“I think you still love me, but we can’t escape the fact that I’m not enough for you. I knew this was going to happen. So I’m not blaming you for falling in love with another woman. I’m not angry, either. I should be, but I’m not. I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt, but I was wrong.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun
“All the animals, the plants, the minerals, even other kinds of men, are being broken and reassembled every day, to preserve an elite few, who are the loudest to theorize on freedom, but the least free of all.”
― Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
“It occurs to me that I really can’t remember your face in any precise detail. Only the way you walked away through the tables in the café, your figure, your dress, that I still see.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena
I know I’ve done this (many) times before – but I am always amused in the winter by how the snow piles up on the little plastic nubs on the children’s climbing wall in the Park at the end of my block… and they look sorta like white hair on top of little faces. Makes it almost worth the bitter cold.
“that Englishman who came to challenge me three or four months ago, and whom I killed to stop him bothering me”
― Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
“The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower.”
― Roberto Bolaño, 2666
So, this weekend I’ve been fiddling around with some stuff – since I soon will have a lot of time on my hands I have been looking for things that are fun to do and don’t cost much money. One thing is I have built a little alcohol stove from a Fancy Feast cat treat can and a little empty can of tomato paste. What I want to do it to put together a kit that I can use to walk to some random spot, heat water, and make coffee.
This evening was a simple test of my idea – alcohol stove for hot water, AeroPress for the coffee. It all fit into a sling bag and I walked down to the park at the end of my block. It worked fairly well – though I had to make three trips back and forth for things I forgot or almost lost. I’m learning – next time will be better.
I sipped my (not hot enough) coffee, looked at all the folks out for a walk, and watched the sun set – it was so beautiful I pulled my phone out and snapped a snap.
“We feared that the music which had given us sustenance was in danger of spiritual starvation. We feared it losing its sense of purpose, we feared it falling into fattened hands, we feared it floundering in a mire of spectacle, finance, and vapid technical complexity. We would call forth in our minds the image of Paul Revere, riding through the American night, petitioning the people to wake up, to take up arms. We too would take up arms, the arms of our generation, the electric guitar and the microphone.”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids
“Turn on the faucet. Wash yourself with the emotion. It won’t hurt you. It will only help. If you let the fear inside, if you pull it on like a familiar shirt, then you can say to yourself, “All right, it’s just fear, I don’t have to let it control me. I see it for what it is”.”
― Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
the experience of the work is inseparable from the place in which the work resides. Apart from that condition, any experience of the work is a deception.”
― Richard Serra
“I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says, “Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass
It was a long drive from Lawrence back to Dallas and we had to leave at six in the morning to insure we made it home in time to watch the Cowboys get beat. It was very cold with most of Saturday’s snow still frozen on the ground.
There was a thick… it couldn’t have been fog because it was too cold – some sort of pea-soup frozen haze… smothering everything. Over an hour later the sun rose unseen over the vast flint-hill plains. The haze slowly lightened into a gray blanket.
We stopped to switch drivers at one of the Kansas Turnpike rest areas, the ones with the oddly shaped water towers.
And I took this photo of one of the few trees within a hundred miles… blurred and obscured by the fog.
“And once the storm is over, you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. 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
Bill Chance 