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Category: Flourishing (page 5 of 38)

Thriving as only a rational animal can

August 9, 2012

Love, sex and philosophy: My book The Unfallen is available on Kindle.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

My novel The Unfallen is now available as an Amazon Kindle eBook. Here is the way I blurbed the book when I wrote it:

The Unfallen is a very sexy book about philosophy and a very philosophical book about love and longing. It’s written about and for smart, productive people who live to love their lives…

I can summarize it Ari Gold-style with three quick synopses:

1. It’s a very romantic novel about philosophy.

2. It’s a send-up of genre romance fiction, a literal inversion of the bodice-ripper how-to book called “Adventurous women, dangerous men.”

3. It’s fifty shades sexier, celebrating the splendor of real love, not the squalor of degradation.

Here’s an extract from The Unfallen, the poem that was the instigating cause of my own marriage:

you come to me by starlight
in a gown of gauzy white
your sacraments revealed concealed
high priestess of the night

you whisper vespers whisper prayers
whisper vows of faith and fear
in still and silent grace you stand
as i in trembling awe draw near

i kneel in worship grasp your hand
press it to my searing lips
pray god to know the endless peace
flowing from your fingertips

you come to me in night divine
your glory lit by crowning gold
you consecrate by hungry glance
devotion’s heat in evening’s cold

you come to me i kneel i stand
you lay me on the dewy ground
you guide my worship guide my hands
lead my heart your heart to sound

you speak to me with loving grace
you catechize in passion’s glow
you reach you teach you seethe and burn
and i am blessed by truth to know

you come to me in gauzy gown
high priestess of the night
i lay in awe in faith in fear
lifted to your heaven’s light

I want you to buy this book, but before that, I want you to help me promote it. If you’d like a free review copy, just say so. The quid-pro-quo is that I will want you to write a review of The Unfallen at Amazon.com. And I would love it if you would recommend the book to your warm network by email, blog or Facebook.

My vow: The Unfallen will more than repay your involvement in the form of a happier, sexier, more-fulfilling marriage. Read more

July 27, 2012

See Man Alive! live in Austin, August 17th – 19th, at the 21 Convention.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I will be doing an hour-long presentation on my book Man Alive! at the The 21 Convention in Austin. The convention runs from August 17th – 19th, and I will be speaking first-thing in the morning on Saturday, August 18th.

My topic? Intellectual self-defense amidst the last-gasp collapse of Rotarian Socialism. Not too surprising if you’ve read Man Alive! My plan is to go through a number of specious arguments, with examples, showing you how to defend your self from the pandemic deceptions deployed by demagogues to defend tyranny.

The 21 Convention is put together by Anthony “Dream” Johnson. It seeks to “surface, restore, and actualize the ideal in man” — a goal I can heartily endorse. There will be a total of 18 speakers over the three days of the event, including Yaron Brook of The Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights and Richard Nikoley of FreeTheAnimal.com.

Anthony Johnson runs his events like Brian Brady and I should run ours, very professional and strictly business. If you want to come see me or the other speakers — with topics ranging from philosophy to politics to health and fitness to sexual relations — you can buy tickets by clicking on this link. That’s an affiliate link, which means that I’m getting a piece of the business, if that matters to you. You can buy three-day or one-day tickets, with upsells, but note that the prices go up on July 31st. There will be video of the presentations available for sale after the event.

I’m interested in doing more of these, if you have a microphone available for me. I’m doing philosophy at the 21 Convention, but there are a lot of topics covered and touched upon in Man Alive! that I would like to bring to an audience. As an example, I can do an hour on orgasms that will change your life forever. To see what I can do without an audience — on philosophy, not orgasms — visit the Videocast category at SelfAdoration.com. Meanwhile, if you’re going to be in Central Texas next month, come give me a look. I plan to put Read more

July 22, 2012

Tell it from the Mountains: Don’t Go to Law School

by

Raleigh Criminal Lawyer

Author website

When, after deciding that think tank and political advocacy were a lost cause (as is true of many things, I should’ve consulted Greg Swann earlier about this), I went back to law school, I decided to go to law school, I had only the vaguest notions of what being a lawyer actually meant.

I knew I wanted to earn a good living. I knew I was pretty smart. I also “knew” that my years in managing non-profits had left me with precious few skills that might be attractive in the for-profit world.

Three years and more than $300,000 in direct and opportunity costs, I emerged from UNC-Chapel Hill (having completed my first year at Arizona State) with a law degree, the privilege (I mean that in the technical sense) to practice law upon passing the bar, and not much more. The economy had collapsed, and in the interim we had sold two homes in Phoenix, one for about what I bought it (thanks to Greg) and the other at a vastly lower price (through a broker my wife selected).

There were no BigLaw jobs for me to take, coming from a good, but not great law school, with good, but not great grades.

Fortunately, I had spent a year and a half getting my hands dirty as a glorified intern at a local Public Defender’s office, where I worked on some very serious cases, and helped win a trial for someone accused of a robbery, the evidence I located would show, he could not have committed.

More importantly, it turned out that I had skills that were much more important than lawyering. Technical and technological skills. And I discovered that I am, while introverted and contemplative, pretty good at interacting people through the crucial hiring (sales?) process.

If I had it all to do again, I don’t know that I would go to law school exactly. Don’t get me wrong: I am probably one of the few lawyers who loves practicing the law.

But I’ve found that I also like building things. I have tons of ideas on how Read more

July 19, 2012

How to Be a Much (Much) Better Agent by Ground Hog Day

by

Real Estate Renaissance Man

Author website

A couple nights ago I got caught up watching the movie Ground Hog Day with Bill Murray. It’s a fun movie I’ve seen before, so you can imagine my surprise when I realized how much I was learning from this character.

Murray plays Phil, a weatherman doing an on-the-scene report covering Punxsutawney Phil, the famous Ground Hog that looks for his shadow on February 2nd. The twist is: Phil finds himself awaking each morning… to the same morning! It’s February 2nd again and again and again. What does he do? At first, he does what most of us would probably do, he tests the limits: he flirts, he overeats, he steals money, he even tries to kill himself, just to see what happens. But each morning, he awakens to the same Sonny & Cher song on the radio, and the same day repeated outside.

Eventually, Phil begins to improve himself. He takes classes and he learns new skills; he seeks out people who need help and through it all, becomes a better man. He learns, albeit slowly, the power of… the moment. The moment is that brief instant when a decision is made; the decision may lead to years of work or an immediate change, but either way a course is set. (Of course, the opposite applies too: a moment passes without a decision, and a course is set as well.)  So Bill Murray’s character Phil, begins seizing those moments, and begins improving his life in ways he could have never imagined.

By the end of the movie, Phil has become a new man; even the locals treat him differently (and remember, to them it truly has been only one day). The motivation behind making those decisions is ultimately unimportant; to improve as a man, to win the heart of a woman, or just to make more money; the “why” is less important than the “what.” He has transformed himself, one decision at a time, one moment at a time.

You may not wake up each morning to “I’ve Got You Babe” on the radio. And you’re most likely not waking up each day only to Read more

July 18, 2012

San Diego Real Estate – A Cacophony of Data

by

Realtor, Renaissance Man

Author website

I love the scene from the “Princess Bride” where they undergo a battle of wits. Very funny scene, and way too reminiscent of popular conversations regarding the housing market in general and the San Diego housing market specifically.

So, How’s the Housing Market Doing in San Diego?

There’s no shortage of data or opinions, of course.  Here a just a couple of places and opinions I found interesting and potentially useful.  First, Here’s DataQuick’s (OMG lengthy) view of the San Diego data.  Quite a bit of stuff in here, all of which seem to indicate that the San Diego market might be recovering slightly.  But right on the heels of the DataQuick report is an article from MSNBC, a report that has  a rather dim view of San Diego’s recovery.

So, with my own opinions of the San Diego market in my head I reviewed a couple of local real estate experts to see what they thought. First a take on one of the neighborhoods in San Diego by Kris Berg.  Her numbers are easier for me to read than DataQuicks, and no one likes to be called a sick real estate market by anyone.  And here’s our good friend Jeff Brown with his take on analyzing real estate data.  Jeff is speaking to the choir in me when he talks about analyzing.  He is asking if the data and the way it is analyzed is as important at the analyst doing the organizing.

 My Take on San Diego Real Estate

My opinion comes after this concerto, aptly named “Cacophony”, but sweet music to my ears, and which I’ll explain below.  Listen to this now.

Pretty cool stuff, huh?  A cacophony of sounds, but your head and your heart allow you to analyze and put these sounds together so that they not only make sense, but are appealing and fun to spend time with.

Which Brings Me to My Opinion on the San Diego Real Estate

Market

  • When you want to know if there’s gas in the coal mine….you send down a bird.
  • If you see smoke, you know’s there’s fire….but how hot is that fire?
  • If it walks, quacks and…you know….it’s a Read more
July 16, 2012

The world you find is the one you’re looking for, and the map to that world is written in the lines of your face.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

A couple weeks ago we got together with an old friend whom we had not seen in some while. She made a huge point of remarking that my appearance had not changed at all, which I dismissed as a kindly untruth, sweet but surely very far from being accurate.

It turns out she was closer to the truth than I had guessed. I am speaking about Man Alive! at The 21 Convention in August, and I had to come up with a head shot for the event.

This is me on April 15, 2001, the photo I’ve used at BloodhoundBlog since its inception:

This is me on July 9, 2012, a week ago today:

A little more weight on me, and a little jowlier, but not much difference. The set of my features is a constant, a reflection of the world I see outside my mind.

This is me from Man Alive!:

Your mama told you, when you glared and grimaced at her, that your face would freeze like that, but neither one of you knew she was right: The facial expressions we wear most often – habituated Mothertongue emotional reactions – inscribe themselves into our skin.

We listed an actual equity sale on Friday, and we’re getting ready to do another one Friday next. I’m waiting right now to get the signed contract on a buyer side, also an equity sale. That much is good, since we have fared very poorly in ForeclosureWorld. But I just lost a buyer side that we need very badly, and I have not had any confidence that we can hold onto our own home for the past four years. Desdemona died, Shyly died, and Odysseus is making his last orbit around the sun. I’ve had family shit, and Cathy lost her father and is slowly losing her mother.

In short, I could wish for more triumphs and fewer tragedies. But the world you find is the one you’re looking for, and the reality of my own life is that I have to make a conscious effort to remember pain as soon as it’s over. I love my life best when I’m too Read more

July 4, 2012

Unchained melodies: Darling, be home soon.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Today is our tenth wedding anniversary. Cathleen and I have been a couple since January, 1998, but we got legally, lawfully married on Independence Day in 2002. Our “our songs” are No Myth and Thunder Road, but there are some “my songs” that I think of often to remind myself of why I so much love being married to this woman.

That recording brings out the jazz in the song’s DNA, but no one, so far, has done a good job of finding the country song that’s in there, too.

I understand this all the way through me. I don’t always like being around other people, but when I do, the person I like to have near me most, most often, most enduringly is Cathleen.

So “Darling, be home soon.” I can’t think of a recording of this song I don’t like, but Derek Trucks just kills on the slide guitar at the end of this one.

And we close with John Hiatt expressing a mystery I understand very well:

June 29, 2012

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield: BloodhoundBlog is six years old today.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I almost let this day slip by without taking notice of it. Shame on me. Six years, almost 5,000 posts, and the only place in the RE.net where truth will out and where hustlers dare not dissemble and jive.

I am sad, to say the truth, that the promise I saw when first I began this crusade for a cleaner, more honest kind of real estate is by now all but shattered. Realtors went from bus benches and urinal cakes to their digital equivalents in the form of Facebook “likes” and Pinterest panderings — all without ever once stopping to think about the things we might have and should have done, the things we could have done and the world we could have made by doing them.

Even so, here’s my take, always:

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,–
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
      –Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

If you loathe your self so much you can’t live without having your ass kissed, BloodhoundBlog is not for you. If you’re desperate to learn the latest tricks for deceiving your clients, you’ve come to the wrong place. But when the stench of corruption is ripe in the streets, when you want for once not to be lied to by the people you pay to lie to you — when you want to know the truth, no matter how painful it might be — you know where to find us.

Here’s a toast to BloodhoundBlog and to all the people who have written here over the years!

June 29, 2012

You say you want a revolution? Here is how to restore freedom in America.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Will Republicans repeal Obamacare next January — or ever? Don’t hold your breath. Mainstream politicians of both parties are addicted to corporate campaign contributions — and who knows what other kinds of bribes? — so what we will get will be a pathetic, cosmetic “reform” of Rotarian Socialist medicine. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

If you want to restore the liberty of the American people, you will need to change the United States Constitution. And you will have to do that by constitutional convention and state-by-state ratification, because there is no way that Congress will vote for the necessary changes.

In a very short summary, here is what needs to be done, if the head of steam built up by libertarians, by free-market conservatives and by the Tea Party movement is not to be wasted. The text within the quotation marks is proposed amendatory language, followed by a discussion of the objective to be achieved.

1. “The words ‘general welfare’ appearing in the United States Constitution or its Amendments do not create any powers of the legislative, executive or judicial branches of the government of the United States. Any legislation authorized by the words ‘general welfare’ is repealed.” This gets rid of one of the most pernicious pieces of federal elasticity.

2. “Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3 of the United States Constitution is stricken in its entirety. Any legislation authorized by that clause is repealed.” This does away with the power of the federal government to regulate commerce. The interstate commerce clause is second only to the general welfare clause as a means of enlarging the power of the national government.

3. “Amendment 16 to the United States Constitution is stricken in its entirety. Any legislation authorized by that Amendment is repealed.” Goodbye federal income tax. The federal government will have to return to taxation by capitation — the head tax.

4. “Amendment 17 to the United States Constitution is stricken in its entirety. Any legislation authorized by that Amendment is repealed.” This language puts the Senate back under the control of the states. This was a vital check on federal power. Read more

June 24, 2012

“If almost-as-good is free or nearly free, what is the market value of slightly-better?”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Six years ago Friday, I launched BloodhoundBlog with the words cited in the headline:

In a subsistence culture, the work of the mind is precious and literally unsupportable. We are by now so rich that millions of people can create intellectual resources that they give away, in turn to be remarketed by others. This may or may not work in the long run for companies tapping into and amplifying open-source-like works of the mind. Consider that aggregator software levels the playing field for small players. The interesting thing is what it will do to companies whose entire business model is based on scarcity and hoarding. If almost-as-good is free or nearly free, what is the market value of slightly-better?

I’ve hit that theme again and again over the years: How much future is there in a job that millions of very smart people are willing to do for free?

Stewart Brand said “information wants to be free”. This has intellectual property implications far beyond ordinary information. But with respect to that ordinary information — news, opinion, fiction, poetry, almost all music, etc. — the war is over. Hoarding lost. The challenge amidst this vast abundance is not getting people to pay for your information — but simply getting them to pay attention to it.

The daily newspaper has no hope whatever of nicking me for fifty cents. The question that will decide if there is even to be a newspaper is, can they hold onto my eyes for as long as fifty seconds? And will someone pay for those eyes in the random hope of piercing my vast indifference to advertising?

It comes down to career advice, I think, for the newspaperati and for all of us: How much future is there in a job that millions of very smart people are willing to do for free? Maybe not the same work, but so close that any differences become academic. And: If you’re committed to sharing information even in a marketplace where ordinary information is so abundant as to be without monetary value, what are you going to do to make a living?

At Forbes magazine, Susannah Read more

June 6, 2012

Ray Bradbury: “In sum, do not insult me with the beheadings, finger-choppings or the lung-defiations you plan for my works. I need my head to shake or nod, my hand to wave or make into a fist, my lungs to shout or whis­per with. I will not go gently onto a shelf, degutted, to become a non-book.”

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

Lately I’ve been pondering where the spice in our culture has gone? Perhaps, as a woman of a certain age, I’m unable to see it, but I don’t think so. My deviant detector is fairly well-tuned and I’m drawn to the outsiders of the world because, well, I am one, but it’s very milquetoast out there these days. We wouldn’t want to offend anyone or their delicate sensibilities.

Somehow I missed reading Ray Bradbury. Well, no, not somehow. That was pretty much a planned avoidance of the sci-fi genre in general because it tends to spawn cult-like followers. True story. And I’m not much into cults however clever they are. But today David Boaz at the CATO Institute posted the Coda to the 1979 Del Rey edition of Fahrenheit 451, written by Ray Bradbury. And while I’ve been pondering our collective love of the plain vanilla, I’ve concluded that it seems to have begun around the year this Coda was written. Either it was the death of disco or the election of Ronald Reagan but something went terribly wrong around that time. I never read Bradbury, but this is quite lovely and also funny and has enough biting social commentary to make me appreciate the man’s sensibilities and shared appreciation of digressions. There are indeed many ways to burn a book.

About two years ago, a letter arrived from a solemn young Vassar lady telling me how much she enjoyed reading my experiment in space mythology, The Martian Chronicles.

But, she added, wouldn’t it be a good idea, this late in time, to rewrite the book inserting more women’s characters and roles?

A few years before that I got a certain amount of mail concerning the same Martian book complaining that the blacks in the book were Uncle Toms and why didn’t I “do them over”?

Along about then came a note from a Southern white suggesting that I was prejudiced in favor of the blacks and the entire story should be dropped.

Two weeks ago my mountain of mail delivered forth a pipsqueak mouse of a letter from a well-known publishing house that wanted to reprint my story “The Fog Read more

June 4, 2012

Unchained melody: Sam Cooke with “A change is gonna come.”

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Sorry if I seem to be ignoring y’all. I am all but completely unable to make an honest living in real estate right now, and that leaves me with next to nothing to say about making an honest living in real estate.

I am not without things to say, of course. Never that. But I am doing most of my talking at SelfAdoration.com just now.

Here’s proof: A post about changing your life for the better featuring the incomparable Sam Cooke singing A change is gonna come.

Art first:

Then rhetoric:

You have a unique, inviolable nature as a type of entity. You have many characteristics in common with other entities, and with other organisms, and for the most part you cannot change those characteristics. But every purposive action you can take is guided by your conceptually-conscious mind — by your free choices — and you can always resolve to choose differently going forward. When you do, your life will change — for the better, if you choose wisely. You know this is so, and, in consequence, if you simultaneously insist to yourself that it is somehow not so, the cognitive dissonance will make you miserable — and progressively less efficacious over time.

But if instead you accept your true nature as a human being for what it is, and then act accordingly, your life will get better and better in every way. No one can absolve you of your sins, since you answer to your self alone. But for the same reason, no one can rob you of your triumphs.

There is much more on that theme in this week’s “movie of the week” — a video podcast I am doing every week.

If you have not yet read Man Alive!, I entreat you to do so — and to share it with everyone you love. We all say we want to see the world change, but the book offers an actual strategy for making the change you’re looking for — in your own life and in the lives of everyone on Earth eventually.

Looking for the Cliff’s Notes? Here is one very potent idea: The world won’t change Read more

May 10, 2012

Let’s Talk Listings – Better Yet? Let’s Talk Gettin’ ’em Sold

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

Since the beginning of last year, how long has it taken to sell your listings? I’m not talkin’ about those priced at half the median value in your market. I’m talkin’ about a traditional seller who simply wants you to sell his real estate. Why do a few listings in every market sell faster than the rest? Let’s set aside the obvious go-to answer, price. Let’s also agree that unless you’re pricing your listings below the market, there are other significant factors involved in market time.

But what are they?

My firm is now on its third generation, and to gain respect at the dinner table, you must be a listing agent. Doesn’t mean you eschew buyers, not even close. It also doesn’t mean we don’t hold buyers’ agents in the highest esteem, cuz we do. In fact, we adore ’em. They’re the main reason we can leave town for extended periods, doin’ deals while applying the sunscreen. ‘Course, I gave up that luxury when I left my hometown market almost a decade ago.

It’s taken about six years, but San Diego’s real estate investors, especially the regular folk, are finally realizing there’s real estate life outside of Paradise. 🙂 If I’m correct in this supposition though, how will I sell their properties quickly and for market value?

BawldJapan strikes again!

I have no false pride when it comes to doing what puts cat skins on the wall. Since I come up with precious few original ideas myself, to survive, I’ve learned to steal like a cat burglar. 🙂 Sometimes I leave well enough alone, sometimes I tweak a little here and there. I’ve learned through experience that my clients are influenced more by one factor than all the others combined: Obtaining the results for which they hired me.

Funny how that works. It’s why most marketing folks keep their distance from guys like me. I’m constantly measuring their efforts with the ‘R’ word — RESULTS.

Serious minded sellers are obsessed with results when they choose an agent to list their property for sale. They universally like the marketing plan we employ. 98% of Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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