Omni Hotel, downtown Dallas, Texas
All I Want for Christmas
Omni Hotel, downtown Dallas, Texas
Tag Archives: street photography
Someone is Having a Bad Day
I was on my way home from a fun bike ride on Exposition Avenue and in Deep Ellum when I saw traffic coming to a sudden stop and a column of nasty black smoke rising in the distance. A car was on fire, right before the Highway 75 Exit to Woodall Rogers.
Car fire just north of downtown, Dallas.
I had this happen to me once… it isn’t fun.
Years ago, I was sitting down in a cheap Chinese restaurant, about to dig into a lunch-portion of cashew chicken when somebody stuck their head in the door.
“Excuse me, does anyone in here drive a blue Ford?” he asked.
“I do,” I piped up. I assumed I had left my lights on or some such drivel.
“Oh, it’s on fire.”
Not good news. I had been having trouble with the carburetor (this was in the ancient days of yore when every car had at least one carburetor) backfiring and such and it seems to have decided to spit out flames while it was sitting there in the tiny parking lot of the Chinese restaurant. This was in the dark days, the absolute nadir of American engineering and the cars were all a terrible, complex mess with all sorts of odd-looking, unfathomable, and flammable parts bolted to their engines and equipped with carburetors that, apparently, were prone to self-immolation.
It had a mile of rubber hoses and tubing supposedly fulfilling mysterious functions running all over under the hood like a giant bowl of evil black spaghetti. All of this was burning, sending a giant column of toxic smoke high into the gray sky.
I stared, dumbstruck into inactivity, at the conflagration until the proprietor came out with an extinguisher… so I extinguished it. The white powder mingled with the black soot and molten rubber in such a mess that I knew the car had had it.
Now I was faced with a difficult choice. The whole restaurant was staring at me, standing there, holding the spent extinguisher next to my ex-vehicle… but I still had a fresh plate of Chinese food sitting inside.
So, I sucked up my pride and what little dignity I had left… walked back inside, sat down, and resumed my luncheon. This was only about a half-mile from my work, so after I finished I strolled out and walked back along the road to my work for the afternoon. This was before cellphones, so I couldn’t really even call anybody to come get me… and I don’t think I would have anyway.
While I walked I would look back over my shoulder at the column of evil black smoke as it continued to rise and then spread out in a cloud that seemed to hover high in the sky, exactly between me and the bright spot in the cloud cover that represented the sun.
I wanted to put this whole thing behind me, so I signed the title, stuck it behind the license plate of the burned out wreck, and had a salvage company come take it away for its scrap metal value without my presence. I asked them to pay the owner for his extinguisher in cash, and they sent me a check for whatever was left.
I was able to buy two Compact Disks with the balance… I think they were Tears for Fears and Fine Young Cannibals (their second CD).
Lucky Dogs
From the wonderful book, A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole. In the story, Ignatius J. Reilly discovers and ends up working for a famous New Orleans Hot Dog Vendor. In the book, it’s Seven Paradise Vendors… in real life, Lucky Dogs.
Seven Paradise Vendors, Incorporated, was housed in what had formerly been an automobile repair shop, the dark ground floor of an otherwise unoccupied commercial building on Poydras Street. The garage doors were usually open, giving the passerby an acrid nos-trilful of boiling hot dogs and mustard and also of cement soaked over many years by automobile lubricants and motor oils that had dripped and drained from Harmons and Hupmobiles. The powerful stench of Paradise Vendors, Incorporated, sometimes led the overwhelmed and perplexed stroller to glance through the open door into the darkness of the garage. There his eye fell upon a fleet of large tin hot dogs mounted on bicycle tires. It was hardly an imposing vehicular collection. Several of the mobile hot dogs were badly dented. One crumpled frankfurter lay on its side, its one wheel horizontally above it, a traffic fatality. Among the afternoon pedestrians who hurried past Paradise Vendors, Incorporated, one formidable figure waddled slowly along. It was Ignatius. Stopping before the narrow garage, he sniffed the fumes from Paradise with great sensory pleasure, the protruding hairs in his nostrils analyzing, cataloging, categorizing, and classifying the distinct odors of hot dog, mustard, and lubricant. Breathing deeply, he wondered whether he also detected the more delicate odor, the fragile scent of hot dog buns. He looked at the white-gloved hands of his Mickey Mouse wristwatch and noticed that he had eaten lunch only an hour before. Still the intriguing aromas were making him salivate actively. He stepped into the garage and looked around. In a corner an old man was boiling hot dogs in a large institutional pot whose size dwarfed the gas range upon which it rested. “Pardon me, sir,” Ignatius called. “Do you retail here?” The man’s watering eyes turned toward the large visitor. “What do you want?”
“I would like to buy one of your hot dogs. They smell rather tasty. I was wondering if I could buy just one.”
Lucky Dogs cart – Bourbon Street, French Quarter, New Orleans
“May I select my own?” Ignatius asked, peering down over the top of the pot. In the boiling water the frankfurters swished and lashed like artificially colored and magnified paramecia. Ignatius filled his lungs with the pungent, sour aroma. “I shall pretend that I am in a smart restaurant and that this is the lobster pond.”
“Here, take this fork,” the man said, handing Ignatius a bent and corroded semblance of a spear. “Try to keep your hands out of the water. It’s like acid. Look what it’s done to the fork.”
“My,” Ignatius said to the old man after having taken his first bite. “These are rather strong. What are the ingredients in these.”
“Rubber, cereal, tripe. Who knows? I wouldn’t touch one of them myself.”
“They’re curiously appealing,” Ignatius said, clearing his throat. “I thought that the vibrissae about my nostrils detected something unique while I was outside.”
Ignatius J. Reilly, sculpture on Canal Street.
Ignatius is such a fan of the Paradise Hot Dog, he is able to get a job as a vendor, setting out on the streets of his beloved New Orleans, pushing a heavy cart.
This does not turn out well.
George, who was wandering up Carondelet with an armload of packages wrapped in plain brown paper, heard.the cry and went up to the gargantuan vendor. “Hey, stop. Gimme one of these.”
Ignatius looked sternly at the young boy who had placed himself in the wagon’s path. His valve protested against the pimples, the surly face that seemed to hang from the long well-lubricated hair, the cigarette behind the ear, the aquamarine jacket, the delicate boots, the tight trousers that bulged offensively in the crotch in violation of all rules of theology and geometry.
“I am sorry,” Ignatius snorted. “I have only a few frankfurters left, and I must save them. Please get out of my way.”
“Save them? Who for?”
“That is none of your business, you waif. Why aren’t you in school? Kindly stop molesting me. Anyway, I have no change.”
“I got a quarter,” the thin white lips sneered. “I cannot sell you a frank, sir. Is that clear?” “Whatsa matter with you, friend?”
“What’s the matter with me? What’s the matter with you? Are you unnatural enough to want a hot dog this early in the afternoon? My conscience will not let me sell you one. Just look at your loathsome complexion. You are a growing boy whose system needs to be surfeited with vegetables and orange juice and whole wheat bread and spinach and such. I, for one, will not contribute to the debauchery of a minor.”
“Whadda you talking about? Sell me one of them hot dogs. I’m hungry. I ain’t had no lunch.”
“No!” Ignatius screamed so furiously that the pas-sersby stared. “Now get away from me before I run over you with this cart.”
George pulled open the lid of the bun compartment and said, “Hey, you got plenty stuff in here. Fix me a weenie.”
“Help!” Ignatius screamed, suddenly remembering the old man’s warnings about robberies. “Someone is stealing my buns! Police!”
My son, Lee in front of a cart.
204
He had met her through a mutual friend that thought they would be good for each other. On their first date, he had taken her to Olivier’s and it felt like they had known each other all their lives. They ate Creole Rabbit and Crawfish Étouffée.
She left him on a gray and drizzling day. He still goes to Olivier’s and watches for her, though he knows she won’t come walking in.
Dog and Master
“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”
—- Groucho Marx
Workmen on the Roof
God buries His workmen but carries on His work.
—-Charles Wesley
“Any fool can write a book and most of them are doing it; but it takes brains to build a house.”
—- Charles F. Lummis
“Our house was made of stone, stucco, and clapboard; the newer wings, designed by a big-city architect, had a good deal of glass, and looked out into the Valley, where on good days we could see for many miles while on humid hazy days we could see barely beyond the fence that marked the edge of our property. Father, however, preferred the roof: In his white, light-woolen three-piece suit, white fedora cocked back on his head, for luck, he spent many of his waking hours on the highest peak of the highest roof of the house, observing, through binoculars, the amazing progress of construction in the Valley – for overnight, it seemed, there appeared roads, expressways, sewers, drainage pipes, “planned” communities with such names as Whispering Glades, Murmuring Oaks, Pheasant Run, Deer Willow, all of them walled to keep out intruders, and, yet more astonishing, towerlike buildings of aluminum and glass and steel and brick, buildings whose windows shone and winked like mirrors, splendid in sunshine like pillars of flame; such beauty where once there had been mere earth and sky, it caught at your throat like a great bird’s talons, taking your breath away. ‘The ways of beauty are as a honeycomb,’ Father told us, and none of us could determine, staring at his slow moving lips, whether the truth he spoke was a happy truth or not, whether even it was truth.”
—-Joyce Carol Oates
“For me, it is as though at every moment the actual world had completely lost its actuality. As though there was nothing there; as though there were no foundations for anything or as though it escaped us. Only one thing, however, is vividly present: the constant tearing of the veil of appearances; the constant destruction of everything in construction. Nothing holds together, everything falls apart.”
—-Eugene Ionesco
Making New Friends
“Blessed are they who have the gift of making friends, for it is one of God’s best gifts. It involves many things, but above all, the power of going out of one’s self, and appreciating whatever is noble and loving in another.”
—-Thomas Hughes
“Mr. Wickham is blessed with such happy manners as may ensure his MAKING friends–whether he may be equally capable of RETAINING them, is less certain.”
—-Jane Austen
The Right Move
The beauty of a move lies not in its appearance but in the thought behind it.
—-Aaron Nimzowitsch
… the woman who grows up with the idea that she is simply to be an amiable animal, to be caressed and coaxed, is invariably a bitterly disappointed woman. A game of chess will cure such a conceit forever. The woman that knows the most, thinks the most, feels the most, is the most. Intellectual affection is the only lasting love. Love that has a game of chess in it can checkmate any man and solve the problem of life.
—- Charles Dickens
Dance
Let us read and let us dance – two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.
—-Voltaire
Balloons
The best way of travel, however, if you aren’t in any hurry at all, if you don’t care where you are going, if you don’t like to use your legs, if you don’t want to be annoyed at all by any choice of directions, is in a balloon. In a balloon, you can decide only when to start, and usually when to stop. The rest is left entirely to nature.
—- William Pene du Bois, The Twenty-one Balloons.
Farmer’s Market, Dallas, TX
who knows if the moon’s
a balloon, coming out of a keen city
in the sky – filled with pretty people?
—-E E Cummings
Bill Chance 