A Bloodhound’s arrogance stumblin’ on the heart of Saturday night

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Cross your fingers, Cathy may have brought home a $600,000 listing today. As my contribution to our household finances, I lassoed a $50,000 prize of my own. Mine will be fun for the whole family though: We’re going to discuss it here as a unique marketing problem. Why unique? It’s a vacant lot with a structure on it. It’s a tear-down that can’t be torn down. It’s a certified antiquity with no discernible historic value. In short: It’s a challenge.

Why did I take the listing? Because I’m committed to the idea that marketing real estate is not fundamentally different from marketing anything else. I believe I can target-market this outrageously anomalous property and get it sold. I think this will be a fun exercise, a chance to explore radically different ideas about selling real property.

I linked today to a post I wrote more than a year ago. Like this post, it has that strangely disorganized cohesion of a weblog entry — part essay, part letter to a beloved friend — but I think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever written here. I reread it today, and Teri tells us in a comment that she did, too.

Here’s the best of it:

A Bloodhound’s virtues are genetic accidents, but that doesn’t make them less than perfectly admirable, whether evidenced in the dog or anthropomorphized and expressed in thoroughly conscious human behavior. Brought up right, a Bloodhound is a natural alpha, regal and indomitable. The dog will move with a lanky, un-self-conscious arrogance that is simply heart-breakingly beautiful to look upon: This what a thriving organism looks like.

I am steadfastly, philosophically opposed to the idea of humility. I think it is one of many evil ideas foisted off on us by malefactors who love us best at our absolute worst. To say to me, “You’re arrogant,” or, “you have a big ego,” is no reproach. On the one hand, it is a statement of obvious fact. But on the other, it puts me on my guard against you. A healthy, normal human being moves and acts and thinks and speaks with the lanky arrogance of a healthy, normal Bloodhound. When people don’t behave that way, I want to know why. When they affect to preach against healthy, normal human behavior, I go on defense — and not by half-measures.

[….] People repeat what they’ve been told their whole lives — monkey-see, monkey-do — for no reason they can name. They have habituated emotional reactions to behaviors they have been told since childhood are wrong without ever puzzling out what is right, what is wrong, and what their habituated emotional reactions have to do with either. None of this means anything to me. Either you can defend your position in cogent reason, or I am occupied elsewhere. I know why my lanky arrogance is better for me, in the context of my own one irreplaceable life, and there is nothing anyone can say to persuade me to hate my life in other people’s behalf.

Even so, this makes for a good lesson in weblogging. Art is social, and a secondary objective of any work of art — even a work of art as banal as a weblog post — is to elicit a response. Not simply a comment, mind you, not the enblogged equivalent of a high-five, but an authentic, heart-felt response: “Thank you so much for saying that!” “Oh, what crap!!” “I thought I was the only person who felt this way!” “Your unwillingness to kneel to the vicious trolls I affect to worship as gods leads me to unpleasant doubts about their divinity, which I am obliged to blame on you.” Oh, wait, that last was a translation of email I get all the time…

In fact, other people’s responses to your work should never be a primary consideration to you. The writing is either good or it isn’t. But if you are not eliciting emotion-laden responses from your readers, what you are doing is brochure-production, not weblogging.

But, in any case, if you feel a strong urge to tell me that I am as arrogant as a normal, healthy Bloodhound, regal and indomitable — what can I say in reply except, “Thanks!”

And for Teri, proof that Tom Waits can be sweet and sentimental and touching:

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