“What I want to know is, in the Middle Ages, did they do anything for Housemaid’s Knee? What did they put in their hot baths after jousting?”
― H.G. Wells, Tono-Bungay
Bicycle Joust
Dallas Tweed Ride
Turner House
Oak Cliff, Dallas, Texas
Fun activities on the 2014 Bike Friendly Oak Cliff Tweed Ride.
i can sense it
something important
is about to happen
it’s coming upit takes courage to enjoy it
the hardcore and the gentle
big time sensuality
—-Bjork, Big Time Sensuality
Cedars Open Studios
1805 Clarence Street
Dallas, Texas
“Cherie, keep walking. Shut your eyes. We are headed for the bridge. We are going to cross it.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away
Keeper of the Plains,
Wichita, Kansas
“If time travel is possible, where are the tourists from the future?”
― Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
The Time Traveler of Paranormal Percussion, with Clyde Casey
New Orleans, Louisiana
The Time Traveler of Paranormal Percussion, with Clyde Casey
New Orleans, Louisiana
The Time Traveler of Paranormal Percussion, with Clyde Casey
New Orleans, Louisiana
A Roving Percussionist On The Big Easy’s Busy Streets
“Party lights hang over the street, yellow and red and green. Sadie stumbles over someone’s chair, but I’m ready for this and I catch her easily by the arm.
“Sorry, clumsy,” she says.
“You always were, Sadie. One of your more endearing traits.”
Before she can ask about that I slip my arm around her waist. She slips hers around mine, still looking up at me. The lights skate across her cheeks and shine in her eyes. We clasp hands, fingers folding together naturally, and for me the years fall away like a coat that’s too heavy and too tight. In that moment, I hope on thing above all others: that she was not too busy to find at least one good man …
She speaks in a voice almost too low to be heard over the music. But I hear her – I always did. “Who are you, George?”
“Someone you knew in another life, honey.”
― Stephen King, 11/22/63
“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”
― Roald Dahl
While in New Orleans over Halloween we stopped at the New Orleans Lager and Ale (NOLA Brewing) company for some free beer (yes, this is truly the best of all possible worlds) and ran across a street magician plying his wares amongst the slightly tipsy crowd. He would attract attention with a spinning, levitating, and ultimately, flying card. Then he would run through a series of close-in slight of hand magic – mostly card tricks. At the end, he would pass the hat for donations.
It was worth the price of admission.
Street Magician
New Orleans, Louisiana
“Sometimes life is merely a matter of coffee and whatever intimacy a cup of coffee affords.”
― Richard Brautigan
Everyone I talk to about New Orleans says they went to Cafe du Monde for chicory coffee and beignets. That’s fine if you want to do the touristy thing, I suppose – but there is better coffee and there are much better beignets.
My favorite is the New Orleans Coffee and Beignet Company, in Uptown, off St. Charles, about halfway to Tulane. You’ll never eat beignets on Decatur again.
Take the streetcar.
New Orleans Beignet Company
“I was like, Am I gay? Am I straight? And I realized…I’m just slutty. Where’s my parade?”
― Margaret Cho
French Quarter
Halloween
New Orleans, Louisiana
“One swallow does not make a summer,
neither does one fine day;
similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.”
― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics
Klyde Warren Park
Dallas, Texas
They said it would be the last hot weekend – the end of summer.
There’s a brand new dance
but I don’t know its name
That people from bad homes
do again and again
It’s big and it’s bland
full of tension and fear
They do it over there but we don’t do it here
—-David Bowie, Fashion
Belle Plaine Service Area, Kansas Turnpike
As a tiny young kid I rode in cars along the Kansas Turnpike so many times that the strip of asphalt took on a life of its own in my tiny young mind. Looming large in the imaginary mythology inside my bean were the oddly-shaped proto-spherical water towers that emerged from the featureless plains at each service area. They were like silver spaceships marking off the molasses crawling miles.
This photo is of the Belle Plaine service area – recently rebuilt after a devastating grease fire in the resident Hardees. The one I remember most is the tower from the Matfield Green service station – one of the most oddly beautiful and weirdly desolate places on earth (in my opinion… and I know desolation when I see it).
And I, to whom so great a vision was given in my youth, — you see me now a pitiful old man who has done nothing, for the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.
—-Black Elk, from Black Elk Speaks
Keeper of the Plains sculpture, Wichita, Kansas
Bill Chance 