“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
Sunflower
A friend called me one Saturday morning to tell me there were fields of Sunflowers blooming, vast, beside the Interstate on the way to Austin. I drove down there to take photographs. It was amazingly beautiful, the miles of yellow faces looking into the sun.
Today’s story reminded me of that day and these photographs.
“Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend.” ― Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
The trail runs through some thick woods between the train line and the creek south of Forest Lane. There is a nice rest area built there. This homeless guy was sitting in the rest area, reading and writing in his notebook. We talked about the weather and I helped him find a lost sock.
“I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.”
― Jerome K. Jerome
Employees/Artists from Orr-Reed Wrecking. Her T-Shirt says, “Show Us Your Junk,” which is their motto.
Years ago, I had a big chest-type deepfreeze freezer in the garage (I guess I still do). People from my background often have these – the generational memory of The Depression, dust bowl, and mass hunger leads to a deep desire to store enough food to get by for an unreasonable time.
At any rate, this freezer was full, mostly beef. I had stumbled across a good deal on half a steer and a lot of it was there, frozen, waiting on my hunger. I was out of town on a long trip and while I was gone someone accidentally unplugged the cord on the deep freeze. I’m not sure how long it thawed out, but it was summertime, and it was way, way too long. It was beyond disgusting.
I thought and thought about what to do. I ended up digging a big hole in my backyard, pulled the freezer out there and tipped the contents into the hole. I covered it up, and used a hazmat mask to clean out the inside of the freezer.
It actually worked. I’ll bet to this day the grass grows really green in one spot in that backyard.
Today’s story is about a man that does this sort of thing for a living, and for redemption.
“- Colonel Kane: Maybe we’re just fish out of water.
– Col. Richard Fell: What was that?
– Colonel Kane: I just think about sickness, cancer in children, earthquakes, war, painful death. Death, just death. If these things are just part of our natural environment why do we think of them as evil? Why do they horrify us so? Unless we were meant for someplace else.”
—-The Ninth Configuration
Dallas Arboretum
I had a very busy and stressful week at work and it kept going until late Friday. It left me enervated and exhausted. There are things that I need to do and things that I want to do but I wasn’t up for anything. To unwind and decompress I decided to sit my lazy ass down in the living room and watch a random movie or two from the Criterion Channel.
For no particular reason I picked a film from 1980 (though it felt very sixties-ish) the directorial debut by the author of the Exorcist, William Peter Blatty – The Ninth Configuration, starring Stacy Keach and a pile of character actors from the time.
My reading group is plowing through The Brothers Karamazov (and I am really enjoying it). As I’m sure you know, one of the themes of TBK is the question of the existence of God and, if he doesn’t exist, what is the basis for morality, if there is one. Very heavy stuff. It turns out that is the theme of The Ninth Configuration also – musings on God and Morality and Sin and Redemption. It’s the same themes, but instead of 19th century Czarist Russia the story is set in a castle in the Pacific Northwest that has been converted into an asylum for soldiers left insane by their experiences in the Vietnam War. Plus one patient – an astronaut that went raving crazy with fear on the verge of his flight to the moon.
It is a movie of its time – it doesn’t age all that well – but it is an interesting work of genius. It starts out silly and clunky – I was on the verge of giving up – but around the halfway point it veers off into new territory. There are revelations and surprises and a really crackerjack bar fight.
When it was over I made the mistake of clicking around the Criterion Channel menus and ended up watching a second film – the 1922 silent version of Nosferatu. I have, of course, seen the imagery from the movie – but had never sat through the film itself. It was fun to see the original vampire film. Count Orlof (Dracula, really, the names were changed due to the fact they never obtained rights to Bram Stoker’s story) is what a vampire would really be like – terrifying, yet strangely sad and pitiful. Vampires have become cool and sexy – that doesn’t make much sense to me. The undead should be shabby and wretched, like in Nosferatu, even if they are terrible and incredibly dangerous.
“The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.” ― Marshall McLuhan
Invasion Car Show
Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
(click to enlarge)
My son bought a car online, unseen. He filled out a form and a truck with a trailer drove up out front and dropped it off. I like that. I never liked dealing with car salesman.
I have never been a car person – to me a car is a box… I get in the box, manipulate some levers and a wheel, push some pedals… for a short time or a long time. Then I get out and I’m somewhere else – hopefully somewhere that I preferred to the place I used to be at when I got in the box.
That’s what a car is to me.
So I value reliability, gas mileage, and low cost. That’s pretty much it. It’s not surprising that I’m like that now, a spent old worn out man, but I was always like that. I always wanted a reliable, low cost, high mileage car.
One time when I was in my mid-twenties I went to buy a car. It was in a small city. The salesman kept taking me to hot souped-up crappy cars. There was a custom Mustang II Cobra, like the one Charlie’s Angels drove. He couldn’t believe I didn’t like that car. I finally found one that I was halfway interested in. We sat in the car and turned the key and it wouldn’t start. It ground and groaned but wouldn’t turn over for more than a couple seconds.
“So do you like the car?” he asked.
“It won’t start.”
“Well, it’s been sitting here for a long time.”
“Do you really think I’m going to buy a car that won’t start?”
“He is mad about being small when you were big, but no, that’s not it, he is mad about being helpless when you were powerful, but no, not that either, he is mad about being contingent when you were necessary, not quite it… he is insane because when he loved you, you didn’t notice.” ― Donald Barthelme
The historic Renner School House, in Dallas Heritage Village, with the skyscrapers of downtown rearing up in the background.
Donald Barthelme is one of my favorite authors. He was a pioneer in the nontraditional school of short-short fiction – eschewing traditional plot structures and styles. I actually came to reading Donald Barthelme from reading about his brothers, Frederick and Steven – both also respected writers. I came across them by reading an article that they wrote about their gambling addiction. It was a fascinating and sad story – two accomplished, intelligent writers caught in a disastrous downward spiral in the gambling barges of southern Mississippi. Really something. So there are three authors, all worth seeking out – both for fiction and non.
I remember when I was a kid growing up – moving from school to school (I went to twelve schools, more or less, in twelve years) sometimes we would have animals or plants in the classroom for the children’s edification. I don’t remember very many specifics except for a nice big bull snake in Mr. Clinkingbeard’s seventh grade class. I remember it because I had no fear of snakes and would handle it whenever I could. Once it bit me on the hand pretty good (nonpoisonous – though it hurt) and once it crawled past my neck and under my shirt. I grabbed the end of its tail and pulled it out. Unlike today’s story, though, it never died (well, as long as we were in the class).
The story has a really nice structure. The first paragraph reads like a memoir. It starts out small, pedestrian, ordinary, and begins to get bigger and stranger and more poignant as it goes along until it springs out of the form and becomes something completely different. I really like that – will make a note and add that structure to my list of writing hints – maybe do a story or two like that.
I have a lot to do – but I’m tired and I have an Echo Dot hooked up to a soundbar next to my bed and Spotify. I lie in bed and think of classic albums. I say out loud, “Alexa, play Dark Side of the Moon,” or “Alexa play Goodbye to the Yellow Brick Road,” or “Alexa play The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars,” or ….
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.” ― Dwight D. Eisenhower
M41 Walker Bulldog
Liberty Park
Plano, Texas
A very long day… very busy. I did some stuff that I haven’t done for a while – and that was a good thing (I’ll write about it soon) – but the stress is so high I couldn’t really enjoy myself. Then it was off to work – so busy, even on a weekend.
So, all I have time today is to read a bit of Microfiction…
It does have some with and interesting ideas in a small space.
Bill Chance 