“Doesn’t it seem as though her heart were a green flame? Perhaps it’s the cold green heart of a small green snake, with a minute flaw in it, the kind of small green snake that slithers from branch to branch in the jungle, passing itself off as a vine. What’s more, perhaps when she gave me the ring with such a gentle, loving expression, she wanted me to draw such a meaning from it some day.”
― Yukio Mishima, Spring Snow
Spring Snow,
Richardson, Texas
When you are old and gray and full of sleep, and nodding by the fire, take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep.
—-William Butler Yeats
“Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades”
—-Traditional
Across and down the street a little ways from our front door the city, a couple of years ago, took a little-used piece of land and built a whole bunch of horseshoe pits there – giving each one a number. The land is still little-used, but once or twice a year a tournament arrives and horseshoe pitchers crowd in and do their thing. Usually portable lighting trailers are brought in and they pitch well into the darkness.
The rest of the year it sits their unused, fenced off, locked up, empty and forlorn. The little sign proclaims “PIT #11” – if anyone other than me ever looks.
Pit 11
Huffhines Park
Richardson, Texas
“We’re so self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. “Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.” And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. Save the planet, we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet. I’m tired of this shit. I’m tired of f-ing Earth Day. I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. Not in the abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn’t impress me.
The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!
We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?”
Plastic… asshole.”
― George Carlin
Huffhines Park,
Richardson, Texas
“I have seen a face with a thousand countenances, and a face that was but a single countenance as if held in a mould.
I have seen a face whose sheen I could look through to the ugliness beneath, and a face whose sheen I had to lift to see how beautiful it was.
I have seen an old face much lined with nothing, and a smooth face in which all things were graven.
I know faces, because I look through the fabric my own eye weaves, and behold the reality beneath.”
― Kahlil Gibran, The Madman
“In their faces–plenty of them were handsome, but ruined–I’ve seen the remnants of who they almost succeeded in being but failed to be, before becoming themselves.”
― Richard Ford, Canada
Huffhines Park,
Richardson, Texas
“A mask tells us more than a face.”
― Oscar Wilde
Huffhines Park,
Richardson, Texas
“In his face there came to be a brooding peace that is seen most often in the faces of the very sorrowful or the very wise. But still he wandered through the streets of the town, always silent and alone.”
― Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter
Huffhines Park,
Richardson, Texas
“She was not one for emptying her face of expression. ”
― J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
Huffhines Park,
Richardson, Texas
“He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.”
― P.G. Wodehouse
Huffhines Park,
Richardson, Texas
Bill Chance 