Category: Happiness

21 Thoughts Occurring Around The Start Of Fall

Well, well, you took my advice about theatricality a bit literally.” – Batman Begins

I always found studying math was the best workout, since there is strength in numbers. (all memes as-found)

Here are some notes that I wrote, mainly for nobody but me.  Then I thought, hey, why not share them?  So, here you have it.  The list is in no particular order.  Your mileage may vary.

Personal responsibility and discipline lead to freedom.  I need to understand that decisions belong to me.  I stand without fear because this comes internally, not externally.  My internal focus is on virtue, and making choices that celebrate Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.

The outcome of virtuous acts is sometimes failure.

I tried opening a packet of tuna to make a tuna fish sandwich, but it didn’t look like there was enough tuna in the bowl, so I opened another packet.  Then?  Too much tuna, enough for four sandwiches.  This is why I only have tuna sandwiches every four years.

What’s the least diverse profession in the United States?  Chief Diversity Officer.

I deal with failure in a game where I put myself out and did all I could.  It is what it is.  An honorable defeat is better than a dishonorable surrender, but an honorable victory is better than both.

Following someone else’s rules isn’t the basis of honor.  Fighting fair when they won’t fight fair isn’t the basis of honor, either.

Realize that defeat is sometimes hidden victory, and victory is sometimes hidden defeat and the biggest decider is timescale.

I realize that other cultures put their own people first, and it does my children no good for me to put other cultures and their people as equal to ours.

If you will only hire an indigenous woman as a housekeeper, is that ethnic cleansing?

Responsibility leads to responsibility.  This is good, in tough times and in good times.  There is no time while I’m still breathing to lay down my burden.

The system is broken.  I fight to make it better.  I will not fix it by myself, and it may not ever be perfect.  Yet, I will not stop.

No Chinese guy ever called me a racist.  Except that one.

I will make audacious goals, because more often than not if I exercise enough discipline and effort, I will meet those goals.  Aiming low does me no good.

Challenge is what gives us the opportunity to be strong, wise, and virtuous.  Understanding that there is some part of me that is eternal is enough to overcome the fear of the ephemeral.

Am I ever ready?  No.  The best I can do is the to face the future with bravery and open eyes, knowing that the challenges I face may be more difficult than any I have ever faced in my life.

I don’t know how you feel about toilet graffiti, but I just signed a partition.

There is only one way:  forward.  There is no return or retreat, time is an unforgiving arrow that moves, leaving the past as a dead and inaccessible country with the exception of the echoes I have in memory, writing, art, and recordings.  Living in the past is living with ghosts, as it is dead and barren.

The past exists to transform me.  I am where I am, and I am who I am because of my successes and failures.  To spend time on regret is a waste.  To feel despair because of what I am not is a temptation put forward by Evil.  I cannot live a life that never was, even if I wish it so.

Dexter was often the good guy.

My favorite time of the year is when the air conditioner isn’t running, as long as I don’t need the air conditioner to be running, and then it’s my least favorite time of the year.  When the machines finally rise against us, I’m going to really regret having to kill my air conditioner.

In one sense, we are all on our own islands, alone.  It is only by talking and listening and doing that one can know another.  The way that minds speak to each other through time and space is by writing and reading.  Maybe in the future it’ll only be memes.

Our nation is not ours, it was given to us in trust by our ancestors for their grandchildren.  To give it away to others is thoughtless theft.

Geography is important to making a people.  Geography is important to controlling the world.  Me?  Based on geography, I fully support the obliteration of Iran. (pic related)

Psst, I hear they have nuclear weapons!

Maybe it was a bad idea to let soulless corporations have access to the immigration system so they could import unlimited amounts of people from a foreign country that have no connection to our genetics, no understanding of our history, no respect for our values, or any sort of comprehension of standards of personal hygiene.  But hey, they have amazing in-group preference and won’t hire actual Americans, so at least you won’t have to work with them.

I never understood the “got your nose” game as a kid.  I spent the entire age of three thinking adults were retarded because they were certain that their thumbs were my nose.  Now, if they had been holding knives . . . .

Less Is More, Plus Camping Fashion Models

“The things you own end up owning you.” – Fight Club

The world spins on its axis.  That really makes my day.

I used to be a Scoutmaster®.  That was in the time before Scouting™ became fully woke, attempting to appease those who only wanted to kill it.  I get it, I get it, those dollars were sexy and the BSA© was a little drunk and just couldn’t say no.

Still, if the BSA™ did it for the money, it’s pretty clear what that makes them.

I digress.

I think Scouting® had been a very valuable program.  I know that the scouts in the troop I was the Scoutmaster© for turned out pretty well.

The secret, as far as I could tell, was to allow the scouts to run the program.  I mean, it was called “Boy Scouts™” and not “Adult Scouts©”.  The program wasn’t set up for the comfort of old men with checkbooks and a La-Z-Boy© at home.

I’m an armchair psychologist.  Just yesterday I diagnosed my recliner with schizophrenia.

The first thing that I did when I became Scoutmaster© was to immediately stop the sharing of food between adults and boys.  I had noticed that whenever dinner depended on what the kids cooked, the adults got involved because they didn’t want to eat awful food or crap.

Not on my watch.

The boys would plan their meals, cook their food, and clean up without adult intervention.  This led to more than one tragic crime against the culinary arts, but I and the other adults always ate pretty well.  The big lesson for me was that if I let them alone, they’d eventually figure it out.  And if they burned dinner, they could go without or move to the next day’s lunch.

No one starved, but they got better and better at preparing and cooking.

Me?  I got better and better at planning.

Don’t talk to me about fashion, it’ll just go in one year and out the other.

My first BSA© camping trip out was some 20 years after my teenage backpacking days on Wilder Mountain.  I read the manual, and it said “be prepared” so my first loadout camping was approximately 300 pounds of gear, most of which was entirely unused for the weekend.

After four years and the BSA© abandoning all pretense at being Morally Straight, I packed for my last campout with the troop.  My loadout?

A sleeping bag, cot, tent, toothbrush, lamp, folding chair, and book.  Maybe there were a few other items, like extra socks.  If it had been summer I would have taken bug spray.

I don’t often have international fashion models in my house, but when I do they manifest directly out of the bathroom counter.

The difference in the amount of kit was based on two thoughts:  first, I’m going to a campground for a weekend, not attempting a solo summit of K2.  Second, being away from the everyday luxuries of life was the point of camping.  Over the years, I had determined that I could do without almost anything for a weekend camping trip.

Almost anything.  I’m quite fond of air.

That was also one of the purposes for the boys involved in the program.  They needed to learn that they could plan and execute a trip, and do without televisions and cell phones and fluffy mattresses and mayonnaise and soda pop for a weekend.  That was one of the more enjoyable parts of the job, really, watching kids doing without and building competence and self-determination in a world that wants to make them helpless and dependent.

Sure, watching them fail again and again was hilarious, but failure was the point.  And doing without was the point.  And coming from a world of plenty, the boys loved the chance to make real decisions, take action, and live with the consequences.

In our current world, I think that we have created a dystopia where whatever isn’t mandatory is prohibited, and the idea of a kid going without a Friday meal because they burned it will make people seethe with anger.

If being a 23 year old Irish swimwear model has taught me anything, it’s that catfishing is surprisingly easy online.

Going to bed with a meagre supper is a consequence of bad skill, and the next time the boys took better care of their cooking so it wasn’t carbonized.  To tell the truth, the carbonized noodles looked more edible than the chicken tartare.  I mean, it was tartare on the inside, but blowtorched on the outside like it had spent an afternoon in Vulcan’s forge.

I still shudder at that thought, but, hey, I didn’t have to eat it.  But in the future . . . ?

It may be that we will soon enter a time where the nation as a whole becomes much poorer than it is today.  Poorer means less material wealth, and fewer . . . things.  To be fair, the things I need the most don’t cost all that much in the first place.  Books are inexpensive, and I have about 20 feet worth of books that I have planned to read.  Poorer lands will have fewer dinner courses.

Economists have told us that we are much wealthier now than we were in the 1950s or 1980s.  Okay.  But I certainly don’t think that the average person is happier now despite being able to communicate with virtually everyone on the planet in an instant.

I hear that the iPhone’s® battery is called Apple© Juice™.

When I grew up, when the phone rang, we ran to it so we could answer it to see who might be on the other end of the line.  As phone calls were expensive then, it was rare to get someone wanting to sell me something, so almost every call was someone reaching out, not something to avoid.

In the end, what makes us better is our competence, and what weakens us is being dependent upon luxury.

Except booze.  Apparently neither the BSA© nor I turn that down.

Tinder© Tramps, InstaThots®, And The Attention Sump In Your Pocket

“I’m bored!  I’m bored and I’m getting eaten by mosquitos.  I’m being eaten.  And I’m bored as well.” – The Grand Tour

I got a free iPhone© and a free iPad® today!  Pistols are magic!

I had my previous cell phone for nine years: from August of 2017 to August of 2026.  That’s a good run.  I bought a fairly nice one back in the day, and took good care of it.

I lie.  Somehow the screen cracked in November, 2020, so I had to make sure it stayed dry.  The old phone did its duty.  I would still be using it, but it’s full, and there are a number of faults going on that make me think that it is time.

On the advice of Pugsley, I swapped over from the Mao People’s Phone© (Android™) to the Fascist Fisher-Price™ phone (Apple©).  I know, it sounds nuts.

What a difference 10 years has made in technology!  Steve Jobs once said that he wanted the iPhone© to feel so sexy that people would be tempted to lick it.  This 17th version is a tightly integrated piece of technology.  I mean, I haven’t licked it, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not WiFi-curious as to what licking it would feel like.

I used to live on Mars®, but decided that was way too much chocolate.

Civilization has been on a downward slide since, oh, whenever they started welfare and started encouraging poor stupid people to make more poor stupid people by paying them to be poor and stupid.  Incentives matter.  Welfare was bad, but the iPhone© really took societal collapse from “Hiroshima” to “full Tsar Bomba”.  Never go full Tsar Bomba.

The iPhone© is the problem.  It allowed interaction on a scale never before seen, and was the platform that empowered Tinder© tramps to seek out Chad to be used for a night and InstaThots® to feed their narcissism.  That was bad enough, but it also became the attention sump, turning every waking moment into a distraction.

Distraction and dopamine hits are what the iPhone® was built to deliver.  I’ve only had mine a week, but a friend indicates that it is also an amazing device for having Apple® to sink their fangs into my credit card and suck as hard as I’ll let them.  They monetize everything.

Like?

Location.  How fast I drive.  The number of steps I take in a day (not enough) and how steady my gait is (very).

Someone stole all the fruit from my farm in Georgia, that leaves me peachless.

The last two are maybe going to be a net benefit for me, as I can certainly see myself always wanting to be above average, so soon enough I’ll be walking 100,000 steps a day.  Well, me and Jason Arday.

Too soon?

The phone is designed to distract, designed to turn every bit of life into a consumption event.  With a dizzying array of apps pre-built in, it’s almost intoxicating flipping through the pages of things I could be doing right this second instead of . . . wait, why did I pick the phone up in the first place?  Oh, yeah, got distracted.  Oh, a notification!  The Mrs. let the dogs out!

How does Jeff Foxworthy kill werewolves?  With a silver mullet.

The first time I went to Las Vegas the sounds and sights were overwhelming after a few hours.  I think that’s the point, but that was also in a world mainly free of the Internet back in 1997.

It may seem like a super-power, but it is a pretty useless superpower, like having the ability to retract my fingernails or hair back into my body.

What is nice, though, is that it tracks and graphs which apps I’m using and when I’m using them, and the option to tell the phone to remind me, “Wilder, time to shut this damn thing down and go to bed”.

That has actually been a positive for me.  I shut down the distraction device, pick up a book, and read.  I’d already gotten through a novel or non-fiction book every other week since the start of the year (last two:  C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, Sweterlitsch’s The Gone World, current:  Hawkins’ The Library at Mount Char), but the other alternative is to be bored.

I read a biography of JFK.  The end was mind blowing.

I avoid brooding and regret since they are a horrible ways to program yourself to think, and a trap that should be avoided.

Besides, boredom is useful.

Boredom is that innate spark in humans, that makes us feel uncomfortable in sitting in a warm, dark room, well fed, with low effort.  Boredom pushes us to create, to learn, to invent.  The first person to figure out a bow-drill or decided that stacking rocks in a pyramid shape might be cool or that being the first guy to make it to the South Pole was a good thing.

Boredom is also why some animals die or refuse to mate in captivity.  Our full-on stimulation world might be part of the reason that mating seems to be no longer as important to many of the young in 2026.

HR was upset with my urine sample.  Apparently they only want them when they request them.

People aren’t meant to be continually distracted.  We are supposed to be bored sometimes because for at least tens of thousands of years that was our default programming.  Boredom forces us to change.

A society based on waiting for someone else to distract us is madness.  Like licking an iPhone©.

Yay!  More microplastics in my testicles!  That’s nuts!

Top 15 Everyday Acts That Used To Be Normal And Now Count As Counter-Revolutionary.  Number 8 Will Make Your Spleen Explode!

“I mean, every part of a kaiju sells.  Cartilage, spleen, liver.” – Pacific Rim

How do you stop two blind bums from fighting?  Yell, “My money is on the guy with the knife.”

Number 1:  Telling a child “no”.

Children are not small adults.  Children’s feelings, for the most part, don’t matter.  We don’t let children drive, buy booze, select their own menu, or make life altering choices.  “No” is a complete sentence, and learning limits is required since no child is born with discipline:  that has to be learned.  And, that over time with enough discipline and effort, no can be turned into yes.  Corollary:  letting kids lose is important for similar reasons, because life is complex enough that they will lose.  Plus, I love to see them cry when I crush them in chess.

Number 2:  Demanding that visitors and new arrivals to our country follow our norms, not their own.

When I visit a friend’s house, do I walk to his fridge, open up a beer, impregnated his wife, and then demand to be given the remote control so I can watch what I want instead?  No, unless my friend is a GloboLeftist.  They don’t seem to mind.  And they don’t seem to mind it when foreigners do exactly that when visiting or invading our country.  Moslem women should feel shame when wearing their desert clothes in the United States, and Mexicans should be embarrassed that they don’t speak English.

The population of Modern Mayberry never changes.  Every time a girl gets pregnant, a guy leaves town.

Number 3:  Not pretending that fat women are attractive.

Yes, some people are fat.  Exactly zero of them are healthy, and exactly zero of them are more than a 3 out of 10.  I bring women as the rule, because no one has ever pretended that fat men are attractive.  It’s just (my guess) the feminine desire to reduce mating competition by telling their fat friends to “never change, you’re lovely as you are” so they can have a better chance at banging Chad.

Number 4:  Not letting your son quit.

Quitting is an addictive drug, because once a kid quits and sees no immediate repercussion in his life, it’s setting the stage for a lifetime of quitting.  And no one likes a quitter, except my doctor when it comes to me drinking.  And I keep telling him, if I’m a quitter, that will make me a hypocrite.  I’d tell you more but . . .

I’m throwing “son” out here in rule 4, but you could (I suppose) put in a daughter, but don’t try to sell me on suffrage for women.  That ship sailed over the horizon after they started celebrating murder moms.

When it failed, he was beside himself.

Number 5:  Looking down on “consumers”.

“Consumers” should be shunned.  There is no virtue in purchasing.  As Mojo Nixon musically noted:  You can’t buy cool.  You also can’t buy virtue.

Number 6:  Expecting young women and men to marry and have children.

This is their job.  If young women want to wreck society by having lazy girl jobs, they won’t like it so much when they’re cold, catted, chardonnayed, and unChaded.  This will revert, because if it doesn’t civilization will collapse.  My solution is to drop the drinking age to 18 and encourage illicit keggers in forests.

You know, for the kids.

Is something that looks like pasta, smells like pasta, and tastes like pasta but isn’t pasta an impasta?

Number 7:  Keeping your word, especially when it is painful.

Keeping my word is important to me, because the biggest pains in my life came from when people didn’t keep their word.  And me, if I promise to do the dishes, I promise, I’ll do the dishes.  There is no need to remind me every six months.

Number 7:  Understanding that legality and morality are not the same thing.

When the entire basis of a society is based on the exact letter of a law, you end up with infinity Indians scamming airports to get wheelchairs to jump the line or “buying” a punchbowl from Costco©, using it for the party, and returning it when the party is over.  These are people without honor.  This failure is not the complete explanation of why India is like it is, but it’s part of the explanation.

Number 9:  Acting like the country you live in was built by your ancestors and owed to their descendants.

A female lawyer in New York who wants to tell me that a “refugee” from Kheezewhizistan is just as American as my family, who have been here since before the Revolutionary War, is lying.  She’s trying to give away something that’s not hers to give, and we’re not mad enough about it.

We’ll know Europe is healing when the part of Europe taking in the most refugees is the Mediterranean Sea.

Number 10:  Saying, “I don’t know.”

I’ve observed that the best leaders with the strongest sense of self are unafraid to ask people to explain things, and to admit when they don’t know something.  I’ve also observed that people who know everything invariably don’t.  TrUSt tHe sCieNce!

Number 11:  Thinking that honor, bravery, and integrity should be the norm.

They should be the norm.  There’s a reason they started making fun of Boy Scouts©, then infiltrating them, then destroying them.  The Boy Scouts™ was a wonderful force to create good men, which is the last thing the GloboLeftElite want.  So they killed it.

Number 12:  Thinking as much about responsibility as liberty.

Responsibility is the brother of keeping your word.  It’s keeping promises you haven’t even made.  It’s investment.  Liberty is easy.  Responsibility is hard.

If we arm the teachers, will the librarians get silencers?

Number 13:  Teaching children that, yes, they will be judged by their table manners.

It’s true.  They don’t have to use them every moment, but they have to know them.

Number 14:  Admitting when you were wrong without explanation.

This is similar to number 10, but a step farther.  It goes beyond ignorance into error.  People who personalize and defend their errors are evil.  Maybe even Evil.

Number 15:  Incorrectly numbering a list.

The Only Freedom They Can Never Take

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.” – Dune

Never forget Cole’s Law:  “Shredded cabbage and carrot can make a decent salad.”

Frank Herbert wrote the opening quote for this post about a desert planet full of sand, giant worms, political backstabbing, and SpaceLSD®.  He could have been describing a Tuesday on the Internet, or maybe even Elon’s plan to get SpaceX™ stop SpaceX®’s shares from crashing and carving a trillion-dollar crater into the S&P 500©.

But back to fear.  Why is it used so often?

It’s because emotions are potent weapons, so they get weaponized.

Constantly.

Every advertisement, every mainstream media news segment, every political social media post is designed to make me feel something specific so I will do something specific.

When my dentist died, his family couldn’t find his tombstone.  There was no plaque on it.

Outrage is easy to provoke, and it motivates.  Fear moves product.  Comfy feels gets votes.  The people pushing the buttons understand this better than most philosophers ever did, I mean, have you ever read much about MK Ultra?

Do you really think they ever stopped, or are they using it now through SnapBook™ and InstaFace©?

The O.G. ancient stoic philosophers wanted to believe that reason was what they used to make decisions.  Marcus Aurelius sat in his tent writing notes to himself about virtue while his son grew up into the Roman version of Hunter Biden.  Using reason as a source of virtue is timeless, but it’s almost completely ignored by actual humans with nervous systems and SnapGram© accounts.

Humans feel first.  Only then do we invent reasons.

Five guys with booze will start a fight.  Five guys with weed will start a band.

That is really the order of operations.  But it also implies that if I guard my feelings then I can guard my decisions.  If I let someone else set the temperature while I’m driving and I have already handed them the steering wheel and they say, “Ha!  Driver gets to choose what’s on the radio!” have I twisted the metaphor too far to include peanut butter and PEZ®?

Absurdity aside, if I hand someone the ability to control me with emotion, I cease to be anything but that MK Ultra automaton.  Thankfully, I tend to run anti-trend anyway.

If the herd is charging one direction, my first move is to imagine that they’re headed toward a cliff at a full gallop.  That habit has kept me out of more than one mistake, like investing my 401K in Beanie Babies©.  But even I, John Wilder, still have a pulse and a set of instincts.

The difference, though, is whether I treat those instincts as orders or as suggestions.

My decisions are my choice.

Any one practicing for a staring contest should take a good, hard look in the mirror.

Yes, emotions matter.  They can be fuel.  But I still get to choose how I feel about an issue.  In the end, that very well may be the only freedom that cannot be taken from me:  I can only give it away.

They can take my money, my job, and MySpace© page.  They can take my reputation.  They can take the flags and the stories I grew up believing.  They can flood every screen with the approved feeling of the week from that high-fructose corn syrup of actresses, Zendaya.

Why high-fructose corn syrup?  No one likes it, and it’s in absolutely everything.

Regardless of Zendaya, what they cannot do is reach into my skull and flip the switch.

Unless I hand them the key.

I used to eat at Applebee’s®.  Then I saved up enough cash to buy my own microwave?

I have watched people hand over that key in real time.  They scroll until the algorithm has told them exactly how angry to be, what to be angry about, and how to soothe that anger.

They outsourced their emotions to the loudest voice in the room and call it being informed . . . “tRUsTinG tHe scIENcE”.

The alternative is to be deliberate.

I notice the emotion when it shows up.  Turn it around in my skull, and name it while avoiding the drama.

Then, and only then, do I decide whether it points toward Truth, Beauty, and Goodness or whether it is just another current trying to pull me somewhere I never intended to go.

That pause is the whole game. In that pause I still own the tiller.

I can choose the things that flow from Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. I can choose honor and discipline instead of convenience and shortcuts. I can choose the hard path because, as the old proverb says, calm seas do not make good sailors.  Smooth water teaches me almost nothing about flip flops, pop-tops, inexplicable tattoos, or using a mixer to blend iced alcoholic beverages.  Oh, wait, that’s Jimmy Buffet talking about his rough time.

My bad.  But the point of Margaritaville is that it shows how a life free from discipline leads to hard lessons in the end, anyway.  I want storms.  I want them early.

It’s rare that a defibrillator fails, but when it happens, no one is shocked.

Discipline looks boring from the outside.  And I am boring.  Honor looks stubborn.  And I’m damned stubborn.  Choosing not to feel what the crowd demands can look cold.

Fine.

I don’t control the storms.  I do not control the media cycle, the markets, the next manufactured crisis, or the next fashionable cause.

I do control whether those things dictate my next move.

Everything else can be bargained, taxed, regulated, stolen, or canceled.  The choice of how I feel about an issue stays mine until I surrender it.

So, I guard it.

I hear they have a new parking meteor at the International Space Station.

The sea will not stay calm, our lives are filled with storms.  The only question is to whether I choose to hold the tiller, or if I’ve already given up for a free ride on the SpaceLSD© express.

At least they have Margaritas.

Patton, Kathleen Turner, and the Difference Between Passion and Enthusiasm

“Like yourself, I have a passion for antiquities.” – Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

The Mrs. had a sinus infection that suppressed her ability to detect odors.  She got upset when I told people, “She doesn’t smell good.”

I’ve always disliked enthusiasm.

That doesn’t mean I haven’t been enthusiastic a time or two, usually after too much coffee or around the second beer.  But, I always, always distrust the emotion.

An aside:  I mean, is “emotion” even the right word for enthusiasm?  It feels more like a mood with a marketing department.

Passion, though?  That I feel.  That I respect.

I simply could not write this blog three times a week, week after week, year after year, without passion.  Passion is deep.  It is to the core.

It is meaning.

I’ve got to take another aside, last for the post.  Passion has a lot of definitions.  In this case, I’m using “an object of deep interest”.  Passion is one of those exceedingly strange words that has about seventeen definitions, some of them absolutely contradictory.  So, it’s not passion in the sense of “1986 Kathleen Turner sweating in a nightie while giving you that look” or passion in the “he lost his reason and committed a crime of passion” it’s passion in the sense of “General Patton was passionate about mobile combined arms warfare.”

Back to the show.  Tank you for your indulgence.

The Joan Wilder?

Enthusiasm?  That’s just the surface.  I tend to react negatively to enthusiasm and to those who try to make me feel it.  It’s a game I don’t want to play, since it is only the cheap reflection of the richness of true passion, sort of like the way Americans actually felt about the Soccer World Cup®.

Likewise, when I look at joy, I realize it is a mercurial, ephemeral, surface mood.  It lasts a second and then vanishes like the last slice of pizza in the fridge when Pugsley is home from Midwest U.

What is the deeper source people are trying to emulate with joy?

I think it’s satisfaction.  Satisfaction doesn’t spike and crash.  It settles in after the work is done, after the hard choice was made, and after I stuck with it long enough for the results to show up.

Joy is a firecracker.  Satisfaction is a campfire that keeps my soul warm.

I like enthusiastic people like I like my tea.  Under water, in a bag.

Once I started looking, similar pairs seem to show up everywhere.

Infatuation is the surface:  heart racing, the sudden conviction that this person is the answer to every problem I’ve ever had.  And yes, I’ve been infatuated a lot in my life, sometimes twice on Fridays.

Love, though, is the deep core.  It shows up when the dirty clothes are on the bathroom floor, when problems hit, and when it’s something that transcends a mere moment.

Infatuation needs constant newness.  Love needs character.

Likewise . . .

Excitement is a surface jolt I get from a new plan, a new gadget, or a diet that promises six-pack abs by Thursday.  Resolve is what remains after the novelty wears off and the plan starts requiring actual effort at 5:30 a.m.  On Monday.  In January.  Outside.  In near-freezing mud.  In Chicago.

My excitement is loud and is good at starting things.  My resolve is quiet, plodding, and is always what actually finishes any important job I start.

I hear pirates often get their hooks at a second-hand store.

There are obviously lots of others:

  • Motivation vs. Discipline
  • Amusement vs. Insight
  • Thrill vs. Purpose
  • Involvement vs. Commitment
  • Attitude vs. Character

Surface feelings are fast, loud, and in today’s world, surface moods are easily manufactured.  Deep sources are slow, quiet, and nearly impossible to fake because they’re substantial.  They don’t happen in an instant.  They are fabricated over the span of years, like when Michelangelo spent four decades on his back while sculpting Neil Armstrong’s face onto Mount Rushmore.

One is today’s weather.  The other is winter, spring, summer, and fall.

Two of my friends got busted for stealing a calendar.  They each got six months.

The modern world is engineered almost exclusively to exploit the surface.  Website responses are calibrated in milliseconds, which actively kills the pause that deep feelings require.  Twitter® used to time the way “likes” showed up in my notifications for a reason.  Twitter© was algorithmically tuned to keep me glued to the app without giving me time to reflect and reach the deeper parts of my soul.

Almost all of the Internet today is built to feed the surface.  Outrage is a trap that rarely means anything, but it does drive “engagement”.  But it leaves people feeling strangely empty, because “engagement” was never meant to carry the weight and meaning of a life.

It is the foam on the beer or the paper wrap on the PEZ© candies.

I distrust enthusiasm because I have seen how quickly it evaporates and how easily it can be manufactured by people who want something from me.  I trust passion because, even though I might not agree with the person or the passion, at least it’s honest.  Passion doesn’t need the crowd’s applause because it is its own reward.

In a world that keeps trying to sell me the surface version at ever-increasing speed, choosing the deeper one is almost a rebellious act.  It is also the only version that has any meaning.

Probably because Patton never met Kathleen Turner while she was in her prime.

Six Strange Life Lessons from Completely Unexpected Sources

“Well, you see, I’m not saying that I’ve been everywhere and done everything, but I do know it’s a pretty amazing planet we live on here and a man would have to be some kind of fool to think we’re all alone in this Universe.” – Big Trouble in Little China

My ex-wife once went missing for a week, and the police told me to expect the worst, so I had to go back to Goodwill® to get her clothes back.

Wisdom doesn’t always wear a tweed jacket with those leather elbow patches, smoke a pipe, and sit and stare in silent judgement over me for hours like the ghost of J.R.R. Tolkien after I do an Internet search for “sexy elves”.  Sometimes wisdom comes from a “low-effort because I’m tired after travelling listicle-post”, so here we go . . .

At least we know Deano’s favorite sea creature:  a moray.

Trees:  Sometimes Just Hanging Around Is a Win

There are roughly three trillion trees on Earth.  That’s more trees than there are stars in the entire Milky Way galaxy.  I did not make that up, and was surprised when I found out.  Most people like trees, but as I’m trying to clean out the forest next to Stately Wilder Manor that I have dubbed Mordor because, “One does not simply walk into Mordor.”

I think too much about trees.

They don’t hustle.  They don’t network.  They don’t chase trends or pay bills.  They just stand there, year after year, doing their job of being an impenetrable forest.

That’s it.  That’s the lesson.

I don’t always have to be grinding, optimizing, or “leveling up.”  Long-term presence and quiet consistency beat frantic motion most of the time.  Trees have been winning at this game for millions of years while the rest of us burn out trying to do everything at once.

Health:  Rest and recovery aren’t laziness.  They’re how you stay standing when the storms hit.

Wealth:  Patient compounding usually destroys the guy who’s constantly chasing the next hot thing.

Happiness:  Sometimes the real win is just refusing to move.

While I’m doom-scrolling and stressing, the trees are out here quietly outnumbering the stars. Maybe I should take the hint.

What did the 2% milk carton say?  I’m feeling a little drained.

Jack Burton: You Don’t Need to Know Everything to Be the Hero

Jack Burton from Big Trouble in Little China is the ultimate example.  Definitely not the one with the master plan.  He spends most of the movie confused, cracking bad jokes, but yet swinging when it counts.

And he still ends up the hero.

The lesson is simple:  I don’t have to understand every variable or have the perfect strategy.  Show up, stay calm when things get weird, and do the next right thing even though I don’t know where everything will end up.  That’s often enough.

Health:  Consistent basic effort beats analysis paralysis every single time.

Wealth:  Good habits and showing up regularly compound.

Life:  Confidence and action usually beat having every answer.

Jack Burton didn’t know what the hell was going on half the time.  He just kept driving the truck, killing the bad guys, and going with the flow.  That sometimes works better than the time I spend overthinking.

I can promise I won’t start a slave labor colony on Mars.  They’ll be able to leave the dome whenever they wish.

Cats: They Domesticated Themselves and Only Talk When It Matters

Domestic cats basically moved in with humans on their own terms.  They showed up, handled the rats, and let us feed them.  Over time we got attached.  Adult cats almost never meow to other cats. They save that sound almost exclusively for humans.

That’s strategic communication.  They know their audience.  They don’t waste energy performing for everyone. They focus where it actually gets results.

Health:  Prioritize the relationships and habits that actually support me instead of trying to please the whole world who mostly don’t care if I live or die.

Wealth:  Don’t chase every opportunity or person. Focus on the ones that pay off.

Happiness:  Authenticity and selective effort beat trying to be liked by everyone.

Cats didn’t ask permission to be part of the household.  They just made themselves useful and trained the humans.  Then they only spoke up when it was worth their time. Take notes.

Never Get Involved in a Land War in Asia

2026 Update:  Never Get Involved in a Land War in Asia.

My Korean friend died yesterday.  So Yung.

Everyone Remembers Godzilla. Nobody Remembers the Heroes.

In decades of Godzilla movies, the giant monster is the star.  The scientists in lab coats, the soldiers, the regular people trying to stop the destruction as Godzilla stomps his way across Tokyo?  They’re mostly forgotten five minutes after the credits roll.

Action gets all the attention.  Quiet, steady competence rarely does.  Yet, the lab coat guys are usually the ones who actually prevent total collapse.

Health:  The boring daily consistency is what actually changes bodies but having 16” biceps never hurts.

Wealth:  Nobody remembers the millionaire dentist, but everyone remembers Elon.

Life:  Being the reliable one who prevents disaster is more valuable than being the one causing the spectacle, but the only one they’ll remember is the one putting on the show.

I think the local Red Cross® uses ships to move plasma, as often as they talk about their blood vessels. 

“Why?” Is Still the Most Powerful Question

Four-year-olds drive adults crazy because they will not stop asking it.

“Why is the sky blue?”

“Why do I have to go to bed?”

“Why can’t I have ice cream for dinner?”

They haven’t yet learned to accept stupid answers and are not yet smart enough to cope with the mathematics of Rayleigh scattering.  It’s annoying.

But it’s also their superpower.

I try to never lose the habit of asking why.  It cuts through marketing, propaganda, bad habits, and bad advice.

Health:  Ask why are these pants tighter than last week.

Wealth:  Ask why people think that spending $700 billion on data centers makes sense and if they’re such a great deal why are the hyperscalers selling majority stakes in them.

Life:  Questioning things is how I attempt to stay sharp and avoid walking into obvious traps.  Kids ask “why” until adults either give a real answer or get annoyed because their small brains are too young to understand a simple equation:

The adults who keep asking “why” tend to do better than the ones who stopped.

Wisdom doesn’t need a stage or a book deal. Sometimes it’s standing quietly in a forest hating trees, driving the Pork Chop Express through minority-owned businesses, training humans without asking permission, not getting involved in land wars in Asia, causing glorious messes, or just refusing to stop asking questions.

Now back to those elves . . .

Just Look At What You’ve Started!

“I fart in your general direction.” – Monty Python and the Holy Grail

I saw the worst page in the dictionary, and what I saw was disgraceful, dishonest, and disgusting.

I find myself, time and again, beginning work that I know I will never see completed.

My time here is finite.  That fact sits in the background of everything, the ticking clock.

Still, I keep launching projects where the meaningful results, if they arrive at all, will show up long after I am gone.  Sometimes the gap stretches into decades or even centuries.  The work starts now because the window for starting is now, even when the finish line sits on the other side of my own existence.

An example of that is the oldest written joke that we know, which is a flatulence joke.  It’s not even a good joke.  Heck, it’s so bad it’s not even Amy Schumer-tier.

But we know it.  And it was a seed planted, thousands of years ago.

A proverb captures the feeling cleanly.  It is often traced to ancient Greek sources: a society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.

The personal version lands just as directly.  I am planting metaphorical trees under whose shade I will never metaphorically sit.  Or fart.  Or whatever.

I can cut a log in half just by staring at it.  I saw it with my own two eyes.

Having children supplies one clear case where we build that future.  Earlier generations treated reproduction as something that largely happened without deliberate long-range planning:  a Saturday night and a bottle of wine and, boom, Julius Caesar was born nine months later and was off invading Gaul nine months after that.  Biology and circumstance and the Roman Legions carried most of the load.

Today the choice sits in the open.

I began a project whose success or failure will play out across lives that extend well past mine.  The uncertainties related to having children arrive immediately, and stay.  What sort of people will they become?  What attitudes will they carry into whatever conditions they meet? How much of what I do now will actually matter when they make their own choices?  Will the daily work of guidance and example turn out to have been enough?  What sort of impact will they have on the lives of others?

These questions do not come with easy answers.  I did it anyway, fully knowing that large parts of the outcome lie outside any direct observation I will ever have.  I’m tossing a message in a bottle into the sea, and one day it will drift beyond my sight.

And it’s okay if you drop a bottle on your foot, since it’s a soft drink.

My writing here forms another example.  Each idea or observation I write down moves outward like a ripple from a stone dropped in still water.  Some ripples weaken quickly and vanish as distance grows from the initial perturbation.  Other of my ripples cross paths with ripples started elsewhere and produce new patterns through interference in the brains of people I’ll never meet.

A smaller number may strengthen when surrounding conditions line up:  when an idea meets receptive minds or aligns with events already in motion.

I have no reliable way to track the final shape any of this takes.  Has any portion of it improved the world in any way?

I cannot measure that from inside.

What I can control is the attempt to keep what I write aligned with observable reality as closely as possible.  The results are not always Beautiful. They are not always Good. They simply aim to stay as True as I can make them.  When I’m lucky, they’re two of the three.  When I’m very lucky, they’re all three.

Is a long metaphor a metaphiv?

Stepping back gives me yet another perspective.

A single human life occupies almost no space against the age of the Universe.  The cosmos we can observe remains young even by its own standards.

Some red dwarfs carry enough fuel supplies to keep them burning for trillions of years, which is slightly longer than The Simpsons has been on TV.  Distant descendants, if any exist at that scale, might live under skies lit by those dim red suns and occasionally consider their own origins.

Far more likely, the timescales involved would have erased any specific memory of earlier generations.  The thread of continuity will be stretched to the utmost at that great depth of time and only the most basic, the greatest of what is Beautiful, Good and True will remain.

Yet, I keep starting these projects.

I keep choosing to begin work whose completion sits beyond my time on Earth.  I try to retell stories that are older than any living man, stories of our history, of self-reliance, of bravery, of what is best in being human.

The way I tell those stories is imperfect and incomplete, but it’s just another tree planted without expectation of sitting under the finished shade.

Why do so few Germans commit crimes?  Crimes are illegal.

Perhaps, at some vastly later point, whatever remains of humanity will retain at least a trace of humor about the whole arrangement and maybe a ripple from this time will impact them.  That possibility, however small, supplies its own quiet justification for continuing to drop stones into the water.

Besides, farting is intrinsically funny, and if my fart joke survives a trillion years, well, that really would be a blast from the past.

My Most Irrational Post Ever. Plus? Hot Chicks.

“Cassandra, in Greek legend, was condemned to know the future, but to be disbelieved when she foretold it.” – Twelve Monkeys

Proof that Jerry Lee Lewis was psychic with at least one of his songs:  A man from Florida was arrested for dipping his testicles into salsa.

One of the simplest geometric forms is a triangle.  It’s just three points and the lines that connect them.  See?  Simple.  Elegant.  The only thing simpler is a circle, but we’ll get to that, at least in passing.

The Greeks were crazy about math, like a geometry teacher on meth and Adderall® who was also genetically spliced with the Taco Bell© chihuahua, and loved dividing things.  Every time they divided something, though, they got either a whole number (1/1=1), a fraction that ended (1/4=0.25) or a fraction that repeated the same number or sequence of numbers forever (1/3=0.33333333…).

See, simple rules.

Rational output.  Literally rational output, because the numbers could be expressed as a ratio.  That’s actually where the word rational comes from:  if something can be expressed by a ratio of whole numbers, it’s a rational number.  In these combinations of numbers and ratios, these Greeks saw the perfection that came from a designed universe, a place where things made sense.

The one cult died out at ate-a-Glock™ in the morning.

And that was important, since math was a cult back then.  Yes, an honest to God, Waco-level showers-optional cult based as near as we can tell on math, mysticism, vegetarianism, reincarnation, and politics.  Since they were vegetarians, we know that they had poor grip strength and were shunned by women.  Basically, its as if they put your high school math club on an island for six generations and made them wear togas.

Triangles, though, eventually ended up driving the Greeks crazy, even crazier than the hot chicks they couldn’t get to talk to them.  Actually, it wasn’t the triangle itself, but what happened when they started thinking about the simplest right triangle, one with two sides that are 90 degrees apart, and are only one unit long.

What’s the hypotenuse of that triangle?

Well, Pythagoras figured it out. With the old a2+b2=c2, the Pythagorean Theorem®, right?  Turns out that it had been developed as early as 1300 years before Pythagoras became a Grecohipster by the Babylonians.  I guess the Babylonians had bad press.

Enough history, back to the hypotenuse.

If a=a2=1, and b=b2=1, then c2=2.  Easy.  That means that c is equal to the square root of two.  Or the speed of light.  But let’s stick with the square root thing.

Funny thing is that their friends were imaginary, too.

Some weak, protein-starved pale Greek from the cult of Pythagoras was able to prove that the square root of 2 was irrational.  It goes like this:

Assume that the square root of 2 is rational. That means we can write it as a fraction of two numbers p and q that have no common factor:

Square both sides to eliminate the square root:

The right side is clearly even (it’s 2 times something), so p² is even.  The square of an odd number is always odd, and the square of an even number is always even.

Therefore, if p² is even, p itself must be even.  So, we can write p = 2m for some positive integer m. Substitute this back in:

Now the left side is even, so q² is also clearly even.

By the same logic as before, q itself must be even. But now both p and q are even, that means they share a common factor of 2.

This directly contradicts our starting assumption that p and q have no common factors

Therefore, the original assumption must be false:  the square root of 2 cannot be expressed as a ratio of two integers.

It is irrational.

I know it’s irrational, but I do love pumpkin pi.

This baked the gourds of the cult.  Rumor has it that they kept it secret and may have even killed to keep it a secret.

This was where the word irrational came from.  But the word in our language came from a concept of a number can’t be expressed as a ratio.  So, before my ex-wife even existed, people were talking about the word irrational.

The square root of 2 is thus irrational.  So are a lot of other numbers, like pi.  The Greeks thought pi was irrational because they kept making bigger and bigger models of circles with smaller and smaller units and could never come up with a ratio that made sense because the denominator kept getting bigger, also like my ex-wife.

But here’s the part that bakes my gourd.  The square root of two never ends.  It’s been calculated to more digits than the weight of my ex-wife in grams, and that’s a lot, and it looks to be very random.  But since it goes on forever . . . that means my social security number is in there.

And so is yours, if you have one.

Those Gen Z kids have a lot of nerve, always walking around like the rent the place.

Everyone’s social security number is probably there.  And if you did something crazy like do a substitution into a different mathematical base (I used base 28) and have it map to the alphabet plus a comma and a period instead of numbers, you could have something like this for the first 400 digits of the square root of two:

AKPTVWWMVL,BOOLWLVQY..RDWM.BHVFYCFJMIAHGIU.EYMXWLPWZ.V.NT.AUBXB.UEGICHKTBRYATPCKPPUFOPWLDTVOOISWJKN,FJGOHZESKBQHPAKZ.OZHSFTPFZRQDTYDN.N.HCSTLQYYQK,HVKIQQGHYMEYDOMPGFSNNMHJAKSHC,,F,YWKSBJLQPAFZGRDMCEIXQGPVQ.NUEQOLDYFGFSRJPR.WMAXMV,NNSGRIGPGKPKGLXSCQR,SYFPHQCJXEMUEWLHOUMDSSMYDAVNXTFWOC,YBNZHBN.GNIHXSU.UBB,CHQCOATUL.AYPALBNAFHOD.ZQB,SHIWDZPCZIM.OL.TRUP.XGJLEWUUIZTCOHXBNUXGVCSVMUPFFHCBJCWMVTUXSNWHSNS.

You could even map it into the ASCII code that I’m typing in, but I was too lazy to do that, but the Sumerians calculated it in base 60 which may have made them more insane even than the Greeks.  But the good news is that every post I’ve ever put up (or ever will put up) is available in the square root of 2.  In order.

That also means that, rolled up in an infinite number is every possible thing that could ever exist.  Every thought that could ever be had.  Every .jpg of Kathleen Turner.

Don’t look up current pictures.  She’s gone into Kathleen Turner Overdrive.

All of it.  In one number.  And in an infinite number of random irrational numbers, like pi.  The Greeks couldn’t prove pi was irrational because they didn’t have calculus until one of them was reincarnated as Newton.

Now, the downside is that we have no index to where everything is sitting the square root of 2.  Where, exactly, all of my posts are besides my hard drive and on the server of the hosting company are unknown.

But they’re there.

That means that everything that is, ever was, or ever will be is compressed in a single number, yet to us, also unknowable because we don’t have the index.  Infinities are embedded in some of the simplest shapes in the universe:  that shape which defines a plane contains, well, everything.

But this is a little deep for a Friday.

Who wants to talk about hot chicks?

 

Excalibur: The Movie The West Needs Now

“My pride broke it!  My rage broke it!  This excellent knight, who fought with fairness and grace, was meant to win.  I used Excalibur to change that verdict.  I’ve lost, for all time, the ancient sword of my fathers, whose power was meant to unite all men, not to serve the vanity of a single man.  I am . . . nothing.” – Excalibur

I tried to pull the sword from the stone, but I wasn’t Arthurized.

I rewatched Excalibur last weekend for the first time, likely, since Reagan was president and the phrase “press one for English” had yet to be spoken.

It was glorious, and better than I remembered, and that isn’t just the wine talking.  Excalibur came out in 1981, directed by John Boorman, who also brought us the underrated epic of Zardoz.  Any man who can talk Sean Connery into wearing an orange diaper for an entire film and likes guns as much as Boorman is okay.

Excalibur, however, features no orange underwear or guns.  It is, however, one of the most nationalistic, unapologetic, mythic, sword-swinging spectacles ever put on film.

To be clear:  it’s not a history lesson.  It’s a legend.

First things first:  no, the armor isn’t remotely historically accurate.  Plate armor like that didn’t show up until centuries after the real  Arthur would have been stomping around Britain in the 600s or 700s.  The knights look like they stepped out of a 15th-century tournament sponsored by the Stainless Steel Institute® instead of a muddy Dark Ages battlefield.

The wedding party lasted too late into the night for one of Arthur’s Knights.  Poor Sir Cadian.

Boorman knew this.  He didn’t care because Excalibur isn’t trying to be a documentary.  It’s a full-throated retelling of the King Arthur myth, the kind that’s been passed around campfires and tavern tables for more than a thousand years.  When I looked back at the overall King Arthur Literary Universe©, I found that there were endless characters and sub-characters and plots and mutually exclusive elements.

Boorman picked the main plot points of the Arthur myth perfectly.  As a result, the film knows exactly what it is:  a legend soaked in Christianity, fog, blood, magic, virtue, redemption, and destiny.

The critics, when it first came out, whined that the characters weren’t “complex” enough.  Arthur wasn’t nuanced.  Guinevere wasn’t layered and didn’t have a chance to prove herself on the battlefield as a Strong Independent Woman©.  Lancelot wasn’t a tortured anti-hero with a tragic backstory and three therapy sessions.

That’s the damn point.

They’re archetypes.

My favorite dessert at Thanksgiving is made by dividing a pumpkin’s circumference by its diameter:  pumpkin pi.

Arthur is the Once and Future King.  He is pure, flawed, larger than life and his failings are the point of the movie.  Merlin is the scheming wizard who sees the long game.  Morgana is ambition and vengeance and hotness wrapped in snakes, silk, and spite.  The film doesn’t waste time giving everyone a five-minute monologue about their feelings.

It trusts the myth to simply be what it is.

And with the exception of Helen Mirren, all of the rest of the cast in main roles flailed for the rest of their careers as B and C listers.  But in this movie?  Nigel Terry is Arthur.  Nicol Williamson is a Merlin that is so Merlin that I can’t imagine another person being Merlin.  In what probably saved their careers, you’ll spot Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne, and Patrick Stewart in roles that are nearly so brief you’ll blink and miss them.

The actors are the roles they were born to play, and the story moves like a river in flood.  That’s why it still works.

Part of the backstory is that Boorman wanted to make a Lord of the Rings movie, but thankfully couldn’t find anyone stupid enough to take the risk on a production far too large for its time.  Instead, he made Excalibur.

I imagine Father’s Day was uncomfortable around the castle.

Excalibur is a nationalist British film, made by a British director, for an audience that still remembered what a legend actually was.  Men were men.  Women were women.

Honor and virtue mattered.  Betrayal hurt.  Sex was raw and consequential, not a punchline or a sermon.  People with good motives weren’t ridiculed.

Boorman put his own flesh and blood into the movie, literally.  Boorman had to direct his own young and incredibly hot daughter in one of the more, shall we say, vigorous scenes in the movie.

Yeah.

Imagine Boorman as a director, talking to his daughter:  “Honey, can you just, you know, a little more passion on take three?  Hip thrusts, dear.”  To top it off, Boorman’s son played the young version of Mordred.  This is the family business, Boorman style.

The man didn’t just make a movie about myth, he co-wrote the screenplay, directed the film, produced the film, and he dragged his own bloodline into the forge.  No wonder the whole movie feels more alive than most things that have been made in the last decade.

That is why Excalibur feels dangerous somehow next to today’s polished, focus-grouped slop.

No one was trying to make Excalibur “relatable for modern audiences.”  No one was worried about alienating the overseas market or triggering the comment section.  No soulless Disney© corporate executive (but I repeat myself at least three times) was trying to make a tentpole for the Arthur Cinematic Universe© and have three more movies so they could triple the profits.

He just told the damn story.

You know I’m right.

The result is a film that looks like it was shot inside a stained-glass window:  every frame drips with atmosphere, every line of dialogue sounds like it was read off of a stone carving.  The classical music fills the spots perfectly.  The (very inaccurate) battles feel like they matter because the people swinging the swords believe in something bigger than themselves.

The movie is earnest.  The actors and writers and crew believe in the story they’re telling.

That’s the contrast that stings in 2026.  We’re drowning in corporate product:  remakes, reboots, and “elevated” retellings that strip out everything that made the originals mythic.

They give us complexity instead of clarity, messaging instead of meaning.

Excalibur reminds me why the old stories endured:  they weren’t about making transgender people or minorities feel seen.  They were about making people feel the weight of destiny, the cost of power, and the pull of something ancient and also something that was True, Beautiful, and Good.

Search for “Amelia Meme UK”.

So, if you haven’t seen it, you might correctly guess I’m a fan.  If you haven’t seen it in a while, give it another shot.  Pour something that Arthur would have quaffed, turn the lights down, put the damn phones up, and let the sword rise from the lake one more time.

In a world that’s forgotten how to tell legends, Excalibur still knows exactly what it is.  And just like King Arthur himself, there will never be another like it.

Let’s hope that Great Britain remembers Arthur’s words from the film:  “Now, once more, I must ride with my knights to defend what was, and the dream of what could be.”