Cinderella’s memories of the zoo

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

Cinderella was in a snit, and who could blame her? She was an orphan swarmed by a family of strangers, accidental intimates, pushy and intrusive and unwelcome. And the most distant stranger of all was the original Prince Charming, the man she had expected would always be beside her.

Physically distant, too, for he led the little brood, prancing on the balls of his feet, ostentatiously trying too hard, while Cinderella dragged her small feet at the rear, palpably punishing Prince Charming. Once he flounced back and tried to jolly her into joining them, into becoming one with them, but she blew him off with a furious shake of her head, horse-whipping him symbolically with her imperious, impetuous, long brown hair.

And something tells me it’s all happening at the zoo. I was sitting on a bench watching the Galapagos tortoises fornicate, a surprisingly delicate, amazingly time-consuming process. The post-modern delegation from the Brothers Grimm came trundling up the path, and they made a fine exhibit, too.

Only a fool would call them a family. They were a composite, an ungainly grafting of two diseased trees. If you keep your eyes open you can spot them all over, whisper-shouting through (more…)

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What We Got Wrong

[The following was duplicated from the original at indarchy.com.]

With “we” here, I mean the so-called “freedom lovers.” I mean those of us who understood what’s been going on for a very long time, and who didn’t like it one little bit. I mean those who’ve been citing the Founding Documents, with a focus on the ideas involved. I mean those who knew all along that reality admits of no contradictions…not in the physical realm and not in the human realm.

We saw all this and we saw even worse. We knew all along that production wasn’t a series of numbers to be tracked. We knew–from principle as well as experience–that statism simply can’t last. We know the nature of the entities involved, and we know that something can’t come from nothing…no matter how deep your wish nor how long your whip. We understood the whole time, the last few decades and the next few years, what simply must happen if collectivism and statism rule the day.

And that’s the part we got wrong. Thank goodness. We see things how they are and we conclude to where they must lead. Hence, the picture in our minds is usually one of collapse. We see fools (more…)

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Reasons to be cheerful, Part 3.1.2: Redemption is egoism in action, so do the world a favor and catch your self doing something right.

I hope I don’t seem to be a scold.

It suits my ends to poke around in the trash can inside your brain, but I’m not doing it to be mean — nor to induce you to feel bad about yourself. I know a whole lot about the interior mental processes that motivate the pursuit of values and disvalues — and about the subsequent and secondary consequences of those mental processes — but it’s not as if I can actually read your mind.

So how do I know so much about how your mind works? I don’t, not by any means except inference. What I know about is how my mind works. We are alike as things — we are ontological equals — so I know that your mind works the same way mine does — no less than and for the same reasons that your heart works the same way mine does. Moreover, I can look you in the eye and tell you the truth of your life in excruciating detail, working from nothing other than past experience with myself and other people. Our differences make us unique and beautiful, but our similarities make us comprehensible to each other.

So without intending to (more…)

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Reasons to be cheerful, Part 3.1.1: Psalm.

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 (more…)

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Reasons to be cheerful, Part 3.2: Yuppie love: The egoist’s guide to mastering the art of frolicking naked with the one you love.

Here’s an eye-opening item from the news feeds: Up to four out of five women are faking orgasms, at least some of the time. Last weekend, I was incredulous at Camille Paglia’s lamentations about sexlessness in the middle class, but, even though I’ve read — and doubted — all of the claims about anorgasmic women, still, I have never been prepared to lend any of this any credence.

And, yes, I’m talking about adult subject matter. If you’re still a giggling pre-teen, you might giggle off elsewhere. I intend to approach this as philosophy, but, if anything, that will just bring out more self-induced juvenility. The actual reason that normal adult Americans have bad sex is because they refuse — very probably in every realm of their lives — to take joy seriously. But we can’t even get that far without a commitment on your part to stop blushing and start thinking. If you won’t do this, what I plan to do here will be a waste of your time.

And must I also defend this as real estate? If you want to learn every new vendorslut trick for not making money while you betray your own soul, get thee to Agent Shortbus (more…)

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Reasons to be cheerful, Part 2.9.5: Carrying a concealed firearm is the first step to reclaiming responsibility for your own self-defense.

Arizona State Senate Bill 1070 — the “Welcome to the Hotel California” legislation that has drawn so much attention nation-wide — will take effect on July 29th, 2010. Two other bills that will become law that day are more interesting to me, if not to TV-camera-mugging know-nothings in other states.

First, it will be lawful in Arizona for citizens to carry a concealed weapon without applying for a state permit. Arizona has always been an open-carry state, and, until now, a concealed carry permit required nothing more than a small fee plus 16 hours of instruction. With or without the legal requirement, the instruction is not a bad idea. But what will change on July 29th is the attitude of bad guys. Unlike thugs in, say, Chicago, criminals in Phoenix know there is a high degree of likelihood that ordinary people will be armed. As Robert A. Heinlein said, “An armed society is a polite society.”

Second, firearms manufactured and sold within the state of Arizona will not be subject to the Federal Brady Law’s national firearms database. It’s not a big deal right now, but it is plausible that there will come a time that the Feds — or their surlier successors (more…)

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Reasons to be cheerful, Part 3.1: The song of the self.

78/365, fly
You can choose the light or the darkness, or you can run from one to the other, wasting your life in a lather of dithering. But you cannot be alive as a human being and yet, somehow, choose not to choose. You cannot choose what you are. Your only choice is who you’ll be.♥serendipity / Foter.com / CC BY-ND

This is a dumb thing to say, but at the same time, I think it’s the essence of everything, the one thing that most needs to be said:

I love life. I love living. I love being alive as a human being — a genetic homo sapiens within whom has been cultivated a self — and I love, love, love being that self with a deep and abiding adoration. I don’t want to be anyone but me, but I want to be me to the utmost, to the evermost — without shame, without hiding or disguising myself in any way and without one word of apology to anyone, ever.

This is fact, obvious and dumb to say but utterly necessary to understand: We are each of us all alone inside the mind, and the self of atoms, actions and events that others see is the (more…)

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Reasons to be cheerful, Part 2.9: Marksmanship is a perfectible praxis.

Take note: If the shit really does hit the fan — which I do not expect to happen — fortune will surely favor the well-prepared mind.

No need to get fancy. Aim for the torso and don’t waste ammo.

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Reasons to be cheerful, Part 2.5: It’s raining soup and all you can do is piss and moan that Big Mother hasn’t given you a free bowl.

Take note: If you slaved away for 152 hours at an ordinary job in 1964, you could have bought yourself this classy stereo from Radio Shack:

Put in the same 152 hours in 2010, at the same kind of job, and you can buy this much stuff instead:

This is the power of (relatively) free markets. Not only can you buy more stuff, better stuff, stuff that was completely unobtainable in 1964, at the same time very smart people have figured out how to make you much more productive than you would have been in 1964.

Chances are you had almost nothing to do with this incredible productive miracle. If you are like most Americans, your major exports are half-digested junk food and bitter lamentations about the unseemly unfairness of everything for everyone, everywhen and everywhere. But this simple example, provided by The Enterprise Blog at the American Enterprise Institute, illustrates what has really been going on in your life, while you have been so busy complaining about how horrible everything is.

We are puerile as a race, about which I will have much more to say later. But even if you are thoroughly grown up in your own thinking, it’s good odds that you (more…)

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Reasons to be cheerful, Part two: If we are wise, and if we are lucky, we won’t “meet the new boss” because there won’t be any bosses.

Watch this:

Yes, everyone knows Saturday Night Live is not funny, but that sketch is interesting, even so.

Why? What is that bit actually saying?

Actors are puppets for writers, never forget that. What are the writers of that unfunny little skit trying to say?

Imagine this: Your parents spent a ton of money to send you to Brown or Yale or Dartmouth, and now you have the thoroughly unsexy job of writing unfunny comedy bits for an unwatched variety show that can’t even sell its own advertising time.

Do you want to believe that some mouth-breather in Dubuque can get an education just as useless as yours at, say, one percent of the cost your parents paid out?

Worse, what if that guy’s education is better than yours? What if he can get a job that amounts to something, in an industry that is growing, not dying? What if people make or lose money — or even live or die — based on his academic performance?

He doesn’t have your class ring, and he doesn’t belong to your network of drunken dissipates — each one of whom is stuck in a going-nowhere job just like yours. But, but, but: He doesn’t feel himself endowed with the centuries (more…)

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