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

Posted on August 30, 2013 by Greg Swann
Carved Marble Relief depicting tragic and comic masks Roman 2nd century CE
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 a tear of late about the dearth of conservative art. The fear is that the absence of what they see as conservative themes in popular art forms, especially television and cinema, serves to advance the slow march of Marxist tyranny.

They’re right, as far as they go. The trouble is, they don’t go far enough — and they’re going the wrong way, anyway.

To begin with, the word ‘conservative’ is useless. John McCain is a ‘conservative’ who never met a government program he couldn’t grow into a malicious monster. Rand Paul or Ted Cruz might be more ideal to Breitbart readers, but they are still, most fundamentally, advocates of a leaner, meaner style of Marxism. The great ‘conservative’ electoral cry is “Less free stuff — now with extra sneering!” I can’t imagine why anyone would expect that to sell. In fiction, in a thriller, that kind of ‘message’ would be a false-flag conspiracy: The seemingly hapless, helpless, clueless enemies of evil are actually its secret allies.

It gets worse. Much of the art would-be anti-Marxists celebrate is itself fundamentally pro-tyranny. War movies and action flicks are all about vengeance and retribution — you know, the stuff that Classical Liberal institutions exist to eliminate. Still worse, superhero adventures document the lives of pathetic wraiths who are doomed to eternal slavery in penance for their superior martial or mental prowess.

Instead of conservative versus liberal, here are some better terms for discriminating among types of art: Pro-freedom versus pro-tyranny, individualist versus collectivist, egoistic versus anegoistic. Dividing things along those much clearer lines helps to separate what liberty-seeking people might hope to see in works of art, and distinguishes the kinds of artworks that are most likely to draw people away from the tyrannical/collectivist/anegoistic ideals that dominate popular art right now.

Here is an even better dividing line: Comedy versus tragedy. By comedy I don’t mean farce but simply narratives (more…)

Posted in #MyKindOfBenedy, Poetry and fiction | 9 Comments

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

Posted on August 6, 2013 by Greg Swann

“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 more devastating regrets – are not to be found on the floors of the casino, not on the Sucker side of the table and not on the house side of the table. But the very best future a Mark can pray for, when he steps up to gamble, is to lose slowly. He knows he’s going to lose, no matter what bullshit he spews, and his big play is to make his pain last as long as possible. “Some fun, huh?”

“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 more devastating regrets – are not to be found on the floors of the casino, not on the Sucker side of the table and not on the house side of the table. But the very best future a Mark can pray for, when he steps up to gamble, is to lose slowly. He knows he’s going to lose, no matter what bullshit he spews, and his big play is to make his pain last as long as possible.
 
“Some fun, huh?”

Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie’s got the ramblin’ blues. His bloodhound, his long-time boon companion Naso, has just died, and Willie’s gone to Las Vegas to regain his footing.

What does he see in his wanderings? You’ll have to read his new book of stories, Losing Slowly, to see everything he turned up, but here are some highlights:

* How can a guy go from being a busted gambler to a broke cab-driver to the headliner in a comedy club?

* Does Jay Sarno’s ghost do a nightly patrol of The Strip like a mysterious Batman-on-the-come?

* How does anybody have the stones to dedicate a book to a billionaire – and then make the dedication pay off?

Losing Slowly is not what you’re expecting, a promise Brother Willie always delivers on:

“Upstairs in the Shoppes, every damn jewelry store is vastly empty, just like everywhere else, but unlike the other miles-of-malls at casino-hotel-resorts, the less-tony retailers were doing real business.

“I put my money where my mouth is, too: I actually left cash behind in a casino, something I make a stout effort never to do.

“I bought my wife a gift, that’s what happened. Huge, momentous story, right? This is the Willie world: I don’t go to your church. If you want twelve dead bodies a page, with the bad guys flossing their teeth with their victims’ veins, you bought the wrong book. I’m interested in (more…)

Posted in Poetry and fiction | Leave a comment

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

Posted on July 23, 2013 by Greg Swann
New York New York in Las Vegas
“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 know I can win my money back’ and the boxman says, ‘That’s the kind of optimism that built this town.’ And the guys actually thanks him for the good advice!”Werner Kunz / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

“So I’ve got these three broads at my table — MILFs, you know, but holding up great, and strictly black chip — and they start trading cards around. ‘You’ve got fourteen, and I’ve got a six. Will that help?’ I say, ‘Ladies, that’s cheating.’ ‘Oh, we’re not cheating. We just like to help each other.’ And I believe that, because their mistakes are too perfect to be planned out. I go, ‘It doesn’t matter. You can’t trade cards. You can’t even touch the cards.’ I call the floorman over to watch — not them, me. When people cheat that stupidly, it’s gotta be an inside job, right? Anyway, it’s not as much fun for them if they can’t lose as a team, so they’re up and off, but they toke me one chip each — three hundred bucks. Made my week.”

This was said by The Blackjack Dealer, obviously, and thus will we denominate this particular card. He was one of three dealers I met at the Race and Sports Book at LVH — The Las Vegas Hotel and Casino. LVH is that tall poppy behind the Convention Center that used to be known as The Las Vegas Hilton, before that The International, all of that before the current owners came up with a name that distinguishes the property from nothing. The LVH Sports Books has been popular with people who work in The Resort Corridor — their name for The Strip — since The Stardust, home of the original Las Vegas sports book, was imploded. The reason for the popularity is exactly the same: Easy in-and-out surface-level parking.

The three dealers were all (more…)

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.

Posted on July 14, 2013 by Greg Swann

“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 looking for girls.” Both of these observations are true, but The World Series crowd was at least twenty-five-to-one male, and maybe closer to fifty-to-one.

“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 looking for girls.” Both of these observations are true, but The World Series crowd was at least twenty-five-to-one male, and maybe closer to fifty-to-one.Extracted from the Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie book Losing Slowly, available at Amazon.com. I have great ideas. You have money. We should trade.

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

I saw her legs first, and, mercy!, that was plenty. They were long and tanned and ornamented only by the flimsiest of sandals. When she stood up from her seat in the taxi, I could not do anything but watch her. It looked like she was wearing nothing but a cover-up, like a diaphanous nightie, really, in a creamy golden brown. She had on shorts — I peered carefully to be sure — but they were short-shorts (or perhaps short-short-shorts), quite a bit shorter than the very short hem of her cover-up. Her breasts were everything you would expect and more — whether natural or man-made is yours to decide. Long brown hair, halfway down her back, and a piquant little face, simultaneously cherubic and charmingly feral.

In other words: Simply Gorgeous — and thus will she be denominated. A Las Vegas showgirl? Maybe. But in Sin City not every girl who looks like she could carry twenty pounds of ostrich on her head works under a room-sized chandelier. Had I been asked to wager, I would have put my money on trophy wife. She looked too much like money to grub away her days chasing paychecks and tips.

This was all happening in the parking lot at the pavilions of the Rio All-Suite Las Vegas Hotel and Casino, home of The World Series of Poker. I had self-parked, sneaking onto the property by way of the unattended employee’s gate to try to get a parking space less than half-a-mile away from the action. She came by cab, and hence she (more…)

Posted in Poetry and fiction, This is Vegas, Willie stories | Leave a comment

Do you hope to save your loved ones from tyranny? First you have to turn around…

Posted on July 11, 2013 by Greg Swann
Jailhouse rock
Tramps like us, everywhere else in the world, live in very grim prison cells and supplement their diets with captured insects. Our good fortune is not so much that our government is more free, but simply that its functionaries are typically so lazy. Here’s to lazy tyrants! May they die in bed – the sooner the better.

Funky64 (www.lucarossato.com) / Foter / CC BY-NC-ND

This is me, in a comment to a free-market anarchist I’ve known so long I can’t remember how, on the plight of anarchocapitalists in the rest of the world, a fate I still somehow hope to avoid here at home:

Tramps like us, everywhere else in the world, live in very grim prison cells and supplement their diets with captured insects. Our good fortune is not so much that our government is more free, but simply that its functionaries are typically so lazy. Here’s to lazy tyrants! May they die in bed — the sooner the better.

The truth is that the very few people who breathe our very rarified air are viewed as a harmless nuissance — or even as ultimately-beneficial cranks — by the ruling class. This is changing now, and it will only get worse for us and for everyone else in due course. We’ve run this dumbass mutual-theft-ring game again and again and it always ends the same way.

That is, unless we reverse our course. If you read what I write and you wonder what the FAQ it is I’m really saying, I wrote a hymn about it:

Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.

We do not have to go the way of Soviet Russia, of Nazi Germany, of Red China, of the Khmer Rouge. But if we are to avoid that fate, we must take one vital step immediately:

We have to turn around.

Read the book to find out how to do it. Not just your life but the life of everyone and everything you love quite literally depends on it.

Posted in Splendor! | Leave a comment

Random observations on the Sin City scene.

Posted on July 9, 2013 by Greg Swann

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 difference — but I’m not prepared to make any comprehensive pronouncements. These are simply things that I thought were interesting enough to take pictures of:


One things that has popped out at me again and again is the sorry state of second-tier commercial real estate near the big-money properties. Out in the ’burbs everything looks like it should — like Orange County. But just off The Strip, on Paradise, on Koval and in other neighborhoods very near the biggest of the gaming towers, you’ll see dumps just like this, which is within walking distance of the Stratosphere. Plausibly, the dirt is worth $10,000 a square inch, and yet thousands acres — right in the heart of everything — not only go to waste, whoever owns them lets them go to ruin.


Likewise, graffiti is everywhere on commercial properties. This wall is at a Wendy’s — one that has no owner, apparently. The awning at the next property got it, too, and the tower in the background is part of The Palms. These sorts of signs of neglect are everywhere. I’m seeing a lot of commercial landscaping given over to thatch. Thatch is like weeds, except weeds don’t come with an elaborate rationale. My expectation is that thatch cuts gardener headcounts by a lot, even though it looks like hell.


But not all the news is dour. They’re spending money Downtown. This will be the starting point for a zipline that will run under the canopy on Fremont Street from Neonopolis, at Las Vegas Boulevard, all the way to Main Street. It would be wicked cool to soar through the air while the light show is going on overhead — so I’ll bet they won’t allow that. Even so, it’s something new Downtown…


And new begets new, or as new as Downtown dares to get. The Golden Nugget spent a ton of money adding a new (more…)

Posted in Splendor!, This is Vegas | Leave a comment

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

Posted on July 9, 2013 by Greg Swann

Uncle Willie wants 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 stories Willie wrote as his ten-year boon companion, his big gangly Bloodhound bitch, Naso, scampers off this mortal coil.

And that’s what everyone needs, a book about death. But wait! There’s more. Sun City is a book about love, the love of a man for his dog, and the enduring love of families wherever it is found.

Here are three groups of people I can think of who should read this book: People who love dogs — and I mean all of them. Folks who have retired from work or are contemplating it. And broken-hearted lovers who can’t seem to keep from making the same mistakes again and again. Parents and grandparents are encouraged to discuss the ideas in Sun City with your young charges. You could spare them the multiple-divorce battlefields the Baby Boomers have slogged through.

Here’s the width, breadth and depth of the Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie sales pitch: If reading contemporary fiction leaves you feeling soiled, you’re going to love this book. It will make you cry, but it will leave you cleansed.

Posted in Love and marriage, Splendor!, The Naso Diaries | Leave a comment

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

Posted on July 8, 2013 by Greg Swann

The view from my fleabag.

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 some miles behind me.

Last Thursday, on Independence Day, my dog Naso died — you can read about that in my book Sun City. Friday morning, my wife Adora and I buried her on a hillside outside of Show Low, on ground she used to love to run. By Saturday, I was publishing the book about her death, and on Sunday morning — this morning as I write this — I hit the bricks, Las Vegas bound.

Brother Willie is on the road again, but it’s a very different Willie this trip. I have a wife now, and a home to return to. Tramps like us, baby we were born to run — but not so much anymore. I’m not gone for good, like I always would have been before, but I don’t want to be. I want to wander; it’s what I do. But I’m tickled at the idea of having a home to go to, and I plan to go home often, once a month at least, just for the experience of having a home to go to.

And I’m too suburbanized anyway. Every day I can, I get up early and ride my bicycle around Sun City. I have a 2.5 mile route I cover in 2, 3, or 4 laps for exercise. I call that one The Bolivar Shuffle — practically speaking because I can’t think about something without giving it a name. I have another route called The Oakridge Diversion that I ride slowly, just as a diversion; a lot of stories get worked out on that route. Either way, I am always the same old Willie, even though I know I look like a pampered yuppie to the Mexican gardeners who tend to Sun City’s pampered lawns, but — face it — they’re not entirely wrong.

Every time I’ve stayed anywhere a while, I’ve always bought a (more…)

Posted in Poetry and fiction, This is Vegas, Willie stories | Leave a comment

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

Posted on July 5, 2013 by Greg Swann

Why make the book free? To find out if you know the difference between price and value...

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 of classic Willie yarns.

The book is called Free Willie and the title is precise, concise and exact: The price for the book is nothing. The zip file you will download at the link contains the book in Kindle, iBook and PDF formats, to suit your eReading preferences.

We’re sampling from all over Willie’s storied career, from broad farce to bitter satire, from squalor to redemption, from treacly parents to the sweetest children you will ever meet. There are even a couple of holiday stories in there.

Here’s the full line-up:

  1. Anastasia in the light and shadow.
  2. How the bank robbed Bonnie and Clyde.
  3. Superman.
  4. Freeing Jefferson’s slaves.
  5. Xavier’s destiny.
  6. Tête-a-tête in Tombstone.
  7. Prufrock’s honor…
  8. The Desperation Waltz.
  9. Cinderella’s memories of the zoo.
  10. Mary Canary on her way to feed the pigeons.
  11. A canticle for Kathleen Sullivan.
  12. How to slay dragons.
  13. Uncle Willie’s manifesto: If the words aren’t worth etching into stone, get someone else to write them.

Click the link to download your free copy of Free Willie. And please feel free to share the link, this post or the zip file with your friends and loved ones. A Willie story is the stuff that sticks with you, and shouldn’t hoard that kind of torment to yourself.

Posted in Poetry and fiction | Leave a comment

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

Posted on July 4, 2013 by Greg Swann
Canon Powershot G7 review
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 patio at sunset. For the rest of the world it’s a dream vacation, or even just an impossible dream. Here it is everyday life, the normal, the banal, the to-be-expected. Not everyone here is rich, rich, rich — I’m definitely not — but Del Webb was right on the money in his own big dreams: There’s gold in them thar golden years.

kevin dooley / Foter / CC BY

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

I sing of Sun City and the dog…

There is no place like this anywhere, not even other so-called ‘active adult’ communities. Those came later and they came smaller, as little niche neighborhoods carved out of bigger towns — like Surprise, just to the west of us. But Del Webb took a big dream to James Boswell, convincing him to put up a dusty ghost town he owned in exchange for 49% of the Sun City Corporation, and a geriatric metropolis was born.

Sun City has its own retail; you don’t have to leave town just to get a burger. Sun City has its own hospital and its own libraries. It has no schools, of course, since the age-restriction is not truly in favor of the elderly, but rather against school-age children, but the rec centers offer classes in everything — and you can set up any they’ve omitted, if you like. Sun City has golf like you never imagined it, with meandering, circular streets threading between the fairways and high-pressure irrigation systems shooting water out in high wide arcs that make miniature rainbows in the bright sunshine all day long, everywhere you look. Sun City has children, even — in small numbers, in small doses, on rare occasions — and children in Sun City are always perfectly turned out and always on their very best behavior.

Sun City has a Fire Department but no Police Department. Why? Because Sun City has no (more…)

Posted in Poetry and fiction, The Naso Diaries, Willie stories | Leave a comment

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

Posted on July 3, 2013 by Greg Swann
Muffin // Our new kitten
“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 they actively work to undermine or destroy the family or other group they once belonged to. But normally when love fades, people just drift away.”

Merlijn Hoek / Cat Photos / CC BY-NC-ND

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

“Took you long enough.” So said My Lady Disdain.

I blinked. I blinked at the sudden change in the light, coming indoors from the bright sunlight, but I also blinked at the challenge. But I knew what she meant, and it’s hard to beat the truth, so I said, “I got distracted.”

Just me, no Naso. My Adoracion is home for the week, and I wasn’t sure my gangly little girl would be welcome at a UPS store. Sun City is the dog-friendliest big city I’ve ever lived in, but there are limits to everything.

Just not there. My Lady Disdain was strictly business, standing behind the counter, her long brown hair just so, her grass-green eyes taking in everything. But off in a corner was the Skatepunk, sprawled on the floor being mauled by three kittens — a black longhair, a black shorthair and a shorthaired tuxedo.

My Lady Disdain is the Skatepunk’s girlfriend, of course. I’ve been planning to meet her and not getting it done for a month. I have an excuse: I got distracted.

“‘Lean-look’d’? Where’d you get that? Didn’t they teach spelling at your school?”

Talking to someone today who has read something I wrote yesterday is disconcerting. I don’t know that I can get used to it. And I didn’t even know how to begin to address the question.

Luckily, I didn’t have to. From the back room of the store, a woman’s voice said, “It’s from Richard the Second, dear.” The voice acquired a body, a slim woman with snow-white hair tied up in a bun behind her head. Her eyes were blue and piercing, and they danced as she spoke: “‘And lean-look’d prophets whisper fearful (more…)

Posted in Poetry and fiction, The Naso Diaries, Willie stories | Leave a comment

Mary Canary on her way to feed the pigeons.

Posted on June 30, 2013 by Greg Swann

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 much effort that takes.

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 much effort that takes.

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

“I married myself a quiet man. He told me so himself, many times. When he was drunk, he’d shout it to the world.”

Mary Canary said that. She says stuff like that just to make sure no one’s listening. And no one on the bus was, no one except me.

And Mary Canary is not her real name; she just calls herself that. Her real name is Maria Carnase, and I had to work on her quite a while to get that out of her. She’s not quite homeless, not quite penniless, not quite elderly and only mildly odorous. She’s bone thin and desiccated, and her flowered tent dress fit her like a tent. Her hair is not quite white and she wears it under a net. She had on cheap sneakers and compression hose bunched up at the ankles; seemingly, there was no flesh on her legs for the hose to compress. She has a bus pass and a mission. The bus pass is paid for by the taxpayers, but the mission is all her own.

“I like the sound of a pedal steel guitar. It makes me think of a cat curling up for an ear-scratching.”

A college girl with a black ponytail stared hard at her paperback book. An office geek whistled softly through his teeth and looked every which way except at Mary Canary.

“When it gets too quiet, I can barely hear. I can’t hear myself sigh for the roar of the silence.”

A very tall, very thin black man got up and walked to the front of the bus. He stood hanging from a pole as if he were about to get off, but he didn’t.

“If I look behind my eyes, I can see the naked face of god.”

A portly little man who had gained a pound or two since (more…)

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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…)

Posted in Poetry and fiction, The Naso Diaries, Willie stories | Leave a comment

“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…)

Posted in Poetry and fiction, The Naso Diaries, Willie stories | Leave a comment

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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