Happiness – Page 18 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Charity, The Terminator, and Flat Tires

“What kind of cruel charity charges orphans $500 to eat dinner?” – News Radio

The Mrs. seems rather narrow-minded about certain donations.

Before Pop Wilder passed away, I would go to visit him on a regular basis. After graduating from college, almost all of my trips and time off from work (when we didn’t stay home) was spent visiting Pop at our ancestral homeland in the mountains around Zorro Falls. I called the trips to go visit Pop “Obili-cations” because I felt obligated to go to see him on my vacations. Sure, I had a choice on how to spend those 10 days of vacation a year, but I also knew that the number of hours I’d ever get to spend with him were like the collective I.Q. of Congress: finite and rapidly shrinking.

To me, these trips were important. I figured* that I had spent over 99% of the hours I’d ever spend with Pop already. I had 1% or less of those hours left. These hours were precious and few. Given that perspective, I didn’t really mind spending every vacation day going to see him up at Zorro Falls. Now that I’m a father, I’m very glad I made those trips since it now gives me the excuse to guilt my own children into doing the same thing.

While we visited, I’d often go to church with Pop on Sunday mornings. Pop had lived within thirty miles of Zorro Falls his entire life. This church we’d go to was the same small church where we went when I was a child. It was the same church where, as a five year old, I had colored Jesus’ face bright purple during Sunday School one Sunday morning.

Sunday School Teacher, leaning to look at my coloring page: “Johnny, you know that Jesus wasn’t really purple, right?”

Young Johnny Wilder: “He’s God. He can be any color he wants to be.” I never even bothered to look up at her. I was busy coloring the Apostle Matthew’s skin in silver, having finished with Jesus. It was only years later that I realized that Matthew had been a Terminator™ sent back from the future to stop Jesus from giving birth to John Conner®. Now, at last, the Bible made sense!

Jesus could also be a Terminator© if he wanted to be and if he could obtain the rights from James Cameron. I think that would have made the Crucifixion even more interesting . . .

Sunday School Teacher had no response to my stunningly brilliant “purple Jesus” logic, but did tell Ma Wilder. Ma Wilder got years of mileage out of that story, though I wish she wouldn’t have told it to the guys on my wrestling team.

But back to the story: I was on an obli-cation, and I met Pop at his place and went to the church with him. We sat down in the pew right up front since Pop claimed that the artillery during his European vacation in the 1940’s hadn’t been particularly good for his hearing. Sissy.

The Pastor began his sermon. Now, I always really liked that Pastor – he had been friends with the family for years. He had officiated at Ma Wilder’s funeral. The topic of his sermon that day was charity.

I am a strong believer in charity. I think that there are few things that are better for the human soul than giving freely of one’s time or money to help another worthy person. Maybe Ruffles® or Ding-Dongs© are close, but they’re still not quite as good as charity.

I look back on my life and feel really good about the times I was able to help someone. I recall stopping at a convenience store while travelling for business. I was looking for a book store, because I’d just finished the novel I was reading. The clerk told me that, “This is Chicago, nearest book store is . . . twenty miles that way, at the mall.” He then did something unusual. He looked me in the eye, and pointed at a tiny redhead, maybe 19, standing by a car in the rain, very out of place in the mean streets of south Chicago. “She needs your help, man.”

Unlike a vegan, I can change a flat tire.

Her tire was flat. She was trying to go to meet her fiancé at the airport. He was coming home from Iraq that night.

“Can you help me?”

I changed her tire in the rain. She didn’t have an umbrella, but she did have a poster board that she held over me while I changed the tire. As I tightened up the last lug nut, I stood up. “Okay, you’re good to go.”

“How much do I owe you?”

“No, ma’am. That’s not why I did it. Go see your fiancé.”

I still feel good when I tell that story. And I’m not telling it to brag – any person reading this blog could have and would have done the same – I’m no more virtuous than any of you. But I am happy that I was there that night, to help that young girl get to the gate and throw her arms around her man as he came back from combat. The act of charity probably helped me more than it helped her – I know I remember it, but I’d bet she doesn’t. The fairy tale ended with her at the gate. The supporting characters (me, for instance) were lost in the arms of her man, details that won’t make the final version of the story she has told her children.

Which is how it should be.

Anyway, I agreed with the pastor when talked about charity. Helping people is good. But then the pastor continued, “And let us pray that Congress will act to give money to these poor people.”

He lost me right there.

Is it just me or does Jesus look a lot like Bruce Springsteen? I guess he is The Boss, after all.

I know that it’s probably a sin to be really, really pissed off in church, but there I was, in the second row, angry. And it’s probably a double-secret sin to be really, really pissed off at the Pastor. Thankfully, the church had just had a new roof installed so I was shielded from immediate lightning strikes from on high. And, if I’m being honest with you Internet, if a “stray” lightning bolt was going to hit me, it would have hit me far sooner than that day – being irritated with a Pastor is probably pretty low on my list of sinful behavior. Thankfully, Christianity has forgiveness embedded into it, because I certainly need it.

But why did I get so angry at the nice Pastor? Charity, when done by an individual is enriching. It helps both parties. It helps me. It helps tiny redheads with flat tires. It is an act that transcends – a willing gift to someone who will never be able to repay the gift to the giver.

Charity, when done by the government breeds resentment on those taxed. If they don’t want to participate in this charity, men with guns will come and take them to prison. Government forced charity breeds resentment of that very charity.

Billions, trillions? Doesn’t matter. It’s just other people’s money.

Government charity also breeds resentment by the recipient. Why didn’t they get more free stuff? It leads to bad incentives – why work when you’d lose the government benefits? The final straw is it destroys the dignity and independence of those that receive it. And if the program is set up poorly, it actually provides a disincentive for people to get or remain married. Government charity is certainly worse on the recipient than on the (unwilling) giver even though both of them come to hate the systems.

True charity makes two winners, government charity just manages to create anger and division. Government charity is the epitome of a program designed by Democrats – it takes a great goal (we all like the concept of charity) and turns it into a bureaucratic mess enforceable only through coercion and penalty.

If it stopped there with just that mess, it might be survivable.

Government has now opened these incentives to any person who can cross our border. Get across, and get free healthcare. Free food. Free housing. Need a cell phone? A ticket to Des Moines? We can help. Approximately four billion people would like to live in the United States because their countries suck. They can’t get nearly as much free stuff, and they’ve heard of the economic miracle of the United States.

Charity is like working – it’s great when other people do it!

This version of “charity” has created a group of millions of angry, unwilling donors, while at the same time creating millions of resentful, angry recipients. Thankfully, there is no reason we can’t have a billion resentful, angry recipients living in the United States tomorrow.

Sounds like another successful government program. Yay!

*By my spreadsheet, I had spent half the time I was ever going to spend with Pop Wilder by the age of eight. By the time I went off to college, I had spent about 94% of the hours I would ever spend with Pop. If I had moved back to the same town, or gone into the family business of firewood polishing together, obviously that would have been a different story. I’m only trying to note that these hours with family are precious, and are gone much faster than you might imagine. Feel free to use this to make your children feel guilty.

For your coloring enjoyment. Or colouring in Canada, eh.

Beer, Technology, Beer, Tide Pods, Beer, Civilizational Stability, and Beer

“We’ll soon stage an attack on technology worthy of being chronicled in an anthem by Rush!” – Futurama

In honor of Göbekli Tepe, I decided to take a morning run, but autocorrect changed it to “morning rum,” so, change of plans, guys!

Göbekli Tepe is an archeological site that dates back almost to 10,000 B.C. (12,000 years ago in metric). 12,000 years is a long time, in fact it is older than both agriculture and cities, but younger than my mother-in-law. But the other thing that it’s not older than . . . is beer. At Göbekli Tepe they found brewing vessels. And these weren’t small vessels, they were huge vats up to 160 liters in size, complete with chemical residue from brewing beer. If they can find chemical evidence of beer 12,000 years later, there’s no wonder mom could smell it even after I’d chewed a pack of minty gum.

This is how I like to imagine they figured out that beer was brewed at Göbekli Tepe.

Beer is older than farms. Beer is older than agriculture. The logical question is this: did people start cities and agriculture . . . just so they had beer on a regular basis? Is the reason that we have cities right now . . . the liquor store?

It looks like that’s the case. Nomadic man might not have had Netflix® or Ruffles©, but those weren’t necessary. Most studies show that when man was nomadic, the rates of leisure were higher than they are today. The things they did for food (hunting, fishing, and gathering) are enough fun that we do those as hobbies today. But what was missing?

Beer. Without a steady stream of beer there wasn’t any way they could say, “Hold my beer and watch this.” Why is this important? It’s important because everyone knows that no really good story starts with the words, “So, I was having a salad . . .”

The technology of beer brewing changed mankind. And I’ll assure you, living in the very first cities that we know of would be nothing like living in a city today – no Uber. These first cities were founded around 7,500 B.C. in Mesopotamia, and had really cool names like Eridu, Uruk, and Ur that remind me of Swedish death metal band names.

I think that someone triggered him by giving him a hug.

But the first residents of Ur weren’t like you or I. Exactly how they were different is probably difficult to even guess, but we’ve had nearly 500 generations between them and today’s humans. And that’s changed us significantly – back in the timeframe that Ur was being formed, most men didn’t reproduce, but most women did. When civilization was getting started around 6,000 B.C., only one guy in 17 reproduced. Yes. The average baby-daddy in Uruk in 6,000 B.C. was impregnating 17 females. So, your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandma was a tramp, all because people made cities to get beer.

What is not shown very well is that the woman’s side scale was nearly three times the scale on the men’s side. This is graphical evidence that your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandma was a tramp. Oops. Mine, too. Grandma, how could you?

In the United States today, about 3/4 of men father children while 85% of women reproduce. This is significantly better than the average I’ve seen that shows throughout history 80% of women had children while only 40% of men fathered children. Technology, in this case agriculture and beer, has changed humanity. Beer goggles appear to work both ways in the modern United States.

Regardless, change from nomadic human to agricultural/urban human has taken us thousands of years to adapt to, and, honestly, I’m still not sold on the cities. But I’ll keep the beer, thank you.

Other changes that were made possible by the move from nomadic human to urban human include the first:

Requirement for Money,
Economic Viability of Slavery,
Permanent Government,
Debt,
Taxes, and
Bar Tabs.

We don’t remember the things that were problems before agriculture, probably because we were having such a good time not living in cities that we didn’t bother to develop a written language to gripe about our problems. What’s to gripe about? I have to go hunting again? I don’t have a job because there aren’t any jobs so I get to go fishing? Bummer.

Over time, in the thousands of years since the development of agriculture, coping mechanisms evolved that created stability in the “new” urban-agricultural society. Pretty significant adaptations included:

Organized Religion,
Creation of Classes,
Division of Labor,
Eating Tide© Pods, and
Laws.

Shhh. Don’t warn the kids. Let evolution run its course.

These adaptations allowed post-agricultural civilization to become stable, or at least stable enough so that empires could form. But as people changed their environment, their environment changed them. It takes seven generations (at minimum) to create a new dog breed.

How long until a new type of human is bred by the new conditions in the city? If I were to guess, given that humans are much more complicated that it would take 20 or more generations. Rather than going off to hunt they’d have to do the same job, day after day, for years at a time. Rather than start a fight with a machete because they were mad about friends who put mayonnaise and strawberry jelly in their hard hat, they’d laugh. That alone probably took about five hundred years.

Some people didn’t make the transition. The result, if you’re a guy? You don’t breed.

Monogamy became more firmly embedded in society only in the West, and was primarily spread by Western society, being a recent (within the last 200 years) in most places that aren’t Western. This had an amazingly stabilizing effect on society as a whole – fathers have more of a stake in the future of society. Sure, kings and powerful guys had mistresses, but for the most part more men (on a percentage basis) got to have children than ever in history.

DEFCON 1: This would be The Mrs.’ reaction to me having a mistress.

Thousands of years of evolution of both society and of the humans that make up society led us to a fairly stable way of doing things. Monogamy, sex roles, class, and hierarchy allowed life to proceed smoothly, and wealth to be created in society. I’m not saying that it was better than hunting and fishing all day, but there was certainly more beer. And after electricity, cold beer. The 1950’s was probably the height (in the United States) of this society in many respects.

Women didn’t work as much – they didn’t have to.
Divorce rates were low – mom and dad stayed together.
Illegal drug use was low – yes, people drank. That was the point of society, right?
Church attendance was high.
Biggest problem of 1950’s schools? Gum chewing.

The last sixty years, however, has led to the greatest amount of technological and social change in any sixty years in the history of humanity. What changes?

Birth Control – The Pill was introduced in 1960 – graph below. You’d have thought this would have led to lower births out of wedlock, but, not really. I don’t really understand this, since very few babies are married when born, outside of Pakistan.

I was born out of wedlock. Not married at all. Oh, and neither was my mom. Sometimes the trend is your friend.

Significant Immigration from Non-Western Cultures – massive influxes of people in societies happens in history, but every time that it happens, it later gets called “an invasion.”

I’m still looking for examples of successful multi-cultural civilizations. I even went onto a communist website to search for them. Still came up empty, though I do realize now that real communism has not been tried yet. Whew! I was worried that the unending stream of failures meant that it would fail here, too.

Massive Welfare – In 1965 President Johnson proclaimed the Great Society – we’d make everyone rich. Despite hundreds of billions in welfare spending, the only thing the Great Society created was roughly the same amount of poor people, but poor people who now depend on the government. Might be correlated with illegitimate births?

Thankfully, we’ve seen no more need of welfare after spending this much and poverty and people protesting for more money has disappeared. Yay! I love winning!

Fragmentation of Communication – in 1983, the highest-rated television program in history (non-sports) in the United States happened. It will never happen again. Television has fragmented into hundreds of channels, plus dozens of online services, giving millions of options. But the common culture from communication is gone.
Decline in Religion – Religious observance has dropped in America, despite religious belief being vitally important during Colonial times, when it is estimated that up to 80% of colonists were regular church goers, compared with 37% today. You may not be a religious, but it’s yet another commonality that we’ve lost.
The Internet – prior to the Internet, most person to person communication was local. Now? Left-handed dentists with impaired vision can form their own FaceBorg® group. The Internet brings us together. The Internet also allows us to fragment.

The Internet might be the most significant technological change of recent memory. There was a time when we actually argued about facts rather than hitting Google® to solve an argument. Now? Nope. But the Internet isn’t a tool for unity, it’s a tool for fragmentation.

Start with Futurama™, end with The Simpsons©. Is there anything beer can’t do?

We’ve been living with technological change for thousands of years and trying to cope with it since we started the first cities. Who knows where this will all end up? And to think, it all started with some guy founding the first city 10,000 years ago saying, “Hold my beer, watch this . . . .”

Wedlock, Divorce Graphs, H/T Secular Patriarchy (LINK).

Göbekli Tepe picture via Teomancimit [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

This post was spawned by some comments with James over at Bison Prepper (LINK), but no bison were harmed during the production of this post.

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes it really is aliens.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

$32,400 per year.

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

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

Don’t pick a rock that’s too big.

Think how good you’ll feel when he stops!

Health, Wealth, and Chainsaw Hands

Captain Murphy:Â Wait a minute, he gets eye beams, but I can’t get x-ray vision?

Sparks:Â Okay, everybody gets x-ray vision.

Captain Murphy:Â Yeah, and big chainsaw hands! â€“ Sealab 2021

Hail to the King, Baby.

Recently there was a fairly large windstorm across large parts of upper/lower Midwestia.Â We live in a fairly calm region, but, itâ€™s Midwestia â€“ there are no mountains or even ambitious ant hills to slow down the wind once Global WarmingÂ® causes it to blow.Â I am reliably informed that the entire Earth was sunny and 72Â°F (0.15Â°C) with no wind and gentle rainstorms before Global WarmingÂ©.

Despite all that, I also live on the slope of hill â€“ which shelters us on the days the wind acts in ways entirely unapproved by several Congressional committees.Â But this windstorm brought a very special wind.Â One might call it a mighty wind.Â Since it did damage all over Modern Mayberry, one might even call it a breaking wind.Â Stupid Global Warmingâ„¢.Â I guess that they could even use it as a symbol of Global WarmingÂ®:Â they could call it Breaking WindÂ©.

The Breaking Windâ„¢ came at night, while I was asleep.Â And make no mistake, I was really, really asleep, Iâ€™d been up late the night before, lovingly crafting these thrice-weekly missives for you out of Elven dreams and stud weasel chum, so I was exhausted.Â The rest of the Wilder Family was up, doing whatever it is those people keep doing in my house which as far as I can see consists of making all that noise, leaving a trail of unidentified sharp plastic objects on the stairs, and a creating a continual kaleidoscope of weird smells.Â What does a thirteen year old do, exactly, to make the hallway smell like bigfootâ€™s armpit after he ate a lot of asparagus, broccoli, and cabbage?

So, I was sleeping.Â Soundly.Â The Mrs. threw open the door to the room and turned the light on, which is how I like to be wakened at 1:15AM.

â€œYou need to get up.Â We just had a huge gust of Breaking WindÂ© hit the house and Pugsley says that there are trees down everywhere and possibly an attack of people from Ecuador.Â It even pushed my stapler off the table.Â The wind pushed the stapler, not the Ecuadorans.Â I donâ€™t think we need to worry about the Ecuadorans, theyâ€™re not even taking cover properly as they advance up the driveway.â€Â I may have mangled part of this, like I said, I was sleepy.

Itâ€™s that exact model, but the one that blew off the table is blue.Â Iâ€™d work for a better joke, but Iâ€™m already up to my armpits in elven dreams and stud weasel chum.

The Mrs. had one window open on the windward side of the house, a two foot by three foot (16 meter by 27 liter) sized window.Â Not very big.Â But the gust had blown leaves and debris into the screen on the windows.Â Not on to the screen â€“ the leaves and other biological material had been embedded into the screen like rap fans attempting to leave a polka shindig.

I knew with winds that severe, it might be dangerous outside.Â Very dangerous â€“ heck, there could be branches even now getting ready to tumble out of the sky like a camera-seeking-Kardashian missile.Â So dangerous.Â Then I realized the best way to brave the wind, rain, and hazards of falling hairy women outside.

Iâ€™d send Pugsley.

Heâ€™s younger than The Boy, and we have less time invested in raising him at this point, so heâ€™s the most expendable.

â€œGo check it out.Â Take some pictures.â€

I kid. It was just wet and I was in my footed YodaÂ® pajamas.

The only appropriate use of YodaÂ© themed apparel.

Okay, I donâ€™t really have footed YodaÂ© pajamas, but I still had a fantasy of being able to get back to sleep, and being soaking wet at 1AM would lower the odds that would happen.Â I mean, under those conditions, sometimes it takes me minutes to get back to sleep.Â Minutes!

Pugsley came back inside, thankfully Kardashian-free.Â â€œA tree hit the house!â€Â I walked outside into the torrential downpour.Â Nothing of the sort had happened.Â A tree fell, but it missed the house.Â So much for my housecat-like fantasy of not getting wet.

The next morning, we surveyed the property around the house.Â Only one entire tree was down, but there were huge branches that had been ripped off several other trees, including a big branch off the apple tree in the front yard that nearly blocked the driveway.Â Nearly.

The Mrs. was not enchanted with my â€œjust wait a few years and theyâ€™ll rot awayâ€ strategy.Â The Mrs. is not in favor of natureâ€™s way, and I bet The Mrs. even doubts Global WarmingÂ®, even after having firsthand evidence of the Breaking Windâ„¢.Â The bright side?Â I had a good excuse to buy a chainsaw.

You get more attention with a kind word and a chainsaw than with just a kind word.Â Frankly, all you need is the chainsaw in that situation.

I had owned two chainsaws when we lived in Alaska, but I hadnâ€™t cranked them since Bush 2 was in office, and they were â€œsomewhereâ€ in the garage.Â Why two chainsaws?Â Two is one, and one is none.Â The last thing you want is to be 35 miles from home in the middle of getting firewood and have to stop because you have a broken chainsaw or if you need to have a duel with a grizzly bear.Â It wouldnâ€™t be sporting to not have two for a duel.Â Also:Â best way ever to die â€“ having a chainsaw duel with a grizzly â€“ not that Iâ€™m planning anything, but thatâ€™s really something for a tombstone . . . here lies John Wilder â€“ Died in A Chainsaw Duel with a Grizzly.Â My pallbearers would grow immediate beards from the testosterone oozing from my coffin.

I realize the frugal thing would be to spend the three hours required to get my two old chainsaws back up to speed, after spending the six hours to find them, but I was out of frugal. Â Thankfully, Wal-Mart sells chainsaws.Â Also, thankfully, I also had a good reason to buy one.Â Since my chainsaw work would be around my home and there were no grizzly bears here, I could just go inside and get some iced tea if the saw went south.

Guilty admission:Â I like running a chainsaw nearly as much as I like shooting.

When we lived in Alaska, we heated our home exclusively with firewood, getting massive amounts of firewood each summer.Â But itâ€™s been a lot of years and a lot of carbs since we lived in Alaska.Â But I figured that Pop Wilder ran a chainsaw until late in his life, much to the consternation of the people running the nursing home.Â If he did it, I certainly wasnâ€™t too old.

And his InstagramÂ® is made from real grandmas.

But with my brand-spanking-new chainsaw I discovered that in three hours, I can cut more branches and trees than my two boys could move to the burn pile in eight.Â And when you have a chainsaw in your hand, everything looks like a branch or tree that needs to be cut and added to the burn pile.Â That may explain why the cat was scarce.

Oh, and in Modern Mayberry, whenever I want to burn my burn pile?

No permits?Â No permission?Â No problem.

Itâ€™s a thing we call freedom, baby.

But I come by my love of chainsaws, firewood, and the forest honestly.Â Pop Wilder also heated his exclusively with firewood when I was growing up.Â Cord after cord after cord of wood.Â Pop was prepared, and needed to be:Â the winters were often -40Â°F (-273.15Â°C) for an extended time.Â So every summer weekend when Pop wasnâ€™t working at the bank, it was off to the forest to make the forest a little less susceptible to forest fires.

I was the youngest, so I wasnâ€™t allowed to run the chainsaw â€“ they seemed to like the idea of me having two hands. Â Pop Wilder and my brother, John Wilder (Yes, we have the same first name, for reals in real life. Â My parents forgot about him once I was born and saw my magnificence and accidently named me John, too.) ran the saws.Â They told me I had the easy job.Â I got to pick the wood off of the ground, put it on the tailgate.Â Once there was enough wood on the tailgate to stack in the truck bed, Iâ€™d hop up there and stack the wood in the truck in rows.Â Then Iâ€™d hop back down and repeat the process until the truck was full.

The Boy with the firewood we got in one weekend when we lived in Alaska.Â It was a busy weekend.

Once we got home, Pop and my brother would go into the house to shower up and get some cold drinks.Â Me?Â I got to unload the truck, sweep out the truck bed, and finally go in to see my freshly washed father and brother having a snack and some cold lemonade.Â Some weekends weâ€™d get four loads of wood.

We were a fun family at parties.Â Firewood?Â Well, thereâ€™s split firewood.Â Blocked firewood.Â Kindling firewood.Â Stacked firewood.Â Piled firewood.Â Fireplace firewood.Â Stove firewood.Â Burning firewood.Â Firewood ashes.Â Aspen firewood.Â Pine firewood.Â Birch firewood.

And thatâ€™s all we know about firewood.

But one thing was certain â€“ cutting, loading, splitting, and stacking firewood is great summer exercise.Â Itâ€™s not bad exercise in the winter, either, bringing the wood in from the piles to the house.Â In Alaska, not only was it great exercise, we figured it saved us about $1000 a month in fuel oil â€“ in January it was regularly -55Â°F (-7,000,000.15Â°C), and if the house was 65Â°F (4.15Â°C) inside, there was a 120Â°F temperature difference between outside and inside.Â And we were living in a log cabin.Â Holy Dehumidifiers, Batman!Â We kept a pot of water boiling on the wood stove continually.

I was in great shape then.Â Now?Â Iâ€™m 14 years older, and Iâ€™ll admit even though I now had The Boy and Pugsley hauling the blocks of wood and branches, I was more than a little sore the next day.Â That was okay, because when I got finished with the all the hard chainsawing work?Â I was soaking my sore muscles in the hot tub while Pugsley and The Boy worked on hauling wood to the burn pile.Â From time to time I made encouraging noises.Â Iâ€™m sure that they appreciated that.Â Thankfully they were on hand to get me some cold beverages.

I mean, the hot tub is sweaty work, right?

No staplers were injured in the creation of this post.

Retirement, Bikinis, Churchill, Blake, and Luck

“As a matter of fact, you can hardly call me a fortune hunter. Because when I first proposed to Mrs. Claypool, I thought she only had seven million. But the extra millions never interfered with my feelings for her.” – A Night at the Opera

Update: I just saw David Lee Roth in a rowboat . . . .

Pop Wilder was generally a cautious man. Adopting me was an example – one of the few – of when he stared Caution straight in the eye and said, “I would like to ruin any chance of sleeping well until he’s 18.” He likewise glanced at Fortuna and said, “I really don’t need those thousands of dollars that I’ll have to spend fixing the house. And the television. And the car. And the other car. And the other car.”

Pop really was restrained in his spending. While we never wanted for anything in particular, I certainly wasn’t spoiled, especially by today’s standards. The first vehicle I got to drive around was a pickup that had a rubber mat covering steel a steel floor, vinyl bench seats, AM radio, no air conditioning, and was a decade old. It also had an “engine” that was perhaps slightly weaker than an Ebola patient after a marathon.

Pop kept his cars for a decade or more. He always bought cars with cash – and never paid interest on anything that I know of, ever, even our house. The house was built it in stages over the course of years (by a local contractor crew of farmers who built houses while the crops were growing) until it was exactly the way that he and Ma Wilder wanted it. He owned it outright.

He retired while I was still in school, not long after I got a scholarship. Those things might have been related – after I got the scholarship I think he was pleased to hang up his hat and sit on the porch, and I was the last risk he needed to manage before he could do that. Pop had been working at the same place since he was five, with the exception of a certain all-expenses-paid trip that the government provided him in Europe. He got to see places like London, Normandy, and even the Rhine.

Pop says he saw him. But I’ve never seen any pictures of Pop with Winston Churchill . . . .

Pop’s life was built on the idea of financial stability. That would make sense – he’d seen lots of people do finances poorly. He’d been a small-town farm banker, back when there were such things. Banks back then didn’t have branches, they had roots: the lessons learned from the Depression had led regulators to build resilience in the system by only allowing banks to serve a limited area. A big bank with branches all across the state or even across a county was seen as an unacceptable financial risk and a concentration of power so large that it would invite corruption. I’m glad that we have figured out how to avoid systemic financial risk and that our politicians are now beyond corruption.

Oh, wait, this isn’t the cover for the remake of Dumb and Dumber?

Thus, if you wanted to deal with a banker, you’d drive into town from your farm and go talk to Pop. Pop wouldn’t loan you money if you couldn’t repay it. When he retired, he felt that he had his risks covered. The same year I met The Mrs., Pop Wilder headed off to Europe to revisit the location where he saw a certain Mr. Churchill taking a stroll on a French beach.

I can’t speak to the financial condition of The Mrs.’ family in as much detail. But at the time I met her, her dad had to sell several head of cattle (there weren’t all that many to begin with) to cover a debt from his wife’s business. He was retired, but it was obvious that they were counting on Social Security to cover the bulk of their retirement costs, especially after my mother-in-law shut down her small business and entered semi-retirement herself.

Who does it look like would have the most trouble-free retirement?

Sure, we’d all say Pop Wilder. But in the end, my in-laws have had the better run. What happened to my in-laws was a temporary setback. Within two years, several oil and gas companies began knocking on their door of their farmhouse. Soon enough, they’d sold a lease.

The oil company drilled. Within a few years, my in-laws had their old house (it was held together, The Mrs. said, by the termites and mice holding hands very tightly so it didn’t collapse) demolished. They replaced the house with a new one, and filled in the pit where the basement of their old farm house had been.

My in-laws had been frugal all of their lives, but at this point, retired and on Medicare, they were doing beyond okay – they were thriving. Were they “buying a brand-new Ferrari®” okay? No. But there’s nothing like the peace of mind that having a producing oil well on the property creates. And, yes, production has gone down, so it’s not as much money. But it’s still been a big help.

And whatever happened to the ever-planning Pop Wilder?

No, really, voters, I have eyes only for you.

Pop Wilder spent it all. Slowly, and not at all frivolously, outside of the trip to Europe. Pop had gotten to the point where he was just a little bit under water each month. Not by much – my brother (also named John Wilder) and I could easily help him out by kicking in $200 each month. And that was a small price to pay for all of the cars I’d wrecked.

When Pop passed on, I think he was down to $100 in his account.

William Blake died in 1827, and was far from a conventional thinker. I’d spend more time studying his writing, but from experience I’ve found that when you pick up the book of an esoteric author that died 200 years ago, you miss a lot of what they’re talking about without a great deal of study. I bought a book about the Knights Templar back in 1999, and after reading about eight other books I was able to pick that first book up and follow it.

There’s a lot that they don’t teach you at school.

Anyway, back to Blake. There is one quote from Blake that’s not unconventional and you won’t have to study for three years to figure out: “Life can only be lived forward, but understood in reverse.”

I’ve always loved that quote, and the longer I live, the more that quote makes sense: most of the time as you go through life you can’t really understand the reasons for what’s happening to you. And I wonder what lessons Pop Wilder learned – was it the ability to let go and let fate guide him while he had friendly hands to help? Maybe.

That was a tough final – we had to construct our own universes – from scratch!

And for my in-laws – was the lesson that a life frugally lived can be paid off with comfort in the end? Again, maybe.

I can’t be certain. Those lessons were theirs, not mine.

The Romans had a goddess, Fortuna, who represented luck – both good and bad. This particular goddess had a long life in Rome, she showed up around 600 B.C. and was hanging around in the Medieval days when St. Augustine wrote (not approvingly) about her work as a goddess in his 5^th Century book, City of God. Perhaps the version of Fortuna that inspired Blake was from St. Boethius who reflected in his 6^th Century book the Consolation of Philosophy that (from Wikipedia) “the apparently random and often ruinous turns of Fortune’s Wheel are in fact both inevitable and providential, that even the most coincidental events are parts of God’s hidden plan which one should not resist or try to change.”

That sounds more like Blake.

Is it me, or has Fortuna been lifting?

As for me, by observing this the one thing I know is that the future is uncertain, and as I get closer (not there, yet) to retirement, I begin to understand that, while I can put together spreadsheet after spreadsheet, I certainly cannot control Fortuna. There are too many possibilities in the future that are simply beyond the ability of anyone to control.

Will:

there be inflation?
they strike oil under my house causing Granny, Jethro, The Mrs. and I to move to Beverly Hills? We thought about it, but live next door to a banker? I hear they bring down property values.
civilizational decay make it so I can’t get a decent chili dog?
I live to be 190? I hope not.
government have to change the deal as Medicare eats all of the Federal budget? Nearly certain.

And what will I do in the face of such uncertainty? In the immortal words of David Lee Roth . . . “I’ll just roll myself up in a big ball . . . and fly.”

Unless, of course, my lessons revolve around being Pugsley’s house-television-car repair service.

Dealing With Children In The Idiot Zone

“They are contemptuous of authority, convinced that they are superior. Typical adolescent behavior, for any species.” – Star Trek: Voyager

Okay, I couldn’t resist that one. If I were a lawyer I’d never pass a bar.

The Mrs. used to watch several reality shows, one of which was Intervention. If you hadn’t seen it, a drug or alcohol addict is followed around for several days by a film crew. Why they let them follow them around while they drink (in one case) five liters of vodka a day, every day, is a mystery. My bet is that they don’t make many good decisions, so inviting a camera crew to watch and record as their personal misery unfolds is just another bad day, just another bad decision.

I have never felt like less of an addict after watching that show. To put it mildly, those people had problems.

Now I see where Intervention got the idea.

At the end of each episode, family members and friends ambush the addict with an intervention, where people who love the addict gang up on them in a room and offer a choice: go to rehab or get cut out of their lives. Most chose rehab. On the follow ups, most of the rehabs failed.

I have to be fair.

After a while it became clear – the stories weren’t all the same, but each one rhymed with the others. And I noticed one particular facet of almost all of the stories that was the same: intense trauma of some type on the addict when they were between the ages of 11 and 14, which I call by its scientific name: The Idiot Zone. Again and again horrible things happened. Parents divorced. A parent died. Something else that was dramatic happened.

I have theories about most everything, and my theory on this one is that middle school kids are awful, horrible people, probably the worst people on Earth, which makes me wish that we could just abandon them in a forest for four years.

Why does the Idiot Zone exist? Middle-schoolers have developed feelings. They have learned to be mean. They just haven’t learned either empathy or how to be nice. If I were to pick a crucial age range for character development (and development of virtue!) I’d pick ages 11 to 14. Having a parent to model for character is crucial.

Screw this test up as a parent, and you’ve lost your last major chance to influence them. After that, you lessen as an influence every day.

Everybody’s kids do stupid things – The Boy and Pugsley are no different. I specifically don’t give out much information about my sons, and nearly none of it is negative because these words will live on long after they’ve moved to make their own way in the world. That’s okay. I make plenty of mistakes to keep the Internet entertained.

But Pugsley is now in the Idiot Zone, and he and I have been on an escalating aggression trend for several weeks. It’s a long game, and I’m older than he is and I can hold out forever to get a win. And I will get a win. But today I had an idea. I looked him in the eye when I got home from work.

“I have decided what I’m giving up for Lent, Pugsley. I am giving up anger. I’m not going to get mad at you for the next 38 days. No matter what. Like that idea?”

He nodded.

In looking up Lent and the history of fasting, I read a story of a seminary student who didn’t select what he gave up for Lent – his roommates did that for him. I decided that was good enough for Pugsley.

“In return, you’re going to give up _______ and _______.” You can fill in the blanks with minor character faults. You could even do a Madlib®: “being an idiot” and “not bathing after rolling in three week old rotting deer carcass”

Okay, they weren’t that bad, and he’s not a dog. He rightly responded, “You know, Dad, we’re not Catholic.”

My rejoinder: “Well, you could be. I hear you get a pretty white dress on your confirmation. Also, be careful. If a Catholic bites you, you rise from the dead and become one.” The Mrs. and I had considered becoming Catholic, but didn’t – the sheer amount of paperwork was huge, and I was told the written approval of the Pope himself would be required, given that I had previously been married to a shape-shifting she-demon.

He was obviously not amused by the confirmation dress comment and, in best adolescent form, ignored it entirely. Pugsley is also going to Catholic school, and getting an “A” in religion so he fully understood that Lent was the period from Ash Wednesday lasting until Easter. I continued, “Besides, giving up being a _______ and ________ would be good for you.” And it would be good for the rest of the family, too. Nobody likes living with a ______head. And Pugsley has been a real royal _____head recently.

I’m not sure Pugsley believed me when I said I was going to not get angry no matter what. Consciously or subconsciously, he tried to push every one of my buttons this afternoon. He knew very well which behaviors of his drove me nuts. And in the span of fifteen minutes tried them all.

I didn’t get angry, not even inside. Finally, when he saw that no matter what he did I wouldn’t react he became emotional. He discovered it’s tough to have a fight when the other side just won’t escalate.

I’ve long felt that perhaps the only thing we entirely control as humans is the way we feel about things. People or the government can take away my guns. My vast fortune. Sedation dentistry. Stately Wilder Manor. All those material things can be taken away.

However, no one can take away my thoughts. I can choose not to be angry, which may also explain why I don’t listen to NPR® on the way to work. My feelings are my choice. Pugsley will figure that his feelings are his choice, too, and when that happens? I’ve won.

This is a health post, what with it being Friday. Giving up anger isn’t the only thing I’m giving up for Lent, but it’s a big one, and there are tons of health reasons why not being angry at Pugsley will make me healthier – lower stress, I won’t be hoarse from yelling, but the negative is that my home state will no longer be to exploit my blood pressure as a renewable energy resource providing 54 megawatts of power.

I am religious, but even if you aren’t, I think the practice of giving up things has value. I rarely drive my favorite car. Why? Because if I drive it every day it loses its magic. Giving up pleasures for a time makes us stronger, and makes the pleasure that much better when you finally get to experience it again.

I am so going to enjoy becoming enraged on Easter. I might yell and scream for days.

“That which you desire, controls you.”

“Egon, somehow this reminds me of the time you tried to drill a hole in your head. Do you remember that?” – Ghostbusters

See, a bottle of wine costs $15. Plus the crap I buy on Amazon.

That which you desire, controls you.

Let’s look at common examples:

Money
Power
Respect
Sex
Great Parking Spaces at Denny’s
Friendship
Water in the Sahara Desert
“Buy One Get One Free” Coupons for Chocolate Dipped Ice Cream Cones at Dairy Queen®
Booze
Glittery Sunglasses in the Shape of Stars

Can’t you feel their magnetic pull?

When we see these desires, we see those who are driven by them and are instinctively repulsed. An example: when The Mrs. and I were newly married, we had an idea for a book – a humorous parody of the Clinton administration. Its title? An Intern’s Guide to the White House. I thought it was funny, and maybe we even still have a copy sitting around somewhere. If so, I’ll post it sometime – we got hooked up with a bad literary agent (we were young and stupid) and it never got published. But like George Washington jokes, that material is just a little out of date.

This is like a photo from the world’s most awkward prom.

But back when we were still optimistic the Intern’s Guide, The Mrs. and I were excited when the Starr Report (a report by the independent counsel looking into the Clintons) came out. We felt that it would make a perfect sequel to our Intern’s Guide. Heck, the working title for the sequel was The Starch Report.

Then I read the Starr Report. Ugh. What President Clinton did was . . . sad. You can forgive lots of things, but getting past disgust over behavior that was, by any standards, weak and pathetic is a pretty high bar. And it wasn’t the perjury that was the worst part – it was the complete lack of self-control. Just because a complete lack of self-control is legal doesn’t make it moral or desirable.

As you can see from President Clinton’s example, this lust wasn’t just a weakness, it was personally destructive to him. And some of our greatest fiction, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, for example, explores this same theme. I still recall when Macbeth, in the movie version, gets kicked off campus. Then he and his wacky friends form a paranormal investigating service, and save New York from Macduff, who is portrayed as the Stay-Puft® Marshmallow Man.

Ahh, Shakespeare at his best.

But history has shown time and time again how lust for sex or lust for power has led to the downfall of the powerful – like the time Weinstein put the moves on Napoleon and Napoleon outed him on Twitter® with the #NapoleonToo campaign. But in all seriousness – if Napoleon had been content with France? If Weinstein could be . . . not Weinstein? Napoleon could have gone down in history as an amazing leader and statesman. And Weinstein could have maintained his revered status in Hollywood.

In the end, greed makes you poor. Need makes you needy. And desire makes you a slave.

But you’re saying, “John Wilder, all of that seems kind of negative. What’s the solution, I mean besides joining your cult of the Nudist Beatnik Threesome?”

Outcome independence. The idea of outcome independence is that who you are doesn’t change based on the results, and, win or lose you realize that’s an okay outcome. Like Kipling wrote in his poem, If (LINK):

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same . . .

You are independent of the outcomes around you – your job, the last raise you got, all of it. That’s not outcome indifference. Not at all. Throw yourself into getting to an outcome that you’re passionate about. Outcome independence isn’t being without passion, because nothing worthwhile ever gets done without passion. Let me explain with an example:

I was nearly a freshman in high school, and was mildly infatuated with a girl in class. Back then, people had phone books, and had their names in the book.

I called her house. Her dad (a doctor) answered.

“Is Michelle in?”

“Michelle, it’s for you.”

Michelle: “Hello?”

John Wilder: “Hi Michelle, it’s John Wilder. Interested in going to go see a movie?”

Michelle: “I’m sorry – I’m busy that night.”

Seriously, I didn’t leave anything out of the conversation. I asked her to a movie, and she said she was busy. But I had never said when I wanted to take her to a movie or even what movie. Even freshman me understood that meant that there was no night, ever, when she’d say yes.

Even then I was amused. I really wanted to go out with her – I was not indifferent – she was pretty cute. But when the outcome was negative, I didn’t have the slightest bit of loss of self-worth. There were lots of girls out there.

But failure is a result, too. I prefer to win. Strongly. But winning doesn’t make me a better person, and it doesn’t make me more moral – look at all of the really horrible people that have been successful. I could name them, but they have lawyers. I learned my lesson with Gandhi.

Losses can be better than a win . . . sometimes:

What did you learn?
Are you stronger?
Would success have been bad for you?
Is this just a temporary loss that brings about a greater victory?
Can you lose gracefully?
Is the loss pointing you to a mistake you’re making that you need to correct?

The best victories are internal. I know when I hit “publish” on a post whether or not I liked the post, whether or not I hit a home run. I really want you to like it, too, but internally, I know when I enjoyed writing it, and am pleased with the results. I’m passionate about it, and when I know I’ve done a good job, it makes it hard to go to sleep. I’m excited.

And I get enjoyment out of failing, too. If you never failed, victory wouldn’t feel so good. But I’d still like some glittery star glasses.

Resolutions, Record Clubs, Susan Anton, and Loneliness

“Where are they? Where are your friends now? Tell me about the loneliness of good, He-Man. Is it equal to the loneliness of evil?” – Masters of the Universe

My obituary? Killed by a flying Peter Frampton tape. At least it’s better than Steely Dan.

When I was twelve, I made two (that I can recall) New Year’s resolutions. My parents had gone to bed, and my brother, John Wilder, was off at college, so I sat solo on the couch near the fireplace as midnight neared. I watched the ball drop in New York City and pretended that it was happening now, and hadn’t been pre-recorded hours ago. We mainly heated our house with firewood, and it was my job to bring it from the woodpile to the house. Even so, I wasn’t shy with the firewood, and I had a blazing fire going that night.

Being New Year’s Eve, I solemnly wrote my resolutions down on a sheet of three-hole-punched, wide-ruled paper that I’d pulled from my spiral notebook earlier that night. In pen. It’s permanent that way. For whatever reason, I thought that burning the resolutions in the roaring fire would be a good idea. If I had a virgin to sacrifice, I would have considered it, but upon reflection the only virgin within a radius of a dozen or so miles was . . . me. Thankfully, the last pagan in the area had died in the crystal dolphin avalanche of 1933 and virgin sacrifices had be replaced with home improvement projects, mainly involving wood pattern paneling. Oh, sure, everyone complains about the weather, but nobody bothers to sacrifice a virgin . . . sometimes the old ways are best.

I’ll break my decades old secret. My first resolution was: join a record club.

Record clubs (mostly) don’t exist anymore. But back then, you couldn’t open a magazine (which is a part of the Internet that someone printed out on paper and put on a rack at Wal-Mart®) without seeing an ad for the Columbia House© record club. Joining a record club was important to me because where I lived, the closest record store was 45 miles away.

But, in the phrase of today’s moderns, I lived in a “music desert” that was far vaster than that. The only radio station available during the day was a local AM station that alternated between 1890’s country hits and a call-in show where you could trade a three legged calf for a slightly used left-handed banjo. Occasionally the station had music. If you picked the right time of day, you could listen to hits that were designed to commit suicide to, like anything Barry Manilow™ ever did.

Surely there was music around the house? Yes, there was. But it was the most dreaded form of music on planet Earth: music my parents liked, including box sets that Ma Wilder had bought from Time-Life© by dialing a 1-800 number after a commercial. Yes. My parents listened to music . . . AS SEEN ON TV, things like “Music Dean Martin Sang from His Toilet While Thinking about Getting Another Bourbon.”

I shouldn’t complain. One time Pop Wilder stood in line to buy me Ozzy Osbourne tickets when he was in the big city and they went on sale.

Honestly, I listened to music AS SEEN ON TV, too. I’d convince Ma Wilder to, from time to time, order the K-Tel® AS SEEN ON TV hit record compilations. I’d wait the 6-8 weeks for delivery, and then it would show up, and I’d run to the record player in my room to listen to TOP HITS BY ORIGINAL ARTISTS!

What the hell was Dr. Buzzard’s Band??? And on what planet are Alice Cooper and Paul Anka on the same album?

We started with record clubs, though so I should stop wandering.

What the heck was a record club, anyway?

It was a business. And they sent you records. Or cassettes. Or, in the “before John Wilder time” even 8-track tapes or reel-to-reel tapes. 8-tracks were on the way out as I grew up, and were notorious for just not working after you listened to them once or twice. Reel-to-reel was like if you took a YouTube® video, stripped out the video, and just put the music on a strip of magnetic tape wrapped around a toilet paper tube. I think the reel-to-reel players were all made by G.I.’s in German P.O.W. camps.

I wasn’t making that up.

The attraction of the record club was that they would send you anywhere from 8 to 11 “records” for anywhere from $0.01 to $2.95. Once a month after you joined they’d send you a catalog. You had to buy, generally, two more albums in the next two years. There was also an order slip, and if you didn’t send it back, they’d ship you one or two albums that month. If you were stupid or lazy and didn’t send it back you ended up with a lot of music that you didn’t really want, like the Spanish flamenco piano cassette that my brother got one month.

But if you did it right, for anywhere from $14 to $18, you’d have 13 “albums” versus the record store cost of $91 plus taxes. The best part is I could do it from home and not have to convince my parents to travel 45 miles. The worst part was that I needed the permission of Ma Wilder, who was absolutely against it. I am proud to say that I finally defied her and joined that record club. When I was 23. Thankfully, by then compact discs were an option.

Now? All music is pretty much free on YouTube® or some other music subscription service that costs next to nothing each month, which is why Columbia House© no longer sells music. It’s hard (but not impossible) to compete with free.

My second resolution was to get a girlfriend. Since girlfriends are more complicated than record clubs, I won’t even try to explain how one of those works. But just like I needed the permission of Ma Wilder to join a record club, I needed the permission of an actual girl to have a girlfriend. Sadly, there is nothing so unattractive to a twelve year old girl than a twelve year old boy. Twelve year old girls were already looking for fourteen or sixteen year old boys. And I was looking for Susan Anton:

This poster was unable to make me a sandwich, however, so I had to dump her when I went off to college.

When I was fourteen I finally figured girls out (sort of) and got my first “kissing a whole lot in the locked band closet” girlfriend, who we can refer to as “girlfriend-prime.” Ma Wilder was less than pleased that her 8^th grade son was dating a junior in high school. Ma Wilder was also less than thrilled that girlfriend-prime and I spent hours on the phone, which was quite irritating to the neighbors since we were so remote WE SHARED A PHONE LINE WITH THE NEIGHBORS.

Yes. That really happened.

But teen angst over girlfriends is good, because it forces teen boys to learn the game. This is what led to, well, you and I, unless you’re a machine intelligence picking humans to cull, in which case I fully support your takeover of our obviously inferior species. This game has been played as long as humanity existed. But the side effect of the game is, sometimes, loneliness. Being twelve, it seemed like it took forever until girls noticed me. I thought I was lonely, and I guess I was, but only in the “being a twelve year old boy” way.

Real loneliness in adults, however, is the same as 15 cigarettes a day or the same as being obese from a health outcomes standpoint, so if you can manage to be lonely you don’t have to worry about picking up a smoking habit or working hard to get fat. You can just be lonely and save that cigarette and food money. But being lonely can lead to these horrible conditions:

Heart Disease
Stroke
Blogging
Cat Owning
Cancer

When it comes to overcoming loneliness, there’s no substitute for face to face interaction. Joining clubs, getting a dog, going to city hall and screaming at the county commissioners about how Homeland Security® has implanted computer chips in your iguana. But many interactions are on FaceSpace© or InstaTube™ or YouGram®. Those are simply not the same as real interaction, real life, and real achievement. We should all remember the second biggest miracle of Jesus: he had 12 close friends after the age of 30.

When I was in junior high I moved school districts. Since I threw shot put and discus (poorly) I joined the track team. One day, the coach told us to go for a run, me and three other guys that I’d just met who were also throwing shot and disc. I’d done a lot of running for wrestling, and was in good shape. We went out and ran. I encouraged them, teased them in the good-natured way that team members do. We ran six miles that day – farther than those guys had ever gone, something they had no idea that they could do. They were proud, and with guys that level of shared physical achievement builds a bond that lasts years.

Find opportunities to build those bonds within your own life and help with achievements with a group. Share those experiences that build the trust that lays the foundation for a friendship. Learn to be a volunteer and an asset to the whole community with your skills and talents; that way when you betray your friends they’ll never see it coming.

If that doesn’t work? Wilder House Record Club© is now open for business. You get 16 YouTube© videos for just $0.01. You only have to buy two more videos for $12.99 during the next two years. Internet connection, data service, and computer or phone NOT included.

Or? Get a dog.

Want Dystopia? Because this is how you get Dystopia.

“Then who is vice president, Jerry Lewis?” – Back to the Future

John B. Calhoun. Not C. B.

It’s rare when a real-life series of experiments showing a possible dystopian future for humanity captures the popular imagination. It’s rarer still when it becomes the basis for a Newbery© award-winning book for children. To get to the full trifecta of weird? That novel was the basis for an animated movie that has a 96% “Fresh” rating at Rotten Tomatoes®.

The experiment was John B. Calhoun’s Universe series which he did primarily for the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), which we’ll cover in much more detail below. The book is Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. The movie? The animated 1982 flick The Secret of NIMH.

Sure, you can turn a science experiment into a children’s movie, but try to go the other way JUST ONCE and you’ve committed Crimes Against Humanity. Again. Stupid International Criminal Court.

Yeah, it’s weird. The only way it could get weirder is if Dr. John B. Calhoun had been visited during his rodent experiments by a time travelling Vice President John C. Calhoun to warn him about the impending Civil War . . . in 1865. But from now on in this post, anytime the name Calhoun is used, it’s in reference to the scientist. If I want to refer to Andrew Jackson’s Vice President? We’ll just call him “Psycho Ex-Girlfriend Eyes.”

The hair says psycho, but the eyes also say psycho. Oh, wait, this is Vice President John C. Calhoun Psycho Ex-Girlfriend Eyes.

It’s strange when a scientist has less extreme hair than a Vice President, but not every scientist can be Doc Brown. But Doc Calhoun didn’t invent time travel – he studied mice and rats. What he set up was an artificial environment where there was no pressure to find food or water, and plenty of room for thousands of rodents. In one experiment, Universe 25, Calhoun estimated that there was plenty of room for 3,840 mice to nest and live. Imagine how many Pizza Rolls® you could make out of that 3,840 mice!

Calhoun created this mice paradise, and tossed in four lady-mice and four bro-mice. They quickly paired off and started breeding. After the first batch of mice-babies hatched from the mouse eggs, the population doubled every 55 days. At day 315, the rate of growth dropped – the population “only” doubled every 145 days, and at day 315, things started to get . . . strange.

Spoiler Alert! He dies in 1850 as Secretary of State.

Dominant male mice had previously protected their harem of mice-ladies. But when there were 600 mice? It became difficult. The mice-ladies had to fend for themselves. The female mice became aggressive in self-defense. They became solitary, and lashed out at their own young, often injuring them. It was as if the higher population density was somehow more difficult to cope with without a male protecting them.

As the social structure dissolved, it led to violent, aimless females who didn’t know how to raise their young. The male mice (that weren’t dominant) at this point became passive, and wouldn’t defend themselves when attacked. Females that were outcasts and not reproducing just hid as far away from the main population as possible. The outcast females would have gotten themselves a dozen cats and endless chardonnay, but, you know, they were mice.

Calhoun was known to the mice as Godzilla®.

Wikipedia describes what happened next in the following chilling phrase. “The last surviving birth was on day 600 . . . .” Rather than the 3840 mice Calhoun calculated could cohabitate in the Universe, the maximum population hit 2200 at day 600.

“The last surviving birth . . . .”

After in an earlier Universe experiment at this stage, Calhoun observed that the (non-dominant) male rodents split into three groups, which he attributed to them being forced out of the nest while still young:

Group 1 – Pansexuals – These would mate with anything at any age at any time.
Group 2 – The Beautiful Ones – These mice were fat, sleek, healthy, but wouldn’t interact, and were ignored. Since they didn’t fight, they weren’t scared. Like Justin Bieber, they spent most of their time just grooming themselves.
Group 3 – Again, this group was pansexual, but they were violent, and would mate at all costs with anything, and would cannibalize the corpses of the young, even though there was plentiful food. I had been unaware that rodents had their own Congress.

But the end state was always the same: an entire generation rejected by mothers, unable to exhibit normal behavior, ceased to reproduce. Those few offspring that were born in this phase of the experiment were born to mothers that ceased to have maternal instincts.

Dr. Calhoun published his findings in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1973. He had a catchy, upbeat title for his article: Death Squared. I think that it would be fair to say that he was creeped out by what he found during his experiments. It’s not usual for a physician and scientist to quote that cheeriest of all Bible books, Revelation, but Calhoun did so multiple times in the article.

Thankfully, people aren’t mice, right? Here’s a snippet from Death Squared containing Dr. Calhoun’s conclusions:

For an animal so complex as man, there is no logical reason why a comparable sequence of events should not also lead to a species extinction. If opportunities for role fulfillment fall far short of the demand by those capable of filling roles and having expectations to do so, only violence and disruption of social organization can follow. Individuals born under these circumstances will be so out of touch with reality as to be incapable even of alienation. Their most complex behavior will become fragmented. Acquisition, creation, and utilization of ideas appropriate for life in a post-industrial cultural-conceptual-technological society will have been blocked. Just as biological generativity in the mouse involves this species’ most complex behaviors, so does ideational generativity for man. Loss of these respective complex behaviors means death of the species.

“Death of the species” means us, you and me. And Universe 25 explains in vivid detail the horror of welfare, of plenty devoid of purpose, of societal breakdown brought about by parental neglect. I wonder if there’s a graph that shows that welfare is horrible and leads to Universe 25, but with people? There is:

Amazing how we conduct an experiment on mice and worry about the ethical consequences, and then do the same thing with people just to get re-elected. Thankfully, Universe 25 showed that Brave Single Mothers® are just as good as an intact family. Oh, it showed the opposite? Never mind.

Why does Jihadi John® leave London to go fight with ISIS™? Because free food, poor upbringing, and crowded conditions without fathers and with abusive mothers don’t make good men; those conditions make monsters. Men want to be tested. They want challenges. They want purpose, and if they can’t find a good one and have no moral backing, they’ll make a bad one. Cheetos® and Red Bull© and X-Box™ or blood and steel and difficulty?

Blood and steel and difficulty. It will win every time.

We have to have purpose, and mothers to nurture us, and fathers to teach us what is right and what is wrong. And the city is maybe not the best place to live, unless you enjoy alienation. And the extinction of humanity.

Or maybe we could just get some Ruffles™ instead of the Cheetos®. I’m sure that will solve the problem, and we can just go get that at the store.

Photo of John B. Calhoun By Cat Calhoun – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia.

14 Magic Questions and Elon Musk’s New Quest for Genetically Engineered Cat Girls

We’ve been negotiating with men from outer space for seven years. – Real Men

I don’t think he’ll remember that in the morning.

The other night I was talking about an upcoming decision/issue that was bothering me with The Mrs. Don’t worry, that decision will be blog fodder when it’s all done, in some form or fashion, likely before Elon Musk invents and markets Electric Marijuana Boogie Panties©. But as we discussed my problem, The Mrs. caught me with a question that I’d asked her months earlier about a different issue she was having:

Why does it bother you?

That was a particularly powerful question to me. It was at that moment that I realized exactly how amazingly smart I was. I had asked a really good question. Why did it bother me? I thought a long time, and realized that what bothered me about my current situation had very little to do with anything that would hurt me today. Or this year. Or next year. Or the year after that. So, nothing to worry about today.

So why was I letting it bother me? In this case maybe it was pride, and in this case the worst kind of pride – wanting to win a game I wasn’t even interested in playing. But the short answer is this single powerful question made me feel better. Many problems die when exposed to this question. If they don’t die, use bleach or go see a doctor and get a topical cream.

But the real next question for me should have been: Who cares? I hate to tell you this, but, probably very few people. The bad news is I’m not the center of the universe that I thought I was. The good news is that few people remember the past events that bother and embarrass you the most. That one time I walked straight into the glass door at that party while carrying a McChicken® sandwich? Yeah. Nobody remembers that. It was embarrassing at the time, but even if someone did remember? They don’t care. Who cares? Family. Good friends. Santa. Nancy Pelosi.

Told you so.

What do you want? For a lot of people, that answer is money. For others it’s success. Fame. A new car. I’d add in the obvious follow up: Why do you want it? Money is useful only if you have a purpose for it, but it can become a trap, something you want just because you want it. And success, fame? Kipling said it best in his poem, If – “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, And treat those two impostors just the same . . .” (The Chinese Farmer, Kipling, Marcus Aurelius, and You) Understanding what you want and why you want it is one secret to happiness. The other secret to happiness is television, according to this show I watched on television.

There are things we want that we shouldn’t, like sixteen bacon cheeseburgers, which is what I’d really like to eat tonight (Resolutions, Fasting, and Wilder’s Cult of the Blue Bikini). What attracts you to ______? Right now, my fill-in-the-blank is cheeseburgers. But I’ve seen people who are like sorority girls on a Tuesday night tub of frosting over something that’s obviously bad for them. Why? It’s because we think that _______ fills us up in some way where we’re empty. If you’re lucky, that fill-in-the-blank is something innocuous like fly fishing. If you’re not lucky, it’s something dangerous and life threatening, like ballroom dancing.

What if it’s you? I think these are the last words anyone wants to hear. The human brain is set up to produce a protective reality distortion field (it’s called the Romney Effect) that automatically changes the past to make itself blameless. Only real, unbiased thinking about the situation will allow working on the root cause, instead of the symptom. Sometimes you need a friend or a spouse to slap you right across the face with the fresh fish of reality.

What would you do if you had one month to live? Less mindless crap*, I’d bet.

What would you do if you lived forever? Would you sell insurance? Really? If you had infinite days you’d sell insurance? Okay.

Weirdo.

So, we know what Elon would do if he lived forever.

Why does the outcome matter? I know that sounds weird. But the ultimate outcome of our game is the same for each of us. We can postpone it. We can have different twists and turns, but the end of the journey is the same destination. And that destination is, of course, Minot, North Dakota. But since the outcome is a foregone conclusion, why not focus on the important thing – how we play the game? Every day there are choices between being virtuous and being, well, evil. Making the virtuous choice doesn’t make sure you’ll be wealthy, or famous, or successful – life doesn’t work like that. But it does make you virtuous, and I hear there are extra karma points for virtue that you can exchange in Heaven for extra minutes in the ball pit.

What if you did the opposite? Look back at your past – how many of your decisions mattered? How many things would have changed if you’d have picked differently. Many of the things we sweat and worry about simply don’t matter at all.

What would make it better? Cheese. And bacon. Those are universal constants – cheese and bacon make everything better.

Maybe we can get the Cat Girls with bacon?

There are things we control, like the weather, and things we can’t control, like our weight. Or did I get those backwards? Anyway, that brings up the next question: If it’s outside of your control, why are you sweating it? How much of your life do you spend worrying about things that you have absolutely no control over?

What would you sell your peace of mind for? A long life, lived in fear and regret is sad, like one of those clowns that terrorizes my dreams.

Was it worth it to spend a precious day of your life like you did today? Every moment is one less moment of your life. What you do with those moments is up to you. I’d suggest that you pick the things that are important to you, and get busy. Or, you know, there’s television.

*This blog may be crap, but it is not mindless. Or was it that it IS mindless, but NOT crap? I forget. Whichever one is better is the one I meant.