Blog Archives
Satellite
I spend around an hour and half every day in my car, driving back and forth to work. I listen to the radio* all the time. I have a lot of random lyrics stuck in my head.
Sometimes those lyrics pop up when I am not expecting them. Like when I saw this house and its four satellite dishes, and there was Dave Matthews in my head, singing:
Satellite dish in my yard
Tell me more, tell me more
Who’s the king of your Satellite Castle?
If you want this song in YOUR head (and who wouldn’t want that, really?), here’s a handy link.
Slaton, Texas
photographed 1.25.2014
*This is neither here nor there (probably), but I listen to satellite radio.
Eight garages
Sometimes I can’t help it. I get completely out of control, throw caution to the wind. I forget my vision, I forsake my followers.
And then this happens: I post a photograph of a new building.
I’ll try to not let it happen very often.
Slaton, Texas
photographed 2.16.2013
Slaton doors
A detail of this place, five months and one day later. Nothing had changed. But I felt better knowing that.
Slaton, Texas
photographed 2.16.2013
Nuisances
I once had a job where it was not at all uncommon for the men to just be not there on Friday afternoons. Because they were playing golf.
As part of our run-up to raising hell about this practice my co-worker (let’s call her Lesli) and I decided that we should first take golf lessons. And, further, we decided to talk about our golf lessons all the time, in front of the boys’ club of golfers. That would, we reckoned, make our exclusion from the group even more noticeable, and even those self-absorbed idiots would figure it out and we could look forward to golfing on Fridays.
The part of the plan that we failed to account for was this: we didn’t really like those guys (I mentioned, didn’t I, that they were self-absorbed idiots?) and spending an afternoon on the course with them was far worse than spending an afternoon at work while they were golfing.
But, there’s this: Lesli decided that our personal goal for our golfing career should be to “suck consistently.” And I am proud to report that we are now able, through diligent practice, to achieve that goal.
There’s also this: neither of us still work at that place. We are much better off.
Abandoned Miniature Golf Course
Slaton, Texas
photographed 2.16.2013
In the rough
These days, miniature golf courses remind me of summer nights. Of the smell of cut grass, of newly watered lawns. Of the sounds of laughter across carpeted greens, of the sounds of putters hitting colored golf balls. Of tiny pencils. Of how hard the last hole-in-one shot was, of how remote the chance at a free game. Of velvety dark skies overhead, with flashes of lightning on the western horizon.
Our church youth group spent many Sunday nights playing miniature golf: it was the carrot at the end of the Bible study stick.
Our church was too little to have a year-round youth director, so each summer there’d be a new one, a young man between semesters at the Perkins School of Theology, always earnest and prayerful, and always having been deemed “safe” by the members of the hiring committee. The girls in the youth group would always have crushes on that summer’s iteration; from the youth director’s arrival in May until he left at the end of August, we were the most religious, most fervent believers ever to participate in the Methodist Youth Fellowship. We’d try to pray the most, sing the loudest, wear the best cross-on-a-leather-cord that any seminarian had ever seen. We’d carry our Good News Bibles around, carefully marking the verses the youth director told us to, all the while pushing down memories of second grade Sunday School and Mrs. Breneman’s admonition that it was Simply Not Proper to write in a Bible.
And then, the end of the summer arrived and we could backslide all the way until the next spring, when it all started over again.
Abandoned Miniature Golf Course
Slaton, Texas
photographed 2.16.2013
One Day | One Image 