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

Posted on June 17, 2017 by Greg Swann
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.”From the Kindle book Sun City.I have great ideas. You have money. We should trade.
 Aristocrats-hat / Beach Photos / CC BY-NC-ND

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

June 18, 2013

“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, and it will not be forgotten. If life were Liars Anonymous, the only way most people would ever get a ninety-day chip would be by lying about it.”

He chuckled. He was sitting opposite me on a bench at Duffeeland Dog Park. He had come there late in the day on Father’s Day Sunday on his skateboard, carrying his grandfather’s white Scots Terrier in his arms. That dog was now nestled up against mine, the two of them lost together in the comfortable affinity of an afternoon nap.

“But if you think about what you’ve done, in the past, when you told a lie, you can learn a whole lot about the world around you. So your choice is not telling the truth or spinning up a lie. Instead, there is facing the music as one (more…)

Posted in Poetry and fiction, The Naso Diaries, Willie stories | 4 Comments

Fathering fathertongue: “The purpose of civilization is to prevent rape, to make the world safe for women and children.”

Posted on June 15, 2017 by Greg Swann

“Can you read the inscriptions on the buildings outside? This is M.I.T.’s way of honoring all the great men of science. Galileo, Kepler, Fourier, LaPlace. Aristotle, toward whom every branch of science must bow. Hundreds of names, some larger, some smaller, almost all of them men. Does that seem odd to you?”By: Justin Jensen

From ‘The Unfallen’
Finally on Friday, not knowing what to do but knowing she had to do something, she called Winnie Booth and asked if she could meet her for lunch. She stopped at Toscannini’s in Central Square for ice cream then again at Bertucci’s, where a pizza was waiting for her, and she met Winnie in a little lounge overlooking Killian Court at M.I.T. They shared small talk over lunch. Winnie was so big with the baby she seemed about to burst and she used her belly like a little table.

“You can afford to eat like this,” Winnie said, “but I can’t.”

“…This is the most I’ve eaten in a week, I think.”

“That bad, is it?”

Gwen put on her best plucky expression. “Nothing’s bad. Just… different.”

“My mistake. Devin comes to the lab on Monday with a face like he’s running for county coroner, but nothing’s bad. Your eyes look like they haven’t got a tear left in them, but nothing’s bad. What could be bad?”

Gwen smiled sheepishly and that was answer enough.

“Do you know the best philosopher I ever studied under? It’s Devin’s grandmother, Cecilia, Candy. No credentials, no college education, no pedigree of any kind, just a mind that can see through twenty miles of bullshit and will not let you get away with a thing. When I first met her, I was the worst kind of smug, college-bred jackass. Knew everything and deferred only to curriculum vitaes longer than my own. And that woman just took me apart. Nothing vicious about it, there’s not a drop of cruelty in her. All she really does is ask questions. But she asks questions that make it painfully obvious that everything you had been so confident about was constructed from solid quicksand.

“The first few times I (more…)

Posted in Love and marriage, Poetry and fiction, Splendor! | 3 Comments

For Father’s Day, sympathy for the trans-aborted.

Posted on June 14, 2017 by Greg Swann

“How can you live your authentic reality as a stuffed animal if you can’t be laundered? Are the trans-furry to be forevermore mislabeled as ‘Dry Clean Only’?”

“How can you live your authentic reality as a stuffed animal if you can’t be laundered? Are the trans-furry to be forevermore mislabeled as ‘Dry Clean Only’?”

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

June 18, 2015

“So here’s a question for you,” the Class Clown said. “Can a trans-furry be abused, neglected, abandoned – even be owned as property?”

“Or laundered?” I said that.

“That’s right. How can you live your authentic reality as a stuffed animal if you can’t be laundered? Are the trans-furry to be forevermore mislabeled as ‘Dry Clean Only’?”

I laughed at that idea. I’ve always been able to laugh with the Class Clown.

“There’s a marriage problem, too,” he said. “Plus a trans-furry polygamy problem. Who has just one stuffed animal? But when things don’t work out as planned, who gets the toy box?”

“And what happens to the little furries? I wish that were funnier.”

The Class Clown shrugged. He said, “None of this is funny. It’s just hysterical.”

We were sprawled into the back corner of a vast, empty sports-themed bar at Skyharbor Airport in scenic, historic Phoenix, Arizona. I had blown one stand-by flight and I was hanging out to see if I could snag a seat on another when he happened upon me and dragged me off for a pop.

He’s pushing forty by now, but I’ve known him since he was an acne-avenging teenager, a real-life class clown making his reputation by mocking the absurdities of the powerful. People love that stuff.

That’s not really true. I make my way by never wanting anything anyone else can take away from me, but normal people don’t have things that easy. The Class Clown is the kind of guy who gets fired from his job for muttering the wrong joke or for making the wrong political contribution or for having the wrong cartoon on his computer screen. I’ve worried about him since we met, just because this is no safe world for a man who knows when to laugh.

“I love the trans-racial idea,” he said. “It explains so much! When John Fogerty was ‘chooblin’ on down to New Orleans,’ what race was (more…)

Posted in Poetry and fiction, Willie stories | 2 Comments

Q: When will #Marxism TRULY work? A: When the proletariat exterminates itself.

Posted on June 12, 2017 by Greg Swann

A trapped rat will gnaw his way out of a wooden box. Trapped people gnaw their way into them.

Photo by: rjp

1. The Trump vote is a slave rebellion.

2. The Tea Party is a slave rebellion.

3. The surge in suicides is a slave rebellion.

4. The obesity epidemic is a slave rebellion.

5. The opioid crisis is a slave rebellion.

6. The middle-class mutiny is a slave rebellion.

7. When slaves can’t run, they rebel. When they can’t do that, they wither.

8. Why should people you despise slave away to keep you alive?

9. Why wouldn’t they prefer to die instead – quickly or slowly?

Practical ontology begins with accepting that facts are facts: There is no contrary to human autonomy. Submit or die? To submit IS to die – as virtually everyone steadfastly pretends not to see.

If you refuse to let people live – they don’t.

Posted in Splendor! | Leave a comment

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

Posted on June 10, 2017 by Greg Swann
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.”From the Kindle book Sun City. I have great ideas. You have money. We should trade.
 dontshoot.me! / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

June 12, 2013

“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 affected boredom.

“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 dog-friendly indoor-outdoor cantina in downtown Tempe. I was ordering drinks for the three of us – water for me, sodas for the girls – and arranging a water bowl for Naso, but they were so loud I couldn’t avoid hearing what they were saying.

Tempe is a little piece of Austin or Boulder in the midst of the vast, ever-inflating bouncy-house that is endlessly-suburban Phoenix. It is home to Arizona State University, which means there is a captive audience of 30,000 students and maybe 20,000 more ex-students and hangers-on within a mile or so of The Handlebar.

In consequence, Tempe is the only reliable night-life in The Valley, as it is called, the only consistent street life, the only place for rich people – the older ones settled down in Scottsdale, the young ones (more…)

Posted in Poetry and fiction, The Naso Diaries, Willie stories | 3 Comments

The DISC of staffing: Find the right shoe, first, then find the right foot for it.

Posted on May 19, 2017 by Greg Swann

If the new guy is a clown – so is the guy who hired him. Doing better – much better – is not just doable but simple.Photo by: Shreveport-Bossier Convention and Tourist Bureau

Here’s a sphincter-clencher for anyone who manages people:

How can you get your own mission-critical work done when you’re constantly mediating conflicts?

A better question: How can you hire and deploy so that your people love the way they work together, rather than constantly getting in each other’s way – and hence in yours?

This is the DISC of staffing, and, as always, it’s all about accepting that people are going to be who they are.

The bad news: They ain’t you or some imagined ideal you cooked up in your verbose “help wanted” ad.

The good news: Who they are is wonderful – and hugely profitable, properly deployed.

This question came by way of Facebook Messenger from a young real estate broker I know in Texas. I know him only net-wise, and we’ve never been close. But I have admired him from afar for years, because he embodies so much of what I celebrate in human virtues: He is a Driven entrepreneur at work and a doting Sociable husband and father at home.

This is how our conversation started:

I’ve been reading your recent posts about DISC. We’ve learned the importance of DISC the hard way (through a couple of bad hires). We’re back at it again trying to hire for a listing and transaction coordinator. Organized, high attention to detail, ability to manage details well, execute quickly.

What kind of DISC profile should we look for in your opinion?

My answer:

Cs. High-C Cautious for the strict attention to fussy details, low-s Sociable because you need to be able to trust a lot of your business to this person, so you need for there to be a feeling of family loyalty between you.

[Added for clarity: When I use that style of notation – Cs – what I mean is a person who is temperamentally Cautious as the dominant characteristic, Sociable as the sub-dominant trait, with Driven and Incandescent displays being much less frequent. The (more…)

Posted in Splendor! | Leave a comment

The book that matters most to me is the one I’m writing with my life. Everything else is just maps…

Posted on May 18, 2017 by Greg Swann

The book that matters most to me is the one I’m writing with my life. Everything else is just maps…

I feel I am approaching a state of sonic perfection, a place where, out of Earth’s seven billion, zero people are hearing me. I despair me nothing – I’ve known forever that I am writing for my own ears – but it’s hard to learn anything listening to your own echoes.

Which is why I’m grateful to know a few folks, at least, who whisper to me in private from time to time. They ask nagging questions, and I get to see what the other guy is not seeing in what I’m saying. With luck, he learns something – but I always do.

Likewise for contact-form email, except that I almost never get any of that. I’m proud to say that yesterday I did, and I’m even prouder to declaim that I can’t answer it.

Dessert first, which is sweet:

> Just wanted to say I’m loving your writing, and am in the process of reading a lot of your old stuff.

Bless you. Thank you. The way to a writer’s heart is through his vanity.

But then: The meat:

> Question – are there any books you recommend that have influenced your thought, or that you have read and can just generally suggest?

No.

There’s so much in that answer that’s funny to me, but the funniest part of all is this: There is a good chance that I will end up writing a curriculum before I die – but books should never have been all of education in the first place.

First, I would much rather write than read, if I have that kind of time.

Second, I read all the time, but since I learned to write C, I tend to read programmer style (index to the gist), which is now internet style (Google to the page, search to the gist). I reread “Stranger in a Strange Land” for fun a couple of years ago. I can’t remember the last whole book I read before that.

Third, I don’t have any use for anyone, so far as (more…)

Posted in Splendor! | 2 Comments

Righting Ayn Rand’s wrongs: Family endures. Everything else is temporary.

Posted on May 17, 2017 by Greg Swann

You say you want a better world? I want for your grandchildren to sail through the air on a tire swing hung from a tree you planted.Photo by: Jim Pennucci

Ayn Rand only got three things seriously wrong. I know that’s a controversial statement – especially for anyone who abhors apologists for government. But as with all her many egregious definition-swaps and proofs-by-outrage, The Big O’s little errors are overwhelmed by her bigger ones.

Why does this matter? Objectivism’s errors are libertarianism’s errors, and taken together, they explain entirely why big-O or little, little-l or big, there is nothing left of either an Objectivist or libertarian movement.

These are the errors of enduring consequence in Ayn Rand’s philosophical praxis:

1. She made the wrong sales pitch

(since no one was ever scolded or scorned into better choices)

2. to the wrong people

(adults, especially Ci/INTJ proto-adults, few of whom even exist, with few of those few willing to change their deeply-ingrained habits-of-mind)

3. while having the actual decision-makers – the offspring of the converted – exterminated.

We can’t fault Rand (or Rothbard) for not knowing what it’s taken me most of my own life to work out, but it is nevertheless obvious that movements grow by childbirth and, accordingly, anti-family movements cannot endure.

Did Ayn Rand miss that obvious fact, or are Objectivism and libertarianism self-extinguishing by design?

The answer ain’t pretty, either way, but my vote’s on incompetence, rather than malice. Regardless, the poor dumb saps at the Ayn Rand Institute are by now left to sputter, “But we were promised that well-prepared undergraduates would grow on trees forever!”

#BrotherYouAskedForIt!

But: What’s done is done. What should you do now? Seed, breed, feed and creed your own. Childless people have a diminishing stake in the future and its portents, where a Hoplite father’s investments grow as they mature. And, regardless of that, the future will belong solely to the people who show up for it.

You say you want a better world? I want for your grandchildren to sail through the air on a tire swing hung from a tree you planted. Study me and you’ll learn how to win (more…)

Posted in Love and marriage, Splendor!, The DISC of family | Leave a comment

Building the perfect Greek: Since DISC is cultivated, we can raise ever-better kids.

Posted on May 15, 2017 by Greg Swann

The persuasive miracle you seek is not just possible – it’s simple! You’re just talking to the wrong people.

Photo by: gemteck1

I know how to build Hoplite Greeks – Testudo fathers and mothers – self-responsible parents raising self-responsible parents, generation after generation. I know how to make ’em from scratch.

If I am not crazy, I pray my work does not die with me, because I think I have it all: How we all get broken, how we can be healed, and how our children can grow up ever more whole – from the spark of each child’s conception and before.

Me on Facebook, as notes to myself:

As always, DISC my way is an empathy-emergent self-abstracted survival strategy. It originates in an individual child’s own estimation of his optimal reward-seeking or punishment-avoidance strategy at the time he is graduating from a still-largely-mammalian toddler to a fully-conceptually-concious child.

The second sentence is what’s new: DISC is learned.

More precisely: Each individual’s DISC profile is cultivated in that child by the people he is growing up around. I’ll document this more, shortly, but it’s literally filigree – the underlying why of the observed phenomena.

The more important implication is that parents can raise the kinds of fathers and mothers I talk about by actively cultivating Ds/Sd displays, behaviors and habits in their children, consistently, from birth. This is what Testudo parents are already doing – each father to his own saints. I know how and why what they are doing works, and how to do it better.

The big news: The persuasive miracle you seek is not just possible – it’s simple! You’re just talking to the wrong people.

Posted in Love and marriage, Splendor!, The DISC of family, ThriversEd | Leave a comment

The DISC of birth order: Each new child fills what is then the biggest hole in your family.

Posted on May 12, 2017 by Greg Swann

That’s right. I am just who you were expecting!Photo by: Jay

There’s an article on leadership and birth order at the Atlantic this morning, but I haven’t read it. It’s behind a paywall, and paying for Marxism is not just double-suicide, not simply geometric or logarithmic suicide, it is infinitely recursive suicide, a self-induced infinite brain-slaughter. Plus which, the article undoubtedly concerns the exhaustive tabulation of precise measurements of the inessential, so I expect I’m not missing anything, anyway.

Birth order is easy: Each new kid fills the most propitious available niche – that is to say, DISC quadrant – in the family. It is normal to speak of normal families, where cultivation is expectation, and, accordingly, a child in a normal family will habituate the displays that most reliably yield positive responses from other family members at the time the child is growing into his humanity. He will fill the biggest available hole in your family. In dysfunctional families, the polarity of the responses and the direction of expectations will be reversed, but it’s still the most propitious available niche that will be filled by that child.

First-born children are often Cautious or Driven, because their parents and grandparents will hugely reward displays of either studiousness or industry, depending on which they prize more. Since there is only one child, so far, all of that kid’s grown-ups will give him a lot of time, both because they have it and because the interaction is reciprocally rewarding to them.

Children are naturally Sociable, obviously, and Sociable parents can snuggle up a SnugBug as their first-born, but, if they do, the second-born child will be a lot less Sociable. Why? Because he can’t compete with the older child at Sociable displays. Children born very close together or three or more years apart can occupy the same DISC quadrant, but normally-competitive siblings typically cannot – precisely because their habituated displays – their DISC profiles – are how they compete for attention and approval.

In a dysfunctional family, it will be the survival niches – not the ornamental ones – that are available to be (more…)

Posted in Love and marriage, Splendor!, The DISC of family, ThriversEd | Leave a comment

You could win the first-ever Ayn Rand Mother’s Day Essay Contest!

Posted on May 11, 2017 by Greg Swann

Nattering pointlessly at Robert Tracinski, I hammered on this notion:

Meanwhile, self-responsible fatherhood is the sole source of human civilization, and on that score Rand = Rowling = Marx. To the extent that children are reading anything, they’re reading roadmaps to humanity’s auto-annihilation.

The gist of that is news to no one here, but it might-could incite the ire of Ayn Rand’s many devoted hagiographers.

So: Let’s put on a show! It would be even more fun to do this for Father’s Day, but Mother’s Day is here upon us, so let’s have at it:

Write an essay of any length on this theme:

The Ayn Rand character who best exemplifies self-responsible motherhood is ____________.

Stone cold nobody, no?

Do it for the fathers, too. Human civilization does not exist without self-responsible fatherhood, and to that objective fact Ayn Rand is indifferent where she is not contemptuous.

Yo, @Tracinski: #BrotherYouAskedForIt!

Posted in Splendor! | Leave a comment

Flowerboxing: Ending the willfully negligent destruction of 98% of all human capital.

Posted on May 5, 2017 by Greg Swann

Two of my favorite people, my wife, Cathleen Collins, and my nephew, Sebastian Brannum.

On the day my nephew, Sebastian, was born, we played a game together. Not much of a game, obviously: I would stick out my tongue, and then Sebastian would stick out his tongue. And then I would stick out my tongue again, and he his – and so on like that for about five minutes. Eighteen hours after he had scrambled his way out of my niece, Maddie, he intentionally played a game of voluntary muscle control – for fun!

I knew this was possible. I’ve taught very young children lingual fun – like ‘raspberries’ – for decades. I was lucky to get to meet Sebastian on the day he was born, and I was lucky to get to hold him when he was awake, fed, clean, dry and bored – psyched for some of that hurly-burly extra-uterine action. But any normal infant should be ready and eager to learn how to have fun from Day One.

If you’re looking for human equality, go to the nursery. Infants have got reptile brain stuff going on, lots of it, as do all owners of a reptile brain. And they are as much mammals as any clowder of suckling kittens. But that thinking brain up front is empty at first, and everything that ends up in there requires exposure, experience and effort.

Do you see? If tabula rasa implies that you taught yourself how to sweat, then it’s a joke – and claims about further fruits of the autonomous nervous system have been used to undermine the thinking brain for centuries. But if the blank slatists are willing to concede that all higher organisms are born with amazing abilities that are not derived from that individual animal’s own exposure, experience and effort, it’s easy enough to make a strong case for tabula rasa in the thinking brain.

That matters to me, because the implication is that the success or failure at ratiocination, for a particular human being, is the result of cultivation and effort, not talent or superior mental prowess. (more…)

Posted in Splendor!, ThriversEd | Leave a comment

#MyKindOfBenedy: Notes on a reconciliation with satire.

Posted on April 17, 2017 by Greg Swann

Just when you thought nothing could be more enduringly funny than the shopping mall choo-choo train itself…

1. As always, comedy is a misleading term, since you can make fun of people either as farce or as satire.

2. That comes down to love versus hate. If you love the people you’re having fun with, you’re making a farce. If you hate them – if you are flogging them in public – your opus is a satire.

3. Every farce will be a benedy in my formulation: The story arc will move from worse to better. Every satire will be a maledy – a tragedy of just desserts.

4. Going back five years, to Man Alive, I’ve done my best to reject satire, as a secondary consequence of rejecting all maledy. I am interested only in benedy in art, both in the art I make and the art I consume.

5. Even so, I love the story-stuff of satire much more than I do that of farce, as is easy enough to see in even the latter-day, kinder-gentler Willie stories.

6. The third act of any random maledy is the first act of a potentially-splendid benedy.

7. All of which comes back to love versus hate: I want a farce that feels like satire and yet pays off in full as benedy.

8. “Here’s what’s wrong,” is an essay, not a story. The story is here: “How I got things right.”

9. Accordingly, my reconciliation with satire starts here: If I’m not willing to dig deeply enough to love the people I’m writing about, I haven’t gotten to the story yet, anyway.

I have two Willie stories I’m playing with, two Traindancing stories. Willie is abducted by wannabe Jihadis, perhaps at Easter. And Willie is put on trial for the subversion of youth. I’m thinking there’s a third gauntlet in there, but I don’t know it yet, if there is.

Here’s what’s fun: The train. The train makes it easy to show what’s lovable about anyone – what is worth loving in each one of us. I like that story, too: Loki does benedy – with an affectionate (more…)

Posted in #MyKindOfBenedy, Poetry and fiction | 1 Comment

Discovering #MyKindOfBenedy: Who do you have to kill to find a good villain around here?

Posted on April 11, 2017 by Greg Swann
If This Picture Doesn\'t Get Into Explore, The Panda Gets It!
Everyone knows how to motivate a villain. You have him rub his hands together with an evil relish and snarl, “Nyar har har har!”Kaptain Kobold / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

I wrote this on April 11, 2012, three days after I had published Man Alive. I had no idea at the time how much more fecund that book was going to make my own intellectual life. I thought I was documenting what I had discovered. Instead, I ended up discovering so much more to document. The posts I have written about art are one example of that, but the underlying changes in my own ideas about art are more significant to me. Nota bene: The improvement in own’s own thinking over time is benedy-in-real-life. But Brother Willie and I have had a hard way to go, since I no longer want to write satire. That joke is on me, even so. Willie is an impossible satiric contradiction, an intentional Butters: He is morally-neutral not by accident of idiocy but by explicit intent. You see Willie discovering #MyKindOfBenedy over the years when he says, “But everybody’s gotta take a side.” I have notions about redeeming satiric forms with benedic endings, but those ideas are still percolating. Meanwhile, behold the Splendor of Willie. –GSS

I worked on the ideas that became Man Alive for more than thirty years, since I was nineteen years old. And the problem I started with was more practical than philosophical: I was a young wannabe novelist, and I could not for the life of me figure out how to motivate a villain.

That might sound silly to you. Everyone knows how to motivate a villain. You have him rub his hands together with an evil relish and snarl, “Nyar har har har!” You’ve seen it in the movies a million times. Does he need some back-story? His parents were rich but neglecting and the butler buggered him in the basement. What could be simpler?

Reality, as it turns out. I was living in New York City at that time, going to school full-time and running the (more…)

Posted in #MyKindOfBenedy, Poetry and fiction | 10 Comments

Five years of Man Alive summarized in four words: Look where you’re going!

Posted on April 10, 2017 by Greg Swann

Moral philosophy in one algorithm.

Church yesterday: Man Alive, my survival manual for the human mind, is five years old – and it is every day a better map to reality:

Posted in Splendor! | Leave a comment