THE BOOK OF LIARS

Laying aside his cane and his gloves, he closed the hotel room door and rested for a moment in the dark. The children, his wife, his peg leg, his life, here in the dark, all that he was, all that he would ever be and minusing.

On the stage there would always be laughter, his ghost would always stay a little longer for the real cord of their appreciation to sink in, and when he left, he would hobble down the alley with the fury of the one-legged.

My grandfather lived his life on Vaudeville. The talkies came, and that was the end of his life, his career. He moved to Los Angeles and died a short time later from T.B.

Here on the web site, things have changed. The cane and hat are there on the table. They are selling tickets outside. But things are different now, and I am going to rework a bit of the site.

I am closing the Book of Liars. It will still be here to read. But, one year after it's first entry, we will close it.

I will offer another book of some sort for our visitors - soon. Maybe the same thing, maybe something new. We'll see. I believe that this last year has been monumental, in so many ways, and it is right to close this book of how we have seen ourselves till now.

One thing I am going to begin is a small book of some of the lovely writings I found here on the site that were not included in the book of Liars. The rabid tone some of our long time visitors will recall in the debates one long ago November, so much passion and hope, venom and involvement. Reason and kindness still extended though from most of our debaters, and I am going back to look and see what remains to bring forward. We obliterated some of the more outlandish and cruel postings. I enjoyed that. I wish I could have caught them all before they were read. I do kind of miss the old board here.

But there is a new one set up somewhere in the electronic world, PLP on Yahoo. It's not as immediate, but it's friendly. The little community transferred themselves and all their luggage there, kind of like the three mile island community after they closed that leaky plant down.

We had so much nuclear energy here we kind of leaked. Suddenly there were a lot of creepy people coming around. But that was long ago now, or so it seems.

Send us sites you'd like people to see, the addresses, organizations you want people to know about, and we can put those in a book, or a page, perhaps. We can rise and clear the path for the good spirits behind us, coming up fast, need room to grow. We can endure, and we can flourish, moment by moment, and in the golden sunlight now and then, for no particular reason except that it is the business of the living to do this.

I am intent that this shall remain an interactive site. I am considering some way we might open the message board around here again. It obviously needs controls. It's kind of like a groovy bar that is in a weird part of cyberspace. Sometimes the wrong people log on when they should have gotten someone to take them home.

Hope takes the shape of ghosts, and I listen at night for any possible movement in the dark kitchen, an old ancestor, perhaps, looking for his stage clothes, reminding me not to sleep too long, because they are getting ready to call me out for my big number.

But it's really more than hope now. It's something else in here.

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