EDITOR’S NOTE: Greetings from the international headquarters of WestVirginiaVille, which involves a fuzzy cat nuzzled against my laptop in the ex-urban hills of West Virginia. Here is a heads-up about keeping up with my latest writing, multimedia work and guests posts. If you got an e-mail today with this post dated this day, September 15, 2025, then you are subscribed to the original version of this site at WestVirginiaVille.com. But here’s the rub — there is a companion version of this site at the online substack platform with the address of WestVirginiaVille.substack.com. I publish more frequent content there, including the three posts seen below, all published there in recent weeks, but not at this older site.
If you wish to keep up with my more frequent content at substack, then free subscribe at: WestVirginiaVille.substack.com | And please take a read on the substack posts below, if you might.
~ Thanks! Douglas John Imbrogno
MY TRUSTED Oxford English Dictionary app defines the word ‘ephemera’ as ‘things that exist or are used or enjoyed for only a short time.’ The word derives from Greek stock—ephēmeros, signifying ‘lasting only a day’. In addition, ephemera’s linguistic cousin, ‘evanescence,’ comes from a Latin word for ‘disappearing.’
All of that is to suggest I have nothing momentous to say in this post that will last in anyone’s consciousness more than a day or an hour. Or a few moments, maybe. And that would be just like the momentary cloud portal that briefly opened in the skies in front of my bedazzled eyes last week while driving down a West Virginia road. I memorialized the portal’s evanescence via the one minute of video ephemera above … | READ ON
I STAND ONE RECENT DAY in Ohio’s capital city, gazing up at what could be a building from another world or maybe a future one. Yet this superbly executed architecture belongs to planet Earth, a part of the Columbus Convention Center complex. The building grabs my attention, so I snap its portrait. I aim to capture its otherworldly angularity against cottony grayscale clouds since I shoot in black-and-white. This seems the best way to portray this pleasing behemoth, whose brash geometry blows fresh air into a head which otherwise might get tangled up in more blues on the jagged rocks of America’s demoralizing daily news.
The better news, however, is that I am headed to dine with my dear son at a delightful restaurant he wants us to check out. Plus, where I stop on the sidewalk to point my phone skyward is just a 15-minute drive to my boyhood home in Whitehall, where I attended first through third grade at Holy Spirit Elementary. We’d walk the couple of blocks to face the hawks-eye scrutiny of all-powerful nuns, who were not about to let us get away with any funny business. We have history, Columbus and I. | READ ON
THE WANNABE WRITER sits in a coffeeshop. Next to his laptop rests a cappuccino made with a little too much caramel syrup by the smiley barista. To be sure, he is more than a wannabe writer. Our fellow has published thousands of articles, essays, poems, riffs, songs, and juvenilia, all the way back to the blue mimeographed class newsletter he edited in 6th grade at Our Lady of the Rosary in Greenhills, Ohio.
The ‘wannabe writer’ thing speaks to him wanting to write something, anything at all useful about our current political moment. Yet he feels as if any words he may put down on this day of August 24, 2025, would be like the wildly flailing arms of a guy caught in an ocean riptide. For this is the thing—our guy with a too-sugary cappuccino on a Sunday morning is feeling full-on political despair while his country rapidly slip-slides toward a police state kakistocracy.
Our boy knows he must pick himself up, dust himself off, and get back onto the playing field with an uplifting message of resistance and solidarity. And also to stop mixing his metaphors. (Weren’t you just flailing in the ocean, guy?!?) Yet the wannabe writer also thinks maybe he should just go sit on the metaphorical bench, let his raggedy spirits calm, and allow other, wiser voices to address the moment. Since he has spent years crafting graphics of inspiring, kick-ass, truth-telling quotes from people with insights to impart, he now cedes the spotlight at this catastrophic, kakistocratic moment in American history. | READ ON
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A view of life based in the hills of West Virginia, yet often ranging well beyond its borders in space and in time. | A multimedia web-magazine edited by DOUGLAS JOHN IMBROGNO with guest contributors.
