“Precipitate as weather, she appeared from somewhere, then evaporated, leaving only memory.”
― Dance Dance Dance
Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, during 2015 high water, Dallas, Texas
Leaving Only Memory
Category Archives: Photography
Their Great Horns Also Seemed To Attract Electricity
“When the longhorns could be gathered up and driven, it was theorized that the heat from the herd’s mass attracted lightning. (Such was the radiant heat from a large herd that a cowboy’s face would be blistered on whichever side of the herd he’d ridden by the day’s end.) Their great horns also seemed to attract electricity, so that lightning and ground-electricity would bounce around from horn to horn throughout the herd – a phantasmagoric burning blue circuitry. The cracking of the cowboy’s whips and the twitching of the cattle’s tails also emitted sparkling “snakes of fire.”
― The New Wolves: The Return of the Mexican Wolf to the American Southwest
Richardson, Texas
I Could Dance With You Till the Cows Come Home
“I could dance with you till the cows come home. Better still, I’ll dance with the cows and you come home.”
―
Italy, Texas
There is something odd about seeing a movie at nine o’clock in the morning. Especially when it ends and you walk out into the sun… and realize that most of the day is still to come.
I’m glad that everyone has been good about not saying or posting spoilers for Avengers Endgame – though the movie played out pretty much exactly as I thought it would.
The Senility Of Obsolescence
“Why do things get weaker and worse? Why don’t they get better? Because we accept that they fall apart! But they don’t have to — they could last forever. Why do things get more expensive? Any fool can see that they should get cheaper as technology gets more efficient. It’s despair to accept the senility of obsolescence…”
― The Mosquito Coast
Recycled Books, Denton, Texas
I remember having a friend that tried to convince me to buy a Betamax.
I miss walking through the aisles of video rental store. The first ever Blockbuster Video store opened near where I lived. I remember going there and listening to some guy in a suit lecturing to a bunch of other guys in suits about how this was going to be the future. He was right… and so very, very wrong.
Time Gains Momentum
“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.”
― A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
Bicycle Drag Race, Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, Dallas, Texas
David Foster Wallace wrote the quote above thirteen years before he hung himself. He will never be as old as me. I am closing in on being twice as old as he was when he wrote that quote.
It’s a shame he wasn’t able to stick it out – as time grinds on things get increasingly weird… especially in the sense of “weird” as in different than you expect and stranger than you imagined.
A Brooding Peace
“In his face there came to be a brooding peace that is seen most often in the faces of the very sorrowful or the very wise. But still he wandered through the streets of the town, always silent and alone.”
― The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Ellis County Courthouse, Waxahatche, Texas
Patches Of Godlight
“Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are ‘patches of Godlight’ in the woods of our experience.”
―
Fabrication Yard, Dallas, Texas
It’s not a gentle woodland breeze wafting the smells of nature – it’s the sour bite of drying spray paint. Not the rustle of a leaved canopy – it’s the pulsing of a rap song from a nearby video shoot. Not a copse of ancient forest – but an abandoned set of corrugated steel shacks covered with crude graffiti.
But still the sun splashes. The same sun.
Holding Malice Like A Puppy
“It was wrong to do this,” said the angel.
“You should live like a flower,
Holding malice like a puppy,
Waging war like a lambkin.”“Not so,” quoth the man
Who had no fear of spirits;
“It is only wrong for angels
Who can live like the flowers,
Holding malice like the puppies,
Waging war like the lambkins.”
― Complete Poems of Stephen Crane
Crocker Crane, Dallas, Texas
I am fascinated by large construction equipment – especially if it is complicated enough that I can’t really tell what the hell it is supposed to do.
The Only Thing That Could Spoil A Day Was People
“When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself.”
― A Moveable Feast
Glencoe Park, Dallas, Texas
Your Opponent Is You
“I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing-for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it’s impossible to see your opponent is you …”
― On Boxing
Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
Bill Chance 