No Time to Make Friends or Enemies

I say it often, that the people I most respect are those that are most alive. I mean, the ones who actually seem to ENJOY being alive, and who make us feel better when they’re around.

Ray Bradbury is one of those people, and I desperately miss him. He and I have never met, but it FEELS like we have, and that feeling came around when I finished his Collected Stories, today’s book in The Bouncer’s Book Club.

Just reading my notes on the book, I’m blown away…again…at how much Ray wants US to live just as intensely as HE did, and as intensely as he wrote.

His stories are filled with such great imagery too. Some examples:

Crowds closing in “like an iris focusing”

“The wheat rippling with moonlight on it, making it into a sea”

“The color fell from her face like light leaving a click-off bulb.”

“Silence opened to let the car pass, and closed swiftly in behind.”

My favorites of all the stories included would have to be “The Rocket Man”, and “Kaleidoscope”, among many others. The whole thing is excellent, jeez.

Just take a look at some of my personal study notes from the book:

Ray wrote Fahrenheit 451 on rented typewriters at the UCLA library, where he had to insert…