Tag Archives: skull

I Get Out

Posted on by Bill Chance

“We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.”
― Tennessee Williams, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore

Skull Mural – Design District, Dragon Street, Dallas, Texas

I have been trapped inside (except for going to work all the time – which is even worse). I think I’m losing my mind.

I did get out today – actually went to a wedding in the design district. It felt odd. So odd I’m getting worried that I have lost all my abilities as a social animal – which were never strong to begin with.

Better They Should Enjoy Their Temporary Lives

Posted on by Bill Chance
“What action would not be futile, when a man could look upon his own aged, yellowed skull? Better they should enjoy their temporary lives, while they still had them to enjoy.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Skull

Smoker Trailer(detail), Braindead Brewing, Deep Ellum, Dallas, Texas

It Still Freaks Me Out a Little

Posted on by Bill Chance

“I come to a red light, tempted to go through it, then stop once I see a billboard sign that I don’t remember seeing and I look up at it. All it says is ‘Disappear Here’ and even though it’s probably an ad for some resort, it still freaks me out a little and I step on the gas really hard and the car screeches as I leave the light.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

Pinstripe Skull, Car Show, Denton, Texas

Their Great Horns Also Seemed To Attract Electricity

Posted on by Bill Chance

“When the longhorns could be gathered up and driven, it was theorized that the heat from the herd’s mass attracted lightning. (Such was the radiant heat from a large herd that a cowboy’s face would be blistered on whichever side of the herd he’d ridden by the day’s end.) Their great horns also seemed to attract electricity, so that lightning and ground-electricity would bounce around from horn to horn throughout the herd – a phantasmagoric burning blue circuitry. The cracking of the cowboy’s whips and the twitching of the cattle’s tails also emitted sparkling “snakes of fire.”
― Rick Bass, The New Wolves: The Return of the Mexican Wolf to the American Southwest

Richardson, Texas

 

No Drink Was Strong Enough

Posted on by Bill Chance

“He was in Guanajuato, Mexico, he was a writer, and tonight was the Day of the Dead ceremony. He was in a little room on the second floor of a hotel, a room with wide windows and a balcony that overlooked the plaza where the children ran and yelled each morning. He heard them shouting now. And this was Mexico’s Death Day. There was a smell of death all through Mexico you never got away from, no matter how far you went. No matter what you said or did, not even if you laughed or drank, did you ever get away from death in Mexico. No car went fast enough. No drink was strong enough.”

― Ray Bradbury, The Candy Skull

Cozumel, Mexico

A Fellow of Infinite Jest

Posted on by Bill Chance

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?
—-Shakespeare, Hamlet, V.i

 

Shakespeare Sculpture, Dallas Arboretum