Festivities

I know this isn't what I usually post... but I had to share. Check out my BSG snowflake. The outside is cylons, and the inside is the BSG crest. Yup, I'm that much of a dork. Oh, and it took me over an hour to develop.

Texas Architecture

A Farewell to the Lone Star State

Near Oglesby, Texas

Texas, that vast expanse of farm land sliced through by pale four-lane highways, the sides of which sprout fast food joints and chain stores, umber and gray suburbs like a hexagonal growth. Behind the suburbs stretch endless fields scarred by the crossing of county roads, and behind even these, the purple flat-topped lines of mesas.From the highway the land out there seems impossibly large and clearly abandoned. From county roads it reveals itself as a treasure trove of the bizare, abandoned and run down.

Ireland, Texas

Bosque River, Texas

An army of leather-skinned older men in pickup trucks and aging trailers guard the

tops of their hillsides with a shotgun and a dog or two. They change nothing of the land, not the barb wire fences, the scrub wood, corroded truck bodies, or the ancient churches left behind when people moved on. The land changes human artifacts into weather-worn heaps of wood, cinder-block and tin.

Ireland, Texas

The cemeteries of the past go silently feral in their spots of shade. Infant tombstones stretch in rows of cemented over graves from the first pioneers of this land. Broken slabs of granite separated from their cadavers by time are heaped in the corners.

Outside Hamilton, Texas

Ireland Cemetery, Ireland, Texas

Lost towns sweat away silently in the sun, inhabited by a handful of souls still eking their living out of some long-horns and the violent green of early summer. The grandiose gates of ranches reach toward the cloudless sky, the houses set far back from the undriven road, a true privacy that seems abhorrent to most modern men. Here prevails the independence of a life that needs no supplies but a tiller and a truck and a hardware store and a gas pump.

Return to the Robert's Bro.'s

Taken from inside the control room. This is the first shot in years that I thought needed to be monochromatic. The only thing I liked better in color was the Kool-Aid blue gallon of punch. Notice the gloves; someone still works here.

It's incredible to think that this saw-mill is still functioning. As a kid, I could hear the deep thrum of it through the woods a mile away. Family legend has it that the Robert's bro.'s stole our trees for lumber, and since their land meets the back of ours separated by nothing more than the old dry-stone wall, it's probably true. My hermit friend Jack says he once saw them burning a huge stack of tires, the black smoke belching out into the air. Their mill has a feeling of menace about it, and on this freezing-rain day it seemed the most desolate place on earth.

Worcester in the Fall

There is that last gasp of fall before the trees are left barren, a time of rusted berries and birch branches that look like a lemon tree. Worcester knows it is in for another salt stained winter. The stray cats who live in the abandoned lot behind my apartment sneak into the condemned house at night for warmth via a crack in the basement window, appearing and disappearing like shadows on a partly cloudy day. The gang of grizzled men who had become a fixture on their porch during fair weather have moved inside, and I can hear their laughter and their mexican marijuana coughing coming from inside the thin triple-decker walls. I sit on my back porch singing the blues into the sky as it fades from honey yellow to palest blue, and finally, to black.

The Neighborhood

The house across the street from my apt. Worcester pit 101 - never show the pit you're scared. That way when he runs across the street to charge you, he will only play-bite your fore-arm, and you will still have 2 hands to hold a camera with.

Happy Halloween

Forgotten Graveyard, somewhere near Copperas Cove, Tx.