BloodhoundBlog

There’s always something to howl about.

Author: Greg Swann (page 53 of 209)

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

December 17, 2010

A father for Christmas

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

“Shame about the bike,” I said to the strained young black man at the bus stop. His head was down and he was staring hard at the ground.

He grunted, a sound that conveyed two ideas: “I heard you” and “I’m not listening.”

“Just as well, I guess. A bike like that…”

He looked up for a moment, piercing me with hard black eyes. “What about it?”

“Oh, you know. Wouldn’t last too long, now would it?”

He scoffed, and that was that. Or so he thought…

What happened was this: I saw a bike going in to Toys ‘R’ Us, about a week before Christmas, and that’s the kind of thing I just have to follow up on.

It was a girl’s bike — a girly bike. Sixteen inch white wheels. A white frame speckled with iridescent pink and purple flakes. An iridescent pink and purple flaked saddle. And matching pink and purple flaked streamers cascading out of the white handle-bar grips. It was the kind of bike Toys ‘R’ Us loves to sell: Thirty-five dollars worth of bike with three dollars worth of plastic ornaments is priced at sixty bucks. Ten dollars extra for professional assembly.

The bike had been dragged into the store by my companion at the bus stop — tall, thin, with an expression of anger etched into his face. Maybe twenty years old; certainly not twenty-five. He was wearing a Michael Jordan warm-up suit and Michael Jordan basketball shoes. That sounds very casual, but we’re talking three hundred dollars, maybe more. At first I thought he might be bringing the bike in for a minor repair, but something about the way he was dragging it — sideways by the saddle — made me think again.

I didn’t go into the store, but I stuck around to see what would happen. Sure enough, he came out bikeless and stalked over to wait for the bus. Three hundred dollars worth of Michael Jordan haberdashery but no car.

I said, “A little girl has a bike like that, she’s just bait on the hook. Doesn’t have a father around to stand up for her, Read more

December 14, 2010

The global history of health and wealth over the past 200 years — expressed visually in four minutes.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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This is amazing, but what’s more astounding to me is to think of how much more dramatic this presentation could have been without the taxes, restraints and wars foisted upon us by the state. Health and wealth are found first and most in free countries, last and worst in slave states. The inference to be drawn is obvious: The less government there is, the greater the longevity and prosperity of ordinary people.

December 13, 2010

Christmas at the cemetery — with Bubba

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

December 25, 1998 – Christmas Day

If you want to hear your thoughts echo into a perfect silence – go to the cemetery.

I do it a lot, actually, not to be too terribly morbid. Potter’s fields and VA graveyards and tidy middle-class golf courses of the dead and tony, upscale permanent condominiums where they frown loudly on walk-in traffic. But democracy makes her last stand at the cemetery, so no one is ever actually turned away, and I expect it would take quite a performance to get yourself ejected.

But the cemetery is not the story – it’s just the honest part. The other part – to be much too kind – starts with my growing a tail.

A Secret Service tail, that is. Last August I wrote a story called ‘How Bubba pulled it off.’ It’s about a teenage masturbator who just happens to be President of the United States, and just after I wrote it I started noticing the tail.

Like this is so hard. I walk from place to place, that’s what I do. Sometimes I take a bus or a train or the subway. Rarely do I fly. Mostly I walk. When you’re walking into an empty dawn on an empty two lane road in upstate New York and the only car on the road is a big black Crown Victoria with D.C. tags, when it’s following you at idling speed with the running lights on – it’s a safe bet you’ve been fed-infested.

Four teams of two agents each, it turned out. They worked in eight hour shifts, and there is no better way to draw attention to yourself than to walk through a small town during the shift change with not one but two big black Crown Victorias following you.

At first it kinda ticked me off. I would run little games on the bozos to lose them – skipping the wrong way down a one-way street, in one door and right out the other, exiting through the freight entrance, that kind of stuff. They would not get out of the car, so I spent about a Read more

December 7, 2010

When the grasshoppers vote to enslave the ants, the ants vote with their feet: “I opt-out of California.”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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From newgeography.com:

So, in protest to the insensitive indulgent big-spenders that run Sacramento, I say, “Don’t touch my junk!!!” My beautiful California home is now on the market for $2,000,000. My next home will be in a no state income tax state like Texas or Nevada. I will not buy that new Jaguar that I was planning to purchase for $75,000. I will keep my old Cadillac and deprive Sacramento of $6,562 from its 8.75% sales tax. My next purchase for my real estate business will be an office building in Prague in the Czech Republic, a democracy that has lower taxes and fewer regulations. My income will remain either offshore or in a state that does not confiscate like the money grubbers in Sacramento. And, I will not be investing my capital to create any new jobs in California. In the digital age, my staff will be located in states that are a little more business friendly.

Apparently, I am not alone. Migration out of California exceeds the rate of almost every other state. Why are my fellow “high-earners” leaving the Golden State? Maybe it is because California ranks nationally in the bottom two for business friendliness while placing third in state income taxes.

We have Jerry Brown as our Governor again, meaning that he will live his entire life without a real job. The Central Valley, once agricultural wonderland of America, has Depression era unemployment, this as a result of a green-inspired court water shut-off designed to protect an Anchovy sized piece of bait called the Delta Smelt. And, our brilliant voters – including those working class voters most impacted – rejected Prop 23. That means that on January 1, 2011, California must begin to reduce our greenhouse gases by 40%. To achieve this noble goal, we seem certain to make ourselves even more uncompetitive with other countries and other states.

If that was not enough, voters also approved Prop 25 which allows the public union dominated Democrats to pass its budget with a simple majority. They did such a good job ($20 billion shortfalls) when they were forced to obtain a 2/3rds Read more

December 5, 2010

How to get out of going to a holiday party…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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So Cathy wanted for us to go to a holiday party last night with one of her favorite clients. I never want to do stuff like that, but I always want for my best-beloved to be happy.

Turns out I got out of going anyway. While we were walking the dogs on the Arizona Canal — walking, not running — I slipped one way as Shyly and Odysseus were charging off the other way. I fell down and cracked my elbow nicely on the tarmac.

We ended up having a very nice evening at the hospital. I’m not joking — attitude is everything. But poor Cathleen didn’t get to go to her party.

I’m typing with one hand right now, so you may be hearing less than a lot from me for a while.

December 3, 2010

Achieving your goals: Things can get a great deal better, over time, if you work at them just a little bit every day.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Here’s my November:

Not bad, and the guitar is sounding pretty decent by now. I’m more action than traction selling real estate, but that’s been the story of my life for the past five years.

Here’s the secret decoder ring, what all those sloppy symbols mean:

S – Write software or work on web-based marketing for the business.

G – Play the guitar for at least half an hour.

W – Walk with Cathleen and the dogs for half an hour.

X – Work out for half and hour.

A – Attend an appointment with a real estate buyer or seller.

C – Write a real estate contract.

O – Open an escrow.

$ – Close an escrow.

Better news first: The server is rockin’ and I’m getting a lot done a little at a time.

Walking and working out are doing great things for both my physique and my psyche. I bumped my repetitions on free weights from 30 to 40 to 50 reps. I’m headed for 60 reps in December. I lost six actual pounds of weight, but, more importantly, I dropped an inch at the waist and at my belly. The accretion of new muscle mass will burn away fat at a steady pace, so I feel like I’m getting where I want to go.

Meanwhile, the guitar is sounding fine to me. Music of any kind is a kinesthetic art: You need to know what to do, as a matter of praxis and theory, but your muscles need to know it, too. To play the guitar, you have to have a perfect muscle memory of dozens of common hand shapes, and you have to be able to hit those shapes perfectly, with a lot of torque, precisely on time. It ain’t easy, which is why it’s so easy to make painful noises on the guitar.

But playing the electric guitar is its own reward. An acoustic guitar has its own sound and it’s own style of playing. But the essential component, when you’re playing an electric guitar, is not the guitar but the amplifier. I can pull a lot of sound out of a solid-body electric without plugging it in. But Read more

December 3, 2010

Zillow says, “If you will send us your clients as web traffic, we’ll be pleased to sell them back to you, again and again, from now on.”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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Q: What do you do when your massive Realty.bot web site, target-marketed to equity-rich home-sellers, finds itself in a real estate market where most sellers are upside down and do not give a rat’s ass what their homes might sell for?

A: Punt.

This is an eyeball play, up front, just pure traffic-baiting. But the genius of it is that it turns into FUD for the agents in the long run: A million necks, one noose.

These sites are just noise, by now, just more “media” — uninformed opinions from people who make their living doing something other than selling real estate. Delivering your clients to them strikes me as a poor idea.

December 2, 2010

Unchained melodies: An ostensive exposition of the vital importance of shit-kicker music to the maintenance of a rebel attitude.

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We’ve been listening to Badlands Country, a rockin’ kind of outlaw alt.country internet radio station. You can get it through the link above, but it should be available from just about any internet radio client. I found it first on iTunes, if that helps, and I listen to in on my iPhone by way of ooTunes, which is totally worth having just by itself.

Badlands has a pretty long playlist, most of it in-your-face rebel country — with zero Nashville pop pabulum.

The station is epoch-eclectic, to say the least, but one of the things I like about it is that they play a lot of classic country, the stuff you will never hear on broadcast stations.

Like this: When Johnny Cash was most enthralled by the music of Bob Dylan, he wrote an homage to Don’t think twice, it’s alright called Understand your man. The debt to Dylan is more than obvious, but the Man in Black wrote a song that is darker, funnier and much more true to the reality of a broken marriage:

I love songwriters as much as I love their songs, and Lacy J. Dalton recorded the absolute best song about songwriting in Sixteenth Avenue:

My pappy purely loves Tom T. Hall, one of the great Nashville songwriters, and I love it that there is still room for his music in the Badlands:

Is all that too old-timey for you? That whole Texas alt.country scene is well-represented, from Chris Knight to Reckless Kelly to James McMurtry. Here’s Fred Eaglesmith with I like trains:

And if you’re lookin’ for more of a back-beat, more of an urban rhythm, the Badlands has you covered, with tunes like this cover of Snoop Dogg’s Gin and juice from The Gourds (not safe for work, kids or your mom):

There’s always room for bebop in our lives — and especially in my car. But Badlands Country is a rockin’ way to deliver the goods in the office.

November 29, 2010

I ran today for the first time in sixteen years…

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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If you’ve seen me in real life, you that know I walk with an ugly limp. I walk fast, but I don’t walk pretty. I was in a car accident in October of 1994, and one of my injuries was the severing of the nerves that control my left foot. Looks normal, works okay, but I can’t push off with that foot, nor curl my toes toward my nose, nor elevate that foot when it’s hanging in mid-air.

I have nothing to complain about. I had truly great doctors, including eight hours under the lights with orthopedic surgeon Dr. Stuart Kozinn, a consistent favorite in Phoenix magazine’s “Best Doctors” feature.

And, since then, my legs have always been very strong. Dr. Kozinn and I were both determined that I wasn’t going to spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair, so I did everything I could to get my legs back under me. I can ride my bike for miles and miles at top speed in the desert heat, because that’s how I got my stride back.

But: I could not run. You have to be able to push off to run, because your toes can’t be dragging on the ground as you are swinging your leg forward. That would hurt — even before you tripped and fell on your face.

I loved to run before the accident. I never cared about exercise when I was young, but I never needed to: I was a high-D in a red-hot hurry. I ran everywhere. I loped everywhere, sailing through the air in nine-yard strides.

So when I couldn’t run any longer, I really missed it. I dream about running, and I love to go to the supermarket so I can run through the aisles, supporting my upper body on the shopping cart.

And all that changed today. Cathleen has been on my case for a while to buy Skechers Shape-Ups shoes. The marketing promise is better fitness, a workout while you walk, but the reality is pretty dramatic. There is so much up-thrust from the heels of those shoes that they replicate the effect of a strong Read more

November 25, 2010

“Thanksgiving was a holiday established by productive people to celebrate the success of their work.”

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

That’s Ayn Rand, from Atlas Shrugged. I love that quotation and I love this holiday, second only to Independence Day. I’m working today, because that’s what I do, but I’m celebrating, too, because I have worked so hard and so well.

Here’s to the dogs — to the people who write, comment and read here. Living anywhere near my world can be a disquieting thing, I know, but I hope you never doubt my gratitude.

And here’s to another year of hard work — and to the Splendor that comes from working wisely and well.

November 17, 2010

A warning to loudmouths everywhere: Cathy’s into pain compliance . . .

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Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

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[Kicking this back to the top. Cathleen is trying to get the very willful Ophelia to walk to her heel, and that put me in mind of this song, which I wrote almost four years ago. –GSS]

 
So: This is a long way in…

First, Ophelia, our newly-adopted Redbone Coonhound, gets all over the nerves of Desdemona, our English Coonhound. A deafening racket ensues. Fortuitously, Odysseus the TV Spokemodel Bloodhound, who is in fact the loudest dog on Earth, doesn’t add much to the cacophony.

But: We were running out of seconds of silence in which to place hurried phone calls. This is not the ideal way to run a real estate business.

I try not to be one of those guys who pretends to have three testicles, but, nevertheless, it usually falls to me to be the bad guy. When there’s constabulary work to be done, the constable’s lot is a terrible one.

So this Monday just past, I decided more or less unilaterally that Desdemona was going to get a shock collar to control her barking. Cathy was all in favor of painless solutions, but we have tried all of these, at considerable expense. I knew that I was going to have to take the blame for inflicting pain on poor Desdemona, but we were all but entirely unable to communicate in our own home.

So: We got the collar. Desdemona moderated her behavior almost immediately. And, biggest surprise of all, my dear sweet tender-hearted Cathleen has become the world’s most vocal champion of pain compliance for dog training. She’s so happy with the results Desdemona is exhibiting that, yesterday, she bought a remote-control training collar for Ophelia.

All this is hugely funny to me, and it all seems to fit so well with with the rest of our insane lives, so I wrote a song about it — up-tempo and loud. And with all that as introduction, here are the lyrics:

Cathy’s into pain compliance

Don’t bark, don’t bite
Don’t growl at night
Don’t post anonymous tripe
Don’t sniff, don’t snivel
And spare us your drivel
You’re hardly the last word in gripes
     Attorneys yearn to cluck defiance
     But Cathy’s into pain compliance

Don’t spout Read more

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