Lies all the way down: Ventilating Uncle Willie’s Father’s Day funk.

I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.
“Hey, dipshit, if you want to lose your house and lose your family, to see your kids a third of the time if you’re lucky, to watch them spin out of control as they learn to pit the two of you against each other, to lose half or more of your income, and to have the happy choice of trolling bars for disease-ridden skanks or spanking the monkey to internet porn for decades on end — all you have to do is nothing. You are right at the threshold of that fate, and it won’t take much of a breeze to push you over the edge.”
 
Aristocrats-hat / Beach Photos / CC BY-NC-ND

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

“Did you ever think about how you go about telling a lie?” I said that. I’m pretty sure no one else in the entire world says things like that.

I was talking to the Skatepunk, who is pretty phlegmatic for his age, but that’s the kind of question to bring out the squirminess in anyone.

“What? Am I telling you something you don’t know? Everyone lies, and the best we can hope for is to put some distance between us and our last big whopper. But it’s there, Continue reading

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Why I read Ibsen.

It is common to play Hedda as a neurotic, but I think a more correct reading is that she is a troll, a sprite, a spark of hell’s fire seeking ready tinder on the Earth. 

It is common to play Hedda as a neurotic, but I think a more correct reading is that she is a troll, a sprite, a spark of hell’s fire seeking ready tinder on the Earth.

I grew up in a grimy little industrial town called Danville, Illinois. It wasn’t until I was four years old that I stumbled onto an atlas and discovered why I had felt so much out of place from the day of my birth. I graduated from Danville High School two years early — and left town the very next morning. My sister was in that same graduating class, but she has never felt herself to be anything but comfortably at home. She got as far away as the University of Illinois in Urbana, forty miles west, then came back to teach Shakespeare to the college-bound minority of Danville High School — a job from which she is now retiring at the age of 55. She used to throw in one Ibsen play a year, and I wrote this essay as a hand-out for her classes. –GSS

 
The latter half of the nineteenth century was a time of amazing progress for the West. Average life-expectancy Continue reading

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Telling long stories about other people’s nightmares — for Father’s Day.

Can't let go
“Every one of those guys knows that this could be his last Father’s Day at home, his last chance to see his kids before they get sideswiped for life by the family court system, his last chance to make believe that he and his wife are building something lasting, that he’s not just swimming against a relentless current that will carry him, eventually, inexorably, over the falls.”
 
dontshoot.me! / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

“Your uncle’s kinda creepy.” Megwyn’s friend Calliope said that. I used to think Megwyn was the dumbest name I’d ever heard of for a girl, but Calliope — once Homer’s muse, now just a noisy sideshow nuisance — owns that trophy now.

“Not creepy, eccentric. He taught me that word. Anyway, he’s not my uncle. People just call him ‘Uncle Willie.’” That was Megwyn herself speaking.

“If he’s not your uncle then why are we here?” She said it ‘hee-yerr,’ a quick elision with a backspin of contempt mixed with ennui.

“Would you rather be back with Cheryl and Jeff?”

“Good point.”

I wasn’t eavesdropping, just inescapably overhearing. Young people seem to think that, if you’re involved in one conversation, you can’t hear another. We were at The Handlebar, a very Continue reading

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Redemption is egoism in action: My eBook “Janio at a Point” is yours free for the downloading.

Download a free eBook about the redemption of the ego – about Splendor.

Download a free eBook about the redemption of the ego – about Splendor.

In February of 1988, I wrote a short book called Janio at a Point. It was written to be the epilogue of a much larger book, a 600-page space opera I’ve never written. In consequence, the book I did write assumes your knowledge of a lot of back-story that isn’t there. Mostly you can work it out from context, but that’s the context.

But the ideas in the book are excellent, in my never-humble opinion, and no one but me has talked about any of this stuff in the intervening 25 years. ManAlive! covers some of this ground in different ways, but there are gems in here — a just derivation of property rights, for example, or what to do about intellectual property theft — that I have not dealt with since.

You can download the book for free by clicking on this link. The zip file you will download contains the book in HTML, PDF, epub and mobi formats, for your eReading edification. In the extract shown below, we document the mechanics of irrationality, specifically how people go about making the same mistakes over and over Continue reading

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Reflections of the irresistible by way of one drop in an ocean of love.

That's my best-beloved, Cathleen Collins. She thinks I'm about to tease her. She's right.

That’s my best-beloved, Cathleen Collins. She thinks I’m about to tease her. She’s right.

I’ve been thinking lately about the idea of irresistibility — this, plausibly, because I get hot for all absolute states — when I blessed my argument with the photo you see to your right.

That’s my best-beloved, Cathleen Collins, about whom I have written much in the past, and who is present, in ways you normally are not likely to see, in everything I write.

Here’s the thing about her, the thing that makes that photo leap out at me: She has always made me crazy, and I expect she always will. I find her irresistible, which means that and only that: I can’t bear not to have her.

Have her sexually? Yes, please, as often as we can work it in, as it were. But I yearn to have her in every possible way, and the way I love her best is the way I love her most often, as the giggling girlchild I get to torment with jokes and pokes and tricks and riddles and songs and poems all day, every day. I love the smile you see in that photo, and I love it Continue reading

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The song of the self.

78/365, fly
You can choose the light or the darkness, or you can run from one to the other, wasting your life in a lather of dithering. But you cannot be alive as a human being and yet, somehow, choose not to choose. You cannot choose what you are. Your only choice is who you’ll be.♥serendipity / Foter.com / CC BY-ND

This is a dumb thing to say, but at the same time, I think it’s the essence of everything, the one thing that most needs to be said:

I love life. I love living. I love being alive as a human being — a genetic homo sapiens within whom has been cultivated a self — and I love, love, love being that self with a deep and abiding adoration. I don’t want to be anyone but me, but I want to be me to the utmost, to the evermost — without shame, without hiding or disguising myself in any way and without one word of apology to anyone, ever.

This is fact, obvious and dumb to say but utterly necessary to understand: We are each of us all alone inside the mind, and the self of atoms, actions and events that others see is the Continue reading

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Love and loyalty: Why I want for my dog to die in Sun City.

The sun-dappled dogs of Duffeeland...

The sun-dappled dogs of Duffeeland…

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

“Your dog’s dying.”

What do you say to that? When you have a wound that won’t heal, there is nothing quite like having someone tear it wide open — expecting you to regard that as a courtesy. How about this? “No shit, Sherlock. A dying dog is obvious to any dog person, and I only get to watch her fading away all day, every day.”

I didn’t say that. Instead I said: “Yeah.”

Naso and I were at Duffeeland Dog Park in Sun City, basking in a late afternoon paradise you know nothing about: A three-digit temperature, a two-digit breeze straight out of the West and one-digit humidity. You sweat and sweat and never know it, and the sweat drying on your skin in the shade of the olive trees keeps you cool and serene, and the light from the setting sun gives everything a golden glow.

If I could pick one spot on the planet for Naso to die, it would be Duffeeland, the ultimate perfect Disneyland for dogs. She loves it there, and so we go there every day, sometimes twice a day. She has other favorite dog parks — and regular-people Continue reading

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