I used to live on one candy bar a day – it cost a nickel. I always remember the candy bar was called Payday. That was my payday. And that candy bar tasted so good, at night I would take one bite, and it was so beautiful.
—-Charles Bukowski
Dallas Skyline at Night
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.”
― Albert Einstein
“I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say “look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. Then he says “I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing,” and I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is … I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.”
― Richard Feynman
“There is a fissure in my vision and madness will always rush through.”
― Anaïs Nin, House of Incest
Monolithic Dome Institute, Italy, Texas
But the most important rule, the rule you can never forget – no matter how much he cries, or how much he begs, never, never feed him after midnight.
—-Gremlins
Rodeo Goat, Dallas, Texas
I am of the age that I remember, vaguely, a time when an American Motors Company Gremlin (undoubtedly one of the worst cars of all time) was pretty cool. Those of you lucky enough to not know what a Gremlin is – it is a vehicle, one of the first American Subcompacts (competing against the Pinto and the Vega… yeah) made by a terrible car company, AMC. They took a bad car, the AMC Hornet, and “improved” it by chopping the back end off, leaving an almost-vertical hatchback. CBS rates it as the sixth ugliest car ever made.
But I remember the 1970’s well and I remember that I thought the Gremlin was really cool. What the hell? A lot of kids drove Gremlins when I was in college, even some of my friend’s moms drove them. I never met a male over 20 that owned one, though there must have been some, somewhere. They sold for about eighteen hundred dollars each at the time (a cherry Gremlin today might cost you almost 30 grand).
My favorite memory was a summer from college, a hot, steamy Saturday night, visiting a friend in a small Kansas town. There were four of us, packed into a Gremlin, driving up and down the rough brick-encrusted main street, up and down, listening to a quadraphonic eight track playing music at a ridiculous volume in that tiny tin space. This was the pinnacle of coolness in 1974.
It has all been downhill since then.
“Miss Morstan and I stood together, and her hand was in mine. A wondrous subtle thing is love, for here were we two, who had never seen each other until that day, between whom no word or even look of affection had ever passed, and yet now in an hour of trouble our hands instinctively sought for each other. I have marveled at it since, but at the time it seemed the most natural thing that I would go out to her so, and, as she has often told me, there was in her also the instinct to turn to me for comfort and protection. So we stood hand in hand like two children, and there was peace in our hearts for all the dark things that surrounded us.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I
“What is a poet? An unhappy man who hides deep anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so formed that when the sigh and cry pass through them, it sounds like lovely music…. And people flock around the poet and say: ‘Sing again soon’ – that is, ‘May new sufferings torment your soul but your lips be fashioned as before, for the cry would only frighten us, but the music, that is blissful.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or
“To have opinions is to sell out to youself. To have no opinions is to exist. To have every opinion is to be a poet.”
—–Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet
“It is a great feeling to know
that from a window
I can go to books to cans of beer to past loves.
And from these gather enough dream
to sneak out a back door.”
—Gregory Corso, The Vestal Lady on Brattle and Other Poems
“Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Anybody can become angry — that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way — that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.”
― Aristotle
Bill Chance 