“His own image; no longer a dark, gray bird, ugly and disagreeable to look at, but a graceful and beautiful swan. To be born in a duck’s nest, in a farmyard, is of no consequence to a bird, if it is hatched from a swan’s egg.”
― Hans Christian Andersen, The Ugly Duckling
“Blood may be thicker than water, but oil is thicker than both.”
― Larry Hagman
“You know the reason The Beatles made it so big?…’I Wanna Hold Your Hand.’ First single. Fucking brilliant. Perhaps the most fucking brilliant song ever written. Because they nailed it. That’s what everyone wants. Not 24/7 hot wet sex. Not a marriage that lasts a hundred years. Not a Porsche…or a million-dollar crib. No. They wanna hold your hand. They have such a feeling that they can’t hide. Every single successful song of the past fifty years can be traced back to ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand.’ And every single successful love story has those unbearable and unbearably exciting moments of hand-holding.”
― David Levithan, Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist
“I walked into my own book, seeking peace.
It was night, and I made a careless movement inside the dream; I turned too brusquely the corner and I bruised myself against my madness.”
― Anaïs Nin, House of Incest
“Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision.”
― Salvador Dali
“Do not swear by the moon, for she changes constantly. then your love would also change.”
― William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
I had read that there would be a lunar eclipse – not a total eclipse, but one that would last longer than any in history (well, at least in 580 years – good enough for me). I also read that it would occur well after midnight on a work night, so I didn’t think any more about it.
The sun was well set (even though there was a pink and purple glow left all around the horizon) as I walked to my car across my work parking lot. The moon was rising in the east and singularly full and beautiful, I even texted Candy to go look at it.
Then, at home I was so exhausted that after watching a bit of college basketball I fell into a hard, deep sleep. I woke up at two thirty in the morning and realized that I had to do a load of laundry (I had no shirts for the next work day) and that I had left my phone in my car.
After starting the washer going I stumbled out to my car to fetch my phone so I could charge it for the upcoming day. I had forgotten about the lunar eclipse but as I looked up from the sidewalk it looked like an irregular swipe had been taken across the lunar orb. The eclipse was more than half complete and it combined with the dark lunar seas to make an unexpected uneven border. It was really odd and interesting.
My new phone has an amazing set of (5) cameras and has examples of fantastic shots all over the internet. Unfortunately, I’m a boomer and still trying to figure the damn thing out… and this is the best I could do:
“Purple is such a twisted, complex color – it conveys the passion of red, the sadness of blue, the depravity of black. Purple is neither happy nor sad. It is pain and despair but longing, too – fiery desire, beaten and bruised but struggling onward, determined to overcome, to move forward rather than retreat.”
― James Patterson, Invisible
“Without pain, without sacrifice we would have nothing. Like the first monkey shot into space.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club
“To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.”
― Aldous Huxley
“And only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri.”
― Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard
Bill Chance 