Dig this shit: “The opposite of anarchy is warfare, and the war is on at Duffeeland Dog Park.”

Posted on June 27, 2013 by Greg Swann
Bloodhund r54
“But think: Before one man owned the park and everyone valued it. Now everyone owns it and no one values it. Before a group of people who got along perfectly worked together joyously in pursuit of the values they shared together. Now there are spoils up for grabs and power to be seized and innocent people to be shamed and bullied and milked and pit against each other, and the spirit of family — this thing that we do together means more to me than something else I might do instead — that spirit is all but gone from Duffeeland. It vanishes every time people try to supplant force for persuasion, coercion for cooperation, warfare for anarchy…”

Pleple2000 / Dog Photos / CC BY-SA

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

This is a story about how the world gets shittier and shittier — utterly unnecessarily — one stinky little turd at a time.

“Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?” Thus spake Commandante Clipboard, the Sun City Recreation Center’s micro-minion charged with annoying people and their dogs at the Duffeeland Dog Park.

His is not my first clipboard, so I said, “I think I need to pass on that opportunity.”

“Okaythen,” he forged ahead obliviously, “Can I ask where–uh… Wuh– ?”

“I said, no, I would rather you did not ask me any questions.”

I was there with Naso, of course, and we had stayed too late in the day. It used to be that the park was open twenty-four hours a day, but since the Rec Center took it over locks and chains and orders backed by threats are the order of the day.

“But I have to know if you belong here.”

“Now there’s a topic fit for a philosopher. I am imminent, surely, but does my imminence make me immanent? But, really, practically speaking, addressing such subjects is no path to eminence, much less prominence, and I speak from a lifetime of experience.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Commandante Clipboard was getting steamed, and I confess to taking a certain satisfaction from this particular flavor of petty vengeance.

“I’m trying to help you determine if (more…)

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“When you chase a kitten away, she never comes back to you.”

Posted on June 25, 2013 by Greg Swann
Shetti // Nikkor 50mm 1.4
“But when you chase a kitten away, she comes back half as often, with half as much confidence and half as much enthusiasm. And with a fear she had never even known before. And if you cut her back again, she’s half-again ready to try again the next time, and twice-again afraid. And you don’t have to halve that kitten’s love too many times before there’s none of it left…”
 Merlijn Hoek / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

“Now there’s a man with a smile on his face.” The Master Sergeant made that observation as he and his little white Scottie marched toward me with an easy precision. I was at Duffeeland Dog Park with Naso and he settled into the park bench across from mine. “Given what you’ve been writing, I thought I might see a scowl on you instead.”

Whatever smile I might have been wearing turned into a queasy grimace. In all this time, I have never had the experience of interacting with people who read what I have written, at least not while I’m still writing it, and I’m thinking it’s something I can have enough of. But the old guy had me dead to rights: I was feeling better than I have in a couple of weeks.

I said, “A young friend just asked me to marry him. Asked me to perform his wedding, that is.”

“I didn’t know you were–”

“I’m not. It’ll be my kind of wedding, no church, no state, just two people fully conscious of the commitment they’re making to each other and to any children they may have. It’s fun for me, because I keep thinking that, with the stories I’ve been writing, someone should ask me to marry him. I deeply enjoy being right about things like that.”

He smiled and leaned back with his fingers locked behind his head, letting the afternoon breezes come to him.

I said, “It’s a problem I’ve been working on for the past ten years or so, since this lump of russet-colored fur landed in my lap: How does a childless man go about cultivating grandchildren?”

“Is that why you’ve (more…)

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A little bit of honey cake for Desdemona as she makes her last escape.

Posted on June 24, 2013 by Greg Swann

Yes, it’s definitely dead dog month around here. I am much informed by the storgic love of dogs for their people, and I am much informed by dogs as such. This sequence of ideas dates from four years ago today, when we lost the very willful Desdemona. —GSS

 
June 24, 2009

We’re going to lose Desdemona, our English Coon Hound, tonight. She’s been with us for more than ten years, and she was an adult when we adopted her. A long life for a big dog.

Desi is by far the smartest dog we’ve ever known, the most willful, the cleverest escape artist, the most vociferous howler. She is maybe six brain cells short of writing angry poetry and howling on stage like the canine version of Tori Amos. There is nothing about this dog that is not astonishing.

This is Desdemona with my son Cameron, a long time ago:

Here’s an encomium Cathleen wrote to Desdemona’s intelligence in September of 2001:

Desdemona’s going to have a sweet year

Because our coon hound, Desdemona, runs away so easily and so tenaciously, we let her stay in the house when we aren’t home. This acknowledges that Desdemona has won the war. Well, of course she has… she won every battle. You’ll recall, she escapes over our 6′ block fence, even after we added an electric wire to the top; even when we strapped her into a full body harness and tethered her; even when we tethered her at both her collar and her harness and attached the two together; even when we put her into a kennel and tethered her at both her harness and collar and ran the two cables out of separate sides of the kennel; even when we drugged her.

The only thing she couldn’t escape from was a $200 solid plastic shell of a kennel, but after a few times in that box she learned how to splay herself so that anyone who tried to stuff her into the kennel came out of the box bloody and Desi, of course, never came close to going in. So, after spending about $600 on gadgets guaranteed to keep (more…)

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Standing with my nose pointed west, waiting for the world to come to me.

Posted on June 20, 2013 by Greg Swann

Desdemona the Scrivener. As is obvious, she would prefer not to.

Desdemona the Scrivener. As is obvious, she would prefer not to.

I live on a five-hundred-year time line. I pay attention to day-to-day stuff, but I recognize how repetitive human issues are. I tend not to lend much thought to anything that wasn’t interesting five hundred years ago, and isn’t likely to be interesting five hundred years from now. It’s comical that I think about what impact something I’ve written might have half-a-millenium from now, but I do think that way.

And I do write that way. I smile at the content of other people’s stories and novels and films, because everything is so far removed from the things that matter in life. It’s fun for me, in that context, to do just the opposite, to take huge, immense, enormous Greek stories and condense them down to a single conversation. Screenwriters, in particular, can tell you how much back-story I burn up with every Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story.

Here’s the part that’s most fun for me: What I’m doing is easy. The philosophical issues are settled art for me, at least for now, so making the link from a ship’s captain to fatherhood, defending the law of agency without ever mentioning it by name, is duck soup. But the rest of the work is, too, building a big story from little stories, with each one of those stories standing easily on its own, birthing characters I admire enough to want to see them again, crafting little turns of phrase that hook their way into your mind and linger there, gnawing away at you. This level of clarity comes and goes, but I’ve been at the top of my game for three years, and everything comes easily to me now.

But I owe a trick to Desdemona, too. She was an English Coon Hound bitch we used to have, the most ruggedly-individualistic dog I have ever known. Like all hounds, she lived by the nose, but she was smart enough to let the smells come to her, instead of always trying to hunt them down. She would stand rigidly still in our (more…)

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Why I read Ibsen.

Posted on June 14, 2013 by Greg Swann

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 doubled. Infant mortality was halved. The fruits of science and industry were spreading to even the poorest of the poor — hygiene, sanitation, bountiful harvests, rail and sea travel, the telegraph and the telephone, abundant cheap fabrics from the much-maligned mills of England and America. The simple innovation of gaslight, precursor to Edison’s bulb, effectively extended human life by half. The year of 1848 was the year of triumph for the Enlightenment, and monarchies fell all across Europe. The ideals of Voltaire and Jefferson were everywhere ascendant and humanity emerged, dazed and wan, from the prison of tyranny, seeming to dance in the clean, sweet air of liberty.

The latter half of the nineteenth century was a time of joy and beauty and purpose in life and in art, and this is one of the best kept secrets in the history of the West. Marx convinced the world that people who (more…)

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

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Greg Swann

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 again:

They start out wanting to have it both ways, wanting to have the life of a human without the identity. They spurn the potency of a man, demanding instead the omnipotence of a god or the impotence of an animal. To achieve this mental abomination, they must erect and sustain a mental inversion. To erect it, they need to deny a premise they know in advance to be true. And to maintain it, they need to continue to deny their own knowledge, their own sense evidence and memory of experience. At full maturity, the Substitute For Experience (SFE) is a ravenous monster…

Now, consider that many people have more than one Madness…

Yikes! Now do you understand why they are so unhappy? Not quite yet…

For there is one thing left to consider: what happens when a person has to choose between something he wants very badly and his Madness? This is reality’s (more…)

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

Posted on June 9, 2013 by Greg Swann

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 most because I love to be the cause of it.

But I love the love you see, too. Cathleen is looking at me as I take that photo, reacting to me, responding to me. The face she is wearing is one drop in her ocean of love for me, but that one drop encapsulates the whole.

What do you see? There’s love, of course, almost a dreamy, schoolgirl-like adulation. But there is respect and admiration, an unshakeable confidence in me. And there is a gentle derision layered over everything, a teasing response from a lovingly-teased woman.

Putative “humanitarians” never tire of chastising us for falling in love with our own reflections, but the values Cathleen reflects back to me, when she looks at me like that, are precisely those values I most want to embody. If there is any external measure of human success, it’s an admiration that pure, that total and that (more…)

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The song of the self.

Posted on June 9, 2013 by Greg Swann
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 physical expression of the self of the imagination that each one of us sees only of his own self and only alone, within that perfect solitude of the mind.

Just that much is breathtakingly beautiful, if you take the time to think about it: A reflexively recollecting mental process, by iteratively expressing itself — in the observable world, of course, but first and most and almost continuously in purely introspective activity — essentially becomes itself and then, over time, progressively recreates itself — learning, changing, growing — over and over again. The self is its own self-abstracted abstraction, and your relationship with your own unique self is by far the most important relationship in your life.

The self is the song of itself, and each one of us is his own song, his own soul, unique and incomparable and fundamentally inexpressible to others. Without human upbringing, we are bad imitations of animals, (more…)

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

Posted on June 7, 2013 by Greg Swann

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 parks — and she is never shy about exploring a new one. But Duffeeland is perfect not just for dogs but for the people who love them, with abundant shade and benches all along the walking paths. All the people at Duffeeland adore Naso, and Naso loves each one of them with a sincere and devout adulation.

I’m in Sun City because my dog is dying. I’ve always had itchy feet, but we’ve taken root here, for now, because I want for her death to be as perfect as I can make it. Sun City is small-town America, circa 1955, and a big gangly Bloodhound bitch is not a nuisance here, she’s a neighbor. They love my girl at the bank, and she knows just where to go to snag a treat at the hardware store. She is welcome everywhere, admired by everyone, loved on sight by anyone who gets close (more…)

Posted in Poetry and fiction, The Naso Diaries, Willie stories | 2 Comments

Tease your lover by text — and drive the Feds crazy doing it.

Posted on June 3, 2013 by Greg Swann

"EF or FF?" Putting hot-sauce on hamburger, making an adventure of the mundane.

“EF or FF?” Putting hot-sauce on hamburger, making an adventure of the mundane.

Last week Uncle Willie wrote about the kinds of playful games loving married couples can carry out over years or decades. This I totally get. I am always pulling Cathleen’s pigtails, because I always want her attention.

Here’s an example, a brand new game I invented today: Our little dog Dusty, my mother’s best legacy and a little piece of her in all his mannerisms, has a grooming appointment later this week at a dog spa called ‘A Loving Touch.’ I thought that sounded kinda creepy, so I changed it in our shared Google calendar to ‘A Furtive Grope.’ I don’t know when she’ll notice the change, and I won’t toy with her business appointments, but that seems like a fun game to play with the family stuff — fun like mussing up her hair or rubbing a little sliver of ice into the nape of her neck.

Here’s another one we do: Poetexting. I think like a poet all the time, which means I’m always swapping sounds and words and concepts around in my mind. Not everyone who gets my full attention likes it, but I can be a fun ride in person, especially if you’re in the mood to keep up with me.

So: Like this: I just texted this to my best-beloved:

Yuba Quinn?

Pure sound: “You back when?” We have a young friend named Quinn, so that will serve as a red-herring, I hope, pushing her off the obvious, leaving her chasing after a second reading that isn’t there.

I do it all the time, she less so, and, obviously, neither of us is clever or coy when minutes matter. Lately I’m transfixed by sound, but another way to play this game is with crostic-style clues or glyphic rebuses. It’s just a little way of putting hot-sauce on hamburger, making an adventure of the mundane.

But wait. There’s more. What do you suppose the NSA might make of this, which I texted to Cathleen last night?

Of ocular stalks, I counted seven, but then I remembered…

What’s the message? I (more…)

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Making men out of boys by breaking all the rules.

Posted on May 31, 2013 by Greg Swann
Skate or live
Boys will be boys, but sooner or later they come to be men. Being serious about being serious is a very good sign in that transition.M.Angel Herrero / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

“Dog’s not supposed to be inside the fence.”

I smiled at that. Rules are a comprehensive illusion concocted by people who take long vacations on exotic maps, dine on descriptions of sumptuous feasts and mate with none but the most breath-taking portraits. Naso was comfortably asnooze on the cool concrete of the skatepark at Rio Vista Park, looking like nothing so much as a lumpy puddle of russet-colored fur, and the drafters of the infinite rules did not even bother to rage in impotent fury at her lazy effrontery.

“She’s never taken a piss on concrete. I doubt she ever will.” I said that. I was talking to The Skatepunk, but he was going to some lengths not to talk to me, skating up and down a fake concrete office plaza, grimly concentrating on the stunts he was practicing.

“Did you ever think about that, what it is that you’re teaching a dog when you house train it? Naso here has not only never peed on a sidewalk or a paved road, she almost never pees except right on top of another’s dog’s old urine.”

He smiled, a flash of pure delight. “Dogs got display” — he hiked his leg up off the skateboard in pantomime — “but bitches got aim!”

“Pain in the ass after a hard rain. It’s two or three days before she can pee reliably, and for all I know, every dog in the Valley is going through the same thing. We think we’re teaching them to distinguish inside from outside, but that’s probably not even possible. What we’re really teaching them is that we will only love them if they pee where all the other dogs pee.”

“Peer pressure!” He laughed so hard he screwed up his trick.

“I had a Labrador mutt that I raised from a puppy. I was all over her and she was eager to please as only a Labrador can be, and she (more…)

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Why would anyone get married? To live the highest expressions of Splendor in the fully-human life.

Posted on May 24, 2013 by Greg Swann
Wedding rings
To be together is an accident of location. To be committed to each other and to the things you make together is a marriage.Jeff Belmonte / Foter.com / CC BY

Dr. Helen asked something like this at the start of the year: Name five good reasons for getting married. My wife, Cathleen, and I talked about it at the time, but I didn’t write anything then. The matter came up in a different way today, in a comment on a Facebook link from Anthony Paul Johnson, and this was my response:

Why would anyone get married?

To dance as one can never dance with anyone less known.

To soar together as only two together can soar, each the other’s other wing.

To know so well, to trust so completely that you can be your whole self for her, and she for you.

To love so fully that your love-making seems to be its own private bubble in the plenum, and yet to love so enduringly that the two of you are always making love to each other, together or apart, awake or asleep — and someday with one of you dead and gone, and still the love will live on.

To build those things — a home, a family, a life of meaning — that are best built by people committed to their love for each other.

To be together is an accident of location. To be committed to each other and to the things you make together is a marriage. I don’t care who you hire to sanctify it, anyone or no one. But if you don’t hold it sacred, you won’t hold it for long.

Posted in Love and marriage, Splendor! | 2 Comments

When the New Left becomes the Old Reich, it’s time to get a gun.

Posted on May 10, 2013 by Greg Swann

When the free press is outlawed -- it's time to get a gun.

When the free press is outlawed — it’s time to get a gun.

The Feds banned the plans for the 3D printed gun yesterday. This is an obvious violation of the First Amendment, and it will be shot down by the courts — assuming we don’t shoot everything else down first.

As my own small act of defiance, I am mirroring a zip file of the Liberator 3D printed handgun plans. I’m hoping this is hugely redundant — thousands of mirrors all over the world — but, either way, come and get me coppers. I am an American, and no one tells me what I can and can’t say.

Meanwhile, some thoughts from Fred Eaglesmith:

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Going Galt with style: By choosing so admirably, Richard Nikoley sets a good example for us all.

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Greg Swann

RichardNikoleyMy friend, Richard Nikoley, showing you what a Randian hero looks like in real life:

I listened to the state collector’s heartfelt, condescending admonishments, including how much he’d so have preferred to work it out, had I just called him back and et cetera, et cetera. I got quiet, nicer.

“Well, I think that tells me everything I need, and I know what I need to do.

“Oh, good.”

“Yea, I’m going to rectify this whole situation immediately, as soon as I hang up. But before I do, I want to thank you for the help. I’ve been neglecting things for too long and I’m going to change that right now. I know it’s only Thursday, but you have a good weekend.

“You too.”

I hung up, and immediately deleted the email server. Then I shut off all the phones and the fax. My next email (I’m operating on private email by this point) was to the bank that holds client funds, telling them I’m done, to delete the $30,000 in already earned fees that trickle in to us as client funds trickle in to them, to delete all drafts and refund all money to clients. Soon as that was confirmed, I sent all paper files to the shredder/recycler, and had the company that hosts our servers shut them down and send them to the electronic recycler (they’re old, no commercial value).

[Update: It’s probably prudent to stipulate that the reason for all of this deletion and shredding was for the purpose of protecting sensitive client information like SSNs, financial records, etc. Since I was closing down and have no means of protecting or storing things in an adequate secure facility (i.e., not my garage), it needed to be professionally disposed of.]

I closed, locked the door, and walked away…having accomplished an irrevocable burning down in hours of what it took 20 years to establish. That night, sleep was less than optimal but Friday morning was euphoric. I learned an instant lesson: make your big moves in life irrevocable. You can’t go back, even if you wanted to.

Or, think of it this way: how many times did you get fired or get a (more…)

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The perfect life and beautiful death of a gangly little mermaid.

Posted on April 17, 2013 by Greg Swann

The Little Mermaid.

The little mermaid lives her life her way, regardless of how you or I might fail to live up to ours.

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

She was the little mermaid, in our world but never of it. Never in all her years with us did she come to understand us. And yet never did she fail to delight in us. And never once did she complain that she could never be one of us, even though this was what she wanted most from her brief, perfect life.

I gave her nothing, and it was everything to her. She gave me everything, and too often it was nothing to me. She never lost sight of me, if she could help it, but I never saw her fully until she was gone forever from my life. The little mermaid is everywhere if you look for her — except no one ever does. But the little mermaid lives her life her way, always, regardless of how you or I might fail to live up to ours.

She was born perfect in a perfect place, where there was nothing to question or doubt, where pain was fleeting, where fear was temporary and in the end almost always comical. Her days were filled with raucous, rough-housing play, her nights with a busily tumbling slumber. Every day was the same, free of every care, and yet every day was a new adventure, a new challenge, a new triumph, a new reason to celebrate the unlimited wonderfulness of everything.

Continue reading this story at Amazon.com

Sun City
Volume One of The Naso Diaries

Posted in Poetry and fiction, The Naso Diaries, Willie stories | 1 Comment