“Imagine a dish like this married to a mug like Benny McBride. The naked and the dead” (Detective Danny Ryan, Armored Car Robbery, 1950.
“What I like about you is you’re rock bottom. I wouldn’t expect you to understand this, but it’s a great comfort for a girl to know she could not possibly sink any […]
Lately when the weather’s nice on my day off I’ve taken to exploring Collin County again. I know it’s a frivolous waste of gas, but it’s cheaper than going to the movies or eating out. It’s one of my luxuries in life. This was one of the signs at an old ranch outside Melissa, about […]
You see them on a long lonely stretch of highway, or near an exit ramp of a city freeway, or just beyond the sidewalk of a busy intersection; roadside memorials erected for someone who died on that spot. It’s an old Latin tradition, though I’m not sure if it dates from old Mexico or from […]
I’ve got to remember to bring my macro lens with me next time I go shooting cemteries. These quiet places are ideal worlds for many small life forms. Here’s a nice jumping spider I chased round and round the headstone trying to capture a likeness. I might have missed the little critter but for the […]
This week I went to Anna, another small town north of McKinney that’s becoming another suburb. It’s sad that the prairie is being turned into subdivisions, but at least I can document a few of the “rustic” things before they’re gone. I was looking for a cemetery that I never found and spotted the corner […]
The land is pretty flat out here on the prairie. For the last few months I’ve enjoyed looking at the bales of hay scattered about some of the larger tracts of grassland. They look so pretty when the sun shines on them in the morning or late afternoon. I have a photo I took of […]
Here’s the overgrown cemetery I found during my explorations on Friday. The plowed field next to it where I was standing to take this photo had a paper “no trespassing” sign precariously attached to a fencepost nearby, but a wire section had been removed or had never been put up as if to allow access […]
Here’s another cemetery I found while exploring Collin County. It was nice and peaceful and shaded by a canopy of oaks and pecan trees. There were lots of orb-weaver spiders with giant webs and chickadees and mockingbirds singing in the trees. There were only about 25 gravestones that were legible, so I decided to […]
A series of tornadoes passed through North Central Texas last night. Here is a photo of a small church in Haltom City, just east of Fort Worth, that had its roof ripped off and another photo of a funnel cloud approaching Oak Cliff in the southwest part of Dallas just minutes later. If you’ve never […]
I take Camus out for a walk at dusk. The temperature has just fallen below 90 degrees but it’s not a comfortable 88 or 89. The humidity is so thick I think it’s pelting me with pinprick drops of rain until I realize it’s a tree pissing on me. I didn’t know for the longest […]