Monthly Archives: April 2015

The Bicycle Is the Product Of Pure Reason Applied To Motion

Posted on by Bill Chance

“To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion. Geometry at the service of man! Give me two spheres and a straight line and I will show you how far I can take them. Voltaire himself might have invented the bicycle, since it contributes so much to man’s welfare and nothing at all to his bane. Beneficial to the health, it emits no harmful fumes and permits only the most decorous speeds. How can a bicycle ever be an implement of harm?”
― Angela Carter

Bicycle Drag Races, Continental Bridge Park, Dallas, Texas

Bicycle Drag Races, Continental Bridge Park,
Dallas, Texas

Bicycle Drag Races, Continental Bridge Park, Dallas, Texas

Bicycle Drag Races, Continental Bridge Park,
Dallas, Texas

Bicycle Drag Races, Continental Bridge Park, Dallas, Texas

Bicycle Drag Races, Continental Bridge Park,
Dallas, Texas

City Full Of Dreams

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Ant swarming City
City full of dreams
Where in broad day the specter tugs your sleeve”
― Charles Baudelaire

Dallas, Texas From the Trinity River Bottoms (click to enlarge)

Dallas, Texas
From the Trinity River Bottoms
(click to enlarge)

Two Vast And Trunkless Legs Of Stone

Posted on by Bill Chance

‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

calatrava_2

As the Grass Grows On the Weirs

Posted on by Bill Chance

In a field by the river my love and I did stand,
And on my leaning shoulder she laid her snow-white hand.
She bid me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs;
But I was young and foolish, and now am full of tears.”
― W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems

Crepe Myrtle trunk in the snow

Crepe Myrtle trunk in the snow

I Can Dream

Posted on by Bill Chance

I can think. I can sleep. I can move. I can ride my bike. I can dream.
—-Bill Walton

The end point of February’s Critical Mass Bicycle Ride was the park on the Continental Bridge. They had bicycle drag races planned, and it was a lot of fun.

Bicycle Drag Races, Continental Bridge Park, Dallas, Texas

Bicycle Drag Races, Continental Bridge Park, Dallas, Texas

Bicycle Drag Races, Continental Bridge Park, Dallas, Texas

Bicycle Drag Races, Continental Bridge Park, Dallas, Texas

Sweat Up the Hills And Coast Down Them

Posted on by Bill Chance

“It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motor car only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle.”
―Ernest Hemmingway

Skiptooth Front Cog Frisco Heritage Center Frisco, Texas

Skiptooth Front Cog
Frisco Heritage Center
Frisco, Texas

Heading A Handmade Nail

Posted on by Bill Chance

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
― Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being

Frisco Heritage Center Frisco, Texas

Frisco Heritage Center
Frisco, Texas

Her Heart Were A Green Flame

Posted on by Bill Chance

“Doesn’t it seem as though her heart were a green flame? Perhaps it’s the cold green heart of a small green snake, with a minute flaw in it, the kind of small green snake that slithers from branch to branch in the jungle, passing itself off as a vine. What’s more, perhaps when she gave me the ring with such a gentle, loving expression, she wanted me to draw such a meaning from it some day.”
― Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow

Spring Snow, Richardson, Texas

Spring Snow,
Richardson, Texas

They Seemed To Know What She Wanted

Posted on by Bill Chance

“She couldn’t stop watching his eyes. They were bright black, surrounded by an incredible network of lines, like a laboratory maze for studying intelligence in tears. They seemed to know what she wanted, even if she didn’t.”
― Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

Design District, Dallas, Texas

Design District,
Dallas, Texas

Much Time Has Passed And Is Passing Faster And Faster Every Day

Posted on by Bill Chance

“I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable–if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.”
― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

Bicycle Drag Race, Continental Bridge Park, Dallas, Texas

Bicycle Drag Race, Continental Bridge Park, Dallas, Texas