WestVirginiaVille

This is all I got. A big ole magnolia tree in a full-throated shout of Spring blossoming, a mile from my house in the village of Barboursville, W.Va. Four viewing variations, from real to less-real.

I get tired of words. When my head gets weary of trying to make sense with them, I turn to pictures. Photographs activate a different neighborhood in the cerebral cortex.

Some scenes from recent ThirdEyeCabarets at The Cellar in downtown Charleston, W.Va.,, with performing songwriters, spoken word performers and bouncer Batman.

A trip to the Magic Mountain in iPhone photos reveals two-story tall human beings, people who breathe fire, a troupe of troubadours and the stray jackalope drumming round the fire before the dawn.

Nick sports one impressive Mohawk and scenes along the way and along the river at this year’s GrinFest. A triple play of photos and videos from Out & About in West Virginia.

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.

I often sit on my glasses, bending them into pretzels. I lose them, constantly. Once, I dropped a pair on the cul de sac and proceeded to run over them with my Honda. Then I changed my ways.

Yet another article on the Next New Thing in Web Publishing sends me fleeing a century into the past, in search of some verities on a southern Italian hillside.

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.

I could go on what I dislike about West Virginia. Its paid-for politicians. Plastic jugs in rivers. Etc. This is one of the things I like about West Virginia: shared tomatoes on the porch.

There’s a warrior in the window. Some Chinese gift shop in South Charleston, West Virginia. I’ve just had my back adjusted down the street, because, well, shite, age happens. And there he is.

I offer you this gander down a long road in the Zumwalt Prairie in northeastern Oregon. Where I hear tell, the gods — the good Old Gods (and the Goddesses) — still live.

A session with writer Luis Alberto Urea delivers live-action magic realism as deer be chillin’ on the Fishtrap lawn and the chortling stream invites you to sit down and write in Joseph, Oregon.

I would, were I able, drive straight into the highest of the peaks ahead, to that notch where snow sits upon a single peak as on a glacier. Why didn’t someone tell me of Oregon before?

So, since my friends will ask, and family, too, what was it like, I fire up the MacBook Pro and sit down with a one-third glass of dark-red wine and set to put some words upon the screen. | A pictorial essay from the Zumwalt Prairie, Joseph, Oregon.

West Virginia metal sculptor, raconteur, environmentalist and unaccountably still curly-haired Official Citizen of WestVirginiaVille Mark Blumenstein, sends along this view from the top of Blumenstein Mountain.

If you’re wondering where the roving WestVirginiaVille home office on any given today might be, you might check out the new nameless coffeeshop at the corner of Lee and Morris streets which opened recently in Charleston, W.Va.

The point is to get to the point where you no longer feel the need to ask: ‘What’s the point?’ Yet the older I get, the more I think this misses the point.

Crossing west to east across the swooping West Virginia hills, a watery pilgrimage I always make is to stroll to the midst of the arching bridge at Seneca Rocks.