Category Archives: Poetry and fiction

Conservatives: If you want for the good guys to win in the end, the art you’re looking for is comedy.

By showing how an individual person applies the great wonder that is the human mind to the process of improving his circumstances over time, comedy makes the libertarian/individualistic/egoistic argument with every telling.mharrsch / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA Breitbart.com is on … Continue reading

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What happens when itinerant raconteur Willie O’Connell takes off for an extended tour of Sin City? Everything you’d never expect!

“Las Vegas lives and dies on the fear of loss. Everything is sold that way. The best things in life are free, and the people who actually have a good time in Vegas – as opposed to accumulating more and … Continue reading

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Feeling lucky in Las Vegas? That’s the kind of optimism that built this town.

“I got that beat,” said The Stickman. “We had this Barney, nothing but purple chips, and he would not come off of hard-eight. Lose, lose, lose, bitch, bitch, bitch, but he just keeps coming back at it. He goes, ‘I … Continue reading

Posted in Poetry and fiction, This is Vegas, Willie stories | 1 Comment

How a simply gorgeous woman took the prize at The World Series of Poker.

“It’s funny, isn’t it?” I said that, without quite making eye contact with her. “Over on The Strip, all the single women are wandering around the casinos and the clubs looking for guys. And over here, all the guys are … Continue reading

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Random observations on the Sin City scene.

I haven’t been to Las Vegas for six years, and a lot has changed. There are things I am specifically watching for — Vegas is so much like Phoenix that it’s very instructive to do-the-deltas, to focus on the radical … Continue reading

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Willie’s wager: Sun City, a new skein of Willie yarns, is going to make you cry.

Got teens? Among many other things, this book strives to redeem marriage and family for the generation of kids for whom stable families have been too rare.But it’ll be a cleansing cry, I promise. Sun City is the collection of … Continue reading

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Scouring the streets of Sin City looking for the itinerant raconteur of my youth.

The view from my fleabag.A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story Let’s hit the road, toads. Home loves me, and, surprisingly enough, I love it, but I’ve been chained to a dog for ten years, and it’s time for me to put … Continue reading

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FREE Willie – Download a free eBook of classic Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie stories…

Why make the book free? To find out if you know the difference between price and value…I’m getting ready to publish the first of three for-pay books of Willie stories, so we thought we would put together a free sampler … Continue reading

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Singing the death of my Nasogirl at a Sun City garden party.

Sun City is mid-century-modern suburban elegance as witnessed nowhere else. Where, snide hipsters, do you suppose the always-hipper-than-you Don Draper lives by now? Golf in the morning. The pool in the afternoon. And grilled steaks and chilled cocktails on the … Continue reading

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Love me, hate me, I don’t mind. I can work with anything except indifference.

“The diametrical opposite of love might be hatred, but the absence of any emotion is simply blank indifference — what you feel after all the love, even the affinity, is gone. People can feel a sort of storgic hatred, where … Continue reading

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Mary Canary on her way to feed the pigeons.

True fact: My fellow citizens have outfitted me with the most fundamentally perfect disguise. They refuse to see me, and therefore they don’t see me. Except they do. Except they don’t want to. So they don’t, damnit!, no matter how … Continue reading

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

“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 … Continue reading

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

“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, … Continue reading

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

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 … 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.I grew up in a grimy … Continue reading

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