There’s always something to howl about.

Month: December 2011 (page 1 of 2)

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

At FreeTheAnimal.com: Master something difficult in 2012.

My friend Richard Nikoley runs a popular paleo-living weblog called FreeTheAnimal.com. In anticipation of New Year’s Day and all its resolutions, I have a guest post up there on how to make 2012 a game-changing year in your life:

‘Tis the season for New Year’s Resolutions, and that’s a good thing. Join that book club. Remodel that kitchen. Lose that unwanted weight. But you can make this a landmark year of your life with just one resolution:

Resolve to master something difficult in 2012.

There is no shame in knowing how to say, “¿Dónde está el baño?,” but you are fluent in a foreign language when you can read and admire its poetry, when you get the jokes, when you can twist that language into clever witticisms. That’s mastery.

We are victims of Art Appreciation and Film Studies classes, glib-and-lazy time-wasters in which we learned nothing but how to pretend to know something. But there is no class called Geometry Appreciation. In the maths, you can either do the work or you can’t. This year you can pick up where you left off in math and push yourself as far as you can go.

And tell the truth: Every time you see a musician performing — popular music or classical — don’t you wish you could do that, too? The good news is, you can. All it takes is commitment and effort — and time.

Mastering a demanding new skill will take a while. The desire for instant results is how all New Year’s Resolutions get abandoned. But to learn a serious discipline will require your time every day — an hour or more a day of serious, dedicated effort. I like the idea of working every day, since, if you take no breaks from the work, you won’t have to resist the temptation to extend a break by one day and then another and another.

But the benefits to be realized are huge — far beyond anything you might be expecting. In Art Appreciation class, everyone participates in the group discussions, there are no right or wrong answers and the class is graded on the curve. That Read more

Slugging Away. One E-mail Address At A Time

I’m on a quest to find 75 San Diego real estate agents.  I need 75 agents, to give me permission, to e-mail them weekly.  I told you about my plan to secure those permissions and I thought I’d update you as I get results.

Bill Lyons agreed to do a joint marketing deal with me but I haven’t taken him up on that yet.  I’ve been scrambling around with year-end stuff, and I took a holiday trip to Arizona, but I’ll do something with Bill next year. For now, I’m focused on the SDAR Officers’ Installation and Dinner as a magnet.

I held a drawing at the Downtown San Diego caravan.  Thirty agents gave me their cards and Debbie Neuman won the tickets.  This works pretty well because while she is a quality agent, with established lending relationships, she’ll sit at my table that night.  This will be a good chance to get to know her and pitch ourselves as her “number two lender” (I’m not proud).    The challenge with the thirty “new” contacts has been securing permission to e-mail them..  I have spoken with ten agents thus far and only five agreed to receive my newsletter.  I do have a drawing scheduled at the La Jolla REBA, next week. and those folks know me better.  I guess if I have 25-30 permissions, by next Friday, I can celebrate the fact that I have achieved one-third of my goal.

That means I’m going to have to grit it out for the final fifty permissions.  I’m going to start the “open house plan” after the first of the year.  The plan is to visit open houses and drop off a “care basket”, filled with snacks.  Agents get hungry at open houses so this is what I’ll give them:

A couple of bottles of water, three bags of snacks, and a couple of oranges (or apples, or bananas).

I’ll assemble them in my newly delivered TANSTAAFL lunch bags.  I ordered these from 4imprint.com and 100 of them cost me less than $300.

I had my name, website, and phone number imprinted on them, along with the word TANSTAAFL.  The 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:

A canticle for Kathleen Sullivan

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

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.

Introducing Hank Miller, Atlanta Realtor and Appraiser

We’re introducing a new dawg today, one who puts his bite where his bark is, Hank Miller of HoundDogRealEstate.com in Atlanta. Hank is an associate broker, leader of a team of Realtors, as well as an appraiser. Here’s his credo, which I like a lot:

My objective is to call bullshit where I see it and have a little fun doing it.

I also did some housekeeping this morning, trimming a dozen folks from our contributors list. No drama, just pruning folks who aren’t spending much time with us. We’ve never deleted an account, so if your name was ever in our sidebar, you’re always welcome here.

Meanwhile, I love seeing the stuff Brian Brady, Mark Madsen, Jeff Brown and others are doing. I spent a little time last week looking at what other weblogs in the RE.net are up to by now. For all of me, we’re the last stand against the vendorslut mafia. This is a resource to be treasured: BloodhoundBlog is the only place on the internet where real estate professionals can call bullshit — fearlessly and in undeniable detail.

When a Bloodhound howls, the rafters shake. That’s a sound I never tire of hearing…