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
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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“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
“A sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin-land, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
I visited the Frisco Heritage Center during one of their open house events and stumbled across a fiddle player in the Lebanon Baptist Church. She explained that she played three styles of fiddle: Texas Style, Bluegrass, and Old-Timey. Then she would world her way through examples of each. She was very good and the atmosphere in the beautifully-restored old church was special – I really enjoyed listening to her play.
“If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery–isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.”
― Charles Bukowski, Factotum
Frisco Heritage Center, Frisco, Texas
“I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.”
― J.G. Ballard
The Horseshoe, Under Construction, Dallas, Texas
Bill Chance 