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“But on this Earth, Rome never fell. A world ruled by emperors who can trace their line back two thousand years, to their own Julius and Augustus Caesars.” – Star Trek
Wilderus, Welthius, and Wisus, the original Roman Edition.
When a star starts its fusion cycle, it starts off with nice, ecologically friendly hydrogen. The star transforms this into helium, using just a bit of energy to send to nearby planets so that they can make Pez®. Eventually, the star will start fusing helium in its core. This causes the boundary of the star to move outward, and the star becomes a red giant.
If the star is big enough, it will continue creating heavier and heavier elements through fusion, each of them in turn making heavier elements. Until the star starts creating iron. Whereas the fusion reactions (including those that form iron) all produce excess energy, iron fusion actually consumes energy. The collapse of a star that starts fusing iron is rapid – the energy required to push the mass away from the center of the star disappears. The mass begins to (quite rapidly) fall inward back to the star. All of it. All at once.
And we call that a “Supernova,” which I hear is a pretty neat surf ride. I voted to name it “Wildernova” but was overruled on the grounds I hadn’t been born yet.
Great cultures have fallen in the past – Rome is forefront among them, since, from founding until the fall of Byzantium (that’s the Eastern Roman Empire) it lasted 2200 years. But there were others, the Mayans, the Greeks, and my next door neighbor when I lived in Alaska. All of those cultures passed away over time.
Since you can’t be a professor and not make up theories and stuff (the job has to look like work at least some of the time) Joseph Tainter came up with his theory of The Collapse of Complex Societies, which he published in a book in 1988. Like many people who have really good ideas, Tainter has been milking this one for quite a while, which I heartily approve of. If they’re gonna buy the same stuff from you again and again? Keep selling it! Heaven knows Aerosmith hasn’t had a new song since 1985.
Tainter’s book is quite accessible, and much shorter than one would imagine with a good idea. Most people take twenty pages of fascinating ideas and stretch them into several thousand pages of books, PowerPoints, and training sessions. Not Tainter. He packs his twenty pages of ideas into a Spartan 267 pages, including end notes.
A note about buying the book: DON’T. I spent $35 for my copy nearly a decade ago, and now a new copy is $47. Plus tax. So, unless you like paying $0.176 per page of book, DON’T. Why did I spend so much? Dunno. I’m cheap, but this book kept being referenced EVERYWHERE, so I thought I’d buy it.
I think it’s so expensive because it’s technically a textbook, and thus normal supply and demand economics don’t work with textbook publishers. Boy, when the Internet takes that group down, I’ll be smiling.
Anyhow . . .
Tainter suggests that societies start small, and aren’t very complex at the beginning. As the society grows in size and scope, it begins to become more complex. And then? Problems start. We have a water heater that supports four normal-human length showers, or one shower by The Boy. Thus, a new rule. Everyone showers BEFORE The Boy. But that has unintended consequences. Now I have to get up earlier to make sure I don’t have to take a shower in water colder than Shia LeBeouf’s jail cell.
Now I have to get up earlier. Since I have to get up earlier, I’m groggy while I drive to work. Since I’m groggy, I forget my coffee, now I’m double groggy and less sharp at work, and don’t create as much value. Then the Cubans invade, sensing weakness, and we have to move to the Rockies to defend against the Soviets. Go Wolverines!
You see how this works.
Actually, the above is a (slight) exaggeration of Tainter’s theory. You start with one rule, and it has unintended consequences that require other rules. Which . . . create more unintended consequences, requiring . . . more rules.
Pretty soon, most of society is either closely governed by the rules, or is so enmeshed in all the rules that they just want to get out – rather than society’s efforts going to create a comfortable life for the citizens, society’s efforts go into . . . supporting society’s rules.
I was reading Seneca’s (the dead Roman) Letters several years ago when one passage struck me . . . Seneca was writing to his friend and mentioned in passing boating regulations in Imperial Rome. Boating regulations. From that you can infer that the Romans had entire bureaucracies working on the correct size of a gladiator’s loincloth to the proper number of grapes in a bowl to be served to the Caesar. And, eventually, people got tired of the regulation. How bad did it get? Bad enough that they had to make a regulation stating that if you were the first born son, you had to do what your dad did. Farms were going unplanted because farmers’ sons were walking away to go do something less regulated, so they had to force them to be farmers. Except they just ignored the rule and walked away, in time.
Additionally, Rome had to support the infrastructure required by the Empire. An Empire requires food, roads, and bridges. And slaves. And Pez® factories. And an Army. And this stuff costs money. Retard the economic progress of the productive folks through regulation and add in a bunch of stuff they have to pay for, and you’ve got trouble.
Plus, let’s say you’re a Roman dealer in granite countertops. When your great-grandfather started business, all the granite was nearby, but the best stuff was used 20 years ago. Now they have to bring it in by ship. The cost of your business goes up and so does the societal energy required to get that granite. Food and wine have to be brought from farther and farther away because, in order to feed over a million people living in Rome, you had to get the stuff here, and it wasn’t like you could walk down to Caesar-Mart to get Hot Pockets® at 2AM. It took much more energy to feed the people of Rome.
And did you see that there were a million people living in Rome? There were as low as 200 million on the whole planet, which would be like a modern city having 0.5% of the world’s population living there, or 350 million people living in one city. (Tokyo is currently the biggest in the world, at only 33 million.) While not overpopulation, this population concentration was costly in an economic sense.
The outward signs of Rome’s weakness were the Goths, Vandals, and Jocks sacking Rome – but Rome had to defeat itself first, just like the Atlanta Falcons in Super Bowl LI.
Eventually, Rome fell, but primarily because its citizens decided, quite voluntarily and rationally to shed a layer of complexity that no longer served their purpose. It was as if they were a star, and started fusing iron. And all the Romans ran together at once at full speed into the center of Rome and mushed into each other. And exploded outward at the speed of light.
“Honor? I’ve got seven kingdoms to rule! One king, seven kingdoms! Do you think honor keeps them in line? Do you think it’s honor that’s keeping the peace? It’s fear! Fear and blood!” – Game of Thrones
I don’t ask for much. I just want to die as I came into this world – screaming and covered in someone else’s blood.
In 1943, Abraham Maslow had one of the two ideas that cemented him in the public consciousness, sort of like a Johnny Depp of years’ past, but with more showers than Johnny usually takes.
This idea (the other idea was, “If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”) became known as Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. For obvious reasons it isn’t known as Wilder’s Hierarchy, though . . . that’s coming soon, I hear, maybe even by the end of the post! (Foreshadowing!)
Maslow’s Hierarchy is often shown as a pyramid, because Maslow only intended for his psychological work to be used for ancient Egyptians, since that greatly reduced his malpractice insurance. Also, his patients could not sue, being dead and all. Upon further reflection and remembering that mummies could come back from the dead if they were played onscreen by really hot people, Maslow changed his mind (and his insurance carrier) and decided that Maslow’s Hierarchy was universally applicable, even onto inanimate objects, like bankers and rocks.
I kid. Everyone knows that rocks have feelings.
Anyhow, Maslow’s Hierarchy was really his way to describe how and why people act the way they do, and asking them is just too darn hard. Maslow’s Hierarchy became really popular in the 1960’s and 1970’s and was used to explain absolutely everything in public education from why kids hate split pea soup to why they are attempting to knife the teacher. But what is the pyramid?
By FireflySixtySeven – Own work using Inkscape, based on Maslow’s paper, A Theory of Human Motivation., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36551248
At the base of the pyramid are the physiological needs – things like breathing, food, water, shelter from the cold, cold winter of your parent’s disappointment. These were the needs that Maslow felt you couldn’t get past unless they were met. You’re not exactly thinking about writing poetry when you’re drowning, so Maslow said you were stuck down here. Interestingly, Maslow felt that sex belonged here, too, despite all of the bad poetry written by involuntarily celibate 15 year olds . . .
Moving right along, Maslow said if you were fed, warm, and could breathe after sex, you could worry about security needs. Me? I worry about staying awake. Maslow might be the only person who locked the door to his bedroom after sex. For the record – Maslow brought up sex first.
But, these security needs weren’t just having a loaded carbine when your Zombie Grandma (LINK) shows up at your bedside. These security needs also include (according to Wikipedia®):
financial security,
health, and,
“safety net” against health problems.
If these sound familiar, this appears (to me) to be the level where almost every political argument is waged. You don’t hear any politicians saying that they’ll get you all the air you can breathe, but they do sure fight for the “government will take care of me” vote.
I imagine Al is normally pretty well adjusted. But TSA? Yeah. They take it out of everyone.
Since when do I worry more about my 401k than my family? Since Maslow said so? Hmmmmm. We might be seeing some cracks in this philosophy.
Next on the list is esteem. This means people accept you and value you. You provide worth to those around you. You’re a ninja in a room full of evil kittens (unweaned, eyes closed, but still REALLY EVIL). And you have those throwing star things. And two samurai swords.
See what happens when someone harshes your esteem:
Esteem is awesome. It’s excellent! I love it when people worship the stuff I do. I also love it when people hold me accountable for the things I don’t do. It means that what I do matters. And if it doesn’t matter? You don’t get real esteem.
I think this is where the current world begins to diverge farther and farther from the social reality. I love soldiers. 95% of them are awesome! But not every single one is a hero. Many are awful people. Again, I generally see the uniform, and I sense pride. But to claim that all are heroes means that none are heroes. All have the same esteem, so they all have none.
Another interesting note (well, it was interesting to me) is that one of the leading causes of depression among men over 40 is . . . loss of esteem, usually job-related. When I say depression, I mean (shhh) suicide. Which if you believed Maslow, this would just send you to your friends, and not all the way to square zero.
At the top of the pyramid? Self-actualization. It’s like if Wolverine® could do math. Oh, wait, that’s Tony Stark. Self-actualization was Maslow’s fantasy of how it felt to be Albert Einstein walking around everyday, but without the autism. This means you’re living your full potential without restraint. It must be how Jeff Bezos feels everyday now that he’s all pumped up on testosterone and has those big guns (arms) and big guns (actual rocket ships). Heck, it’s likely he even has large artillery somewhere.
The rich aren’t like you and me – they have cannon. (With apologies to F. Scott Fitzgerald.)
Later in life, apparently after watching the TV show Kung-Fu or maybe seeing Led Zeppelin on stage, Maslow added a capstone:
SELF-TRANSCENDENCE. Remember how Connor McCloud of the Clan McCloud could do and be everything after he chopped all the heads off of all of those people in Highlander? (SPOILER ALERT FROM 1985) Yeah. Apparently this was what Maslow envisioned when he added this to his pyramid.
I’ve been snarking at poor old Maslow this whole time, primarily because he looks like a well-meaning hippy from today’s standards. And I’m not sure he deserves it, but, really, it sure is fun. Ironically, my comments are tame compared to the criticisms of his fellow academicians:
Ethnocentric – individualistic versus communal. Soviet Union fell, dude.
Peacetime Vs. Wartime – war combines the two bottom parts of the pyramid so that security takes on the same level of importance as eating. Which, except for a few hundred years in a few small places on Earth?
I Could Have Done It Better – Well, sure! What part of the pyramid are you on? Sissy.
Okay, can I criticize it better than those idiots?
Absolutely.
Maslow entirely neglected the concept of time. If hunger has been gnawing at me for weeks, it’s a very different story than if I’m worried about being hungry tomorrow. Hunger forever gnaws at the soul. (Not the sole – who eats feet?)
Likewise, a brave man will jump on that grenade for you in combat, whereas one who has been sitting at the bottom of a trench for a week might just want to see you gone because you snore or eat your own toenails.
The concept of time is crucial.
And, on further reflection? Most of our motivation comes not from a clear and shining purpose – it comes from fear. And fear is time-dependent. The longer it goes, the more it nips at your soul. And those we rightly call heroes are those that overcome that fear, both in the short-term and during the long game. We used to call that character.
So, I make the following Modest Proposal:
Let’s call this . . . the Wilder Hierarchy of Fear™ – (represented by a blob, not a pyramid) starting with –
First Fear: Fear of not having Pez®. And not breathing. And not having food. And freezing to death. This fear will make you do stupid things, especially in the short term. Longer term (a week or so) it might even grow into a debilitating fear.
Second Fear: Family Survival. Fear of losing your family. Many times it will overcome the First Fear, unless you really, really like Pez® more than one of your children.
Third Fear: Bloodline Survival. You like your kids. You want them to have more kids. Why? It’s good. Especially if you read this blog, because your IQ is totes above 125. And we need more of you! Fears of financial failure fall in here.
Fourth Fear: Fear of Shame. You have people you work with. People who look up to you. People who admire you. You don’t want to appear weak or incompetent or dishonorable to them – in many ways, that’s worse than death, because it puts a blight on the family name.
Fifth Fear: Fear of Lack of Achievement. Me? I have to wonder how much more I could have done if it weren’t for the Pez®. Stupid Pez™.
Sixth Fear:Fear You Aren’t a Marvel® Superhero. Name says it all. WHY DON’T I HAVE ADAMANTIUM CLAWS???
Noting that the First through Fourth Fears are driven by a desire to save your family and your community is pretty easy. And maybe, maybe, I should change it to a pyramid. Why?
“Yeah, that’s nothing. Peter would spend millions just to mildly annoy Gavin. These are billionaires, Richard. Annoying each other means more to them than we’ll make in a lifetime.” – Silicon Valley
So, I met William Shatner. He wasn’t as thrilled as I was. I saw him sign this, for me. It looked like he wanted to get to the Holiday Inn and soak his feet.
Part of great success is built by luck.
Yes, that’s a declarative sentence, and of course I knowmy old granddaddy Quintin Tarantino used to say, “The less a man makes declarative statements, the less apt he is to look foolish in retrospect,” but I’ll stick by this one.
One of my favorite stories is about an author who submitted his novel to about a zillion publishers, only to be turned down by all of them. All of them.
He was working a crappy night job at a dry cleaner, and after the novel came back, in a fit of anger he threw it into the trash, right on top of last night’s dinner. He had given up. His wife, however, still had hope. She picked the novel out of the trash. She replaced the cover – the old one had gotten spaghetti sauce all over it – and she sent it in.
One more time.
The publisher loved it. Soon a book contract. Then a movie, “Carrie.”
Yeah, that was Stephen King. How many Stephen Kings are there working that just never got a break? That didn’t have Brian dePalma direct a masterful movie off of their work? Hundreds? Thousands?
Heck, I have my own magnum opus I wrote on construction paper about a robot that could kill all of humanity and then died. Because . . .
Dang, that was the hard part. Yes. Because humanity was so strong!!!!!
But, that’s me, not Stephen King.
Stephen King can write fiction that millions want to see. But he was lucky he married a woman who believed one more time than he did. Unlike my Mom, who cried on the construction paper. She told me she was happy, but I still think those weren’t happy tears.
Let’s switch gears . . . .
Pick anyone named Bill who is wildly successful, and I’ll point to the break that they had – the luck – that got them over the top.
I’m NOT saying that Bill Shatner isn’t a gift to the world, because clearly he is. But he was the second person who sat at the helm of the Enterprise, not the first. He had a stroke or two of luck in that one . . . But I follow him on Twitter®, he doesn’t follow me. (Yet)
There were thousands of people who competed with Gates. But we should all be honest: it took more than one lucky break for Gates to end up with enough money to buy up all of the Pez® in the world three times over:
Gates was born rich. Not mega-rich, but rich. As we all know, that’s the best way to get rich (LINK).
Gates had access to computers at a private prep school when only NASA, MIT, and The Hair Club for Men had access to that kind of computing power.
He met lots of the “right people” at Harvard.
He was lucky enough to bring some of those “right people” to Microsoft®.
He had a lucky meeting with IBM®. They’d use his new DOS® software, because (laughing) WHO WANTS TO OWN SOFTWARE? Look at this cool green screen!
Bill eventually won – he built a monolith of a cash-generating company from the ground up. At the right moment in history, Mr. Gates either developed or found:
The Right Vision. As early as 1980, the vision was a computer on every desk, in every home, running Microsoft® software. By 1998 geriatric grandfathers had them to get e-mail from distant family. By 2002 they were getting e-mailed photos regularly. By 2004 they were sending money to Nigerian Princes and sending out virus-encrusted email greeting cards to EVERYONE in their address book.
The Right Skills. Bill Gates developed a wide variety of skills beyond his programming chops – he developed team leadership skills, accounting and sales skills, and the skills to hire the best.
The Right Team. Windows 1.0 sucked. So did Word 1.0. So did Excel 1.0. They were the WORST. But the team did second and third versions that were so good, so strong, so well integrated that dominant products like “Lotus 1-2-3” and “WordPerfect” were smashed harder than an Amish girl at spring break in Cancun.
The Right Business Environment. The early vision of computers on each desk meant . . . they had to be usable. They had to provide value. They had to be something that people wanted to use. By creating that software, by creating Windows 95™, Gates got rid of the old constraints of the IBM clone as a business machine, and brought it into the home, massively multiplying the user base in a single year.
Mr. Gates was always going to do well. He had too many factors in his favor from day one, even without the family wealth and support. That was like having a springboard. With his intellect at that time and place? No way Bill walks away with less than $100,000,000. He was going to create something awesome no matter what. But one of the largest and most profitable companies on Earth?
Nah. That wasn’t a cinch.
Again, I’m not saying that these Captains of Industry (Gates, Musk, Jobs, Thiel, Bezos, Brin, Page) aren’t worthy. They most clearly are. (But do you think that Page gets mad that I put Brin first?) Again, clearly, each of them would have been very successful without luck. But luck has played a part in vaulting each of these men into the massive success that they now enjoy. (I was tempted to throw “clearly” into that last sentence, but, I think you’ve gotten the point by now. Clearly.)
So you should Get Lucky.
Good heavens! There must have been a LOT of bad decisions in the 1980s. Starting with this album cover.
Well, you’re in luck! I have a fairly short list that I’ll expand at a future point, when the astrological signs are right:
Hard Work – There is no substitute for this. Okay, there is. Massive piles of talent and luck. And money.
Live in a Big City (A Rich One) – For heaven’s sake, if you’re not rich? Hang around rich people! They have opportunity, and, most importantly, businesses you can learn to work with. And . . . run.
Work In a Job Where The Money Is – There are rich cities and poor cities. And there are rich portions of the economy and poor ones. Would you rather work at the place where they recycle used water bottles, or the place where they build underground secret bases for aspiring Bond villains? (I’m looking at you, Elon Musk).
Expose Yourself At Your Best – Have you ever seen that show, Cops? It’s every person, ever, at their very worst day. On film. Honestly, we all have bad days. And we all have things we’re bad at (hopefully the thing you’re bad at isn’t personal hygiene – and it wouldn’t be, since you read this blog – you must smell like roses and fresh bread, and that’s on a bad day!). But when you get a chance and you’re with a billionaire? Show him what you do best. Unless what you do best is eat Pez®. Focus on things you can do for the billionaire that make him even more money.
Believe You’re Lucky – Sounds crazy, right? No science behind it? But if you believe you’re lucky you’ll see good things when others see only bad. You’ll see opportunity when others only see stone walls. And if you stare at the Sun long enough . . . WAIT . . . don’t do that. But I’m not kidding – believing you’re lucky makes you lucky. Me? I’m the luckiest guy you’ve ever read, unless you’ve read something that Keanu Reeves wrote, because that man is golden (LINK).
In 2016, there were 540 billionaires living in the US. If 35% of them inherited their great gobs of billionaire cash, that leaves 351 who did it themselves. Yay, them! That gives you a 0.000117% chance of being one.
By doing the things I’ve listed above? If you’re really smart (like 140+ IQ, PLUS read this blog)? That means you can force those odds several orders of magnitude closer to your own private island. Maybe even to 0.01% of a shot at the Tres Commas (A Billion has Three Commas) club.
This much, much closer than you could ever become with a lottery ticket. And, the good news? You will certainly become a millionaire, you know, with the shameful two commas.
All of this is better than winning the lottery. Certainly your biggest shame? You’re only a millionaire.
But none of this will allow you to become as cool as Bill Shatner. Because there can be Only One True Shatner!
“What? Come on! Man, you’re smart. You made poison out of beans, yo. Look, we got, we got an entire lab right here. Alright? How about you pick some of these chemicals and mix up some rocket fuel? That way you could just send up a signal flare. Or you make some kind of robot to get us help, or a homing device, or build a new battery, or wait. No. What if we just take some stuff off of the RV and build it into something completely different? You know, like a like a dune buggy?” – Breaking Bad
Our camp, as viewed by the disembodied spirit of Elvis.
“I can’t believe you did this,” The Boy was flat out surprised.
And, I’ll admit it, when you have a guy that drives a 12 year old car (LINK) until it gets totaled (LINK) it would seem a bit out of character for him to buy what can only be considered a luxury item. Or at least that’s what I thought of, when I thought of RVs.
The Mrs. and I had actually discussed purchasing an RV for the last 15 or so years. At first it was a little pop-up camper that occupied our dreams. When we moved to Alaska, we looked at several different campers and camper types, and were pretty close to offering some money for a little integrated camper with its own engine, etc., but I couldn’t quite get comfortable driving in the bush in Alaska where there were no cell phones with a camper that had 271,000 miles on it. That’s just asking for Hollywood to make an “Into The Wild”-type movie starring your family and a grizzly bear that stalks you for 231 miles of your trek back to civilization while you have to fight it off with marshmallow roasting forks.
I like to think that they’d get Liam Neeson to play me. If he works out and gets some bigger biceps.
Anyway, we put the idea of an RV on the back burner living in Texas, because the last thing you want to be is a Texan with an RV. That’s like ALL Texans, and, since The Mrs. and I have never read Harry Potter, we figured why join the crowd now?
But I like camping, and after a few camping adventures that seem more like a horror movie to The Mrs. (Just a little farther, dear – you can stop throwing up whenever you get to the top!), she decided that she liked . . . showers. And a bed. And not throwing up on the trail.
But, to buy a camper seemed so frivolous. And not that I don’t buy frivolous crap – I do. Right now I’m wearing a 2016 Campaign t-shirt for The Flight of the Conchords (Jemaine & Brett 2016 – It’s Business Time).
It’s worth the watch – 3:55 minutes of New Zealand’s second most popular comedy-folk duo.
Anyway, it seems so frivolous, something that someone with LOTS of money would do. It’s something that . . . rich people would do? Or old retired people who wanted to drive a house around slowly so they could have their house be in different places. Kind of like the Tardis, but with Social Security.
I started stalking Craigslist around where we live. And, after getting a whole lot of free Styrofoam packing peanuts, I finally found two candidates. I’d also looked at a dealer, but the brand new one he showed me had a table that was split open due to humidity. Not a great selling point. The one I liked best was an R-Pod.
An R-Pod was designed to be smaller. We have a generic pickup, and a youth-skewed 4×4 SUV that The Mrs. likes to remind me is older than Pugsley. Pugsley is 12. She is not exaggerating. It doesn’t have a cassette deck, but . . . close. Both of these vehicles could pull the R-Pod, which weighs in at a whopping 2800 pounds, with a cargo capacity of at least another half-ton. This is important, since we’d have two vehicles capable of pulling the beast around, since our 4×4 was capable of “only” pulling 5,000 pounds.
First lesson? If I wanted to do this cheaply (and, Internet, you know I do!) I would have to buy something light, or I’d have to buy a trailer AND a car.
Again, we’d found two of these located two hours away in River City, Lower-Northern Midwestia. We texted and, without hearing back, turned our pickup to go buy an RV.
Now, I’m not opposed to other people buying brand-new RVs. If they didn’t, I wouldn’t have a pool of cheap used ones to pick from. Make no mistake – an RV isn’t an asset. All it does is either take you to the lake for fishing (or gold panning! (LINK)) or sit in a storage space. It creates no income. And every second it sits on the planet it depreciates, until it turns 50 and becomes either “classic” or “constructed entirely of prohibited components like lead and asbestos.”
An RV is not an investment.
So, on our way to River City someone returned my Craigslist email, and said they’d be there when we got there.
They were. They were a nice couple who had bought the RV to go to musical concerts, but the wife couldn’t manage to get around the trailer. I looked the trailer over, checked what I could figure out, and then, consulting Kelley’s Blue Book for RVs® (yes, this is a thing), made an offer of $1,000 less than the asking price. Unbeknownst to me, The Mrs. had been talking to the Mrs. of the owner’s side, and, they’d had it on the market for some time and were just getting ready to lower the price.
So, while I felt like a wheeler-dealer, I probably pegged the number that they really wanted. I wrote out a check, they wrote out a title, and we hooked OUR RV to the truck and headed back home. It looked strange, since most RPods have decals that make them look all pretty. In this case, the original owner (not the one we bought from) had painted over everything to advertise his traveling patent medicine show that he ran with Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves.
I know, I know, but you have to give the 70’s some slack. They’d just discovered polyester.
The Mrs. and I talked about what to do about our generic, white RV. In general, we decided we should either paint it like the mystery machine or like the shuttle Galileo from TOS Star Trek. In general, we both liked the way that we imagined the shuttle . . . . and we’ve gotta paint it . . . but can we bring our phasers?
Upon getting it home and hooking it up to power, I found that everything was functional, except the refrigerator and sensors that indicate the levels in the waste tanks and battery. RV refrigerators are mind-numbingly expensive, since they are configured to run on propane, plug-in power, batteries, and hope. They are apparently only made in Germany by small gnomes that live in the Harz Mountains. I resigned myself to buy a cheap college dorm fridge (there was a plug in) and move on. I went to work (mildy) brooding on this. Primarily I was depressed because the nice man hadn’t told me the fridge was on the fritz. I would have still bought it.
Most RV folks say the sensors are useless, and often stop working quickly. Not a problem.
I decided to not make our new toy a source of sadness. I buried any disappointment in a determination to fix it.
Pugsley had spent the night in the trailer. The Mrs. had bet he’d get in the first night it was home, but he waited until the second night to make his move.
Upon returning home from work, I decided to check out other systems.
Nothing electrical worked. Nothing, except the air conditioning, microwave . . . . hmmm.
It was hot, I was sweating, and I began to check various components. I suppressed the burning desire to choke Pugsley. I really reasoned that he was only a bystander – and honestly, the fact that everything was broken was really encouraging.
I know, that sounds weird. But when one thing breaks? Yeah, that thing is generally broken. When it all breaks? That means your mind can generally fix it if you think smart enough, or have a great deal of experience really screwing things up. Me? I have a great running history of not giving up when I should (LINK).
After a bit of investigation, I found that two main fuses were blown. I sent The Boy to buy new ones. During his absence, I flipped the battery terminals on the brand new battery the previous owner had installed. The Boy arrives. I pop in the fuses.
Everything works. Everything. Including the German Ice Machine! Even the sensors that tell me how much onboard poop we have!
So, in best Star Trek® fashion? REVERSE THE POLARITY AND EVERYTHING WORKS!!!!
The previous owner had flopped the terminals on the battery. Now I had a flawlessly working system. Yay! And, unlike constructing tire chains by hand, this didn’t take sixteen hours to noodle through.
During this time, I remembered that the previous owner had stressed I should look at the wheel bearings. For those of you that may not be aware, a wheel spins. But the trailer does not. The contact part for the spinny-part to meet the non-spinny-part is the wheel bearing. It’s essentially a bunch of greased up balls (no jokes here) that allow everything to spin around without getting hot or grinding the nice metal into a pile of hot, combusting metal dust.
On side had a great place to inject grease into the bearing, which is what we used to do when Nixon was president (or so I’m told). Now most cars have sealed bearings that would last to Jupiter and back, but in the 1960’s (I’m told) you had to grease stuff all the time or else you’d die when the wheels flew off of your Model T at 22 miles per hour.
My crappy $500 trailer has sealed bearings. Not this trailer. Nope. It has bearings that must be greased. So I greased the ditch-side (think about it) bearing. There’s a small dust cap that covers the grease Zerk. The grease Zerk is the fitting that allows grease to be pumped on a one-way journey to the bearing, and is named for . . . Austrian engineer Otto U. Zerk. I know it sounds like a joke. It’s not. It should be. It’s not. Otto. U. Zerk.
Anyway – one side done, new grease covering all the nice bearing parts.
Next side . . . where’s the Zerk? Where’s the cap that holds the grease in?
I pulled the Zerk off the other side – Otto’s THREADED Zerk!!! – and put it on the other wheel. And pumped in a LOT of grease. And resolved on our trip to gold country that I’d pump grease into that wheel every hundred miles. (Spoiler, that seemed to work.)
Things I never really thought about:
It takes a LOT of gas to pull even a small trailer. I thought that perhaps if I had one much larger that I’d need to pull a small refinery behind me to supply me with gasoline.
Even a slight uphill was devastating to our progress. Speeding? Uphill? Ha! Never, never, never going to happen.
What I could normally do at the Real Speed Limit (normal speed limit +5 miles per hour) I now had to do at my Maximum Thermodynamic Speed Limit – which was often normal speed limit -5 miles per hour, sometimes -20 miles per hour.
It matters how you load a trailer. For the first 90 miles, whenever I approached 55 miles per hour, the trailer would start to sway from side to side like a break-dancing backup singer during a seizure. When I stopped to fill the Wildermobile with gas the first time I looked up “Trailer Sway” on the Internets. It turns out you simply have to put most of the weight forward so that there’s more weight on the hitch. I moved a bunch of things forward, and it worked like to stop the sway.
I’m not comfortable running a consumer engine at 5000 RPM for 12 hours. I let it back down to 3000 RPM just so I didn’t wreck the family’s hearing. Mine is already shot. Thank you very much, Iron Maiden.
But it worked. We even had one offer at a gas station (while we were on our way) to buy the trailer from us for what we paid for it. Nope.
The issue we had that concerned me the most was the trailer breaking. Apparently all travel trailers have electric brakes. These brakes interact with the braking system on the vehicle pulling the trailer and have the trailer brakes slow the trailer at a (similar) rate to the pulling vehicle. Why?
Because if not, the trailer would be pushing the pulling vehicle as it tried to stop. Worst case, it would keep going during an emergency stop (Newton’s Second Law – A fully loaded travel trailer in motion without brakes will keep going even when you’ve decided that stopping might be in your best interest.)
What concerned me were the mountain passes in gold country. They’re steep. And, while going up would certainly be slow, I wanted going down to be at something less than the speed of sound and not resemble CW McCall’s Wolf Creek Pass.
For these brakes to work, however, an electric controller has to be installed. While I am pretty sure I could install one okay, I’m not going to settle for pretty sure when it comes to preserving my pretty face, unless I want them to pick my remains up off the highway with a stick and a spoon. I farmed it out. But halfway to the mountains, it wasn’t working – showing a code that it had short circuited.
Well, when we stopped to buy a new fuse because Pugsley had plugged a Cray2200 supercomputer into the power outlet. While stopped, I looked a bit closer, traced the wires from the battery back, and found one of the crimped connections that the mechanic had installed had worked its way loose. Ten seconds later? Electric brakes back in business.
We got the camper to gold country, and then, well, camped. In a never-before-happened event, the family decided to extend the vacation for an additional day.
Here is my personal review of the camper:
Sunday Night: Omigosh. We’re here after 70 hours of driving today. And now? We have to set it up. In the dark. Without waking other campers. Three occupants. Only I will pee in camper restroom, and only when no one around. Camper cold, windows left open by Pugsley. Found the next day. Closed windows.
Monday Night: Everyone now fine with peeing in the camper – bathroom walk way too long at 40˚F. Camper way too hot. Four of us. I open the windows.
Tuesday Night: Four of us. Firefly. The Mrs. closes the windows, causing me to have a dream that I live in Houston again. Aaaaargh!
Wednesday Night: Four of us. Lots more Firefly. Slept great all nights. Too many stupid little dogs with stupid hot dog breath.
Thursday Night: Going to stay in it overnight at some nameless city, but we had the “great rush home” which was unanimously approved by the Family Subcommittee on Travel Hours. Sometimes it’s better to sleep in your “other” own bed. Plus I get to wake the neighbors by trying to back the trailer into my driveway at 3AM.
Once I bought the trailer, I now notice that there are trailers . . . everywhere. There are trailers parked out in front of houses where the trailer would CLEARLY be a better place to live than the home it’s in front of. I’m not sure I understand how you can afford a $20,000 or $30,000 RV when you clearly make less than $50,000; but then again, I don’t understand fashion.
I read that since they look like a home that interest a trailer loan is tax deductible? DO NOT use me as a source, unless you’d like to spend a long time in prison for “Using Internet Blogs As Tax Advice.”
My big financial advice on campers – don’t buy one if you can’t do or pay for:
Maintenance: It’s like owning an additional home. There are electrical systems, plumbing, and structural systems. The first night I got it, it attracted ants from five counties away.
Tow Vehicle: No, your Prius™ (LINK) won’t pull one. If you don’t have a good tow vehicle and need one, can you afford the trailer?
Gasoline: You will have to use more gasoline than you ever have, since Elon Musk hasn’t invented an electric trailer puller. He will, I have no doubt, but it’ll be on Mars.
Economics? Cheapest vacation we’ve taken in years (except for the whole “buying the trailer” thing). Didn’t buy restaurant food except twice. Didn’t spend much on attractions. And we saw things like this:
This is a video I took. Felt like Francis Ford Coppola shooting Apocaforest Now. That’s our trailer at the end.
I did the economics, and it will likely pay out in four or so years, which is better than most investments do. I may bore you with them at a future time. But you’re not Vulcans® so you might not like math jokes.
We are planning on using it for many vacations where we’d normally use hotels, so you’ll hear more about it soon.
Dorothy said there’s nowhere like home. And it’s not home, but it’s like home. So, I guess there is somewhere like home, and it’s on wheels. The Boy and Pugsley and The Mrs. rated it the best vacation except for one where we went to Alaska on spring break (yes, we really did this, and maybe I’ll post about it sometime).
So, verdict? It was wonderful. It was economical. It was peaceful (LINK). I learned about gold panning (LINK).
“Oh, okay. So I guess you came here in a Hot Tub Time Machine, too.” – Hot Tub Time Machine 2
A homemade cocoon for our first hot tub. Notice the used insulation – true Alaska!
It was twenty years ago today . . . oh, wait, that’s Sergeant Pepper . . . in my case it was closer to nineteen years ago . . .
I had just been paid the biggest bonus that I’d ever gotten. It had been a good year, and I managed a high profile project well – I’d saved the company several million dollars while bringing it in on time. I had a great, supportive, guru boss (this is both good and bad) who had solid numbers to take to the higher-ups to support his case. Awesome!
Also awesome was that, after taxes, the bonus could pay down approximately 1/3 of the credit card debt I had at that time. I had been at the point in my life where I was trying to keep my head above water after a divorce, and credit cards had been a stop gap. The Mrs. and I sat on the couch in the upstairs living room, as the Sun shined its last golden rays of the day into the room, providing a soft, mellow glow. We argued about the merits of choosing to pay down the debt, versus other options. We spent several hours discussing it.
So, The Mrs. and I sat, and made the momentous decision that . . . forget the debt, we’re getting a hot tub.
I know that this is probably not what your financial advisor would suggest you do, unless your financial planner was a twenty-eight year old with a short attention span who lived in his parent’s basement so he could save his money to buy even more weed. It was a horrible, frivolous decision. And it was one that I have never regretted.
Not only did we get a hot tub, we got the full-blown Sundance™ party hot tub – seats eight. We even custom ordered it to match the same colors as our house. When it arrived several weeks later we moved out of the house and into the tub. I exaggerate. We still went into the house for showers.
When we moved to Alaska, we took the hot tub with us. I eventually encased it in an outer cocoon of plywood and insulation, so even when it was -55˚F outside, the tub didn’t freeze, and didn’t cause the meters at the power plant to spin at light speed.
Our house in Central Midwestia was a great place to hot tub, but if there’s a truly awesome place to hot tub, it’s Alaska. The Mrs. and I would sit out in the tub for hours watching the aurora borealis write physics equations in the sky in particle, ions, and color. The aurora would move and undulate, lasting (on a good night) hours as the rivers of light threaded through the sky. We’ve had a hot tub at every house we’ve lived at, although we never used the one we had in Houston, since . . . it was Houston.
I think that buying that first hot tub was a good decision for two reasons: we got out of debt, but we did it slowly, and with discipline. That was good to teach us to live within our means and be frugal, unless I really, really needed those night-vision goggles.
But this isn’t a post about finance, that’s Wednesday’s topic. Today’s is health . . . and, like apple cider vinegar, hot tubs appear to also be amazingly good for you under most circumstances:
Hot tubs appear to make the following things better:
Arthritis
Asthma
Aurora Viewing* (Offer Void Outside Alaska)
Stress (lowers it)
Sleep (makes it better)
Blood Pressure (lowers it)
Migraine Frequency and Intensity (lowers it – I’ve never had one – it’s working!)
On the flip side, people mentioned these negative health consequences:
Infections from unsanitary hot tubs (In my experience this would be hard to do.)
Birth defects (I’ll abstain when pregnant.)
Lower sperm count (No comments here.)
Heart issues (But, isn’t that every darn thing??)
Chlorine over-exposure (see below)
I have had personal experiences with the chlorine, especially early on nineteen years ago when learning how to chemically treat the tub. At one point, my hot tub had nearly the same chlorine gas content as last seen during trench warfare in France.
Most recently The Mrs. bought a swimming-pool sized chlorinator for the hot tub because there might be 50 hot tubs within 20 miles, Wal-Mart doesn’t stock any hot-tub sized chlorinators.
This aircraft carrier sized chlorine-berg treats approximately 100 times the volume of water as the hot tub on its lowest setting. The deceptive danger from this chlorinator is that as it sits and bobs in the tub, it’s releasing chlorine into the water, and not a whole lot comes out as gas, so the water doesn’t smell like chlorine.
I got into the tub for a bit after the chlorinator had been sitting in there for about 48 hours. Pretty soon I felt like I was getting prickly heat (if you’ve never had it, it’s the feeling of pins and needles from when you go from cold to hot). The way that you solve prickly heat is to . . . wait it out. Seventeen minutes later, I determined it wasn’t prickly heat, but an actual chemical burn from the chlorine in the tub forming hydrochloric acid and eating my skin. On the plus side? I got a rad chemical peel of the type that New York women pay the big bucks for.
One website went as far as recommending no more than five minutes in a hot tub. I regularly spend several hours in one, but not several hours at 104˚F. More like 102˚F. Meh.
So, a bad financial decision is sometimes a great life decision. Maybe some Beatles in the tub tonight?
PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING YOU HOLD DEAR TALK TO SOMEONE SANE BEFORE FOLLOWING ANY ADVICE HERE. Can’t you tell by the stories that I’m not to be trusted on certain topics?
“Lawyers. We’re like health insurance. Hope you never need it. But man-o-man, not havin’ it?” – Better Call Saul
Artist Conception of my wreck in Houston. Man, I want to drive a Monster Truck in traffic, just once!
It was a wet, hot, humid day in Houston.
But every day in Houston is like that. One thing we noticed after we’d lived there, oh, two hours is that it’s always hot and humid out, like being forced to live in Rosie O’Donnell’s armpit, except Houston smells less like Cheetos™.
True story: one spring day after we’d lived there for over a year I got up to mow the yard. I was shocked to find that a northern dry wind had blown in during the night and the humidity was about 30%. It was about 60˚F out at 8AM (that’s 7.431 PM in metric). I was shocked because I had never seen a better day in Houston. It was the perfect day to go to the park, or go do something outside. The Mrs. especially hated Houston’s climate, probably exacerbated by her love of Alaska’s climate and the icewater that flows through her veins instead of blood.
I went inside, full of enthusiasm, and exclaimed to The Mrs., “Honey, we’ve got to go do something today, it’s beautiful outside!”
The Mrs., voice dripping with cynicism: “I have only your word for that.”
But this wasn’t that day, it was six months later. It was a hot, humid day, like almost every day. And it was raining for the first time in about a month, a slow drizzle that started about an hour before I left the 35th floor of the shining office tower for the day.
Driving home meant Houston traffic. And on this day, it was fairly light. To get to the highway, I first had to merge onto the frontage road, which generally meant getting some speed up so that you didn’t commit the traffic foul of slowing everyone up, which I think condemns you to traffic hell, which is kinda like regular hell, but with more sitting and listening to Bob Segar, forever.
I looked in front of me, and there was only a Volvo getting ready to merge into traffic, but there was a gap larger than a Texan Prom Queen’s hair, meaning he just had to get going and he’d be merged without an issue.
I looked to the left to see if I’d have a similar gap. I saw that I would have a great gap, if I was going just a little bit faster.
I hit the accelerator to get to merging speed.
The Volvo® was still there, so instead of merging speed, it was now ramming speed.
I hit the brakes, since surely there was enough road to stop.
My airbag deployed, but I was fine, I have massive, bulging arms, so it was more likely the steering wheel would break than my sternum.
I jumped out of the car and went to the person in the Volvo, a guy of about 28. Houston loves people who are 28, since they can work 14 hour days for months without end. “I’m sorry! That was my fault! Are you okay?”
I know that my insurance company would rather beg to differ that it was my fault, but, really, if you’re rear ended? It’s the idiot behind you who is at fault.
And this was my day to be that idiot.
“Are you okay?”
He was still a little stunned, the way everyone is after a wreck, which is exactly the way that Johnny Manziel must always feel.
“Yeah, I am.”
“I’m just glad you’re not hurt.”
After a wreck in Houston, unless one of you has been decapitated, you drive to a police substation and fill out an accident report. We exchanged insurance information, and drove to fill out the report.
After filling out our information, I said, “I’m just glad no one was hurt.”
“Now that you mention it,” he said, “my neck is sore . . . .” I’m not sure how much my face gave away, but he quickly stopped there, “No man, it’s fine. I was just joking.”
Whew. Fortunately for me, he really was fine, because I wasn’t insured well enough for him to be injured, and in that moment I knew it.
When I was just out of college, I kept all of my car insurance at the minimum required by law. My theory was that if they sued me, they couldn’t take anything from me unless they wanted part of my debt. The only time you’re really immune to lawsuits is when you have nothing worth taking. But now I had actual cash in my bank account, and my only debt was part of my mortgage.
Not good. If Mr. Volvo had really been injured? Ouch. I was lucky!
The next week I realized just how big my luck was. My brother, John Wilder (don’t ask), has a son who was injured in a motorcycle accident where he wasn’t at fault. He wasn’t hurt especially badly, but his medical bills had already surpassed $78,000 and they were suing the driver.
I called my insurance company and upped my coverage. A lot. So I was a little safer, right?
I moved out of Texas and into Upper Southeast Midwestia. One night while drinking beer and burning a brush bonfire in my backyard, my next door neighbor (for whom my family must be a nightmare) and I were talking about our youthful misadventures. He told a rather delightful story of how he and his friends were throwing dirt clods at one another. No, it wasn’t last week, it was when he was nine.
(For the benefit of those who have never left the concrete of our big cities, a dirt clod is dried mud, much softer than a rock, but much harder than your life has ever been.)
Everyone was throwing clods at everyone, in what was a fairly common experience back before the Safety Moms clamped down.
One boy, my neighbor’s best friend, got hit. He had to go to the hospital. Guess who got sued? My neighbor’s parents, because they owned a bank. My neighbor confided in me that he had an umbrella policy that covered him for $1,000,000, mainly to cover him against the future misdeeds of his son.
The Boy probably won’t cause that kind of havoc, but I have to worry about Pugsley, who, in a good natured goof that no one would hold against him, might cause Canada to fall into a black hole. Oops!
Okay, I called my insurance company and the next day I had a $2,000,000 umbrella policy. It costs about $200 a year. I did have to upgrade my homeowner’s insurance and my car insurance, but that’s fine. I actually never calculated the percentage increase, because the peace of mind was so great.
Lessons I’ve learned:
Minimum insurance is awesome, as long as you don’t own anything. Once you have a nest egg? Insurance is cheap.
The amount of coverage can be as much as, or more than your net worth. They have to go through State Farm® to get to you.
I like oxygen. No real relationship to the topic, but I thought a third point would be more visually appealing.
It’s my personal opinion, for me (as my lawyer, Lazlo made me write, because he was assigned to me by my insurance company) that insurance makes sense if you have assets, drive, or have teenage sons and don’t want to be bankrupt because Laura-Lou and Cletus have a great lawyer.
On the bright side? We don’t live in Houston anymore.
“No, John Wilder, I said I want to make less thank I’m worth,” said my friend, who I will call Spock.
I was surprised. I took it as an axiom, a truthticle (John Wilder Definition: A quantum truth particle), that the old adage was right – you want to get paid what you’re worth.
Spock continued, “Yeah, if I’m worth what I’m paid, I’m not a bargain. If I’m worth more than I’m paid? That’s the guy you keep around – he makes you money.”
And Spock was right, his argument as logical as his Vulcan blood is green.
If I go to work and don’t create more value than the amount I’m paid, unless I work at the Department of Motor Vehicles in the Customer Hostility Division, I’m going to get fired. This isn’t a moral judgement, it’s just that companies can’t survive hauling around with comatose employees that don’t make it money.
To put it simply: If I don’t make (much) more money for the company than they pay me? They’ll find a way to make sure I work for the competition. And if someone (or a cool robot) can do the job for less than they’re paying me? I’m probably going to be doing a lot more blogging in all the free time that I’ll have. I will have been Terminated.
Not killed, though at one company I worked at:
HR told the story of a gentleman that worked there who was fired. The HR Personbot2000™ told them that they were going to be terminated. Having been a recent transplant (with correspondingly iffy English skills) from a country where the voters regularly re-elected the dictator with a 99.9% majority, the employee panicked, and barricaded himself in his office. The standoff lasted until the Personbot2000® got another employee to translate to the fired employee that he wasn’t going to be killed, he just didn’t have a job there anymore.
No one in the world has been happier to find out he was “only” fired.
I digress.
One way to make sure that you’re creating value is to be where the value is created. I know that sounds circular, but understand that more than just working hard is required to create value. Another example:
I was living in Alaska, and loving it. I had a great job, loved the weather, friends, and the family loved the place. One day the phone at work rang. It was an old boss. Come to Houston, he said. He wanted me to work on a project that would impact the lives of (literally) millions of consumers, and be the biggest project of my life so far. We didn’t want to move, really, but the opportunity to work in the hottest (at the time) sector of the economy on a huge project was too much to turn down. Plus it was hard to breathe with all the money they were forcing down my throat. So we went.
In this instance, a small team was working on an investment of billions of dollars. The revenue per employee was massive. The team worked unconscionably long hours for years to put the project together and bring it to completion. I can count multiple days where my savings to the company was over a million dollars. And multiple days where I had to ignore huge problems to go work on even bigger problems.
Creating value was easy in such a target-rich environment, as was working 14 hour days and not exercising. But the food was awesome and the houses were cheap because Houston is as hot as the surface of the Sun.
In the end? The projects were finished. And me, too. I moved on to another economic sector, but my big lesson was: If you want to find an easy way create value, go to where the big money is changing hands.
Makes logical sense, as Spock might have said . . .
Another short post – the notes for the second half of this post will show up in Monday’s post, since they are broader in nature, and provide a better understanding of the workings of the world economy and didn’t really fit well with the above stuff. But enough shop talk . . .
“Dad, before you blame the dryer, have you ever considered stepping on the bathroom scale?” – Frasier
Pugsley, after a particularly bad binge a decade or so ago . . .
One of the things that I do to keep myself motivated while exercising is to watch Youtube videos about people who’ve done amazing things. I do this while I climb endless stairs to nowhere at the gym while the sweat runs down me like money through a government agency.
Now, keep in mind, there’s a component of survivor bias associated with these videos. I have yet to see a video put together by someone who said:
“I started this diet at 245 pounds, and finished at 260 pounds plus now Nutrasystem® owns my spleen and just sold it to a Chinese billionaire to pay for all of the food I ate – I’m an utter failure. Oh, and my wife left me for Mickey Rourke.”
No, those videos don’t get made. And is it just me that I think that Mickey Rourke might smell like dried leather and day-old potato salad? Unrefrigerated potato salad.
So, I watch these videos. At ten weeks in, sometimes motivation is about as high as a Baptist teetotaler on temperance Tuesday, especially after having climbed over nine vertical miles. A quote from one of the videos struck me – it was Penn Jillette (I’ve talked about him earlier, here) talking about his weight loss. And his comment wasn’t the point he was trying to make, it was just an aside: “I don’t know how much I weighed. No one weighs themselves at their heaviest.” This really made me pay attention. And think. Wow. That is a really profound truth.
Why is that so profound?
My theory is that our brains create reality distortion fields that allow us to ignore certain things, or mark them as insignificant. Then it hit me. I can ignore or get used to the way I might look in a mirror, but I cannot ignore the actual weight shown on the scale. I can’t hide from it, I can’t explain it away.
The second data point was that Penn posted his weight to his friends as he, quite single mindedly, proceeded to lose the weight equivalent of a fifth grader. Penn posts to his friends, I post to Batman.
I wrestled when I was in high school, and one of the rituals was weighing in. To be able to compete, you have to be at or under the weight that you’re planning on wrestling at. They weighed us in on a balance scale, like you used to see in the doctor’s office. If the weights balanced, you passed. One of the junior varsity wrestlers (I’ll call him “Steve,” because his name is “Steve”) was just barely over on the weight, as close as I’d ever seen. One of the other wrestlers noticed that Steve was chewing gum (helps you spit, so you can lose weight that way, too).
“Hey, Steve, take out your gum.” Steve took out his gum and stepped back on the scale. With the gum still in his hand.
Some kind soul convinced Steve that perhaps the gum weighed just as much in his hand as in his mouth, and he threw it away . . . and made weight.
Numbers on a scale can’t be cheated. They’re objective. They’re real. And saying “The extra weight is really muscle” only works if you’re Vin Diesel. Or Chad Kerosene.
My weight is a fact, and as a fact, it’s the number one way to destroy the pretty little lies that my brain cooks up to tell me everything’s fine the way it is. John Wilder’s Brain: “You don’t want to be hungry. You don’t want to work hard. You like pie.” Mostly true. I rather enjoy working hard, but really do like pie.
Eliminating Variation
I’ve tried to pick a day and time to minimize fluctuations and also the opportunity for me to tell myself more lies. In past weight loss iterations, I’ve picked the low weight of the week, and just recorded that in my spreadsheet, but now, I’m all about first thing Friday morning.
I’ve noticed the following things make my weight vary. By vary, of course, I mean be higher:
Carb Intake. I’ve noticed that the amount of carbohydrates that I eat impact how much I weigh. I’m certain that ties back directly to the amount of water my body can get rid of if I’m not trying to digest carbohydrates.
Work Outs. If I’ve not been able to work out, again, there’s a lot of water that remains in the system.
Recent Food Intake. Duh.
Phase of the Moon. Sometimes you step up on the scale and . . . huh? How did that happen? This (for me) is a pleasant surprise about half the time.
And how are things going? Pretty well. I’ve (consciously) varied from diet and exercise during Spring Break (wooo, party!) and for Pugsley’s birthday party. That really points out the impact of carbs on my system. They have no real positive effect, and I find my energy, motivation, and even mood are better when I’ve been avoiding carbs. As part of a systems approach (more on that soon!) carbs are something I’m leaving out.
Every Thursday, I have the folks at the gym take a picture. I’m planning on having The Boy stitch them together to a time-lapse when I’m where I want to be. As it is, the improvement is noticeable. And it has to be.
I’m thinking that Mickey Rourke is sniffing around The Mrs.
By FireflySixtySeven – Own work using Inkscape, based on Maslow’s paper, A Theory of Human Motivation., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36551248
