Author: John Poplett
-
Long Day’s Journey into a Mind Going Dark
Returning from a road-trip that kept me away for two weeks, I knew to expect that my mother, Carolyn, who is fast approaching her 92nd birthday, would impress me with how dementia had robbed another tiny piece of her mind. It’s hard to go away without some dread of the return, knowing how she depends…
-
How to Fulfill a Boyhood Dream in Cumberland Gap, TN
Routinely in the sixties and early seventies my parents would load me up with my kid brother in a borrowed station wagon and buzz down from Chicago to Asheville, NC as fast as centrifugal force and the likelihood of sliding sideways over the edge of a mountainous road would allow. Dad always drove and he…
-
Ode to the Adventure Prone
Inaugural East Coast Cascade Campers Owners Convention I was among the privileged few, there were ten of us in all, to bring my Cascade Camper campervan to Western Virginia to convene for a few days of birds-of-a-feather style camaraderie combined with interludes of revelry. It was—to be precise—a “hoot”. The Cascade Camper van is a…
-
Would you please please please please please please please stop worshipping this jackass?
Notes on the Ken Burns / Lynn Novick 6-hour documentary on Hemingway The documentary aired over three days from April 6 – April 8, 2021 on PBS. Moral of the story: don’t drink alcohol (straight or in any of its diluted forms), a tendency for ideation and alcohol don’t mix. It is—at the very least—a…
-
What is Willful Fantasy?
The opposite of willful denial is willful fantasy. It is the idea that we can exert mind over experience so forcefully that experience starts to conform to the fantasy. The practitioner is constantly aware that what he wills is fantasy and its discord with things as they otherwise seem but is charmed by his fantasy…