- “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 I belong here. I would argue that my presence is an existential instantiation of a contingent, temporary inevitability: I am here by my own free choice, but while I am here I am incontrovertibly here, I am not anywhere else, and no one else is where I am. If that doesn’t equate to belonging here, then you’ll have to do your own homework.”
“Sir. What is your full name?”
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Sun City
Volume One of The Naso Diaries
