Good luck, y’all. Definitely interested in hearing your how-we-survived stories.
Author: Greg Swann (page 46 of 209)
Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker
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.
Good Jobs reading:
- What we can learn from Steve Jobs… by Eric Blackwell here at BloodhoundBlog
- “Capitalism makes better people — and you are living proof” — me at Splendorquest.com
- Steve Job’s most inspriational quotations
- Vodkapundit: Steve Jobs: A Legacy
- Andy Kessler: How Steve Jobs Changed The World
- The Amazing Steve Jobs Story
- What Makes Steve Jobs Great
- Steve Jobs Reigned in a Kingdom of Altered Landscapes
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
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
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
This is an extract from a book I wrote in 1997 called The Unfallen. This amounts to me letting people I make up speak for me, too, but it’s apposite to the larger conversation, and it’s good, I think. I like art about adults, and this is fun for me because we get to watch a teenage boy growing into his adulthood. I have never yet written a good book, and I don’t know that I ever will; the last chapter of childhood consists of coming to grips with your own mediocrity, after all. But The Unfallen is concerned with nothing but my world — my kind of people tackling my kind of issues. I hope this book is not the best I will ever do, but it’s the best I’ve done so far. And if you want to get drenched my way, it will do that job from the very first page. –GSS
Devin stood with Spencer as the car pulled away. He said, “Are you cold? Can you stand to walk?”
“I’m all right.”
“Let’s just walk, then. I learned how to think on the streets of Boston and Cambridge. I don’t always find the answer I’m looking for, but I can always walk my way to peace, to serenity.” They walked their way to the Harvard Bridge across the Charles — named the Harvard Bridge because the students of M.I.T. thought it was too badly designed to be called the M.I.T. Bridge. Elements of the more-or-less perpetual repair crew were out in their orange vests and traffic was backed up in both directions. The walkways were free, though, and they walked, one foot in front of the other, without speaking.
Finally Devin said, “Are you a boy or a man, Spencer?”
“I’m not sure I get that…”
“It’s yours to say. People will treat you like a boy for the most part, I guess. But if you decide you’re a man, and if you decide to behave like a man, who can stop you?”
Spencer grinned, his smile as bright as the sun. “There’s that, isn’t there?”
“I ask because I think it’s a very brave Read more
[This is me in February of 2004. It’s fun for me to read now, because we were selling a lot then, and — like a lot of folks — the next year, 2005, was my best year so far. I’m not selling success as a matter of dollars and cents. That matters to me, but not as much as Splendor does, not as much as integrity and follow-through and a comprehensive commitment not just to the good but to getting better — all the time. I have an essay aborning in me about everything I have learned about sales in the last ten years, but even that’s not as much as I want to do — as much as I want to have done. I want better money, yes, for us and for everyone who listens to us. And I want for Realtors to be better. I want for us to have an earned and deserved reputation as honest brokers who put our clients’ interest first. But before all that, I want for people to do better, to be better, to experience life more as a rapturous treasure and less as an unwanted burden. I want for the world to be better, remarkably better in every conceivable way.
This essay is me, the real deal, entirely unedited. I know I’m not alone in being like this, but no one dares to talk this way. We are children of Abel in every way that matters, and we are too much ashamed of being alive to celebrate the simple fact of our vitality. And yet this is the change that matters. To be free of other people means to be free of them in the silence and solitude of your own mind. If they can’t get at you there, then chains and walls are nothing but expressions of their inevitable failure. But if you forebear to be who you really are at the command of some internal editor, you are imprisoned everywhere — even when you are completely alone.
If you want to buy or sell some real estate in Metro Phoenix, I’m your guy. Read more
[I wrote this in the late Summer of 1995. –GSS]
I moved to a new apartment this Spring, and it happens that my new apartment number is 101. We live by symbols, like it or not, and I can’t look at my door or write my address without thinking of George Orwell’s “1984.” For in Room 101 is housed one’s greatest fear, the secret dread that, Orwell implies, will drive a person to betray every value in his life. Nothing like that here, thankfully, but there’s nothing so fine as a metaphor to focus the mind.
I spend a lot of time thinking about the love of life and its antithesis. For me, the quest for human liberty has little to do with laws or strictures or jack-booted thugs hiding behind mirrored shades. We are not enslaved or set free by other people, and we will not change our interior existence by convincing other people to change their behavior. We are free as we dare to rejoice in the beauty and glory of life, and we are enslaved as we shrink from that rejoicing. The ego is a realm infinite in extent, and it cannot ever be invaded from the outside.
And thus, some of the secret desires of libertarians seem a little silly to me. Assuredly we need to stand firm against new statist encroachments and complain incessantly about those already in place. But the Minerva fantasies and Atlantis fantasies are a bit much. To the world, we speak of free countries where free men and free women can produce untold wealth in free markets by the free exercise of free thought. But I suspect that in the privacy of imagination what is foreseen is the Neverland, where one can play forever and never grow weary. That’s fine, I suppose; life would be dull without daydreams. But the essence of a daydream, or the vice at least, is imagining a universe where one is not oneself, where one is not who one really is.
“‘I like people who live their dreams in the day.'” I made a fictional character say that a long time Read more
Totally cool. An actual newspaper article about America’s favorite welfare program, government subsidized mortgages — and in The Boston Globe, no less:
Amid all the clamor about entitlement reform during the struggle to raise the debt ceiling, one enormous cost – and potential source of future savings – largely escaped scrutiny: the billions of dollars the United States spends to support the mortgage market. Even before the 2008 financial crisis, the government assumed the credit risk on most loans, which allowed banks to offer better rates, but ultimately left taxpayers footing the bill when the housing market collapsed: $138 billion and counting.
During the crisis, the government became even more involved in the mortgage market by rescuing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and agreeing to backstop larger loans. This furnished enough liquidity to prop up the housing market and helped bring about the low mortgage rates of the last three years. But getting in has proved much easier than getting out. Today, the government backs 95 percent of new loans, leaving taxpayers more exposed than ever.
That could finally be about to change. After next month, federal loan limits in expensive areas like Boston, New York, and Los Angeles are set to decline from $729,750 to $625,500. Had the lower limits applied last year, the government would have backed 50,000 fewer loans. But even this modest pullback may not happen. At the urging of homebuilders and realtors, lawmakers in both parties want to extend the higher limits, possibly for good. It’s an early skirmish in the larger battle over the government’s proper role in the mortgage market. And the issue isn’t just when to pull back, but whether to do so at all: Many Americans have come to regard cheap mortgages as an entitlement.
I am so ecstatic to see Fannie, Freddie, Ginnie and FHAVAUSDA properly identified as welfare programs — invented by rent-seeking Rotarian Socialists for the benefit of other rent-seeking Rotarian Socialists — that I’m finding it hard to kvetch.
Well, maybe not too hard. Look at this:
Liberals tend to support government intervention as a means of subsidizing home ownership for the poor and Read more
The Sunday paper is full of wonderful news, provided you know where to look for it.
I’m getting quit of bitching at people, but I confess, always, to taking delight in well-written castigation. For eloquent excoriation, none surpasses that of Mark Steyn:
Within two generations of the Blitz and the Battle of Britain, a significant proportion of the once-free British people entrusted themselves to social rewiring by liberal compassionate Big Government and thereby rendered themselves paralytic and unemployable save for nonspeaking parts in “Rise of The Planet Of The Apes.” And even that would likely be too much like hard work.
Give the man your mind. He’ll give it back to you wittier, at least, if not wiser.
Dang. There goes the NAR’s chance to force every American to buy three or four more houses, thus to save the starving real estate brokers.
As President Obama himself has noted, there is something wrong with our politics when perfectly reliable campaign donors cannot despoil the taxpayers at will, without judicial interference…
From the Associated Press:
The Obama administration may turn thousands of government-owned foreclosures into rental properties to help boost falling home prices.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency said Wednesday it is seeking input from investors on how to rent roughly 250,000 homes owned by government-controlled mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration. All of the homes are foreclosures.
The U.S. government rescued the two mortgage giants in September 2008 and has funded them since the financial crisis. Fannie and Freddie own or guarantee about half of the nation’s mortgages and nearly all new mortgages.
Converting the homes into rentals may reduce “credit losses and help stabilize neighborhoods and home values,” said Edward DeMarco, acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie and Freddie.
Fannie and Freddie have been hoarding foreclosure inventory in Phoenix for months. Now I know why. Witness:
It also might meet the growing demand for rentals.
So would selling them, except then they would be owned and managed by people who are working for profit, not political functionaries.
But wait. There’s more:
Private investors could also be allowed to oversee the conversions.
That is to say, all the best Fed-friendly butt-buddies will be cut in on the graft.
And you thought the Federal government could not screw the housing market up any worse…