that, being a writer, I have the chance to write about my mother dying. A thousand other families reading this are going through the same anguished motions.

So, if my mother had not died from Alzheimers, she’d have celebrated her 82nd birthday today. But she did die, in 2002, of this merciless affliction. Therein lies the explanation for this downloadable song.

A selection of poems from “Sprittling Secrets,” in the debut of “aFewPoems,” an occasional series on poetry found around the Village of WestVirginiaVille.

Some nights, I drag home from the office with all good intentions. I’ll finally write that piece about my thoughts on Occupy Whatever. But then, I got nothin’. But I got pictures.

A found poem pounces out the morning e-mail box. Surely, it does. But now I’m not so sure how surely best to phrase it.

No open casket. If you weren’t around to see my face before the undertaker’s scary Silly Putty makeover, then I’m just saying. Google my name, say goodbye to one of those pictures of me. I looked a lot better back then.

If my moods had had their own meteorologist, the weather report would have been regular squalls of anger and whats-the-point-anyway despair followed by thunderstorms of self-pity and flash floods of fecklessness.

Walker DeVille and Abdullah flee the Buddhist temple and head to a 17th century Paris flat for Christmas. His mother wants him home, but he’s not coming. Walker reads a postcard from Davin back in Lagos from bullet-riddled Chad.

Poems can be found in the most unexpected places. Such as page 2 of the Calhoun Chronicle’s “This Week in History,” with news of some chestnuts that came to town 100 years ago.

“Monastery Nights” is an Occasional Memoir of Visits to the Bhavana Society Buddhist Monastery in West Virginia and Encounters with Abbot Bhante Gunaratana. See new excerpts each Thursday on WestVirginiaVille.com.

Abdullah was on fire. This was not something new. Abdullah’s pants — more specifically, his pant cuffs — had caught fire before on the construction site of the Buddhist temple in a Parisian suburb.

WestVirginiaVille’s town square will be quiet for nearly two weeks and then will start welcoming visitors and tourists with a new season of occasional material. Beyond that — wired-wise and wireless-wise — all bets are off.

As an arts-and-culture blogazine based in the alternative mythical realm of WestVirginiaVille, we are pre-disposed to be intrigued by writers running for governor of the state of West Virginia.

A curious, well-done, scrawled declaration intrigues the visitor passing a nook of an abandoned doorway along Summers Street in downtown Charleston, West Virginia.

It is inherently interesting to write about drugs. Most of us live obedient, law-abiding lives, or we try to appear as if we do. Behind the masquerade, of course, all sorts of illegal, un-abiding, disgraceful, unappealing, messy things are going on.