“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” ― C.S. Lewis
It was very cold this morning, but the sun was making it through the clouds a tiny bit, so I decided to go for a walk. I didn’t dress too warmly as I wanted to feel the cold in addition to seeing the sun.
I decided to walk to Starbucks. I haven’t been to Starbucks in a long time – since I upped my coffee game their coffee simply isn’t that good. Especially since I don’t drink fancy sugary milky concoctions – I only order a cup of black brewed coffee (I like coffee, why put other shit in it?). With fresh beans, my grinder, and my Aeropress I can make far, far, better coffee at home for much, much less cost.
However, I have never considered Starbucks to be a place to buy coffee. It’s an office rental place – you simply pay by buying overpriced drink items. I never understand people that drive through Starbucks, or pick up an order… make it yourself!
Viewed as an office or meeting place I realize I have a lot of really fond memories of various Starbucks. There was the one in Mesquite where I would stretch out a coffee for two hours listening to the various Saturday Morning Confessions while I would write and wait for my son Lee’s double art lessons. Some significant and meaningful aspects of my life were born in that Starbucks a long, long time ago. I wrote something about it during the previous century – I’ll have to look through my stuff, find where I put it.
Then there is the Plano Starbucks that I met with my writing group, every Wednesday for over a decade. I could calculate how much coffee I drank there, in hundreds of gallons, but I won’t.
So today, nothing dramatic. I walked there with my library book, The City and Its Uncertain Walls, by Murakami. It’s a popular book so I won’t be able to renew it – that means I only have three weeks to get through its prodigious pages, but thirty pages a day will be more than fast enough. I’m loving the book, so this won’t be hard.
After one large brew and thirty four pages I decided to hike home. Crossing Beltline I went by Gong Cha, one of the many Asian Boba Tea spots in my ‘hood – and considered if this might be another possible future destination. Unfortunately, most of their offerings have way, way too much sugar in them for my health… so I need to stick to American style black coffee.
In an empty parking spot was an abandoned mostly-drank Boba Tea. Its festive bright pink lid and specked black tapioca balls peeking through the clouds of milk tea looked festive on the cold morning, so I snapped a picture of it.
Oh, I found what I wrote… I think it was the first time I had ever been to Starbucks – I actually bought an iced tea with a gift certificate that Candy gave me. I bought the tea because I was intimidated with the coffee menu (this was a long, long time ago).
Here’s what I wrote – it’s silly- but it brings back good memories.
Saturday, August 29, 1998
Coffee foams
….. Coffee foams comes in a foam cup seashells hidden in the foam, spirals like an ear like time time flies Tea cold, iced, cubed the tea of the day is reddish, fruity cold and refreshing. Fresh tea is hot from the pot and steams hissing onto the cubes. The tea is iced, but the day is not the day is hot and sweaty
Round Green Tables
time flies blue eyes “I seldom talk to anyone anymore other than children and rednecks”
South American Beans Roasted, toasted, ground and boiled and percolate the suspension of disbelief
Once, I quit drinking coffee It made my stomach hurt
I feel something, sometimes as a burning worm in my stomach, my gut a monster of strain
According to the DART web site, these bike lids were all bought with a federal grant and meet all homeland security requirements. I had to think about that for a while – I guess it’s harder to hide a bomb in these, compared to the old bike lockers. There are 142 of these all over the system.
Working Model for Three Piece No. 3: Vertebrae, by Henry Moore
My Curves Are Not Mad, by Richard Serra
Eve, by Auguste Rodin
There’s a nice stone bench behind the Henry Moore sculpture in the Nasher Sculpture Garden, where you can take a load off of your feet and look out at all the folks wandering around. It’s one of my favorite spots.
I have been playing around with my camera. I want to try a technique – actually a set of techniques – to paint with light. These are not finished attempts, just preliminary studies to see what the possibilities are.
When I was a little kid I used to read Popular Science and Popular Mechanics like they were the word from God. There was an article where you would set a camera down in the dark, open the shutter, and swing a light over the top of it, making a pattern. It’s a lot easier now, with a digital camera, because you can see what comes out right away – instead of having to develop the film. You can play around.
A couple of test shots with a small flashlight hanging from a ceiling fan.
Working on adding a little color
Next, I want to go outside at night and experiment with “painting” on objects. I actually tried that, but my neighborhood has too much ambient light – plus all the dogs go nuts. I need to think about this a bit more.
Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
—-Gustave Flaubert
I was down in the Dallas Arts District. In front of the Symphony Hall the Bald Cypress trees have been growing for decades now, they are huge and beautiful. Their knees are coming up now and pushing through the little blocks of granite that pave the ground between the sidewalk and the street.
The small granite paving blocks.
I set my camera down on the ground and took these pictures – mostly to remind myself of the spot. I’ve always liked the stretch of shaded sidewalk along there, and the rough displacement of the carefully set granite pavestones… the bits of goldbrown cypress needles falling into and filling the gaps… I like that even better.
The block of granite which was an obstacle in the pathway of the weak, became a stepping-stone in the pathway of the strong.
—-Thomas Carlyle
“For me chemistry represented an indefinite cloud of future potentialities which enveloped my life to come in black volutes torn by fiery flashes, like those which had hidden Mount Sinai. Like Moses, from that cloud I expected my law, the principle of order in me, around me, and in the world. I would watch the buds swell in spring, the mica glint in the granite, my own hands, and I would say to myself: ”I will understand this, too, I will understand everything.””
“You’ve got to push yourself harder. You’ve got to start looking for pictures nobody else could take. You’ve got to take the tools you have and probe deeper.” ~ William Albert Allard
The thing about photography is that, especially now, everybody has a camera. Everybody is always taking pictures.
How do you capture something different than everbody else?
I was in the Dallas Arts District and taking a picture of the Wylie Theater. Everybody in the picture had a camera.
Think photographs should be provocative and not tell you what you already know. It takes no great powers or magic to reproduce somebody’s face in a photograph. The magic is in seeing people in new ways.
—-Duane Micals
The Wylie Theater. Down in the lower left, a woman is photographing a man.
I noticed a guy walking around the reflecting pool with a big camera and a woman doing a photo shoot .
Nothing happens when you sit at home. I always make it a point to carry a camera with me at all times…I just shoot at what interests me at that moment.
—- Elliott Erwitt
I have no idea who this guy is or why he is getting his photo done.
I think the best pictures are often on the edges of any situation, I don’t find photographing the situation nearly as interesting as photographing the edges.
—-William Albert Allard
All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this – as in other ways – they are the opposite of paintings. Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.
—-John Berger
Photography deals exquisitely with appearances, but nothing is what it appears to be.
The terrible heat continues…. It’s always hot here in the summer, of course, but this is crazy. When I left work today, going out into the parking lot, it literally felt like I was walking into an open oven door.
At any rate, I took this picture a few years ago… it looks cool and relaxing somehow.
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Oh, and here’s some music from a band I really like… and you have never heard of. They are called “My Favorite” – I have no idea where I first heard their stuff, but I really liked it. They broke up in 2005, I don’t know anything about what’s happened to their members since. They did have some fans.
Bill Chance 
