P.S. ~ As you’ll see when you click on the story link above, you can no longer link to my full story, just the first few paragraphs on the story’s comments page as it has disappeared behind the Gazette online library’s ‘read it in 7-days or fork over $5‘ pay wall. Welcome either to the future – or the death – of local online news links.

Don’t you some days feel like you’re the guy in the red shirt picked for the landing party? Now, you can dress for it by joining the Red Shirt Society.

Snowstorms (ice storms, floods, lightning, volcanos etc.) are Nature’s way of reminding us she’s still the HMFIC.

PHOTO | Indoor Cat Looking Out | MoltoMediaWerks 2010

Country road. WestVirginiaVille | MoltoMediaWerks | 2007-ish | Click bigger

The sun drops down on Upshur County. Or maybe it’s Summers County, West Virginia. I was coming back from the mountaintop lair of a sculpture-making friend of mine a few years ago. | The sun was like a fried egg on the horizon. Had to consult with my camera. | A late afternoon rain painted the country road off to the right the color of Saran Wrap.

“May you have the hindsight to know where you’ve been, The foresight to know where you are going, And the insight to know when you have gone too far.” ~ Irish Blessing

“Do you want to spoon?” Jerry asked. He was standing by the bed, holding two six-foot spoons. A week later we forked for the first time.”

~ from ‘Twitter Sized Fiction” by twitter.com/VeryShortStory

I used the word ‘confabulation’ in a message to a friend this morning — incorrectly, it turns out.  I figured  I  should understand the word’s meaning and connotations better before bandying it about. So, looked  it up (or, to be precise, clicked it up). Finally! A useful word that explains the birthers, the Tea Partiers and perhaps Sarah Palin:

confabulation

A confabulation is a fantasy that has unconsciously emerged as a factual account in memory. A confabulation may be based partly on fact or be a complete construction of the imagination . . . (read on)

PS | Owning up to our own confabulations  – or even figuring out we have them -  and what they are, and how they warp a clearer-eyed view of our individual worlds is the stuff of therapy. And spiritual practice. And drug-taking, which can either lift the veil on our confabulatory natures or  create whole new meta-confabulations. Or maybe, “Matrix”-like, we are living inside one huge confabulation? Where is Toto when you need him?

]]> http://hundredmountain.com/archives/431/feed 0 http://hundredmountain.com/archives/420 http://hundredmountain.com/archives/420#comments Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:59:40 +0000 admin http://hundredmountain.com/?p=420 One can take issue with Christopher Hitchens, over a number of his stands on war and politics. But when he does  a takedown, he does a takedown. The theory is we’re supposed to ignore the vapid, opportunistic, imbecility of Sarah Palin, in hopes she will go the way of  the Quayle. But one should never underestimate the hunger for a beaming authoritarian, especially one with nice legs. As Hitchens puts it in today’s Slate:

What price the courageous frontier huntress now—an empty-headed echo chamber for rumor-mongers and freaks who shoots from ambush and then runs away? Some condescending right-wing intellectuals are calling her style “populist” and comparing it with Andrew Jackson and William Jennings Bryan. The true name for it is demagogy, descending from Joseph McCarthy, Robert Welch, and the nastier elements of the old Nixon gang—people to whom slander and defamation was second nature.

I considered also posting the photo of Palin that Slate editors put with Hitchens’ piece. But I could not bear to gaze upon it more than once,  in all its grinning bufoonery, masking ambition minus smarts, sense and soul.