You Breathe In Nihilism

“If you live today, you breathe in nihilism … it’s the gas you breathe. If I hadn’t had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now.”
― Flannery O’Connor

Tin Ceiling Frisco, Texas

Tin Ceiling
Frisco, Texas

I have always had a love for embossed tin ceilings and look out for them in old buildings across the heartland. This beautiful example is in the Lebanon Baptist Church in the Frisco Heritage Village. I took this shot while listening to a talented woman play the fiddle.

The only thing better than a tin ceiling is a tin roof.

That’s What This Storm’s All About

“When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

Trinity River Dallas, Texas

Trinity River
Dallas, Texas

People Stopped Being People

“Historical fact: People stopped being people in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford put his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, the adaptation has been passed down: we’ve all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joy-sticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.”
― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

Frisco, Texas

Frisco, Texas

City Full Of Dreams

“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)

Heading A Handmade Nail

“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

All Things Were Older Than Man

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Design District Dallas, Texas

Design District
Dallas, Texas

Teach Him What He Does Not Want To Learn

“A responsible Warrior is not someone who takes the weight of the world on his shoulders, but someone who has learned to deal with the challenges of the moment.”
― Paulo Coelho, Warrior of the Light

Design District Dallas, Texas

Design District
Dallas, Texas

“The Warrior knows that no man is an island.
He cannot fight alone; whatever his plan, he depends on other people. He needs to discuss his strategy, to ask for help, and, in moments of relaxation, to have someone with whom he can sit by the fire, someone he can regale with tales of battle.”

“Then the Warrior realizes that these repeated experiences have but one aim: to teach him what he does not want to learn.”
― Paulo Coelho, Warrior of the Light

The Sword Of Damocles Is Hanging Over My Head

The sword of Damocles is hanging over my head
And I’ve got the feeling someone’s gonna be cutting the thread
Oh, woe is me, my life is a misery
Oh, can’t you see that I’m at the start of a pretty big downer?
—-The Rocky Horror Show

Damocles

Was This Thing Really Him?

“Samsa looked down in dismay at his naked body. How ill-formed it was! Worse than ill-formed. It possessed no means of self-defense. Smooth white skin (covered by only a perfunctory amount of hair) with fragile blue blood vessels visible through it; a soft, unprotected belly; ludicrous, impossibly shaped genitals; gangly arms and legs (just two of each!); a scrawny, breakable neck; an enormous, misshapen head with a tangle of stiff hair on its crown; two absurd ears, jutting out like a pair of seashells. Was this thing really him? Could a body so preposterous, so easy to destroy (no shell for protection, no weapons for attack), survive in the world?”
― Haruki Murakami, Samsa in Love

Dragon Park, Dallas, Texas

Dragon Park, Dallas, Texas

To Make Something Happen

“That’s the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

Design District, Dallas, Texas

Design District,
Dallas, Texas