Bad Self Help Ideas, A Naked Cat Fight, and Johnny Depp (In His Own Gravy)

“If you eliminate the third, fifth, and sixth letters, then it’s Red’s Digest, comrade.” – M*A*S*H

Yes, Laura Ingalls Wilder is where I got my blogging name.  Long story.

My parents subscribed to Reader’s Digest© as I was growing up.  For those unfamiliar with the magazine, it was a little bigger than a paperback book, and contained shortened versions of articles from other magazines.

TL;DR?  Reader’s Digest™ is like Reddit® for old people.

Sometimes it really is aliens. 

Reader’s Digest™ also contains several pages of stories from readers, mainly jokes and humorous stories, or at least it did back the last time I read it, when I was just a kid, say 10 or so.  One of the stories has stuck with me since then.  It goes something like this:

One day a mother looked out the kitchen window and saw her children playing in the backyard.  She noticed that her son, about age seven, had a rock in his hand and was using it to strike the top of a soup can.  The can was being held in place by the woman’s five-year-old daughter.  What alarmed the woman was that the daughter was holding the can on top of her head.

“Timmy, stop hitting your sister!” yelled the mother.

The daughter replied, “It’s okay, Mommy, he’s almost done.”

Some of the details of the story might be wrong, but I remember the last line exactly.  It amuses me to this day, because I can see that, while uncomfortable as it may be to have a seven year old whacking at a soup can on top of your head with a rock, you can be certain you will feel better when they stop.

I listen to YouTube® on the drive to work.  Listen.  I used to watch it, but the pedestrians didn’t seem to like sharing the sidewalk, and Pop Wilder told me when I was first learning to drive to never swerve, it was dangerous.  I guess I’ll miss Grandma.  Pity about the will.  Anyway, the terms of my parole don’t let me watch YouTube® anymore.  We have strict judges in Modern Mayberry.

YouTube™ has autoplay, and since I’m driving, I wasn’t watching, and it’s played everything from videos on Stalin to videos on chainsaws to Alice Cooper® songs that he performed for a Philippino werewolf movie.  So this particular random video didn’t surprise me.  In the video, I heard a person talking about how they made their life better through “Negative Visualization.”

Stalin’s program was so effective, he made 20 million people disappear!  Just like food, this offer is not available in stores.

My first thought was that I had never heard that term and I was wondering if it was some sort of self-help video hosted by Stalin.  Once you get into the Stalin self-help videos, that’s a never ending video sink-hole.  Better Mental Health Through Collective Farming And Not Eating All That Decadent Food Like the Capitalists still gives me the shivers.

It turns out this video was entirely unrelated to Stalin, entirely bypassing the U.S.S.R. self-help craze currently so popular in California.  In this particular video, the presenter suggested you imagine that something horrible happened to your family, say, they were killed slowly in a fire, or were forced to go to a Cher™ concert.  He suggested that then you’d feel better when you realized that none of those horrible things happened to them.  His theory is that you’d love them more and appreciate them more after mentally throwing yourself through a daily tragedy.  What could go wrong?

Timmy, in other words, would stop banging the soup can on your head with a rock and you’d feel better.

I feel that Negative Visualization is a supremely stupid idea, at least for me.  I thought that if I started my day imagining tragedy in all aspects of my life, that my relationships fractured, that I became ill, that I became bankrupt, or that I had to give Johnny Depp a two hour sponge bath with tepid water, I would just be depressed.  So I tried it.  And I was right.  It was just depressing.  Instead of feeling better because my bathroom was Depp-free, the emotions of imagining a nude and smelly Johnny Depp in my bathtub was just gross, so I felt both depressed and unclean.

Is it just me, or do you think that this room smells like Dinty Moore Beef Stew®, expensive foreign alcohol made from bugs, and despair?  As a note, The Mrs. felt the caption should have used gravy instead of sauce.  Which do you prefer, Depp Gravy™ or Depp Sauce©?

Instead of Stalin’s Daily Devotion® I decided to go back to what I’ve done for most of my life:  just be grateful for what I have.  Today, in this moment I have it pretty good.  I have enough money to not worry for the next ten minutes.  I have a loving family that will pretend to be happy to see me when I get home tonight.  I have friends that I can call up and share the innermost details of my life with, so they can make fun of me behind my back.  And I’m healthy, losing weight consistently, and don’t have an immediate departure date from planet Earth.  Plus?  I just bought a bitchin’ 6.5 Creedmoor that I need to sight in.

My life is good.  Because you have a computer and you’re reading this, you have it good, too.  In fact, chances are pretty strong that you’re part of the dreaded 1%.

Don’t think so?  Don’t argue with Wilder.

I got into a Twitter® slapfight about just this subject.  The thing I have since discovered is that winning an argument on Twitter© carries the same prestige as beating a kitten in a knife fight, so I have (mostly) given it up, which is nice for the kitten.  The kitten was getting pretty tired of it, even though it had it coming.  Sir Flappy Knobkins knows why.

Cats may be quick, but I have a secret weapon:  I’ve mastered Laser-Fu.

But in this particular Twitter© slapfight, a gentleman from England was complaining about “the evil 1%”.  My response to him was, “dude, you ARE the 1%.”  He then preceded to deny that he was part of the 1%, because they were evil and owned private islands.  I then pointed out the minimum income to crack the top 1%:

$32,400 per year.

Yup.  If you make $32,400 a year, you’re in the top 1%.  But that’s looking at the whole world.  I could tell by the pause that the gentleman I was arguing with looked it up.  Then he responded, “Well, not that 1%.  I meant the really rich people.”  His entire persona was built around the idea that he was oppressed and his Tweets® were filled with envy.  I bet he’s fun at parties.

So my suggestion is this:  get up every morning and don’t imagine those you love being slowly, lovingly, caressed by Joe Biden.  No.  Get up and be grateful.  I know for a fact that many of you reading this blog are multi-thousandaires, so you have a lot to be grateful for.  Gratitude feels better than envy or being depressed any day.  And if something really is wrong?  Remember it will pass.  Eventually life gets tired, and stops hitting the can on your head with a rock.

Don’t pick a rock that’s too big.

Think how good you’ll feel when he stops!