Thursday, June 7, 2012

Fahrenheit 6712

One of my favorite authors, Ray Bradbury, has passed away at 91 years old.  I cannot name just one of his works to reference, because there are so many that hold a special bookmark in the chapters of my life preceding today.

I collect passages from other writer's work that inspires me or reflects the state of my existence in that moment. In June of 1999 I was in San Francisco for the first of countless adventures running away to the Northern California coast. I bought a journal at City Lights Bookstore in the North Beach section and started writing down the greatness of others. I had the Martian Chronicles with me on that trip and this passage I cited was the first that came to mind today when I saw he had passed.

"It was like those days when you heard a thunderstorm coming and there was the waiting silence and then the faintest pressure of the atmosphere as the climate blew over the land in shifts and shadows and vapors. And the change pressured at your ears and you were suspended in the waiting time of the coming storm. You began to tremble. The sky was stained and coloured; the clouds were thickened, the mountains took on an iron taint...
 

Somewhere in the house the voice-clock sang, 'Time, time, time, time...' ever so gently, no more than water tapping on velvet." 
-Ray Bradbury "The Martian Chronicles" 

That passage always brought me to think of one of my favorite songs by Tom Waits. It's time, time, time that you love...and it's time, time, time... To whatever plain of existence Ray Bradbury moved to, I hope it was a fantastic/fantastical one.

 

Monday, June 4, 2012

TRUTH

“All your life you have been hearing about how your lives will be changed on this occasion as you enter the real world. I have a news bulletin for you tonight. You’ve already been there. Turns out, junior high was the real world … The same petty jealousies, the insecurities, the snobs, the cliques, the dorks, the egos, the tantrums, and the dopes that you met in junior high, you’re going to encounter for the rest of your lives.”
Tom Brokaw
Excerpted from his Commencement Address to the University of Arizona Class of 2012