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“If you’re his favorite skateboard, he’s a crystal vase to you, a thing to be treasured forever or shattered in an instant’s rage.”This story first appeared in Sun City, but it’s also collected in Loving Cathleen, a book about building a love to live up to. I have great ideas. You have money. We should trade.Photo by: Didriks

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

July 3, 2013

“What if…” I posed, “you had a skateboard you loved more than all the world?” I was talking to The Skatepunk, of course. He and My Lady Disdain, his sharp-tongued girlfriend, had met me at Duffeeland Dog Park in the late afternoon. They were snuggled into each other on the bench across the walk from mine. Naso was slowly meandering behind a dog she fancied, I hope immersing herself in a scent that smelled like home to her, a long-forgotten aroma of everyday perfection.

“When you skate on that board, every move you try comes easy. And when you compete, you always win. You tinker with it constantly, always keeping it tuned to perfect performance. You love it so much you have dreams about it.”

“You think you’re joking,” said My Lady Disdain, “but he has that skateboard.”

The Skatepunk smiled, half proud, half bashful. “I only bring it out for big events.”

“Can I borrow it?”

“Hell no!”

“I’ll take good care of it.”

“You can’t even skate.”

“But I’m going to Las Vegas when Naso dies. I think it would be cool to cruise down The Strip on a really bitchin’ skateboard…” I grinned so hard it hurt.

When he had stopped laughing, The Skatepunk said, “I don’t share that board with anyone.”

I nodded. “Now you understand extra-marital sex.”

WTF?! Both of them.

“Take that deck down to the skatepark, and don’t just share it, offer it up to anyone. Let anyone who wants to take a ride. If they scratch it, so what? If they beat it up, who cares? If they ruin it forever, what difference does it make?”

The horror on his face was a wonder to behold, and here’s why: You don’t understand something until you do, particularly if you’ve been (more…)

Why are these men smiling? Because they – and you – are no longer slaves to the Deep State’s perpetual war machine.

I wrote this little bit yesterday, for me eminently clarifying:

#Trump is not undoing @BarackObama. Not even #FDR, the Moby Dick of #ReaganRepublican dreams.

No, @realDonaldTrump is dismantling Woodrow Wilson’s legacy.

One hundred years of uninterrupted slavery to the rapacious, rent-seeking war machine is ENDING before your eyes.

What could be clearer? 😉

Okay, so I’ll do a little better here. The Trump Administration’s foreign policy is paleo-libertarian: Do as you choose in your own countries, but keep the trade routes open. All of this seems completely obvious to me, most of it foreseeable from the Neom announcement last fall. Trump’s plan is actually pretty simple:

Step 1. Obstacle removal.

Step 2. Incredible profits.

The obvious obstacle being removed is North Korea, but it’s really just one of three formerly-sysiphean boulders the president’s team is pulverizing. The chop for the remnants of the Axis of Evil was 70%/25%/5% – autonomy, survival and regime change, respectively. Saudi Arabia chose autonomy, hoping that Iran would get hind tit. North Korea toyed with snatching that booby prize, but managed to cling to a smiling survival instead. Iran will fall shortly – and Persia will rise again.

The incredible profits will result from a reordering of superpowers, adding an Israel-assisted Saudi Arabia as the fourth global policing power. The goal is unimpeded trade routes, with the world split into “streamlined” departments: To China go the Orientalists and their inscrutable ideograms, Russia and the U.S. will split The West by geography and the Saudis will contain Islam – and I expect Africa, as well.

My belief is that NSA or Five Eyes hacked the North Korea missile guidance systems – thus making Kim negotiable – which seems to suggest that Pakistan’s missiles may also be aimed only at Karachi. If that’s so, we can expect to see a denuclearized Pakistan sometime soon, (more…)

“I never had sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”

March 8, 1998

To be sung loud and fast, a sassy girl-group sound:

VERSE:
They say he’s a cruiser, a good-for-nothing user
They tell me he’s a tar-pit of deception and guile
But I can judge him better than the law of the letter
I sink into his wink because I’m stuck on his smile

        CHORUS:
        So I’m his co-dependent co-defendant
        Yeah, I’m the kind of girl he can count on
        I’m his co-dependent co-defendant
        He stands for everything I sit down on

VERSE:
He cheated on his wife but that’s the story of his life
But then he tripped on Linda Tripp and she pushed “record”
But they won’t take him to the cleaners for high crimes and misdemeanors
I don’t have Betty Currie’s worries, I’ll just fall on his sword

        CHORUS:
        And be his co-dependent co-defendant
        He’s finally found a girl he can count on
        I’m his co-dependent co-defendant
        He stands for everything I sit down on

    BRIDGE:
    My friends say, “Monica, Monica, you’re Betty not Veronica
    You need to have a practical plan!”
    I know it’s all true, but what else can I do?
    I’m just another little fish who’s been hooked by that man!

Extracted from Bubba:
How the Predator-in-Chief pulled it off.
Buy Bubba. Then: Bye, Bubba!

        CHORUS:
        ’Cause I’m his co-dependent co-defendant
        I’ll always be the girl he can count on
        I’m his co-dependent co-defendant
        He stands for everything I sit down on

        Oh yeah, he proudly stands
            He steadfastly stands
                He stands for everything I sit down on

I wrote a ton in 2017, lots of everything. Among other works, I published four new Willie books. They’re short – because I leave out all the boring stuff – but they’re cheap – because I want them to be read.

They’re cheap like greeting cards are cheap, and I wish y’all would deploy them that way: By sending my books as gifts to people who you know could profit by them. That kind of recommendation gets a book read – and that’s what matters.

These are the new books:

• Las Vegas Redemption: Pastor Trey Coyle and the reincarnation of Sarno’s Ghost. Jay Sarno’s Ghost takes you on a frolicking adventure in Las Vegas – with the world’s biggest televangelist, Pastor Trey Coyle. The yarn is pure farce, and it has nothing whatever to do with Pastor Joel Osteen.

• Traindancing: Bedtime stories for your inner child from The Mall of Misfit Families. Listen in on the thoughts of Loco Willie, the carney-in-kiddie-portions who runs the choo-choo train down at the mall: “Mock me if you like. I know I will. But this is loco engineering. This is how it’s done.”

• Dusty: An elegy of hope and love. Dusty is about a road trip – back from a funeral. And it’s a buddy story – about a dog. It won’t take you an hour to read, but it will breathe new life into your hopes – in languages living and dead.

• Bubba: How the Predator-in-Chief pulled it off. Watch as His Bubbaness, erstwhile Predator-in-Chief, takes you on a tour of the America he made for us: Sex scandals, political paralysis – Bush, Obama, Hillary, Trump – and more sex scandals.

Bubba is rough stuff, ideal for any political junkie still capable of laughter. The other three are benedies, redemption songs. They’re all built on Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie’s ham-on-wry sense of humor, and they’re peopled with peculiar people and precocious kids.

So: Please go buy, read, review and share some Willie today.

Nothing attracts like mutual attraction.Photo by: Kevin Johnston

Want proof? Turn off the heater before you go to bed tonight. If you are lucky enough to be happily enspoused, you’ll find a way to stay warm(er). And even if not, you’ll still be better off than reptiles and bugs – who are freezing to death by the billions right now.

Wait… Warm-bloodedness is not empathy!

That’s correct. Warm-bloodedness is evolution’s answer to the mass die-offs occasioned by cold-blooded errors of judgement. Birds and non-human mammals aren’t any less clueless, mind you. They’re just better equipped to deal with the consequences of ineptitude.

By internal temperature regulation, yes, but also by the brand new type of empathy strategy engendered and made possible by homeothermicity: Sharing body heat.

Birds of a feather will huddle together, and you can’t keep mammals from cuddling. That’s the origin of mutually-reciprocal empathy – the Sociable strategy – which is itself the source of storgic love – the enduring love of families.

The give-and-take of mammalian empathy is there from conception, with sharing of resources being the sine qua non of the gestation of birds and mammals. We feed our young after birth in hugely empathy-rich ways, and for all of our lives, we live as a part of a pack or clan or family.

Warm-blooded creatures thrive by mammalian empathy. They all deploy reptilian empathy among strangers, but the existence and persistence of the storgic community is caused solely by mammalian empathy – by practicing give-to-get and by taking enormous delight in the opportunity to give-to-get.

This is what we are, too, regardless of what we say about it. That’s why Ci (“Transreptiles and Borgbugs unite! You have nothing to lose but your survival strategy!”) is doomed as a cultural strategy: Mutually-repulsive empathy is hysterically (ahem!) infecund.

Every other argument I can make for Ds and against Ci or Dc is trumped by that simple fact: Nothing attracts like mutual attraction, and only Ds is enduringly mutually-attractive at every level of social interaction, from strangers becoming friends to neighbors cooperating in commerce or defense to loving families (more…)

“Whose Festivus do you have to grab to get some laughs around here?”

Cover illustration by the incomparable
DonkeyHotey | Creative Commons.

Bubba: How the Predator-in-Chief pulled it off.

What is it? Twenty years of brutal jokes – with songs!

As implausible as it might seem, a theme emerges from fifteen Willie stories written across twenty years: Hillary Clinton is a battered wife. It’s hard not to say “None so deserving,” but it’s there, regardless. Willie first saw it in 1998 – the garden party events he describes are all strictly factual, supported by contemporary photos and video. That much is not funny, but it’s there all the way to the end of the book.

Sad to say, there’s a movie in here. Manny Kant shines in the second act, which I had not foreseen. I wonder where his hands have been…

Buy the book. It only costs a buck, so that’s no objection. What’s left? Afraid you’ll learn something that makes your shoes pinch? Afraid you’ll laugh?

For all of me, I wish you would gift this book upstream to whomever you think it will amuse or annoy the most. Prometheus freed us from the gods, but it is laughter that frees us from tyrants.

When you mock Bubba, you mock ignominy, abomination, insolence and profanation.

What could be funnier than that?

You can’t win if Gus Hansen already did.Photo by: ND Strupler

Why would this work? Because Ci can easily be transcribed as “perfect planning” – and a good plan today beats a perfect plan tomorrow.

That’s the Madelyn Nguyen theory of egoism, and I like it so much that I wrote a song about it (with baritone backing vocals in parentheses):

You can’t win if Madelyn Nguyen already did.
    (You can’t win. If she just did.)
You can’t win if Madelyn Nguyen already did.
    (You can’t win. She just did.)
She’s a super-hero but when you look at her
  all you see is a kid.
    (You think. She’s just a kid.)

Here’s the deal: DISC-my-way is the game theory of everything, and, accordingly, it’s also really good for winning games.

Vide:

That’s the DISC of Poker, but it’s also the DISC of any game – from board games to salesmanship to romance. If values can be won or lost by skill or guile, this is how the spoils get spilled.

Understanding people is of less value in rigid, transparent games like Chess or Go – and this is why they are so beloved of Cautious temperaments.

Understanding people matters everything in Poker, and that’s why high-C’s try to play the game as rigidly as they can – the Sklansky strategy, tight-aggressive.

That’s their leak, though, as Gus Hansen lives to demonstrate. C is cautious, D is bold. C is deliberate and risk-verse. D is reckless. Hansen consistently kicks the asses of some of the best Ci players in professional Poker by being a Di with an Id affected table image. Who can get a read on a wild man? Who can even put him on cards?

And this may be the best long-term strategy for winning at board or card games. Don’t grind up against Ci’s, ever, not without huge pot-odds: They never tire of shaling away. But play as a Di and (more…)

In Latin we can say, “Educere est educare” – to bring up is to bring out – to cultivate your mind is to liberate it, to lead it forevermore away from the slavery of ignorance. No matter what your pedigree, unless you were very lucky you were cheated of an education when you were young. This is the year you can begin to amend that deficit.Photo by: Sodanie Chea

I guess it’s useful to exaggerate your opposition, but here’s the thing:

Everyone I remember from school was a fuck-up.

Start with a good solid two-thirds compliant drones, dutifully going through whatever motions seemed to be required. Maybe half of the rest were glib and lazy. Even the straight-A apple-polishers were just phoning it in, doing the minimum necessary to get the grade from the glib-and-lazy grown-up teaching the class.

Am I misrepresenting the world of education? Is there anything you can think of that you did in school that you’re truly proud of now. Away from athletics or the school play, was there anything in your academic life that you gave everything you had? Was there anyone else who did that?

Was there any class that you took – ever – where you had to bust ass every day or risk get hopelessly lost? And when you got to that class, was that the end of your forward progress in that discipline?

The kids from the hard side of the quad – the maths, the sciences – know what I’m talking about. The kids from the soft side of the quad – the arts, the social sciences – may be recalling a graceless exit from the maths and sciences.

But the truth is that virtually all of us were denied the kind of education that was a matter of expected routine for our grandparents. Partly this is our fault: Too often we were grade-greedy glib-and-lazy (more…)