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There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Egoism in Action (page 6 of 26)

Realtor, Associate Broker

January 1, 2012

Me in 2012: Writing Splendor’s sound-track, among other things.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’ve been living for years now with my daily calendar system of staying focused on my goals. Some months I do better, some I do worse, but having a regular agenda has proved fruitful for me.

These are my daily goals:

  • Work-out with free weights
  • Walk with Cathleen and the dogs
  • Write or update software
  • Blog or write essays or Willie stories
  • Practice the guitar

Software and writing came and went, strong and weak, in 2011, but the guitar got the benefit of end-of-day exhaustion almost every day: Mindless sitcoms on the TV, internet radio playing in my office, eye-candy on the iPad and “a Telecaster through a Vibralux turned up to ten.”

I love it, to say the truth, especially the sound of a solid-body electric amped up very loud but played very quietly. This is what made those Chicago blues gods such great underpants gnomes, and it’s the trick the British blues-rock gods missed when they doubled the tempo on all those old riffs and called it rock ‘n’ roll. I feel sorry for poor Cathleen, who by now has heard the I,IV,V blues played crudely in at least half of its infinite variations. But it works for me so well that sometimes I take pity on her and play through a headphone amp. This also promotes dancing — by me, that is, since I’m self-contained and free to move where I will.

But I’m wary of it, too, because the guitar gives me two benefits I must always find in my work: A creative outlet and something to do with my hands. I don’t want to give it up. To the contrary, I think I might take up the piano, as well, this year, as a looping and recording platform. My solution is to learn to write songs. I know I can do this, but by now it is possible to carry the song-writing process all the way through to a marketable demo — or even a release-ready recording. I have no desire to perform, but I would love to find an ambitious act to feed tunes to.

My other big blue-sky project for the year is to Read more

December 31, 2011

Courtney at the speed of life

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

“Lord-a-mercy!” I said in my thickest southern drawl. “Somebody tell god to take the rest of the week off. He has made perfection, and there ain’t no topping that!”

The beautiful blonde woman scowled and blushed at the same time. It made her look seventeen again.

“Where is your charming husband? I can’t believe he’d ever dare to leave your side.”

She shook her head gravely, and maybe that was my cue to lay off. Or maybe not…

“Well, tell me what your boyfriend looks like, then. So I’ll know who to run from.”

She chuckled. “No boyfriend.”

“Well, then, the next man that asks, you tell him I’m sprouting gray hairs in patches and I carry a little paunch. I’m half-a-step slower than I never was. I’m ugly as sin, and I stink something awful toward the end of the day. You tell him that’s my description.”

She drew a finger across her eyebrow, the hair so fine it was almost white. Her eyes were blue and deeper than a quarry lake, alive with the light of mischief. “Am I to take that as an offer?”

I nodded gravely. “What fool could pass on perfection?”

She smiled a wistful little half-smile. A woman with a secret, a woman with a story to tell. “I think it was you…”

I wanted to stay and talk but somebody pulled me away. It was a New Year’s Eve party at my sister’s house. I was the guest of honor, the prodigal son returned, and I hadn’t seen some of the revelers for twenty years. I kept getting bounced around the room, passed like the torch of sobriety from one drunk to the next. But my eyes always sought her out, sought her supple perfection amidst all that was chaotic and deformed. She moved like liquid glass, like a cat, like a leopard. Her hands preceded her always, and she caressed everything with long, slender fingers. It was as though she had the power of vision in her fingertips, and she saw more than you or I will ever see with mere eyes.

She moved, and she graced the universe with Read more

December 31, 2011

How to slay dragons

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

And now I am a man-killer.

We live with the consequences of our choices, and we cannot fail to live with all the consequences of all our choices. Sic semper nobis, sic etiam mihi. Thus always to us, thus even to me.

Your money? Or your life? Your mind – the means of your life? Or your life – the end of your mind’s devising? Lie or die? Can any such choice be made? And if it can’t – what then?

What if you choose neither?

What then?

I got mugged, that’s what happened. Or almost mugged, anyway. On New Year’s Eve of all days, the very last day of the bloodiest century in human history.

I live on the edge of a world you barely know about, that place you read about in the newspaper, that fetid cavern that seems to house everything that is vicious and venomous and vile. I’m not interested in vice except as the object of derision, which is why I’m on the edge of that world. But I know the price of living where you do instead, and I choose not to pay it.

So I was out on New Year’s Eve. Not out partying, not out driving drunk, not out shooting off fireworks or shooting off my mouth. I was out because that’s where I am almost all of the time, out walking the empty streets.

Since before Thanksgiving I had been wandering within a mile or so of a big-city shopping mall. Not for any reason, but simply because I lacked the reason to go somewhere else. I see your story in what you do, in how you behave. If your story interests me I will stick around to watch you. Until I understand you. Or until I think I do. Or until I get bored.

This is a fact, and it might be news to you: Stray dogs don’t stray far. The population of vagrants who infest the neighborhood around a big-city shopping mall is pretty stable. Homeless people, winos, addicts, runaways – you think they come and go. But in fact mostly they come and stay. Read more

December 24, 2011

A canticle for Kathleen Sullivan

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

I got to the hospital after visiting hours, but the nurse led me to the room anyway. “There hasn’t been anyone,” she confided.

I pursed my lips in grim acknowledgment. “That’s why I’m here.”

Inside the room the patient looked like purple death. It was a critical-care room, bright and white and cheerfully clinical. The bed was surrounded by apparatus, with lines and leads and probes and IV tubes running to him. The only unbruised part of him that I could see were his eyes, and his eyes were more deeply wounded than anything.

I’ll tell you his story, but I won’t tell you his name. His name is yours. His name is mine. His name is legion…

I pulled up a chair and got as close to the bed as I could. I wanted to see his eyes. I wanted him to see mine. His jaw was wired and he was breathing though a plastic tube mounted in his throat, which makes for a fairly one-sided conversation.

“I just came from the funeral,” I said. “Biggest one I’ve ever seen. The procession must have been two miles long. Kathleen Sullivan, mother of six, grandmother of two, with two more on the way, loving wife of Brian Sullivan – in the newspaper it’s just something that’s there, like the basketball scores or the stock tables. People die every day. People are born every day. It doesn’t seem to matter very much.”

I shrugged. “I think it does. I’ll tell you a story: About six months ago there was a woman driving down Endicott Avenue. Driving very safely, five miles an hour below the speed limit, doing everything just exactly right. There were some schoolboys riding their bikes on the sidewalk beside her, and, all at once, one of the boys decided to dart out into the street, right in front of her car. She stood on the brake pedal, but it was already too late. Screech, crunch, tragedy. The boy was killed instantly.

“She saw it, of course. His little schoolfriends saw it. Half a block away was the crossing guard, and she had Read more

November 24, 2011

A dumpster diver’s Christmas

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

I can be counted upon to walk, after all.

When everybody’s nowhere and even the laundromats are empty. When the respectable stores are closed and the line at the 24-Hour Slurp ‘n’ Burp is 15 deep with people craving cold beer and hot salsa and high-octane unleaded. When there’s one lonely mailman in an immense empty truck delivering insanely last-minute gifts sent via God-Help-Me-If-I-Screw-It-Up-Again Express Mail. When the streets are empty and the highways are empty and the parking lots are empty and, for once, even the bars are empty — I can be counted upon to walk. You’re at home with the yule log blazing, with a glazed ham baking, with a Bordeaux breathing, with the children seething to tear into that cache of treasures parked beneath the tree. And Uncle Willie’s out walking on Christmas Eve, dragging his pencil on the pavement for no good reason at all.

“Storm windows,” John Prine sings. “Gee, but I’m getting old. Storm windows, keep away the cold.” And that’s a silly enough thought in the great outdoors. I was cutting through an apartment complex and the closed-for-the-holidays supermarket next door had left its parking lot speakers blaring. And the radio station was playing a song they’d never play if they thought anyone was listening.

I can hear the wheels of automobiles
so far away, just moving along through the drifting snow.
It’s times like these, when the temperatures freeze
I sit alone, looking at the world through a storm window.
Down on the beach, the sandman sleeps.
Time don’t fly, it bounds and leaps.
The country band, it plays for keeps.
They play it so slow…

I was about twenty feet away from a big blue dumpster and I heard a rustle. You can take the boy out of the city, but you can’t take away the boy’s revulsion for rats, and I was suddenly in the mood to be walking elsewhere. But then there was a big tumble-rumble-boom, something big knocking into the steel walls of the dumpster, and I knew it wasn’t a rat.

And I knew what it was, too, and so do you. We call them Read more

November 1, 2011

The role of information hiding in keeping all of us enslaved to the state.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is from my book Janio at a Point. I wrote this in 1988 as a sort of blueprint to Agorism, anarcho-capitalism. It questions everything, which is why its proscriptions often meet resistance from people who are in love with human freedom except when it’s inconvenient or prevents them from pushing other people around. I would write the book differently today — and I plan to rewrite it before I die — but there is almost nothing I would change in its philosophy.

 

Information Hiding

We have looked at a number of the obviously tragic consequences of government, but there are others of which we can take account that are not so obvious. You can call it “beating a dead horse” if you want, a Madness. So be it. I want to make sure that horse stays dead…

All of these non-obvious effects are the result of what I call Information Hiding. We can easily see that government commits crimes: it taxes, regulates, conscripts, murders — all in a day’s work. And there is no barrier to our noticing that the state is lousy at keeping Crime from occurring and recovering losses. What is not so easy to notice is the way the government, by its crimes, contributes to non-governmental crimes…

This is no absolution. The man who wields a gun deserves to be shot. If he is misled by the state into thinking that this is an intelligent solution to the problem of survival, it is still only he who is in charge of his brain. It is still only he who motivates himself to pick up that gun. No matter what “egged him on” and how, it is still only he who is acting. If he commits a crime, he is at fault.

But it is worthwhile to look to the actions of government, to see if they do induce people to commit crimes. I say they do, and, moreover, that the actions of government tend to dilute the value of self-preservation and self-love. Beating a dead horse though it may be, I say that the idea of government is at war with human Read more

October 26, 2011

Real estate licensing laws are a criminal conspiracy against the consumer created by and for the benefit of a cartel.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me writing in June of 2007. Someone linked to it from Twitter yesterday, and I read it for the first time in years. The argument holds up — there has never been any attempt at rigorous refutation — but it’s even more interesting now that America has discovered what Sarah Palin and others are calling “crony capitalism” — the pandemic affliction I call Rotarian Socialism or simply rent-seeking.

When I wrote this, I was sure that the real estate licensing laws had nothing to fear. Things have changed. For a first thing, when state governments have to choose between marginal departments and continuing to provide a food dole to reliable voters, the state department of real estate could see huge budget cuts. But even better, sooner or later it will dawn on people that the only way to push “businesspeople” like the NAR off the taxpayer’s tit is to repeal all commercial regulation.

That’s a game-changer. If you’re good at actually delivering value to your clients, so much the better for you. The free market rewards virtue. And if you’ve been depending on the NAR and all those huge stacks of rent-seeking legislation for your income — good luck at your next job… –GSS

 
Real estate licensing laws are a criminal conspiracy against the consumer created by and for the benefit of a cartel

When I walk into a supermarket, the first thing I look at are the floors. If they aren’t buffed to a blinding glow, I walk right back out. Why? Because if the manager isn’t staying on top of the floor maintenance, he isn’t staying on top of anything else, either. Without doubt, I am “protected” by vast armies of federal, state and local food cops, but it turns out that they are not willing to get food poisoning in my place. If I fail to guard my own self-interest, the courts might make me (or my heirs) whole — after-the-fact. But nothing can protect me if I won’t protect myself.

Surely you effect many similar sorts of “consumer protection” in your own behalf, possibly believing in your heart that the Read more

September 5, 2011

Splendor on — and in spite of — Labor Day.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is me looking back on looking back on a Labor Day a long time ago. The first extract was written on Labor Day, 2005, as the City of New Orleans was demonstrating for all of us that dependence on government is a fatal error. The second extract was written a year or two before that. And the Labor Day I am talking about there must have been eleven or twelve years ago. Even so, every bit of this is perfectly apposite to the world we live in now — more is the pity.

This is me from elsewhen. I think about this every year at Labor Day. I spent much of the weekend working on business planning issues, macro, micro and meta. I remember from the days when I had a job how much I relished long weekends, because I could build so much on vast tracts of uninterrupted time. I did a bunch of money work last week, but my weekend was virtually my own — to fill with the work that too often takes a back seat to money work. Off and on we had Fox News on in the office, and the whining, pissing and moaning was an effective counterpoint to my entire way of life. My world is where the Splendor is, no alternatives, no substitutions, no adulterations, no crybaby excuses:

The time of your life is your sole capital. If you trade that time in such a way that you get in exchange less than you really want, less than you might actually have achieved, you have deliberately cheated yourself. You have acted to your own destruction by failing to use your time to construct of your life what you want most and need most and deserve most. You have let your obsession or anger — over what amounts to a trivial evil in a world where people are shredded alive — deprive you of all of the rest of your values. This is anegoic, acting contrary to the true needs of the self.

One of my favorite memories is of a Labor Day years ago. My son Read more

September 3, 2011

Unchained melody: Robert Earl Keen, Feelin’ good again.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

This is my kind of country song, a celebration of what human social interaction can be and should be.

This is what Don Reedy comes to BloodhoundBlog for. Teri Lussier, too. Al Lorenz, as well, I think, all of them in their own ways, along with a few other folks.

The funny part is, I’m actually pretty poor at delivering that experience here.

That feelin’-good-again feeling comes not so much from BloodhoundBlog as it does from BloodhoundBlog Unchained, from our memories of our shared experiences in Phoenix, Orlando and Seattle.

Here’s why: BloodhoundBlog Unchained brought out the best in you, wherever we did it. We were all of us learning, all of us teaching, and all of us were appreciated for our accomplishments. Just making it through our killer workdays was an achievement all on its own, but what made those workdays feel so right was that your virtues were fully visible to everyone, and each one of us was in full agreement about the worthiness and admirability of those virtues.

I am due some credit for this, I think. You cannot both attract my attention and hide from me. I learn a lot about the people I see from every opportunity I have to observe them. I have done this for my entire adult life, and I know I am good at it. When I see you, even if you don’t know I am aware of you, I am figuring out everything I can about you, gleaning every implication I can from every action of yours I am aware of. I can do a plausible back-story on just about anyone, and if I take the time to think about you, any secrets you keep from me will be matters of meaningless detail. I will have inferred everything about you that matters to you.

That’s actually a fine reason to dismiss me: I am scary-good at “reading” people.

But that matters in this context because I think that feelin’-good-again feeling starts with me seeing, understanding, admiring and celebrating your virtues — and celebrating you for being so wonderfully virtuous — by my standards and by your own. I Read more

August 25, 2011

Saying goodbye to Shyly…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

She loved me better than any dog I’ve ever known. She loved me better than I deserved, more than I ever did anything to earn. She was with me at my desk all day and on the floor beside my bed all night. When I left the house, she would wait for my return where last she saw me, and when I came home she would yip and scamper and dance and rejoice with every fiber of her being.

I loved her better than any dog I’ve ever known, but I loved her nothing like she deserved. I loved having her with me, but I ignored her almost all the time. But I always knew where to drop my hand when I wanted to touch her. I didn’t have to look for her. Her love and her loyalty were so complete, I always knew where she would be.

She taught me so much just by being alive, but what she taught me best was how to be that completely, that unreservedly, that rapturously alive. She was beautiful inside and out, and she was exuberantly delighted every day of her life — even this one, the last day of her life.

The photo montage above is from the out-takes from our Christmas Card for the year 2000. Shyly is the gorgeous black bitch in my arms who can’t sit still — who never could sit still.

She was a mutt, half Chow, half Labrador, but she was a proud and perfect puppy for every minute that she lived — always eager, always excited, always involved. She died at peace, as dogs can and as human beings so often cannot. I know she had a happy life, and I’m glad she had a painless death.

She was with me for thirteen years, but she’ll be with me for the rest of my life. I’ll never love another dog as much as I loved my Shylygirl. I’ll miss her every day.

August 25, 2011

Thank different…

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Good Jobs reading:

August 23, 2011

SplendorQuest: A rallying cry for the Tea Party rebellion: “You’re not the boss of me!”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I’m kicking this back to the top, which I think means no one will read it. 😉 In fact, I’m moving stuff like this to SplendorQuest.com, going forward. I think this an insanely-great essay, but it reads better elsewhere.

But: The comments to this post are amazing, BloodhoundBlog at its very best. Here are two of my remarks, illuminating why I am moving content like this and what I plan to do at SplendorQuest.com:

Celebrating my self: I have amazing things to say about the ontology and teleology of egoism and individualism, and virtually no one is paying any attention at all. I would be frustrated, except I can’t be: It’s raining soup in my mind, even if in no one else’s.

And:

I don’t have any organizational goals, I just want to induce people to think better, if I can. It’s a good thing for me, in the long run, since I stand to do better when other people do better — and since I’m pretty much incinerator-bait if things go to hell. But I know that the people I’m talking to will do better if they learn to seek Splendor in their lives. If I give anyone any time at all, my objective is to get that person to question his most basic assumptions about how the universe works. That much is not a kindness, at least at first, since people don’t generally love having the stilts kicked out from under them. But that’s “how much and how far” I want to go. There is no other way to get here from there.

“Save the world from home in your spare time!” I love that joke. But that’s what I plan to do, as time and minds permit. Come play with me, if the quest for Splendor moves you. –GSS

 
A rallying cry for the Tea Party rebellion: “You’re not the boss of me!”

I love that phrase — “You’re not the boss of me!” — those words, that order, that emphasis. Children say it when they’re put upon, and I love it so much I write it into their mouths in fiction, too.

The sentence has Read more

August 21, 2011

Shyly’s delight: “The Secret” to man and god in the universe . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Kicking this back to the top from February of 2007, although the underlying essay is much older than that. This is the shortest statement I have made, so far, of the ontology of human behavior. –GSS

 
Russell Shaw has mentioned the film The Secret a couple of times. Cathy bought the DVD, and we took the time to watch it tonight. As an expression of the right attitude to take toward life, it was right up my street. As physics, metaphysics, epistemology and ontology, it struck me as babbling word salad. The Law of Attraction commended me to The Eyelid Show, as television often does, so Cathy saw the whole thing, and I saw about half.

What the movie would seek to ascribe to a volitionally-caused physics (this is solipsism, right there), I would argue is simply the secondary consequences of particular habits of mind. Russell wants to freely and very generously share all that he has learned in his career. To do this, he needed me as his amplifier, and the two of us needed Allen Butler for his technological prowess. A great many other very talented people will be involved in this project. Are we drawn to each other by a Law of Attraction, or all we all simply oscillating in our own minds at around the same frequency — birds of a feather?

I wrote a book about the ontology of human social relationships, but it’s dense, tough sledding. Appended below is a easier-reading summary of some of these ideas. I wrote this as a speech for my Toastmaster’s Club in August of 2001. In the weblogging world, I’ll throw out details about our lives, but that’s really just so much plastic fruit, local color. This is the world that I live in, the world I wish everyone lived in…

Shyly’s delight

or

Manifesting the secondary consequences of splendor

I have a Labrador mutt named Shyly. She’s about three years old, but because she’s a Lab, she’ll always be a puppy. Always busy, always involved, always eager to be right in the middle of everything.

Shyly is the world’s greatest master at expressing delight. She Read more

August 21, 2011

Reasons to be cheerful, Part 3.1.1: Psalm.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Art is demanding, and that’s good. But art is petulant and importunate and presumptuous to a fault. Art is that damned nuisance of a snoopy neighbor who keeps knocking, knocking, knocking on your cellar door. Art goes straight for the places you forbid yourself to think about and rummages through your most terrifying secrets like a burglar tearing through your underwear drawer. Good art makes you hate it as you devour it, shun it as you immerse yourself in it. Good art makes you restless and jagged and ragged and inspired. Good art makes you shiver. Great art makes you cringe.

Art is a vanity in precisely this way: I presume to recreate reality in my own image and likeness, and I have the effrontery to demand that you not only acknowledge that reality but prefer it. I presume to seize the universe and squeeze out of it a tiny seed of truth. And I presume to plant that seed within you — without your consent, perhaps without even your knowledge. And I presume to nurture this new universe I have caused to grow within you until you scream — if I am good enough — scream from agony and delight. And I presume to do all of this for no purpose of yours, but only for reasons of my own devising. And at the end of it you may thank me or damn me, but you will never have been more than the means to my end: I sought not you but only to spawn myself anew within you — immaculate conceptualization. Art is a vanity because it is the means by which the artist postures as a god — and not a very merciful god.

I see all of this and yet I embrace it. I am as much art’s victim as you, although on my best days I am lucky enough to have a bit of my own back. But as a species and as individuals we are unwilling to forswear the worst of our vices without that resounding blow to the head that art alone provides. Our artists are Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

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