1.
‘TWO GUYS’ | Barboursville, W.Va. | Free subscribe for more posts at theSTORYistheTHING.substack.com | november2024
“In a time of destruction, create something.”
~ MAXINE HONG KINGSTON
photos & text by douglas john imbrogno | november19.2024
I wander and click. Click and then wander. Onward to my next destination, the next improvisation. Who are these big-headed, smiling white guys plastered on an empty storefront? Perhaps they are good guys, good dads, good men. Yet I am weary of us white guys, grinning out our too-often deceptive grins in public. Then, winning everything, running the table and, finally, the show. Again, dammit. Gaming the game. Usurping a whole trillion-dollar government because some of you, a big whole bunch of you, just bet the whole country on a carnival barker — loud, leering, incipiently demented. Upon his Second Coming. ‘Just you watch this freakshow! It’ll freak you out!!‘ Which, after all, is the larger part of his piteous, pathetic, perverted Vaudeville point. You pay me heed.
“It may be when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey.”
~ WENDELL BERRY
2.
‘YOU’VE GOT MAIL’ | Charleston, W.Va. | theSTORYistheTHING.com | november2024
In times like these, especially in times like these, when words are just upchucked by annihilationists, institutional arsonists, and a world-historic, nihilist-narcissist whose much-kissed ring gleams with saliva, only poetry makes sense. Uttered by poets maybe dropped in from other worlds and I mean that in the broadest sense. From the better part of our sidelong, other existences. Come to the fore, to the breech, in eternal defense of words and meaning, allusion, even salvation. Be heard, now, avatars and lone wolves, incarnate prophets of genuine recompense, restitution, and redress.
I purified my intentions,
went out to dine alone with myself.
and so I left, keeping my silence.
~ PABLO NERUDA (from ‘Sobre mi mala educacion’)
3.
‘TALK WITH MY PORTRAIT’ | Charleston, W.Va. | theSTORYistheTHING.com | november2024 | Excerpt from the Pabol Neruda poem ‘Sobre mi mala educacion’ (‘On my bad education’)
The sun came out yesterday, in all its occasional, hopeful glory, watercoloring my world in hues of bronze and saffron, daffodil and dandelion. Black-and-bruised purple clouds returned with this morning’s occluded dawn, but that is the way of things. If we learn to accept this see-saw gift of sky & light, dark & shade, it will go better for us.
“This stuff of a past not worthily lived is also medicine.”
~ JOAN HALIFAX
4.
‘AND THEN SHE LAUGHED …’ | Charleston, W.Va. | theSTORYistheTHING.com | november2024
We sit across from one another, wondering about each other’s full and secret lives. Judging ours as wanting, if depressed or morose. Judging yours as less, if full of ourselves or inclined to mean spirits. Or if infused with rage, inculcated with growing resentment by sharkskinned hucksters, stepped out the back of black stretch limousines. Political earthquakes, whole eras, pivot upon churning crowds into hotheaded, mob-adjacent resentment. Raging at how they do not live, have not lived, cannot live their best dreamed lives. But why? Because of someone else, whose name and face they brand onto bottles of bargain-price oil from poison snakes for sale from out of that limo trunk. This tonic will make you feel so much better! It’s mathematics, really. Rob someone else’s larder and they feel so bad and so sad. Ipso facto, you hurt a smidgen less while you enjoy their dispossession and disquietude. How cool is that!
“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must live.”
~ CHARLES BUKOWSKI
5.
‘WORLD IN A PUDDLE’ | Hoeft Marsh, Greenbottom, W.Va. | theSTORYistheTHING.com | may2024
Now, it is days later. I am lost in an empire of trees — oak, sycamore, maple, beech, walnut. A hawk screeches its battle cry, swoops in a parabolic arc downward from patrolling the atmospheric sea above the marshland. Ahead upon the trail, a puddle represents the woodlands and sky, an utter illusion. Yet, it’s no less a part, no less real, than the Tiger Swallowtail that stops me in my life’s dash for a few breathless, still seconds. Such encounters may not save us from ourselves, from this rabid specie’s demolition and blighting of all the other species’ homelands. And, yet … When I, when you, when we pause to listen and look, to wander far from the clamor of the constant delivery trucks arriving with new flavors and the raging rallies now requiring bulletproof enclosure for their prophets of bitter irritation and loathing, we may hear — again — what we heard before things got so loud.
“There is no love of life without despair of life.”
~ ALBERT CAMUS
6.
‘THE LONG VIEW’ | Spring Hill Cemetery, Huntington, W.Va. | theSTORYistheTHING.com photo | januray2024
Where will it all end? In what the nation’s Founding Parents, if not our grandmas, feared? Cruel souls ruining your life. Or a kingly autocracy? An Idiocracy? An oligarchic, tech-bro Nerd Reich? Maybe a Stasi-like surveillance society, where inoffizielle mitarbeiter neighbors tell the surveilors what other neighbors whisper, and, so, earn a round of tickets to Dave and Busters or a coupon for an extra-large, Door Dash-delivered pepperoni pizza, as their next-door fellows hear strong raps upon an evening door and freeze? Maybe, maybe so. Yet where it will all truly end is in rolling waves of oceanic graveyards. In ridiculous ornate mausoleums to unremembered moguls. In penile granite spires to forgotten kingpins and in lost graves in partibus infidelium. What do you wish to recollect on your dying bed? How you hated? How you helped? How you rampaged? How you seeded, sowed, and reaped? How you antagonized? How you nurtured? Each moment the graveyard nears. Each moment a choice. Each moment a life in its balance. Each one.
FRODO: I can’t do this, Sam.
SAM: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened. But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.
FRODO: What are we holding on to, Sam?
SAM: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.
~ “The Lord of the Rings,” J.R.R Tolkien
P.S.
‘SUNBURSTING’ | Barboursville Park, Barboursville, W.Va. | theSTORYistheTHING.com photo | august2024
FREE SUBSCRIBE
For updates on new essays, poems, diatribes, photo essays, experimental videos & sorta memoir excerpts, subscribe to this site’s free e-mail newsletter: TheStoryIsTheThing.substack.com
