There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Casual Friday (page 3 of 25)

Courtney at the speed of life

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

How to slay dragons

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

You may have wondered, “Why is there bad weather?” The reason? So you can properly appreciate heaven on earth — Phoenix, Arizona.

We just went through our “fall” — a span of about three days when all the deciduous trees in metropolitan Phoenix lose all their leaves all at once.

Why does it happen this way? Because it never gets cold enough for leaf-bearing trees to behave the way they do where you live.

Instead, right about this time of year, the trees start to bud with new leaves, and the buds push the old leaves out of the way.

Witness:

That tree is budding now, and the smell of the flowers is heavenly.

And not to rub your nose in our ubiquitous natural beauty, but this cute little guy lives in a palm tree at a home I have listed for sale:

Dawgs on the run: Brian Brady in Phoenix

Here is Brian Brady, this afternoon in Phoenix:

Brian has family here, which is why he is in town, and he was gracious enough to spend some time with me and Cathleen. We had a chance to catch up, as well as to talk about future BloodhoundBlog Unchained events. We talked about the love of human liberty, too, but I can attest that Brian definitely did not arrive in this vehicle:

Reading myself right into welfare via a Kindle Fire. Forgetting whats important.

In almost two years of participating at Bloodhound this will be my first tech and family combined post. Recently, I decided it was time to buy some bling aka the Kindle Fire. What really attracted me to the Kindle Fire was all that it can do coupled with it’s tiny size. Although it’s not an I-Pad 2, the Kindle Fire is still really practical for reading and Android apps which is the two sole purposes I bought it in the first place.

Have you ever thought that you might have been reading yourself right into welfare? I wake up in the morning to read for 30 minutes prior to getting out of bed. I read on the toilet! (smile) But using the bathroom now takes longer because I can’t put a book down on the middle of page. I read before and after diner. My social life has decreased and my newly found love aka the Kindle Fire has me consumed.

Brian (The Genius and mortgage mega broker) really wrote a great post about how he needs more agents to close more mortgages. And that article had me thinking about my time management skills which have clearly gone right out the window. Like the title says, I’m reading myself right into welfare. Of course we need time to unwind and so forth, but what I’ve been doing has been habit which I repeat daily. I am a wife whom is a homemaker and two small girls. I often find myself working longer hours just so we have enough padding in the bank. Just went it seems like we have a good pad, something breaks!

I guess this post is more of a spiritual battle with myself. I want to be the best husband, always there for my family even at night instead of showing homes. But dad’s need to work harder than ever right now just to survive and care for their family. I do have a confession. I’ve been reading 10 Read more

Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie goes straight — to jail. Meanwhile, he has a new book of short stories out for Christmas.

William F.X. O’Connell — that’s Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie to you — has been making a game effort to go straight over the past few years. This paid off in abundance this morning, when he finally managed to get himself arrested.

Meanwhile, just yesterday Willie published a collection of his outrageously brutal Christmas stories at Amazon.com. It’s Kindle-only, but every smartphone and tablet computer has a Kindle reader by now.

These are the stories, all of which have been published here in various versions over the years:

The season’s greetings
A dumpster diver’s Christmas
A canticle for Kathleen Sullivan
A future more vivid
A father for Christmas
Merry Christmas, Princess Peach
A Costco family Christmas
How to slay dragons
Courtney at the speed of life

Cathleen and I did the line-edits on the final manuscript, and it was interesting to me to see how well the thing holds together as a collection. Separately, the yarns are almost too brutal, but taken together they have that certain cathartic something that left me feeling cleansed — beat up, to be sure, but better for having endured the punishment.

Anyway, y’all could do a favor or three for our jailbird friend:

  1. Buy the book — or give it as a present. At around 20,000 words, it’s a lazy afternoon or a cross-country flight in length.
  2. Review the book. It would be nice for Willie if you have good things to say about the stories, but it will be better for everyone if you simply tell the truth.
  3. Tell your friends. Here is code you can link from:

Willie has an account at SplendorQuest.com, so we can hide and watch to see what has to say about being a fully-processed citizen of the U.S. at last. In the mean time his presence at Amazon.com puts him all the way into the establishment, like it or don’t.

A dumpster diver’s Christmas

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

A cocktail to keep a Bloodhound hunting: Thirty-Six Hours in Vegas.

It would be not-quite-correct to say that I don’t drink. I don’t object to casual drinking intellectually or philosophically, but it has never appealed to me. I will toast with Irish whiskey when appropriate, and I will sometimes have a beer with pizza-and-wings or Mexican food, but my absolute favorite beverage is dihydromonoxide, and alcoholic drinks of any sort are well down the list for me. De gustibus non est disputandum.

But I wanted to come up with something that I could stand to drink when I want to drink with Cathy on our date nights — at home, in town or in Las Vegas. So I invented my own cocktail, the top-secret recipe for which I will now share with you:

Thirty-Six Hours in Vegas

In a 24-ounce glass, pour over 8 ounces of ice:

One shot (or more) Tequila
One bottle of Lemon-Lime flavored Five-Hour Energy
12 ounces of Mountain Dew

Quite a bit sweeter than a Margarita, and very nicely caffeinated. That much liquid lasts me a long time, so I don’t notice the alcohol much, but I get all that good Mountain Dew stuff — hydration, sugar, sodium.

I’ll be in Anaheim for 36 hours later this week, but I doubt I’ll have one of these. If you make one for yourself, I’ll be interested to hear what you think about it.

Bocephus wants y’all to know: A country boy can survive.

Just that quick:

The song is not new. If he were truly net.wise, Hank could have had this done the same day he quit/got fired. Even so, he’s close enough in time for the response to resonate.

I’m not taking sides in any of this; the man was a fool to go off message when we was making a PR run at a dipshit talk-show. But: The whole episode is fun to watch.

Jump now and you can download the recording for free.