Morty [to Summer]: Well then get your shit together, get it all together, and put it in a backpack, all your shit, so it’s together.
[pause]
And if you gotta take it somewhere, take it somewhere, you know. Take it to the shit store and sell it, or put it in the shit museum. I don’t care what you do, you just gotta get it together.
[pause]
Get your shit together.
—–Rick and Morty, Big Trouble in Little Sanchez
Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
“The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery.”
―
Back in the heady days of the Leaning Tower of Dallas (now, sadly Long Gone) I had to stop by to see the thing up close, commune with a group of people (also, sadly, now long gone) and get my traditional leaning tower of Dallas photo.
Leaning Tower of Dallas, Dallas, Texas
While I was at the fence you see in the photo above, as close to the tower as was allowed, I noticed four objects hanging from cables on the side of the tower. “What the hell are those things?” I asked the people around me.
At first I thought they might be vending machines left behind and hanging by their electrical cords out over the void. That is sort of what they looked like. It looked like glassed in rectangular objects with stuff at the bottom. I imagined a vaporized break area on an upper floor with the vending machines left behind clinging for life against the concrete core. I imagined bags of chips and candy bars hanging out there for the birds and brave squirrels to plunder. I put the telephoto lens on my camera and took a shot.
Mysterious objects on the side of the Leaning Tower of Dallas.
A small group gathered around my camera to look at the mystery on the tiny screen on the back. That gave enough magnification to be sure they weren’t vending machines. At any rate three of them looked exactly the same. I was disappointed.
It’s obvious that they were some sort of electrical things that probably supplied power to the elevator shafts in some way. Relays and capacitors and transformers and such. They are hanging by the stout high-voltage cables that electrical things have attached to them. Still a mystery, but less of a cool one.
“Junk turns the user into a plant. Plants do not feel pain since pain has no function in a stationary organism. Junk is a pain killer. A plant has no libido in the human or animal sense. Junk replaces the sex drive. Seeding is the sex of the plant and the function of opium is to delay seeding.
Perhaps the intense discomfort of withdrawal is the transition from plant back to animal, from a painless, sexless, timeless state back to sex and pain and time, from death back to life.”
― Junky
Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
“Then there is the tamarind. I thought tamarinds were made to eat, but that was probably not the idea. I ate several, and it seemed to me that they were rather sour that year. They pursed up my lips, till they resembled the stem-end of a tomato, and I had to take my sustenance through a quill for twenty-four hours. They sharpened my teeth till I could have shaved with them, and gave them a “wire edge” that I was afraid would stay; but a citizen said no, it will come off when the enamel does” – which was comforting, at any rate. I found, afterward, that only strangers eat tamarinds – but they only eat them once.”
― Mark Twain in Hawaii: Roughing It in the Sandwich Islands: Hawaii in the 1860s
Mural, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
“The haft of the arrow had been feathered with one of the eagles own plumes. We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction.”
―
Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
“My heart is warm with the friends I make,
And better friends I’ll not be knowing,
Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take,
No matter where it’s going.”
― The Selected Poetry
Mural, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
“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.”
― Women
Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
Divine: Connie Marble, you stand convicted of assholeism! Your proper punishment will now take place. Look pretty for the picture, Connie!
—-Pink Flamingos
Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche
Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
There is a tattoo parlor in Deep Ellum with a selection of odd and famous vintage newspaper articles taped to the window. They are all fading in the sun. Sometime one catches my eye – like this one.
“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967
Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas
Bill Chance 