“Don’t Think. Thinking Is The Enemy Of Creativity. It’s Self-conscious, And Anything Self-conscious

“The ability to fantasize is the ability to survive”, ink on paper, 2021. Dedicated to the mystical Ray Bradbury. Happy birthday to me

the rocket man

“Doug,” he said, about five in the afternoon, as we were picking up our towels and heading back along the beach near the surf. “I want you to promise me something.

“Don’t ever be a rocket man.”

I stopped.

“I mean it,” he said, “because when you’re out there you want to be here, and when you’re here you want to be out there. Don’t start that. Don’t let it get hold of you.

“You don’t know what it is. Every time I’m out there I think, if I ever get back to Earth I’ll stay there, I’ll never go out again. But I go out and I guess I’ll always go out.”

“I’ve thought about being a Rocket Man for a long time,” I said.

He didn’t hear me. “I try to stay here. Last Saturday when I got home I started trying so damned hard to stay here.”

I remembered him in the garden, sweating, and all the traveling and doing and listening, and I knew that he did this to convince himself that the sea and the towns and the land and his family were the only real things and the good things. But I knew where he would be tonight: looking at the jewelry in Orion from our front porch.

“Promise me you won’t be like me,” he said.

ray bradbury, maclean's magazine, march 1, 1951

* * * *

“Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.”

― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

The October Country - art by Joseph Mugnaini (1955)

"To think that thought could live that long! A million years, perhaps, all these thoughts of death and disorder and conquest, lingering in the innocent but poisonous air of the planet, waiting for a real man to give them a channel through which they might issue again in all their senseless virulence."

Asleep in Armageddon, Ray Bradbury

“Each book was a world unto itself, and in it I took refuge.”

—

Alberto Manguel

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

-- Ray Bradbury

(Chambéry, France)

The Small Assassin, Ray Bradbury

“It’s a long way back to sunset, a far way on to dawn, so you summon all the fool things of your life, the stupid lovely things done with people known so very well who are now so very dead...”

Something Wicked This Way Comes, Ray Bradbury

“waiting out there, and waiting out there, while man comes and goes on this pitiful little planet. waiting and waiting.”

illustration for "the fog horn" by ray bradbury