Category: Happiness

Cathedrals, Buzz Aldrin, And Changing The World

“You know, most people think that the name Buzz Aldrin has some huge meaning behind it.  Nope, he was afraid of bees.” – Frasier

What’s the difference between Joe Biden and Buzz Aldrin?  Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon.  Joe Biden likes kids to rub his leg hair.

I think back to the builders of the European cathedrals.  The construction of Notre Dame was started in 1163 A.D., not long after the Norman Conquest of England.  Notre Dame was finished in 1345 A.D.

182 years.  I might not even live that long, and I take vitamins and eat only a diet of meat that I hunt half-naked while armed only with stone-tipped spears.  The people in Wal-Mart® have gotten a bit tired of the spears, but it doesn’t technically violate their weapons policy.  And I use a Visa™ to pay, though they make a “eeeew” face when I pull it from my fur loincloth on a sweaty summer day.

Think about that.  NO!  Not my sweaty fur loincloth, the cathedral.  Think about the motivation that it requires to get up every morning when the thing you’re trying to accomplish won’t be done in your lifetime.  Or the lifetime of your child.  Or the lifetime of their children.

That requires motivation.  Also, I have no idea what they used for alarm clocks, and their humor-blogging infrastructure appeared to be singing marginally naughty songs about the local barmaid and complaining about how French they were and how they hoped the Germans would never invent panzers.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame sure had a twisted back story.

Motivation, though, remains key in everything you do in life, even if you’re not building a cathedral.  One motivational mistake is to aim too high.  When someone aims too high, they run the risk of being disappointed by results.

As I’ve discussed with one of my friends, he noted that research shows the most happy people in the Olympics®, overall, are the bronze medal winners.  Third place isn’t so bad.  Since I heard that the intelligence of dolphins was second only to man, that means Leftists should be happy, being in third place and all.

For the bronze medal winners, well, here they are on the world stage.  They did really well.  Were they close to winning it all?  Sure, close enough to get a bronze medal.  But, there’s the guy over there with the silver medal, so, he and another guy were better.

Most bronze medal winners can be happy that if they’d been just a little bit better, they’d have been in . . . second place.  If they’d worked a lot harder, they’d have still been only one place better.  So, third isn’t so bad.  They might even get the Junior High Marching Band to lead a parade when they get home.

The silver medal winner, though, will always have it eating on him:  what if he hadn’t skipped practice that week?  What if he had pushed a little harder in the weight room?  The silver medalist is plagued with a bushel basket of “what if’s” that will wake him up in the middle of the night.  Second place is tantalizing.  It is the story of near success, like England’s soccer team.

Helen Keller never saw a movie about pirates.  Because she’s dead.

The gold medalist?  It depends.  In many cases, Olympic™ level athletes work for two decades to get the skill and experience to win Olympic® gold, to be, literally, the best in the world at something that no one will pay them to do.

Sure winning’s great, right?  But what happens when the dog finally catches the car?  What then?

Let’s move sideways a bit more, and return to one of my favorite people in history:  Buzz Aldrin.  It will all make sense in the end.  I’m a trained professional.

Buzz was a guy who did a lot of things that were world-class.  He went to the USMA at West Point.  He was a fighter pilot who shot down commies in Korea, but still didn’t get to kill as many commies as Mao or Stalin did.  He got a doctorate from MIT on rocket navigation.

And one other thing.  What was it?

Oh, yeah.  He was the second man on the frigging Moon.

That’s really cool.  But there appears to be a downside to that.  It wasn’t a just something small and fleeting like an Olympic® gold medal, it was one of the ultimate gold medals in all of human history.

Ever.

How do you follow that up?  Get a Denny’s® Franchisee Award for cleanest bathroom in Des Moines?

I hear Santa’s bathroom is clean because he uses Comet.

Neil Armstrong figured out how to follow it up.  That man was always kind of spooky and Zen and perhaps was okay owning a Denny’s© in Des Moines, selling Moons over My Hammies™ and Rootie Tootie Fresh and Fruity® pancakes.

Buzz didn’t figure it out, probably because his work in physics and killing commies did not prepare him to make a decent pancake.  Imagine:  Buzz was 39 and there was literally no way his life hadn’t peaked.  Nothing, and I mean nothing he could ever do again would match up to what he did.

First a week passes.  Then a month passes.  Then a year passes.  The hollow feeling inside of Buzz grew.  How do you move forward?  How do you top yourself?  I mean, you could make a really great pancake, but it would have to be the best pancake in the history of pancakes.  Dang.  That still doesn’t beat being on the frigging Moon.

He was stumped.  He had fame.  He had the ability to get whatever money he wanted, more or less.

But he had peaked.

What to do?

Buzz crawled into a bottle.  Eventually, after leaving the Air Force, Buzz even spent time selling used cars.  Sure, that worked for Kurt Russell in the 1980 film, but Buzz was awful at it.

What’s the difference between a used car salesman and a COVID-Jab advocate?  The used car salesman knows when he’s lying.

As near as I can tell, Mr. Aldrin finally pulled himself out of his funk.  He finally decided his place was being an advocate for manned spaceflight, specifically to Mars.  He even helped to create a transfer orbit to make a trip to Mars the most time-effective that he could envision.  You could say that Buzz figured out the gravity of the situation.

That more than anything, I think, helped him.  Buzz found something that was so big, so important, that he knew he wasn’t going to be able to do it in his lifetime.

Mars.  A worthy goal for mankind.  A goal that is meant for brave dreamers, for people who might want to change humanity.  He had found his cathedral.

Again.  Buzz had already done it once.

Mr. Aldrin is an unusual case – one of the highest achievers in a generation of high achievers.  Many mornings I’m just glad that the alarm managed to wake me up.  But I’ve had my share of success in the business world, reaching as high as I ever really wanted to go, doing the one job I wanted to do.

When Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Mike Collins went to meet President Nixon after the Moon mission, Mike had to spend the entire time driving around the White House.

Where Buzz aimed high, perhaps I didn’t aim as high, but I still got there.

Then what?

My writing is a part of that.  Where do you go when you have whatever you want?

You find something important, and you start building.  You start building something more important than you.  I think Neil Armstrong found that when he started teaching.  Perhaps he got his satisfaction from helping the next generation learn.

I can’t be sure.  Neil didn’t really say.  He seemed happy that the attention had passed.  My Apollo-gies if I got that wrong.  And this isn’t about him, anyway.

The lesson I learned from Buzz was a simple one:  have a goal.

Find a cathedral to build.  Find something so much bigger than yourself that you’re willing to build it even though no one alive on Earth will ever see it through.  Make it something that you can care about.  Make it big enough that, at best, you can help build only part of it.

If you can find your cathedral, you will have the rarest of gifts:  you will shape the future.

Remember, not all cathedrals are made with stones, and the best ones are built in the minds of men.

Why?

Because rent is cheaper there.

The Greatest Game

“A member of an elite paramilitary organization: Eagle Scouts.” – Red Dawn

I have a friend who has a trophy wife.  It wasn’t first place.

I once had a position with a certain paramilitary organization aimed at youth who identified as were boys.  I have always raised my own children by a simple rule:  if they thought they were old enough to try something, they probably were.  A related rule was:  if I thought they were old enough, I’d make them try something.  Especially if it made my life easier.

Five-year-olds can do drywall.  I mean, through the tears, that is.

Obviously, this got mixed results.  The judgment of a ten-year-old is not as good as that of even a boy two years older.  When I asked Pugsley to warm up the car one winter evening when he was 10 or so, while sitting in the front seat he did a neutral drop at high RPM.  Right into the house.

Live and learn.  Weirdly, we managed to put the wall back into place (mostly) with a mallet.  Was I irritated he ran a car into our house?  Certainly.  But, independence has costs.

Learning is never free.

I promise to stop using police-related puns.  I’ll give them arrest.

When I later became a paramilitary organization leader to other boys in addition to mine, I found something interesting:  most parents hadn’t taught the boys even rudimentary life skills or woodcraft.  Lessons I had learned just tromping around Wilder Mountain seemed like magic to them.  It made sense.  We don’t really live in a world that values those skills.

In my first campout with the boys, one of the skills we focused on was simple:  building a fire.  To my amazement, half of the boys hadn’t done that, ever.  One of the oldest boys on the campout was around sixteen. He worked on his fire for over an hour.  In that hour, he learned a lot of ways to not start a fire.  Finally, he got it going.

Me:  “Okay, good job!  You can put it out now.”

He didn’t.  It was the first fire he’d ever made, and he stoked and babied that fire like it was the first one that mankind had ever mastered.  And, for him, that was true.  He kept that fire going for hours.

There was a fire at Goodwill® today.  No injuries, just some secondhand smoke exposure.

I learned as much from the boys as they learned from me.  In this moment I learned a real, hard fact of life.  When that boy made his first fire, he didn’t need a badge.  He didn’t need a medal.  What did he need?

Nothing.  He had struggled for an hour to make that fire.  His reward wasn’t anything outside of him.  His reward was the skill.  In a sense, that real, physical fire had started a metaphorical fire in him.

Give that a thought.  Soccer leagues give children participation trophies so their feelings aren’t hurt.  I’m not sure anyone understands the damage done by those hunks of gilt plastic.  The trophies are cheap, but the sense of entitlement created by them lasts a lifetime.

When a man makes a fire, or wins a judo match, or does something that is his and his alone, the medal isn’t the accomplishment, the medal is the acknowledgment.

A child who grows up in Montana who can ride a horse, skin an elk, and shoot a rifle straight and true doesn’t need a medal.  They don’t need outside affirmation.  They are who they are.

Arnold was a great gardener.  They called him the Germinator.

That’s the rule of the Greatest Game.  Struggle.  Learn.  Master.  Repeat.

Missing?  A trophy.  Why is it missing?  It’s simply not necessary.

We live in a culture where people don’t have to struggle.  I imagine the only meal missed in recent memory by readers here is one they chose to miss.  Food in this day may be more expensive than it was last year, but it’s still everywhere.  The calories to feed a person are plentiful.

So why are video games popular?

They’re popular because we’re wired to Struggle, Learn, Master, and Repeat.  Deep down inside, though, we know it’s only a pale shadow of the Greatest Game.

Technology has improved so much that it has interfered with the programming that is at the core of what it means to be human.  To be the best that we can be, the struggle has to be worth our time.  The game has to be worth playing.

No matter how bad you think you are, Moses was worse.  He broke all of the Commandments at once.   

I think that a lot of the dysfunction in our society stems to that – people who would have mattered to their tribe back in 200 B.C. or 1,000 A.D. are simply playing their parts in big machines.  Our technology has changed our culture.  Our culture has changed our roles in society.

These changed roles weren’t made with men in mind, they emerged from the technology.  Even 140 years ago, the typical farmer and his family often had to fabricate many if not most of the things that he depended on.  That led to independence.

The farmer was free in a way that people chained to an international financial system and a technological corporate machine aren’t.  He was free to succeed, or free to fail.

What mattered was how he played the Greatest Game.

We’re still here.  We can play the Greatest Game, because, surprisingly, it’s still out there.  Each day we have the chance:  Struggle, Learn, Master and Repeat.

Me?  I’m still learning to make a fire or two.

What Advice Would You Give A Kid In 2021?

“My best friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s brother’s girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who’s going with the girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors® last night. I guess it’s pretty serious.” – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

What does a German scientist say when he runs out of beer glasses?  “Nein stein.”

One thing I’ve done with my kids is try to give them the best understanding of the world as I know it.

The problem with advice is that it assumes a set of conditions where the advice is valid.  If you’d assume that learning how to balance a checkbook would always be useful, sending you back to 1066 or forward to 2036 would probably convince you otherwise, though the Normans might find your penmanship amusing.

The most common set of conditions that we assume is that tomorrow will look a lot like today.  That works pretty well most of the time.  Heck, there are entire millennia of human history where tomorrow looked exactly like today.  “Uhh, Grug make rock into pointy spear, kill mammoth, maybe get Mammothlix and Chill with Samantha.”

A second set of conditions is that today’s trends will continue.  This is similar to the first one, but involves, well, trends.  One trend is that electronics keep getting more advanced, and the pace of technological change keeps increasing.  That seems logical, but . . . well, look around.  It’s not like we’re getting any smarter, so there’s a limit there.

There are times when neither of these things is true.

Hobbits may not be smart, but they are well rounded.

A few years ago (has it been that long???) The Boy and I were discussing his future college plans.  There were two good state schools he was seriously considering.  He was also considering either Annapolis, West Point, or Colorado Springs.  His swimming looked much like a swan attempting to change a tire on a 1993 Buick® without a lug wrench.  I mean, it’s possible, but there is a lot of unnecessary motion involved.  And feathers.  Feathers everywhere.

Part of me was hoping that The Boy would be interested in one of the military academies.  He had the grades and the athletics, and certainly the love of country.  He rejected them.  Perhaps he saw then what I see now, that the United States military is being very quickly absorbed into the Leftist collective.  Or maybe he just decided that the military would keep him from his ambition of starting his own cryptocurrency and buying Paraguay.

Who can say?

I hadn’t anticipated the change in the rank and file of the military, so quickly.  The military has had issues over time, but I expected that the Oath would matter more than the occupant of the White House.  Everything I see now points as evidence that the Left is moving exceptionally quickly to politicize the military.  The idea is simple:  drum those out who don’t conform.

So, me telling him to go to a military academy would have been very bad advice.

I guess if you’re hungover at West Point, the advice is to use breath mints, like Tac-Tics®.

What other advice doesn’t ring true in 2021?

How about, save money and buy a house?

That has been wonderful advice since, oh, 1945 or so.  Before then, I assume, you wandered into the great frontier and hewed a cabin out of logs.  Oh, wait.  The Great Depression caused a previous mini-mansion real estate boom to collapse.

My bad.

But does it make sense today?  In many urban areas, would it even be in the realm of possibility for a kid today?

Not in San Francisco.  The median home price there is now $1.4 million bucks.

  • What about Miami? $385,000.
  • Minneapolis, a city I regularly make fun of? $325,000.
  • Salt Lake City? $485,000.

If I do the math, just the payments on a $450,000 loan are about $2,000 a month.  Add in taxes and insurance and you’re probably closer to a monthly payment of nearly $3,000?  At that point, even an average home in Salt Lake City is out of reach of most people under 30, unless of course, they were bringing home in excess of $120,000 a month as a family.

Possible?  Sure.  But at that level of debt payment, there’s very little margin for error.  Mom loses her job making PowerPoints® about (spins wheel) “Overcoming Group Synergy Issues In Dispersed Work Environments” and now the entire family is just a month or two away from knife fights with bums over great overpasses to put a box under.  Well, I guess that’s still real estate.

I tried to offer 0% loans for houses, but there was no interest.

Oh, that brings up other old advice:  save your money.  I consider savings great.  It’s a moral thing to do, and virtue should always pay off in the future.  Unless, of course, the Fed® is printing money as fast as the computer can add zeros.  Then, what you saved soon becomes worth less, and eventually worthless.  Spend it as fast as you can on pantyhose, PEZ® and elephant rides because tomorrow you won’t be able to buy a used disposable razor with that cash.

So, there’s another value inverted.  Honestly, I’d rather suggest that my kids save money in Bitcoin over the dollar.  At least the Fed® can’t (yet) print Bitcoin.  If I were to give my kids advice, I’d say to stock up on all the silver they can.

At least silver holds value.

If the werewolf was clueless?  He’d be an unwarewolf.

Or it has in most times and places.  After the Romans left Britain, though, silver was pretty much ignored because the concern was getting food after civilization collapsed.  Newsflash:  you can’t eat silver.  Yes, that’s a very cherry-picked example, but there are circumstances where even precious metals cease to be precious.   Except for the One Ring.

What about education?

I used to be a “if you can go to college, go to college” guy.  I am not any longer.  College is like any other business proposition.  If a degree has a positive rate of return?  Go for it.  That’s probably limited to a few select degrees in 2021, especially with the price of college.  It certainly doesn’t include any degree that ends in “studies”.

If someone else is paying for most of school, it probably is a good idea to choose a degree that’s in demand, that can’t be done online by someone from Mumbai or Shanghai at $0.43 per hour and has a credential that an illegal alien can’t (yet) get.  Remember, if a degree can be replaced by a machine or computer program or an Internet search?  Don’t do it.

But if it’s not going to cost a kidney or require later “repayment” to gentlemen from extortionist rackets, like organized crime people who make student loans.

Then, go to college.  Otherwise?  Get a job that requires a credential that an illegal can’t (yet) get.

The best advice I’d give today is this:

  • Be adaptable.
  • Be useful.
  • Be optimistic.
  • Learn skills, and understand that learning never stops.

What skills?  Figure out a strength that helps people and earns your keep.  Then get good at it.  Then learn a skill that complements it, a next-door neighbor, if you will.  Then?  Repeat.

Here’s my example:  I always tested well and performed well in language stuff, umm, things.  But for most of my career it was just a complement to the other work I did.  Since I’ve been writing these blog posts I think I’ve gotten a bit better at writing, and much, much better at editing.

Why could the Bible have used a better editor?  Well, to make a long story short . . .

The big result is that I can now tear through an amazing amount of communication-stuff at work with little effort.  They don’t seem to like the bikini memes I keep throwing into emails, though HR keeps laughing.

The world has changed.  Bigly.

Not all of the Millennials and Zoomers are lazy.  The advice Pa Wilder gave me was tried and true and lasted for decades before he shared it with his odd Gen-X son.  Mostly, it worked, and worked really well for me.

But society has moved on.  And, after my study of history, I cannot see the trends we see before us lasting for more than a decade.  Herbert Stein (Ben’s dad) said it very well:  “If something cannot go on forever, it will, Bueller . . . Bueller . . . anyone . . .  stop.”

I see before us several things that are near their stopping point.  In reality, everyone before the Millennials and Zoomers had it easier.  No, not easy.  Easier.  We worked hard.  We put in the time.

But the old rules still worked.  Now?

Not so much.

Think about it:  what is the best advice you’d give a 15 to 30 year-old kid in 2021?

The Beauty Of The Red Pill

“Hey Samantha, don’t take the Red Pill!” – Grandma’s Boy

If my son wanted to be a fiction writer, I’d send him to college to study journalism.

Have you ever not asked a question because you already knew the answer, but were afraid to hear it?  I’m willing to bet we all have.  I try to leave occasional breadcrumbs here, especially during my Monday and Wednesday posts, but I’ve stopped short of leaving my posts in the forest near a witch’s house.  Besides, I hear Hillary has security guards.

The Truth is shocking.  Many times, the Truth isn’t pleasant.  I remember coming to one unpleasant Truth realization in college:  the college didn’t care if I did well or even if I graduated.

It hadn’t been like that in high school.  But in college?  I was just a number.  It sounds silly to me now, but back then it was quite a realization for me.  Gradually, more Truths started showing up in my life.  In many cases, I denied them as long as I could, but they eventually became inevitable.

They call this the Red Pill, after the scene in The Matrix where Keanu Reeves gets a job painting pills red.

Never let Morpheus do the cooking at a Matrix cast barbeque.  There’s a reason they call him Lawrence Fishburne.

Part of the problem with discovering Truth is that it can make you feel alone.  Much of our society is based on covering uncomfortable Truth with pretty little lies.  It has always been so, but in 2021 it’s at the very worst that it has been in the history of the United States.  People were censored a year ago for telling what are now the (generally) accepted theories about CoronaChan.

The Truth is that we still don’t know where it came from, but vary from any generally accepted truth about COVID on YouTube® and you’ll be censored.  Thankfully, YouTube™ is so committed to “truth” that they gave themselves an award for being so courageous about it.  Really – there isn’t even a punchline.

Here’s another Red Pill:  no one (and I mean no one) is coming to save you.  No one (and I mean no one) is responsible for your actions but you.  If you can’t save yourself, you’ll just have to depend on luck, which is a crappy strategy.  There is no secret cabal of government good guys like Qanon® used to put in his cryptic message board posts.  Q is not coming to save you.

I guess QANON was just another 4Chan teller.

Part of the problem with taking a Red Pill is that, once you’re finally awake and aware of how the world works, just like Ebola, you want to share it with people.  That’s a bad idea.

The unfortunately named Desiderius Erasmus Roterdamus made the silly quote, “In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king,” and with the new Red Pill knowledge, you want to share it far and wide.

Sadly, Desiderius, the one-eyed man is not king.

As H.G. Wells wrote, the blind people can’t see what the one-eyed dude describes.  They think him mad, and if they have a chance they’ll tie him down and remove that silly eye that keeps giving him all of those wild notions and that awful practical joke of leaving the plunger in the toilet.  People will fight nearly to the death to keep a pretty lie alive, especially when the Truth is ugly.

I wrote a check to a charity for the blind, but I’m worried they’ll never see a penny of it.

But there is opportunity for an individual once the first real Red Pill hits.  Seeking Truth becomes a habit.  And you find that Truth exists in many, many more places than you might imagine.  When I go to find Truth, I know one place I can find it very quickly.

Truth is in the Iron.

I started lifting again this week for the first time since COVID raised its head.  I was stunned at how one of my standard lifts was half – HALF – what it had been 18 months ago.

That is Truth.  The Iron is Truth.

Was it at all pleasant to find my strength had dropped that far, that fast?

Of course not.

But it is True.

I gave up on lifting cases of Pepsi® for exercise, it was just soda pressing. 

I cannot hide from the Iron.  I cannot cheat the Iron.  The only things there in the weight room are the Iron, Gravity, and Me.  The only thing that changes in that equation is me.  I can’t blame the Iron.  I can’t blame Gravity.

The Red Pill?

No one will make me physically stronger but me.  And the only way I can do that is to wrestle against Gravity with the Iron.  And, unless I am quite ill, it will always work.

And here is the hope.  Here is where the Red Pill really begins to pay dividends.

I’m the one responsible for:

  • my physical state,
  • what I eat,
  • how I react,
  • what I say,
  • what I watch,
  • how I treat others,
  • my own Virtue,
  • who I am, and
  • where my life ends up.

I’m not responsible for who loves me.  I’m not responsible for how much they love me.  Those are the output.  If I control every bit of input in my life, what happens, happens.

There is nothing, and I mean nothing more wonderful than that realization.  It goes beyond winning and losing.  It goes beyond the opinions of others.

The downside, of course, is seeing all of the pretty little lies and all of the attempted manipulation.  Even worse:  the attempts to numb minds, to distract, and to pretend that the new lie doesn’t contradict the last lie.  The stunning thing to me is how many people will flitter from one contradictory opinion to another like butterflies in the Sun, with never a thought.

When I take responsibility for myself, I am a changed person.

I was born a male, I identify as a male, but according to Stouffer’s Frozen Lasagna®, I identify as a family of four.

That doesn’t mean the battle ever ends.  The first struggle is, always, against myself.  Why am I weaker?

I had weights at home, but didn’t lift.

Why?

Well, I could make any number of excuses, but none of them matter.  I didn’t lift.  That was it.  So, my choice is simple:  will I work to get better every week, or will I be complacent with where I am?

I asked the Iron a question.  It told me the Truth.

Now, my choice is how will I answer?

I have only one answer.  Sweat.

It’s never lonely when you’ve got Truth for a companion.

Blogger Versus Evil

Jack Burton:  “Great.  Walls are probably three feet thick, welded shut from the outside, and covered with brick by now.”

Wang Chi:  “Don’t give up, Jack.”

Jack Burton:  “Okay, I won’t Wang.  Let’s just chew our way out of here.” – Big Trouble in Little China

Never make a deal to buy a guitar from the Devil.  There are always strings attached.

The Exorcist is a feel-good movie.  Well, at least it is for me.

I wanted to watch it when I was an especially wee Wilder, but for whatever reason, Ma and Pa Wilder felt that exposing a first grader to that particular film would be considered a war crime.  I don’t remember how old I was when I finally saw it, but as I recall it was rented on a VHS tape.

By the time I’d seen it, I’d already been exposed to much more brutal horror:  Lovecraft, Stephen King, and Norman Lear sitcoms.  I’ll say this about reading horror – the things I conjured in my mind while tearing through the pages of The Stand were far scarier than anything I’d ever seen in a movie.

But I made a pretty bold statement:  The Exorcist is a feel-good movie, so I guess you’re gonna make me back it up.  Thankfully, I have that not only on my authority, but on the authority of the author of The Exorcist.  William Peter Blatty summed up the reason I like horror films with this very simple quote:

“My logic was simple:  if demons are real, why not angels? If angels are real, why not souls? And if souls are real, what about your own soul?”

Blatty even described The Exorcist as his ministry – it seems he’s religious.  Who would have expected that?

What don’t demons wear hairpieces?  Because there would be Hell toupee. 

Much of what we see in the world we explain through simple materialism.  But when I read novels where the demons are mere humans, well, (with the exception of Hannibal Lechter) I’m generally let down when the Scooby Doo® ending explains away the supernatural mystery at the heart of the story.  Mr. Blatty’s quote describes exactly why.

“If demons are real, why not angels.”

Now I know that several readers are atheists.  As I’ve pointed out before, this blog is sort-of a litmus test.  People that are the kind of atheist that just hates God will generally not opt-in to reading this blog for any length of time.  I have no idea why, but they just don’t.  Actual, rational atheists that don’t turn rabid when the supernatural is discussed don’t seem to mind.

Maybe they look at it like I look at the WWE®:  they can watch it and be amused, even though they’re certain it’s not real.  They especially like it when Hulk Hogan® hits me in the head with a chair.

Where did Randy “Macho Man” Savage™ work out?  The Slim-Jim©.

Regardless, I think most readers here share the same view of Evil (or even evil) in this world.  It’s visible in the raw naked lust for power that we have seen repeated again and again from the Left.  It’s also visible in their unbridled joy at the destruction of Truth, Beauty, and Society.

The Left revels in the Lie, the inversion of Truth, the inversion of Beauty:

  • Billions of dollars in damage in Minneapolis is a “peaceful protest” while a march on the Capitol is, according to President* Biden: “The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.”
  • They demand, using free speech, to restrict the free speech of those that offend them.
  • The Left demands you look at what is obviously a man, and claim it to be a woman.

It’s simple, really:  everything that’s Bad is presented as good.  And everything Good?  Well, it’s Bad.  How dare you think self-restraint and hard work is virtuous?

Sniff.  “Smells like fraud.”

Let’s look at how a simple Good thing like a married man and woman having a baby is turned on its head:

  • What about the woman’s career?
  • Why not live the childfree life?
  • Why have the baby at all?
  • There are too many people on the planet already.

The last argument is especially Evil, because when the propaganda works, the headlines then sing out:  “since we’re not having enough babies, we need to import multitudes to grow our economy.”  “Meet the New Americans.”

It’s fun to use this technique on Leftists.  I can recall a Twitter® exchange with a Leftist where I Tweeted™ that I opposed immigration to the United States on the grounds that people in the United States had the highest carbon footprint, so by bringing in more people into the United States they were destroying the planet.

Brain lock ensued when they couldn’t deal with the conflict between their two opposing beliefs.  It’s fun to come up with these couplets to invert the Evil right back at them, though, in the end, there is no conversion for a True Believer outside of a gentle helicopter ride.  They have given in to the Evil.  They’ll avoid the conversation.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle:  three ways to dispose of a dead Leftist.

It is especially difficult for parents of children:  what is innocent is sexualized.  A first-grade boy isn’t old enough to decide what he should eat on a regular basis – why would the world think that he should be turned into a she?

It’s all around us, every day.  It’s sold to us in media, it’s in the news, it’s everywhere.

And it’s attacking the Values of what we all know, deep inside ourselves, to be True and Good.  That which is Good, True and Beautiful hasn’t changed within the lifetime of mankind on this planet, but when you’re confronted with people trying to sell that which is a Lie as the Truth?

You can be sure those people are Evil.

Not to say that people on the Right are immune to that – far from it.  Eaton Rapids Joe has a great little story to that effect here (LINK).

To be clear, the ultimate aim of the propaganda of Evil is simple:  to make Good people feel despair.

Why despair?  Despair is the opposite of hope.  It is the opposite of Truth.  It is the opposite of Beauty.  Despair is Evil.

And when propaganda wins?  Evil wins.

H.P. Lovecraft was tormented by doubt all of his life.  Imagine if he hadn’t slept in despair bedroom.

But that’s not what happened in The Exorcist.  Father Karras, who had lingering doubts and was on the verge of Despair, conquered it.

Because he conquered Despair, Father Karras conquered Evil.

When you feel Despair, know that’s nothing more than Evil.  And you can conquer it, too.

Yeah, I told you that The Exorcist was a feel-good story.  And I was right.

———————————————

Extra Meme and Tagline, because I made one too many:

In other news, the 2024 election will be postponed until they find the results in Biden’s desk.

Money Is Not The Only Form Of Wealth

“Well, as I said, time has no meaning here. So if you leave, you can go anywhere, any time.” – Star Trek:  Generations

What do you call a rogue sheep with a machine gun?  Lambo.

When I lived in Houston, my job was all consuming.  It’s been my theory that people move to Houston for one reason:  to work.  The climate is difficult.  The freeways are often lines of cars creeping along like Joe Biden in an elementary school.  One upside is that there can’t be a (Some) Black Lives Matter® protest because the Houston Astros© always steal their signs.

When I was a Temporary Texan, my life was consumed by work – and it was stressful work.  Each day brought a new crisis we had to solve.  It got so bad that   I left home early to avoid the traffic, so I got to work early.  I left work late to avoid the traffic, so I got home late.  A fourteen-hour day wasn’t uncommon.  I put blood, sweat, and tears into that job, so it was good that I wasn’t working at a restaurant.

The last time I went out for dinner, I asked the waiter how they prepared the chicken for frying.  “Nothing special.  We just tell them they’re going to die.”

For many weeks, I was gone every hour that baby Pugsley was awake during a weekday.  I would, however, catch up with The Mrs. when I got home.  That was a priority.  We knew what we were getting into when we made the move from Alaska.  Moving to Houston was, for us, entirely about work.  I should have known during the job interview that something was up:  they asked if I could perform under pressure, but I told them I only knew Bohemian Rhapsody.

Most (not all!) weekends I was able to keep the work at bay.  I’d sleep in on Saturday, and then we’d do something as a family.  By Saturday night I felt, “normal” but by Sunday afternoon I’d realize that I’d have to go back in to work on Monday and repeat the whole thing again.  That made me feel pretty gloomy – it felt like time was slipping away.

This was how Sunday evening felt when I worked in Houston.

One Sunday night, however, I was getting my things ready for the next day.  I was looking for my dress shoes (I was in an office that required them at that time) and couldn’t find them.  Since I always took them off at the same place, that confused me.

After looking in all the logical places, the only choice then was to look in all of the illogical places.  When you live alone, everything is pretty findable.  When you have a wife, things move around on their own.  When you have children under seven?  The toilet gets clogged with decorative clam shell soaps that The Mrs. bought.

So, when I found my shoes under Pugsley’s bed, I wasn’t really surprised.

I was, however, touched.  As near as we can figure, Pugsley had come to the conclusion that I only wore those shoes when I was gone all day.  As near as his Gerber®-addled mind could conceive, if I didn’t have the shoes, I could spend every day at home with him.

Not bad.  And I was touched.

I tried to buy running shoes the other day – but the only ones I saw were stationary.

One of the ideas of wealth is money.  And I was in Houston, like everyone else, to make money.

But there’s another idea of wealth:  time.

There are a group of people who are driven by playing that game and devote themselves exclusively to their business.  That makes sense.  The world needs people who are single-minded in wanting to change it.

Most people have read about people like Edison who never slept more than seven minutes a night and spent most of his life at work while making a fortune, and Elon Musk who famously slept in the factory to get car production worked out.  And Musk and Edison both have another thing in common:  they both got rich off of Tesla.

Meanwhile, the GPS is saying:  “Recalculating . . . recalculating . . . “

If that’s what they choose?  Fine.  The idea of spending time on their passion for business is exactly that – a choice.  Just like having a finite supply of money gives you a set of choices of what you can do in life, there is another budget – a finite number of hours.

And that is life.  Life is made up of those hours that we use.  Just as inflation eats away at the value of money, distraction eats away at the value of life.

What kind of distraction?

Well, pointless things – think Twitter® and most of Facebook™.  I was on Twitter© a while back, and found it was good at exactly one thing:  making me irritated.

I even take this aversion to not wasting the hours and minutes of my life unless it was a conscious decision to absurd levels.  For several years of my life, I ate something I didn’t like all that much for lunch because there was no line.

I hate the idea of waiting five minutes of my life when I don’t to.  This still applies even if I waste those five minutes on something unproductive.  For a long time, I avoided history – I just couldn’t see a future in it.

I’m reading a book about the history of lubricating oils and bearings.  Best non-friction book I’ve ever read.

But now society is built on creating and feeding distraction to people – the more distraction that’s consumed, the greater the profit level for these companies.  And these are not even distractions that make us feel better – but distractions that in many cases just consume time.

I’m not sure that the idea of a “balanced” life is one that exists in reality.  A human life is built up in phases.  The long languid summers of youth give up to days that are packed with all the trappings of a family and work and the fullness of life.  When my youngest, Pugsley, heads out into the world, who knows what I’ll do with the time?

Perhaps I’ll spend it finding places to hide his shoes.

Life Is A Struggle: That’s A Good Thing

“The closer you are to death, the more alive you feel. It’s a wonderful way to live. It’s the only way to drive.” – Rush

A computer once beat me at chess.  It lost at kickboxing, though.

The Mrs. and I have recently been playing chess.  It’s not a lot of chess, it’s mainly on Saturday nights when things are a bit slower.  I’ve been enjoying the games.  If I were to guess, before the last time we played, the games tilted slightly in my favor.

I think I’ve won about 30.  The Mrs. was still sitting at, well, zero wins.

30-0.

Don’t think poorly of her.  The Mrs. is going from a standing start.  At one point in college, I lived with eight other guys in a house, and nearly all of the time a chess game was going.  I could generally beat everyone in the house by the end of the school year.  It took a while for one guy, about four months.  First, he wiped the floor with me, then he and I traded games.  By the end of two semesters?

I usually won.  I have played a lot more chess than The Mrs.  I will say this, though, she’s smart as a whip, and when I give her position analysis and show her why she lost the game, she listens.

The Mrs. doesn’t listen like someone who wants to defend why they did what they did.  She listens with the ears of someone who wants to learn, who wants to get better.  There has been exactly zero ego in learning the game for her.

Did I mention that The Mrs. is competitive?  Really competitive?

Ever notice that Tom Cruise has a tooth perfectly centered under his nose, like it’s one-half tooth too far over?  Now you’ll never be able to unsee that.  You’re welcome.

The last time The Mrs. and I played chess, we played three games.  The first game, I crushed her.  By the start of the mid-game, I was up on pieces and position.  It was like a velociraptor in a room full of bacon-wrapped kittens covered in pudding.  Then the next game.  Again, by the mid-game, I was up.  I was toying with her king like a teacup poodle lords over a pork chop, getting ready for checkmate.

Then, she moved.

Then, I moved.  That’s the rule, right?

But my move made it so she had no legal moves left.  The Mrs. wasn’t in check, but couldn’t move.  I was winning, decisively.

But if she has no legal moves and her king isn’t in check?

It’s a draw.  The score was now 30-0-1.

My blunder, her draw.  The next game went, shall we say, a little differently.  The start went okay.  Then, in the mid-game?  She took control and by the beginning of the end-game?  I was breathing for air harder than Biden sniffing a teenager.  Which Biden?  Apparently any of them.

What mall did they get this picture taken at? 

Then?  I caught a break.  The Mrs. was up on pieces and position, but I found a way out.  I could keep her king in perpetual check.

The Mrs. moved, I moved, check.

The Mrs. moved, I moved, check.

The Mrs. moved, I moved, check.

Note:  I couldn’t win, but I could make the game as annoying as an 8-year-old asking, “Are we there yet?”

Thankfully, there’s a rule for that.  It’s called?

A draw.

We went from me constantly crushing her, to her lucking to a draw, to me grasping to find a way out of a game without a loss.

30-0-2.

Good for The Mrs.

And good for me.  Now I’m going to have to work to bring my A-game.  And Saturday nights just got better.

Why?

Would it be better if I could crush her in chess every evening like Oprah crushes couch cushions?  Of course not.

I told my barber to cut my hair like he would for Tom Cruise.  He made me sit on two phone books.

The best victories in life are going head to head with someone near your level in skill.  Going all out.  Pushing each other to be better.  I mean, I can beat up any number of third graders.  Honestly, I have no idea how many third graders I couldn’t beat up.

I could do it all day.  It’s really not a challenge.  Seriously, I could beat up lots of them.

But fourth graders?  I mean, I could be at least the third-best player on the fourth-grade soccer team.

Life is challenge.  Life is struggle.

And thank heavens for that.  Or thank Heaven for that?  (Stick with me – this isn’t a sermon.)

Speaking of Heaven, from the time I was just a little Wilder, I caused a *lot* of problems at church.  I distinctly recall that I colored a picture of Jesus with His skin being bright purple.  On purpose.

My only excuse is that I was five and had no glitter.

The Sunday school teacher came up to me and said, “Johnny, you know that Jesus wasn’t purple.”

I replied, “Well, please allow me to retort.  Jesus is God, right?  Well, if He wants to be purple, He can be purple.”

How can you argue with logic like that?  Even kindergartners score some points now and then.  I last saw my Sunday school teacher when I was thirty.  She was really thrilled to see me.  I think she was just happy I hadn’t started the Cult of the Glittery Purple Jesus.  And, yes, all of those things really happened.

But back to heaven, or in this case, Heaven.

When they described Heaven to me in Sunday school, I was as appalled and indignant as a precocious five-year-old can be.

Sunday school teacher, describing Heaven:  “You’re happy all the time.  Nothing bad ever happens.  You wake up and everything is fine.”

Five-year-old me thought:  “Well, that sucks.  It’s stupid.  That sounds boring.”  Even then, I was wise enough not to throw out a level-five heresy in the middle of Sunday school.  Jesus might turn me purple or something.  I’m certainly glad they didn’t teach me about Valhalla then, because that sounds much, much better than Heaven:  Wake up.  Fight and get soused and maybe die.  Wake up.  Repeat.

What did the Vikings call English villages?  Chopping centers.

Sure you teach little kids the things that you think they like.  But me as a little kid?  Peace was the last thing on my mind.  But I’m not alone.

When you look at the life of Jesus, He didn’t spend it sitting on fluffy pillows and eating Ding-Dongs®.  Nope.  If you think WWJD, remember, taking a whip and kicking vermin out of church is within the realm of permissible actions.

Jesus was clear in that:  life is the struggle.

  • Life is not about the easy way out.
  • Life is not about running out the clock in the 20 years until you retire.
  • Life is not about being nice.

If you played your life like a video game, your goal isn’t to have a pleasant but non-threatening experience.  You want to climb the mountain, fight for the fair maiden, and drink from the skull of your enemy.  I want The Mrs. to be kick-ass at chess, so when I win, it means something.

It meant something to The Mrs. when I had to force a draw to save my sorry (rare NSFW word coming) ass.

That, my friends, is life.  Life is the struggle.

And my bet at Heaven is that it’s more like this:

LEVEL ONE COMPLETE.

PREPARE FOR LEVEL TWO.

I started a job digging deeper and deeper holes – but that was boring on so many levels.

Yeah.  Let’s go.  Let’s live life.

Bring.

It.

On.

Take big bites.

Who is with me?

Why I Write

“All work and no play makes Jack Phil a dull boy.” – The Shining

What do you call a Mongolian defeatist?  Genghis Khan’t.

Stephen King, especially the coked-out version who doesn’t remember the entire Reagan presidency, often wrote about writing.  This might have been interesting if all of those main characters in his stories weren’t writers, too.  The Mrs. has felt that Steve has been a bad writer since, oh, 1992 or so.  The Mrs. had been a big enough fan that she drove three hours to take part in an interview with him back in the day.  I gave up on him around 2008.  The Mrs. even Facebook®-told-him he was a “hack”.

I don’t often write about writing.  But I write a lot.  652 posts since March, 2017, with a total word count before this post of 942,879 words.  So, just like Mr. King, I’ve at least become a much more proficient typist since 1992.

Why do I spend the hours writing these posts every week?

Well, the first reason is I like to write them.

When I’ve finished a post and I’ve said absolutely everything that I want to say, and said it exactly the way that I want to say it, I feel great.

That’s a problem.

I run a weird sleep schedule because of the posts, and often finish up writing into the wee hours of the morning.  On more than one morning, I finished the final touches on the post and scheduled it just as the Sun was coming up.

There have been one or two days when I went straight from the keyboard to the shower to work to back home and then directly to bed.  Ugh.  This (partially) explains why I generally only comment right before the new post shows up.

I’m so tired that I can only buy pizza from Papa Yawns.

But even when I finish so I’ll have a shot at getting a few hours of sleep, there comes the problem of feeling great, because there is nothing worse than going to bed at 3AM with a looming 6AM alarm when I’m so excited about what I wrote that I feel like a kid on Christmas Eve.

That makes me happy.  But it also makes me as sleepy as Joe Biden before they take him out of the fridge and unzip the Hefty Glad Bag™ each morning to thaw him out.

I also write these because at least some people like to read them.

I’m not sure I’d put the effort into writing these on a regular basis if people didn’t come by.  I used to journal but ended up putting that down after some ludicrous number of pages that no one will ever read.  It got to be pretty repetitive after a while.

My neighbor thinks I don’t respect his boundaries, or at least he wrote that in his journal.

I know that some of you like reading these because you comment.  Of course, there are those who are regulars who never comment – and that’s fine!  Then there are those that only send me email.  But there is a sense of real community that I’m seeing building in the comments.  I consider it a win when half the comments are people talking to each other – and I try to stay out of that, mostly.  It is a food fight, after all.

I write these because, on occasion, I think I’ve got something to contribute.

It’s no real surprise to anyone who reads here regularly that I’m fairly concerned with more than one set of trends related to our future.  The biggest clue to that is seeing things that showed up in the past – Kipling’s Gods of the Copybook Headings (which I’ve written about before and I’ll reprint again below) seems written to describe our modern age.  That may make sense – Kipling was watching from the peak of British power, and seeing the cracks forming in 1919 that would shatter less than 30 years later.

“I’d kill for a Nobel Peace Prize™.” – Barack Obama

I get that sense today, and get clues that we’re far from the United States – the Untied States? – that any of us knew in our youth.  Just like Kipling used his genius and verse to create snapshots of the world, I try to do the same with humor and more than one bikini graph.  Different times, different tools.  Also, I doubt they’ll give me a Nobel Prize™ for literature unless they create one especially for me for bad puns.

Our future will be different, but I like to think that when the dust settles we don’t end up like Moscow in 1919 but the United States in 1787, the beginning of something better.

I do it because I like humor. 

I have no idea why.  I’ve been writing nonsense like this since I was a kid.  It makes me as happy as Hunter Biden when he got the highest test score.  I mean, the policeman holding the breathalyzer wasn’t amused, but . . . .

I do it because I want to leave something behind.

Yup.  942,879 words.  If you read them all out loud, it would take you nearly as long as the Lord of the Rings trilogy movies.  Unless you got the special extended version, which lasts 19.5 years.  It may not be great, but just like the Federal Reserve® and money printing:  I make up for it in volume.

Bruce Willis will play an older Frodo in the next movie.  Old Hobbits Die Hard.

I do it because I want to get better.

The Mrs. challenged me on this one when I wrote my previous blog, and for the first year on this one that I wasn’t really trying.  They were “fine”, she told me, but unless I was working to make them better, why should I spend all of that time and be content with “fine”?

She was right.

And it takes me a lot longer now to write a post.  There’s a whole process, which, unlike Stephen King’s best work, doesn’t involve turning myself into a snowmachine but it does involve a lot of editing.  The Mrs. doesn’t even think that I’m a hack, and she’d tell me.

And she’s mean.  The Mrs. once (this really happened) walked by NFL® commentator Phil Simms (former quarterback) and said, exceptionally loudly so there was NO DOUBT he heard her, “Look, it’s Boomer Esaison.”

He was on camera.  He paused in mid-sentence, just a half-second, but restarted and kept chugging on like a pro.  But I could tell he was a little irritated.  The lesson here?

If you make The Mrs. mad, you will pay.  Just ask Stephen King or Phil Simms.

Ok, Boomer.

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Truth: Never Give Up

“And remember, I’m offering the truth, nothing more.” – The Matrix

What is the first foreign language lesson given to French troops?  “I surrender,” in German.

I remember walking down a very big hill.  Big, in this case, was over 14,000 feet (28,000 meters) in height.  When I convinced my friends to climb it with me, they were skeptical.  14,000 feet is, by most accounts, a pretty tall hill.  And this particular one didn’t have a gift shop at the top.

Going up was actually easy.  We even smoked a cigar back at our 12,000 foot (37 liter) basecamp after we climbed it.  I tossed three beers in the glacier by our tents, but by the time we got back from the summit, one had frozen and cracked open.  So, the three of us shared two beers.  We each had our own cigar.  I even Googled® how to light a cigar, and 43,800,000 matches.

That’s a lot of matches, which surprised me.  Normally it takes me one or two.

We then slept after our trip, and spent the night at our basecamp.  I’ve never had a meal as exquisite as the dehydrated chili-mac that I had that night.  Our basecamp was so high that boiling water wasn’t very hot at all.  And bugs?  Not a problem.  No mosquito can fly in air that thin.  Really.

Normally, when you’ve climbed one of the tallest mountains in North America, you think, “Well, going down is easy, as long as it’s not over a cliff.”

That was what I thought.

I would tell more cliff jokes, but most of them are pretty edgy.

I climbed the hill in running shoes.  It’s easy going up in those.

But down?  That’s a different story.  For me, the downhill part was the hardest.  Those running shoes were loose enough that each time I stepped down on that path, they slipped.  Maybe a quarter of an inch (57 kilojoules).  Maybe even an eighth of an inch (34 megaergs).  But it slipped.

The problem with a foot slipping on the inside of a shoe is that it builds up heat.  The heat was absorbed by the sole of my foot (I’m assuming a metric foot is a hand?) and built up.

Halfway down the mountain, my feet really, really hurt.  Pain focused my mind on the following thoughts:

  • Owwww, my feet hurt!
  • I never give up.
  • Owwww, my feet hurt!

When we got back to the Jeep® that originally took us to the trailhead, I gratefully tossed my backpack in.  We then bounced down the hill, and then zoomed across the flatland to the place we were staying.  If there’s anything as fine as having climbed a mountain and then feeling the wind in your hair (I had it then) as you scoot on a highway at 70 miles per hour (230 km/min), I don’t know what it is.

I heard that 98% of Jeeps® that have ever been made are on the road today!  The other 2% made it home.

When I got back to where we were staying, I pulled my shoes off.  When I peeled my socks off, the bottom skin of both feet came off.

Stop!

It wasn’t as bad as it sounds.  I had a blister that covered the entire part of both of my feet.  When I, um, removed it, a slight breeze felt like a hurricane filled with stainless steel scouring pads.  Again, a beer or two helped dampen the pain.

The good news?

My feet got better.

I’m telling you that not giving up has consequences.  And most of the consequences are good, especially for pride.

My friends on the trip asked me this:  “Why didn’t you let us carry your pack?”

My response was simple:  “I carried it up, I’m carrying it down.”

Congress has a new sign hanging up by their copy of the Constitution:  Not Responsible For Lost Or Stolen Articles.

Responsibility is like that.  Once you own it, putting it down is much harder than picking it up in the first place.  And giving up?  Once you do that, it becomes a habit.

I speak, of course, of where the Right stands.

We’re not winning here in 2021.

  • The courts appear to be an extra arm of the Left.
  • The troops are being culled – if you have a belief to the Right of Ché Guévérrå, well, out you go.
  • Opinions on the Internet? They had better be the correct ones or they’ll never see the light of day.

So?

Ask me if I care if my opinions are unpopular with Google®, Coca-Cola™, Chick-fil-a™, or Nike©.

I do not.

The Truth doesn’t cease being the Truth because it’s mocked or because corporate HR departments blame it for (spins wheel) just being so damn pretty.  The Truth always remains the Truth.

I guess there is a Colonel of truth to what he says?

I am, thankfully, of an age and status where I don’t ever think I’ll have to lie to anyone, ever, again in my life.  The Mrs.?  I told her when we met that I’d never lie to her, and I haven’t, which is why she never, ever, asks if those pants make her butt look big.  Is it the pants, or is it the butt?

Never ask a question you don’t want to hear a Truthful answer to.

Everyone has the ability to have these superpowers:

  • Never Give Up
  • Always Tell The Truth
  • To Thine Own Self Be True

Okay, I got the last bullet point from Gilligan’s Island.  Really.  There was an episode where they did a musical version of Hamlet, which was my first encounter with the Bard.

There was an earthquake during the production.  It was quite the Shakesperience.

But the biggest sin of all is this one:  giving up.

The Boy texted me that Fox News® has lost over 50% of their web traffic since the election.  That sounds like despair.  And despair is giving up.

Me?

I’m not done.  Why should I be?  The one thing I could do to betray myself, and to betray everything I believe in?  Is to give up.  That would be giving up on me, and giving up on you.

I can’t abide by that.

Corporate powers may try to silence me, and may temporarily lower my traffic.

That won’t stop the signal.

And if I fall?  A dozen others will take my place.  Truth will win.  It may make a thousand years, and billions of lives, but Truth will win.

Does gravity care if you believe in it?  It does not.  Neither does the Truth.

Which is why I won’t give up.  And which is why the Truth will always win.

Welcome To Being An Outsider

“Now, I didn’t start it, but be sure as Hell I mean to see it through.” – Shooter

If you boil a clown you get laughing stock.

We’re Outsiders.

Well, not all of us.  But when you look at the system, most of the people reading this post are Outsiders.

I happen to live in a place filled with Outsiders.  Here in Modern Mayberry, you’re ten a hundred times as likely to see a Gadsden flag on a flagpole as a Bernie® bumper sticker.  Besides the Bernie supporters around here have now all been kicked out by their roommates, you know, “Mom and Dad”.

That’s why it’s Modern Mayberry.

It’s not paradise.  There are some thefts.  There are some drugs of the most destructive kind.  There’s even a hipster who was an outdoorsman before it was cool – you’d call him a homeless guy.

But yet . . .

People here still remember the United States that was, or at least the United States we remembered from our dreams.  One where the Constitution was the rule.  One where the dream wasn’t one of dependence on handouts.  One where you could ignore it when the government called you at home – you could let freedom ring.

A friend of mine used his stimulus check to buy baby chickens.  Money for nothing and the chicks for free.

Tonight I drove home along Main Street, and I saw people out and about.  In one block I saw six people that I personally knew, and most of them made it off the sidewalk in time.

Yet all of us in Modern Mayberry are really Outsiders, and I think that we know that.  And I think we cherish it, just like the EpiPen® my friend gave me as he was dying – I know I’ll always cherish it.

I watch the news stories of places that seem alien to me.  I know that California in 1980 was overwhelmingly what we now call a Red state.  Now?  It’s alien even to many that were born there.

The politics that created what would have been one of the most prosperous nations in the world have given way to politics that has made California one of the most impoverished states in the United States.  I know Gavin Newsom tried to fight poverty, but he kept losing.  Homeless people can be deceptively strong when you try to wrestle them.

Sure, I’d love to have California back.  I’d love to have Disneyland® back and the American Dream Vacation™, too, with bonus points for stops at the Grand Canyon and Uncle Eddie’s place.  But the beliefs that I believe most readers here have aren’t shared by most voters in California in 2021.

There was a person who saw the California ban coming:  No-Straw-Domus.

I don’t blame the native Californians – they voted against this insanity again and again, but were overruled from activist benches.  We know what sort of trash is on the benches, but what is on the table for the United States?

  • Individual Rights – these are being replaced by group rights. Reparations for crimes committed nearly two hundred years ago?  By the descendants of people who moved here from Germany in 1880?
  • Freedom of Choice – this is being replaced by coercion, explicit and implicit. Want to do business?  You can have whatever opinion you want – as long as it’s the right one.
  • Due Process – this is being replaced by guilt by inference. Red flag laws, anyone?
  • Right to Keep and Bear Arms – this is being replaced by the right of approved people to potentially be allowed to purchase a limited number of weapons and keep them locked in a safe at home. As long as we know the weapons are kitten-safe.

Propaganda for collectivism has long been in the offing.  For all of my life the programming has been in place to change attitudes to accept this – Leftists have monopolized the major networks since I was a kid.  Society has changed in ways that promote collectivism.  People move from location to location or live in monolithic cities or sterile suburbs that actively discourage people from acting together in the spirit of real community.

What is it replaced with?  City governments.  Homeowners’ Associations. Neither of those build community – those are, in larger cities, the expression of power and control.  The Mayor of Chicago holds more power than governors of many states.  That’s not any semblance of community – when is the last time you heard of anyone holding up Chicago for the face of election fairness?

What part of the mayor of Chicago weighs the most?  The scales.

That’s the downside.  But it gets better from here.

The first part of winning as an Outsider comes from knowing that you are an Outsider.  There is power in being an outsider – it only took a dozen Outsiders to eventually change the entire Roman Empire from people who worshiped Funko Pop® figurines to Christians.  Well, a dozen people and a few years.

Ideas are powerful.

Likewise, Outsiders are powerful.  Once a person realizes that they’re an Outsider, entire routes open to them.  This is a special type of freedom:

  • Freedom from the system. The system was built not to reward me, but to keep me in line, to keep me fearful.  To keep me compliant.  Recognizing that is everything.
  • Freedom from caring about the opinions of the world. Do I care about what France thinks about me?  Do I care about what Google® thinks about me?  Most (not all, but most) of the people whose opinions matter to me know it, and they all have excellent posture and dental hygiene.
  • Freedom to set my own goals. What is it that I value?  What is it that I want to accomplish?  This is mine, and mine alone.  Oh, wait, except for trash day.  I have to remember trash day.
  • Freedom to not apologize. When I make a mistake and I agree I’ve made a mistake, I own up to it, proudly.  When I don’t, I don’t apologize.  And I won’t.  Especially not for the bad jokes.
  • Freedom to change the world. And I will.  I’m going to keep going so I can inject my ideas so deeply into the Outsider psyche that the mRNA shot from Pfizer® will seem like a non-invasive procedure.

Kamala Harris is very concerned about COVID.  She heard that super-spreaders were the problem.

One piece of the puzzle, interestingly enough, came to me from crappy Star Wars® movie, The Force Awakens™.  The movie was horrible.  One thing that I couldn’t figure out was why, after killing the Emperor®, that the Rebels™ were . . . the Resistance©?

The movie was awful, partially because it was poorly written and choked with social justice.  But it revealed the mind of the Left in ways that I hadn’t realized before:

  • The Left wanted to identify with the Resistance© because they rely on powerlessness. Powerlessness is necessary to recruit Leftists – the core of Leftism is self-hate.
  • The Left is about power, but it refuses to admit it has it. That’s why Leftist professors from Leftist colleges complain about insufficient Leftism from Leftist politicians and Leftist media.  And vice versa – it becomes self-reinforcing.

Leftists rely on powerlessness as a route to power.  It is their foundational myth; it is their unifying element.  They are downtrodden, even as they control every major corporation.  They are disenfranchised, even though they control nearly every major media outlet – if there’s a cure for that, it’s unTweetable.

Twitter® is like a Leftist bank account – after you enter the wrong opinion five times, you’re locked out.

Given all of that, why am I so happy?

Because I’m free.  I’m free of my illusions.  I’m free to be an Outsider.

I’ll enjoy seeing the Gadsden flag tomorrow.  After all, there were another group of Outsiders a few years ago who seemed to like that flag.

And you remember where the Gadsden flag first flew?

On a pole.