Elvis? Really> – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Deep Thoughts And Dank Memes About Halloween And Strippers

“When the fear takes him, and the blood and the screams and the horror of battle take hold, do you think he would stand and fight?” – The Return of the King

I have a cookbook that mentions ancient evil monoliths: the Necronomnomnomicon.

Most memes “as-found”, maybe an edit or two here and there..

When I was a kid, it seemed that Halloween was really about the kids. I would dress up (usually) as a vampire, until I got older. As I got older, it seemed that Halloween tipped from being a holiday for children to an excuse for younger adults to have drunken parties in costumes like “slutty elf costume” and “slutty Handmaid’s Tale costume” and “slutty presidential candidate”.

One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is that Halloween is about the darker side. Ghosts and witches and monsters have been a part of the celebration since Pharaoh Bubbahotep got his chariot license. You’ve probably not heard of that Pharaoh before – after they mummified him they kept him under wraps.

The time of Halloween is certainly in line with being a harvest festival – I mean, it’s after harvest in the northern hemisphere, and there’s plenty of evidence that some version of Halloween was observed in ancient times. Whether or not the Christian holiday of All-Saints Day (November 1) was a takeoff from this is up for grabs, but the trappings and idea of this being a time focused on dead humans is undeniably thousands of years old.

At college, I told my advisor I wanted to take a class on how to be a mime. He said, “Say no more.”

But, again, a harvest festival. In the northern hemisphere, plants are dying at this time of year, leaves are falling, and it begins to get cold and dark. This is the foreshadowing of winter, a time where the planning and planting and preparing pay off in order to tide families back to spring when the world comes alive again. What better way to celebrate the idea of dead people and the impending bitter winter than by having a party, getting drunk, and dressing like a “slutty Seal Team Six” member?

Trick or treating itself has been practiced for (at least) five hundred years, including costumes and begging for food. Ultimately, though, the idea comes back around to the idea of what happens to the soul after death – the year becomes, essentially, a proxy for the life of a human, with Halloween marking the time when death is contemplated. And it’s scary to think about death.

Many people like to be scared – that’s one reason why horror movies are so popular. In my dating days, I noted also that the scarier the movie I took my date to, the more amorous they became afterwards. Keep in mind my sample size was mainly limited to girls who would eventually become strippers, but nevertheless, it’s still data. Like grandma always said, “Write what you know, Johnny, even if it involves bad decisions, teenage lust, and women with daddy issues and narcissistic personality disorder.”

That meme makes me feel like a Djinn and tonic.

So, just like Pavlov’s dog, I began to associate scary movies with good times. But I liked them before that, even as a young kid I’d stay up late to watch B-movies in black and white on Saturday night and feel the hair on the back of my neck stand up when the sound of the house settling at night would happen in the dark behind me.

Is working on your abs for forty minutes daily a waist of time?

Part of horror for me, though, was the idea of the supernatural. I recall reading Stephen King before he morphed into a parody of someone’s GloboLeft lesbian wine aunt with Trump Derangement Syndrome and the first book of his to profoundly disappoint me was Cujo. Why?

It was about a dog with rabies. That’s it. No evil spirits. No Walkin’ Dude. No vampires. Just a stupid dog with a stupid disease.

So what?

Bad things happen, I get it, but horror to me wasn’t Michael Myers attacking teenagers in the night while wearing a William Shatner mask inside-out. No. It was him getting up after taking damage that would kill a dozen men and relentlessly pressing forward. He wasn’t a man – he was a force beyond anything natural, much like my deodorant.

The other part of the horror trope at the time was that the Final Girl, the one who faced down the supernatural bad guy, was virtuous. Who got killed? The kids drinking and making out. Who lived? The clumsy virgin. In essence, these horror movies were morality plays showing that the wicked were punished and that the virtuous were rewarded, a lesson that thankfully went over the heads of the eager and enthusiastic frolicsome fräuleins.

Those morality plays made sense, and the plot, like a tune, had a melody that was familiar and pleasing.

I guess they couldn’t party in the living room.

Again, for me the element of the supernatural was crucial. One of the things that I realized over time is that the element of Evil implied that there was Good, too. The dark, Lovecraftian world where ancient brooding evil ones who didn’t even pay any regard to mankind in an unfeeling universe hadn’t crossed my mind yet, but that was before I had even met my ex-wife. But a movie like The Exorcist, was based on the existence of Evil.

And that Evil wasn’t aloof and uncaring. No. That Evil was intensely interested in humanity. Intensely. In fact, humanity was the focus of that Evil in a war that we could only see the edges of, one that was being played out in realms we had only the barest perception of. The Exorcist implied all of that, but also more than implied the existence of the other side: Good. With a capital G.

If Cthulhu made cheese, would he call them “LoveKraft Singles”.

I know that moral relativists hate the idea of this duality of Good and Evil, preferring to live in a world not of black and white, but one filled with shades of gray. Or grey. Or . . . now why am I thinking about gravy?

Regardless, lots of people were scared by the embodiment of Evil shown in The Exorcist. I was comforted. My love of horror isn’t about a fascination with death and Bad things – quite the opposite, it’s about a fascination for life and Good things.

And most of those girls I dated aren’t strippers anymore, which is a good thing given their age, that they’re now saying: “Sorry, we’re clothed until further notice.”

Hopefully My Last COVID Post Ever

“There was a vaccine, just and experimental batch.” – Omega Man

I wish that there was still a mask mandate, at least for Pelosi.

It’s Father’s Day and I have to get up earlier than usual in the morning, so I thought I’d just put a retrospective of COVID headlines instead of a Lame Repost. Some of them might be fake (you’ll see them) but I left ’em in anyway. It gives a sense of where we were that they could have been real.

The statistics were pretty clear (to me) early on (and everything I wrote is still here, unchanged) that I wouldn’t recommend the Vaxx to anyone that wasn’t at a bigger risk of death (because of complications and co-morbidities) to take a bioactive compound that, on purpose, hijacked human cells to make bits of foreign material to stimulate the immune system.

It was a clinical trial in the tens of millions. My family and I decided to be the control group. I have never regretted it, and they certainly don’t now. Pugsley competed in a very cardiovascularly intense sport. Not long after being Vaxxed, one of the competitors at a local school died. A seventeen-year-old boy, in peak physical condition.

Yeah, the number of times I’d heard of that happening was zero, and that’s through decades. Could it have been a fluke?

Sure. Just like the two people I knew who took the Johson & Johnson® Vaxx on the same day had open heart surgery a month apart.

It turned out that “safe and effective” wasn’t either, since whatever immunity the Vaxx granted was, at best, transient, and, at worst, made people who took it subsequently more likely to catch strains later on. It was interesting when I blurted that out at a meeting, and the medical guy there nodded.

Now we’re at the predictable endgame, where a court has ruled that the Vaxx wasn’t a vaccine in any sense at all and a major newspaper has asked the question about if the Vaxx has “helped fuel rise in excess deaths”.

But Google® isn’t happy about this.

It started with:

A Trump Vaxx was horrible, but the GloboLeft loved the idea of a Biden Vaxx:

But that turned into actual hate:

But then motives became apparent:

But the tune began to change as “Suddenly” people were impacted:

Politicians did normal politician things:

And the press started covering it all up:

But did someone know?

Regardless:

Life Choices Are Resilience Choices: When One Income Is More Than Two

“An idea is like a virus. Resilient. Highly contagious. And even the smallest seed of an idea can grow. It can grow to define or destroy you.” – Inception

I’ve heard that King Charles at his coronation vowed to keep his armies in his sleevies.

During the Great Recession I read an article about the economic resilience of families. I can’t find it, since I’ve slept several thousand nights since then. Heck, I’m not sure even Frequent Commentor Ricky could find it. The conclusion of the article was interesting to me – two-earner families were actually less economically resilient than sole-breadwinner families.

The article went on to explain that in most two income families, the families weren’t stashing tons of money away, but rather spending at about the level of the two incomes – nicer cars, shinier PEZ®, more velvet Elvis paintings. They were operating on a similar margin as a typical sole breadwinner. The big difference was in flexibility. If one member of a two-income family became unemployed, it was often a hit of 50% or more of the family income.

This may be the best painting ever done – the Mona Lisa could not show such elegance.

Sure, losing 50% of family income sounds bad, and I’m sure it is. The flip side, however, is that if the sole breadwinner lost a job, that family lost 100% of their income. That sounded worse to me, but those families performed better during hard times.

Why?

It turns out that a dual income family was already operating at nearly 100% efficiency. The mortgage, the cars, the PEZ®, the private schools, whatever expenses they had were based on Mom and Dad going out and making nearly their theoretical maximum incomes. To lose half of that is devastating, unless they had saved some of that cash.

It turned out that in economic hard times, the assets that people buy often go down in value. So, during the Great Recession, people bought hella-nice houses complete with granite avocado sharpeners and walk-in nail-trimming rooms that they could just barely afford the payments on.

But during an economic downturn, the price of the McMansions® went down. I talked to several folks during the Great Recession that dual-incomed themselves into bankruptcies as they lost jobs and had to walk away from expensive houses in half-finished subdivisions to move across the country to places that they didn’t want to live. Ouch. One dude I knew was bitter for just this reason. I think he was a tool anyway, but this magnified it.

I guess my regular ladder went for a pack of cigarettes and never came back.

Sometimes this economic stress ends in divorce as Dad loses his mojo and Mom loses a bit of respect and better-deals Dad. This isn’t an indictment of women, more so a realization of the fact that women want (in survey after survey) to have a man that’s more economically successful than them, despite them wanting equal pay.

Contradiction? Yeah. But still and amazing stress on a family.

And they want a man who is sensitive but who will also take charge.

On the other hand, I knew some single income families (intact families) where Dad lost his job, and Mom went into the labor force, Dad took a job to get by, and the family didn’t skip a beat in making payments. Did things like daycare go up?

Yup, unless Grandma could help out or Grandpa could use the kids as help down at the still. But the families weren’t flying so close to the flame, so they made it, and in most cases Dad found something again, maybe not as good as before, but close enough so Mom could cut down on hours or quit her job entirely.

I’ve made many, many, many arguments against efficiency. This is another one. It’s also insidious because that quest for economic efficiency ends (often) in weakness.

This idea that women should go out into the labor force, make as much as men, and thus make their families more vulnerable to economic dislocation caused by (spins wheel) inflation, COVID, immigration, or recession has been propagandized into the population for decades. There is hardly any little girl that wasn’t exposed to the idea that she shouldn’t go out and be just as good as a man and that she had some sort of duty to work because, well, because women.

It’s powerful when that’s the propaganda that millions in Gen X and later grew up with.

Chuck Norris told a joke about Jada Smith. Will Smith then slugged Jada.

To be fair, there are some amazingly capable women that I know who have had very strong careers, executive level stuff, who have kept it together and been great moms, to boot. In most cases, though, if those women quit tomorrow their family could do fine on their husband’s income. But that’s not the norm.

As we move into a time of greater economic instability, this will have the impact of making families more dependent on government, because efficiency is the enemy of independence. This may very well be the plan – dependent people are easier to control. When the next meal is dependent on pleasing power, people tend to stop testing boundaries, tend to be pushed to conform to power.

The opposite of efficiency is resilience, finding our own way economically, becoming independent rather than dependent. This is difficult when focused on trying to meet the ideals of a society bent on consumption at all costs.

That’s a big one. I guess my faith in huge manatee has been restored.

Economically, this flies in the face of propaganda we’ve seen for decades. It flies in the face of the desired outcome to treat people as economic units whose purpose is to create money to pay of a debt so large as to be unimaginable by any person alive atop a technological framework that is increasingly prone to failure.

Resiliency is our future, the only future outside of living in the pods and eating the bugs, which is a perfect life for an economic unit, but no life for a man. The end part of the 2020s will be (my guess) the biggest change that we’ll ever see in our lives, which includes the time when we added those extra four digits to the zip code.

The only solution? Resilience.

How Occupy Wall Street Led To The Current Woke Crisis

“Being a villain is such a waste of time!” – The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show

The way she set up the pieces, I think she might be planning on eating them, rather than playing a game.

Once in a while, it’s good to take a step back. Where are we?

First, it’s important to review that the economy is not the financial system. The economy consists of the stuff we make, and the people who make it, and their productivity. It’s matched with people who want that stuff.

Stuff can be anything people want to pay money for: PEZ®. Cars. Machetes. Beer. Zirconium nose hair trimmers. Video game software. Pictures of PEZ©. Gasoline. Streaming movies about PEZ™. Velvet Elvis™ paintings (I still need one, I prefer the “mid-carbohydrate, wearing sunglasses and a sequined jumpsuit” King). Houses. People to polish the PEZ® statues I keep in my yard. Did I mention beer?

Notice that the stuff is physical stuff as well as information and services.

What’s not required?

I have the heart of a lion! I have the eye of an eagle! I have the legs of a gazelle! I also have a lifetime ban from the zoo.

Money. Debt. Interest rates. These are fundamentally constructions of humanity, and are meant only to make transactions easier. They are not required. When Pepsi® wanted to do trades with the Russians, they traded cases of Pepsi™ concentrate for seventeen submarines, a frigate, a cruiser, and a destroyer. Think about how cool that was: for a time, Pepsi© had a navy that could have probably made France surrender in a fury of carbonated corn syrup. Again.

And how cool would it be for a soft drink company to stage a march down the Champs-Élysées while Parisians cried? Honestly, it probably would have led to a better outcome than they currently have.

But what happens when the tail (finance) wags the dog (the economy)?

I guess the best answer goes right back to France, but this time not to around 1990, but to around 1790. What did the masses see? They saw the upper class scamming and cratering the economy while eating piles of bacon-wrapped shrimp, or whatever passed for a delicacy in 1790s France. The system really was rigged, but it was so rigged that poor Marie Antoinette couldn’t imagine actual hunger.

I will admit, they had cutting edge technology.

Here, though, I think that the Powers That Be see the end coming. Remember Occupy Wall Street?

Yeah, it was a bunch of smelly hippies that mainly spent time arguing about who was in control of the collective, and it featured all of the woke crap that is currently being paraded, but back in 2011 only the smelly hippies took it seriously. Oh, my, to be back in 2011.

Anyway, what happened after 2011?

The media and the Powers That Be were scared. How scared?

A neutron walks into a bar. The bartender says, “For you, no charge.” The electron next to him yells “That’s discrimination!”

They upped the ante. If people were unhappy about the manipulation of the banks and the mortgage-led meltdown of the Great Recession, the answer was simple from the Powers That Be: “Look, a squirrel!”

They doubled down on every single thing that is Woke. And, why not? The seeds were simmering as the Leftists took control of the education system and threw children into sex education that was really indoctrination, often without the knowledge of the parents or their consent, was yet another thing that finance could get behind.

And when finance gets behind it? All the companies that require finance get behind it, too. The attempt is gone a bit farther – an attempt to regame the system so that the financial imbalances built on decades of mismanagement could be controlled. Every aspect of finance and money, if it were only in the control of the Powers That Be, well, then the tail (finance) could really control the dog (the economy).

Looks like the Woke want to refund the police?

But here is the salvation. The Powers That Be only understand the financial side of what’s going on – the shadows on the wall. They do not understand the systems that they need to survive. Remember Mike Bloomberg in 2016 saying, “I could teach anybody, even people in this room, to be a farmer. It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.” This is the shallow understanding of a person whose feet have never left asphalt and concrete, and learned all he needed to know about farming by watching Green Acres.

Mike Bloomberg doesn’t understand where the food he eats comes from. He does not understand it, and cannot recreate it. No matter what Mike Bloomberg does, he cannot use his financial magic to create one kernel of corn, not one molecule of water. Financial magic encourages production of corn, but cannot make it.

Woke culture cannot produce prosperity, or a single PEZ®.
Printing money cannot produce a single steak.
The tyranny of the Left cannot produce a human civilization.

The regular person has spoken this week – Bud Light® is now off the menu for millions and I’ve heard that it lost up to 70% or 80% sales last week. Will it kill Bud Light™? I doubt it. Drunk people often don’t make the best decisions, but, then again, I’m here.

How to remove 80% of beer drinkers with this one simple trick.

I think bud light will manage to survive, but we are seeing the cracks in the woke agenda that showed up after Occupy Wall Street – at some point, regardless of all of the financial shenanigans, at some point someone has to want the crap that’s being produced.

To those that look at the mess that we’re in, I can assure you of this – it’s all going away. It’s merely a matter of time. The economy is not the financial system, and a bank cratering doesn’t destroy all the corn that Mike Bloomberg has no idea how to grow.

Or maybe he could teach me otherwise?

Don’t Fear The Reaper

“No. Not like this. I haven’t faced death. I’ve cheated death. I’ve tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing.” Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

Why did New Jersey get all the toxic waste and California get all the lawyers? New Jersey picked first.

When The Soon To Be Mrs. and I were just dating, I was cooking something or other. I think it was eggs. I like eggs sunny side up, and don’t particularly care if they’re cooked all the way.

The Soon To Be Mrs.: “Aren’t you worried about salmonella?”

John Wilder: (Laughs in full Chad manifestation.)

The Soon To Be Mrs.: (Swoons.)

Seriously, she swooned. I’ve never seen it before in my life, but in that moment I think that was what sealed the deal, the moment in time that The Soon To Be Mrs. realized that this one is different. He’s not like the others. Here is a man who has zero fear of The Current Thing, and knows that salmonella won’t be the thing that punches his ticket out of having a functioning circulatory system.

Weird. You can get salmonella from chickens, but not chickenella from salmon.

No. I’m not afraid of salmonella. I would spit in its tiny little eyes or flagellum or tentacles and say, “Not today, my bacterium friend! My Danish-Scots-Germanic blood is far too strong for the likes of you!” And then I would attack Poland. Oh, wait, that’s been done.

I know I’m not going to die like Hemingway, and I’m not going to die like the comedy greats Belushi, Twain, or Nietzsche did. Nope. I think I’m gonna go out like Elvis. On a toilet after having eaten a fried peanut butter, jelly and bacon sandwich covered in cheddar cheese and mayo. Nope, I’m gonna die on a toilet.

I mean, after all, a king should spend his last moments on the throne, right?

A lot of people worry about dying. I suppose I did, in my 20s, when I was worried about carrying out my responsibilities as a dad. Those are serious responsibilities – because those kids are going to be the legacy that I leave on Earth. That and my writing, collection of PEZ® dispensers and velvet Elvis paintings.

I tell you, when the King died, that left me all shook up.

Again, a lot of people worry about dying. I’m not sure why. Of things that are more-or-less predetermined, that’s the big one. We’re all going to die. All of us.

And I’m not sure I care.

Oh, sure, I want to live. I have no particular desire to die. If given the preference, I suppose I’m in favor of my continued heartbeat. But I don’t fear death. I don’t go to sleep at night wondering if this pain or that pain or that thing might be the symptom I look up on WebMD® that seals the deal that Wilder is going up to irritate Jesus in Heaven with bad puns.

I don’t worry about some future point when I’m going to enjoy life. I’ve achieved nearly every goal I’ve ever set for my life. End. Full stop. It’s like when a baseball game goes into extra innings, “Hey, free baseball.” And me? Free life. I’ve done nearly everything I’ve ever wanted to do.

If you don’t like Hillary, you should move to Benghazi. At least you know that there, she’ll leave you alone.

What do you give a man who has everything? I mean, besides another bottle of wine. You give that man: Today.

I’ve got Today. The only moment I live in is right now. And right now isn’t all that bad. I’m sitting in the sitting room (question: is any room I sit in, by definition, a sitting room? Discuss.) with the cool night air blowing in the window, some songs I love playing on the laptop, a cold beer by the keyboard, and the knowledge that at this moment, everything is fine.

Literally, in my life, Every Single Thing Is Fine. I could go into details, but you already know how awesome I am. So, I live for today?

Hell no.

That’s YOLO. The idea that “You Only Live Once” is a free pass to act in any fashion has corroded society. It’s really at the root of many of the problems we have today. It is, in many ways, the absolute inverse of the philosophy I’m trying to describe. YOLO seeks to elevate hedonism and the passions of the moment as the highest good. YOLO is Tinder® times Planned Parenthood© times SnapFaceGramInstaChat® times Rwanda®.

I wonder if Hindus consider YOLO offensive? (not my meme, as found)

It’s the inversion of beauty: it consists of being positive about, well, any old thing that feels good. I could list these “pleasures”, but you know the list as well as I do. We see it every day, with vice being paraded as virtue, and the continual demand going out for people to celebrate it, because, “Can’t you see? This horrid abomination that no healthy society or people in the entire history of the world has tolerated, iS BeAuTIfUL!” No, I think living a life built on YOLO is one doomed to fail – inevitably it will fail based on two reasons: it is materialism or a faith based on the nihilism of the material world writ large, and it is based on needs, like youth, wealth, sensation, or, yes, even life.

So, not YOLO.

One thing I’ve tried to preach is outcome independence. Indeed, since the final outcome of life on Earth is fixed, all the intermediate steps lead there. Instead, I try to focus on virtue and faith. I write not because of YOLO, and not because it’s easy. Some nights it’s hard as hell to get the post to “close” and feel right. There are dozens of posts where, even after 1600 words, I still didn’t say exactly what I meant to say. That’s okay, it’s on me. I’m learning, and if I were perfect at this, I wouldn’t have more work to do.

For me, it’s the work. It’s getting better. It’s finding ways to add value to those people around me. There are those who pull their weight in the world, and those that don’t. I want to be one that pulls his weight, who has contributed as much as I can to helping my family and the wider world.

Why was Karl Marx buried at Highgate Cemetery? He was dead.

I don’t always do it. And I’m not always right, either. I’ve produced some stuff in my life that was really, really good, but not perfect. Thankfully, that’s not my mark, either, since just like immortality here on Earth, searching for perfection is a lonely and silly pastime. I want to make the world a better place with my family (first) and my work (now second) guided by God. And I want people to laugh hard while learning and thinking about the things I write.

The beauty of this is to win, all I have to do is the best that I can do every day. To win? All I have to do is be the best person I can be every day. See? Each night, I go to bed and sleep soundly if I know, in that day, that I gave it my all. Do I take time for me? Sure. But that’s not the goal – I serve a higher purpose.

So, what do I fear? Not death. It’s coming whether I like it or not, and, honestly, I’d rather not return my body in factory-fresh condition – I’d like all the parts to fail at once. On the toilet. I think Elvis would have wanted it that way.

Oh, wait . . . .

I wonder if Elvis ate eggs sunny-side-up? Hang on, I’m sure he did. Elvis ate everything.