All You Will Ever Need To Read About How To Be Happy* (*Most of the Time)

“Happy premise number three:  even though I feel like I might ignite, I probably won’t.” – Bowfinger

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This is a common phrase when something goes wrong around Stately Wilder Mansion™.  After the cussing is over, I mean.

I’m travelling for business again this week.  The upside to business travel is that it allows me to break my normal routine.  I almost feel guilty.  Almost.  The work this week is light, and my travel has been fun, the food has been great, and the work I am doing has given me a lot of new ideas to think about, and I like that.  My toenails also seem to grow faster when I’m on the road but might be imagination.  Or, maybe it’s my feet shrinking?

The other advantage being on the road is that it breaks routines.  In this case, I found myself eating at the bar at Applechilies®.  Eating at the bar makes sense when you’re travelling alone:  it seems a bit less pathetic, and you can talk to the bartender if it’s not too busy on a Tuesday night by Interstate 3.14 in Upper Midwestia.  This night, the bartender was a young lady of about 22, I’m guessing.  We talked a bit.  As often happens to me when I meet a stranger, (I have no idea why) pretty soon she was pouring out her entire life story.  Seriously.

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For the record, as far as you know I only had one drink.

I’ll skip the really wild parts, since the point relevant to this post is that she had dropped out of college.

“That’s fine, and you shouldn’t go to college just to go to college.  What is it that you want to do, though?”  That question seemed to be really tough for her.  And it is a big question, but as I’ve noted again and again, people fail most often because they don’t act on their dreams, not because they can’t achieve them.

After some considerable thought, she answered.  “I guess . . . I guess I just want to be happy.”

“Happy?  Is that all?  Happy is the easiest thing,” I replied.

And it is.  Being happy is so easy to achieve it is almost trivial.  Note:  being happy every minute of every day is impossible.  Bad things happen.  Professors put your computer program up on the screen to show what not to do.  Your pants split at the crotch during a presentation.  You walk into a glass door going to a party with people you just met and you get McDonald’s® Hot Mustard© sauce all over the door in a big yellow blob about chest high.  Oh, did I say you?  Those were all me.  And the computer program did do what I intended it to do, though I was surprised it did bring down a mainframe.  I guess infinite loops are powerful things.

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Remember, no matter what they say, failure is an option.

Warning:  this advice probably won’t work for people who are clinically depressed because their brain chemistry is all messed up.  That’s wiring that this advice probably won’t fix – they need to see a doctor.

But I learned to be happy when I was relatively young.  It’s wickedly effective.  As an example, one company I was working for was experiencing huge financial difficulties.  Everyone was working to make sure the business stayed open.  I was, too, but I wasn’t letting it get me down.  I had a new son (The Boy) and was pretty happy at home even though the bank account wasn’t all that full.

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Yes, this was on my performance review.  “Employee is too optimistic and believes that the business will ultimately succeed if we work hard and solve our problems.”

In my performance review I was docked for being too happy.  Apparently being angry and pissed off increases profitability?  Spoiler, the company survived.  Bonus points?  It’s at least partially due to some changes I made – while I was in a good mood.  I don’t know if they still have the “don’t be happy at work” policy.

But being happy is simple.  In order (more or less) here’s what works for me.

  • Be close to someone – like physically close. Touching them close.  Or get a pet.  It’s hard for me to have a bad day when I know that someone loves me.  People are herd animals (those that aren’t bears) and physical touch works wonders at making people happy.  No sex with the pets, no matter how much they’re asking for it.
  • Have a friend you can call when something good happens to you. For bonus points, have a friend you can call when something awful happens to you – that’s rough, because only a good friend is willing to share in the bad things that happen.  If you don’t have friends?  Make some.  I know that some people say that Jesus’ biggest miracle was having a dozen close friends after the age of 30, but it is possible.  And these need to be friends in real life.  FaceBook® friends are nice, but it helps to have physically known the friend for the friendship to be solid.
  • Exercise. Do something:  Walk on the treadmill.  Go for a run.  Lift weights.  Run through a cave being chased by a giant stone bowling ball.  I’m fairly fanatical about working out every lunch hour to the point I’m a jerk about not skipping it for (nearly) anything  – it really improves the quality of my day.   There are times I come back from working out and feel awesome and happy for no reason at all.  The harder I worked out, the better I feel.
  • Eat right. Avoid carbs – they screw with your emotions, especially in quantity.  Don’t eat too much.  Yes, I’m still fasting on a weekly basis, and some of my happiest days are while I’m fasting.  Besides vegans, who is sad when they’re eating a steak?  Eat steak.  If you’re a vegan, pretend it’s a bacon, since bacon comes from plants, right?  Meat may be murder, but it’s tasty murder that makes you feel good.  But I have learned if The Mrs. is eating ice cream straight from the carton to NOT ask how she’s doing.
  • If you are sad, don’t drink alcohol. It’s a depressant.  I refuse to drink on those rare days I’m sad.  It helps.  You can’t find happiness at the bottom of a beer bottle, because who’s happy when they run out of beer?
  • Get enough sleep. I advise people to sleep as consistently as possible, especially if they have problems getting to sleep.  If you can’t sleep consistent hours, at least get enough sleep even if it’s not the same sleep every night.  Since I blog after work, and often after everyone at home has gone to bed, this is the rule where I’m the biggest hypocrite.
  • As much as possible, avoid crappy people. Sure, everybody has a bad day and needs to share.  That’s okay.  But if you’re constantly complaining about bad news to your friends?  Expect that they won’t pick up when you call, so try to give more than you take.
  • As much as possible, feel good for other people that have done well. I worked with a guy who put up a bulletin board with stories about how much the CEO of our company made.  He called it the “Wall of Shame” since he didn’t think the CEO was worth that much.  Me?  I want the CEO to make a lot of money, that way my check looks smaller the rent for the place he rents for his mistress.
  • As much as possible, avoid envy. See above.  If something good happens to someone, feel genuine joy for them, even if it didn’t happen to you.  Envy is a wasted emotion.
  • As much as possible, when bad thoughts slip into your brain – sad ones, mean ones, anything Hillary Clinton would think – get them out. Think of something positive, like the fact that you don’t have to drink alone because your cats are alcoholics, or that you can be the person to put the “fun” back in funeral.
  • Keep things in perspective. Most things you do aren’t memorable to other people, and most mistakes you make will be forgotten in a week, unless you were the guy running the test at Chernobyl, then people just won’t shut up about it.

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But you could claim that you were late to work because of a flock of wild teacup poodles.

Scott Adams, of Dilbert® fame has a very similar list – I know because after I talked to the bartender and decided to write this post, he did a video on . . . being happy.  He’s in the video below discussing it.  Adams is much more of the “people are sacks of chemicals” and he uses that model to make sure that he’s maximizing the brain chemicals that show up when you’re happy.  It works for him and he does it without ever attempting to control his thoughts.  But if you are someone who drains him of happy because you’re a complete tool?  He’ll cut you out of his life.  Since he’s a multi-millionaire and more-or-less self-employed, he can do it.

Me?  If Ted is a tool at work and I need the job?  I have to deal with Ted.  Though, honestly I’ve only ever worked with one guy named Ted, and he was super to work with and one of the nicest people I’ve ever met.  Unlike Scott, I don’t go for the “sacks of chemicals” theory.  They do make a difference, but mind matters, too, at least for me.  The one time in my life I was profoundly unhappy, I learned to manage my mind first, while finding all the other little tips and tricks of “sacks of chemicals” management more or less independently of Mr. Adams.

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I think this was from the pilot of that new series, Breaking Bras®.  And you can’t make a mask like that without silicone . . . .

And that’s it.  Those are the secrets.  Nothing mystical, nothing difficult.

Again, I’m not happy every second of every day, but when I follow just over half the steps above, I’m happy 95% of the day.  I have it good.  There’s no reason to not enjoy being me.

For 80% of people reading this, happiness is easy.  So, choose happiness if you want it, unless there’s a workplace policy at your office, too.  In that case?  Become a loner, drunk, vegan insomniac that spends your free time at Antifa® meetings.  And have another doughnut.

Scholarships to Avoid, and . . . College Isn’t the Best Idea for Everyone

“Now if Eb needs a diploma, he should go to college so he can become a vegetarian.” – Green Acres

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Please, calm down.  Show me where Bernie tried to touch you.

The Mrs. and I were off to Midwestia State (Home of the Fighting Red-Crested Yaks©) on Saturday to move The Boy into the dorms.  The reality is that he had left hours before us and was unpacked by the time we got there and had already managed to flirt with the girl working the dorm desk and lock himself out of his own room for the first time.  I saw the look in the eyes of dorm desk girl – “cute, but still a dorky freshman who locks himself out of his room two hours after getting a key.”

I was actually shocked they still had keys – I was expecting that they’d be subjected to retinal checks to get back in their rooms.  Until I heard that the floor had a shared bathroom.  A co-ed shared bathroom.  Imagine being in the midst of a growler when the girl of your dreams drops on by to leave the kids off at the pool?  I’ve been married forever, and I like to pretend that’s not something The Mrs. does – at all.

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I was surprised.  I was unaware that the diet of Deadpool® was entirely comprised of burning tires.

The Mrs. and I were there, really, for The Mrs. and not The Boy at all.

When The Mrs. had talked about The Boy moving away, it had started off with a matter-of-fact statement about “. . . when we drop him off at college.”

I had responded with, “Why would we need to go up there to drop him off?  He seems to be perfectly capable of carrying a few boxes to an elevator.  It’s not like we’re dropping off Stephen Hawking.”  This was, apparently, not the thing to say to a mother getting mentally ready to cope with her eldest son going off to college.  It doesn’t help that The Mrs. is also staring down the added mathematical certainty that her youngest child, Pugsley, will likewise be moving out within a handful of years.

She responded with:  “Of course we’re going.”

If you can put “icy” into a tone, this one was nearly at absolute zero.  I saw the molecules in her exhaled breath stop vibrating as they fell to the carpet and form a nice Ice-9 frost (look it up).  I could see that we’d be driving the hours required to get to Midwestia State (Home of the Whimsical Crotch Goblins®) the day the dorms opened.

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When I met Stephen Hawking, he told me that there are an infinite number of universes out there, and maybe even one where I was funny.  I responded, “Here’s a great joke:  Stephen Hawking walked into a bar.”  That one really made him mad.  Now I have to live in this Universe, where Kardashians aren’t fast food workers.

I can understand how The Mrs. felt.  It’s almost always a melancholy time when a child moves out, unless that child is Johnny Depp, in which case his parents were happy to be able to announce to their friends that their house was now aerobics-free as Johnny was now doing Pilates of the Caribbean.  I’m sorry.  I’ll admit that there were uneasy questions floating through my mind.  I thought the questions were about him, but in reality after reflecting, I realized the questions were really about me:

I thought the questions were:  “Is he ready?  Does he have the tools to go out into the world?  Will he make the right judgements?”

It sounds like those questions were about him, but they’re not.  Those questions are really about me.  A more truthful way to write them is:  “Did I prepare him?  Did I teach him enough so that he’ll be competent and safe?  Is he a good man?”

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The only thing I’m sad about is that he thinks steak tastes like chicken.

I think college is a good idea for The Boy, and I’ll get back to his specifics a bit later after Morpheus is done with him.

But I don’t think college is for everyone, and I think it’s really a horrible idea for some people.  I learned this from my association with a youth group.  I was discussing the future with one young, bright kid – he was a junior at the time, I think.  I asked him what his plans were.

“I’m going to become an electrical lineman.”  An electrical lineman is the guy who fixes the big wires on the electrical poles so you can charge your iPad© and watch Netflix® – it’s like a superhero who can chew Copenhagen®.  It’s technical work – you have to be smart.  It’s physical.  And most line failures happen during big storms.  So when your power goes out for an hour?  It’s a lineman who’s out fixing it in the rain or snow or ice or thunderstorm or temporal rift.

I stopped.  I was getting ready to give him my “you need to go to college” speech, but hesitated.  This young man had thought about it.  He loved being outside.  He hated paperwork.  He was very smart.  The average hourly wage for an electrical lineman is $30 an hour for a journeyman.  With overtime, he could be making $100,000+ a year in just a few years and live in an area near Modern Mayberry where most of the nicest houses are available for $200,000 or less.

It was a shockingly (intended) good choice.

Being an electrical lineman also offered some other benefits:  it’s not a career that you can do online.  You have to physically be there.  This is nice, so you don’t have to compete with a two billion or so people in China and India like you might if you were being a computer programmer.

This job has another advantage – it requires just enough certification that it shuts down people who would randomly try it, mainly because no matter how crispy the body is electrical companies hate to pay to have them removed.  But the young man in question wouldn’t have to compete with illegal aliens, either.

Being a lineman has a third advantage:  it is a basic service that you can’t outsource.  You can ship a factory nearly completely overseas – I’ve heard of just this happening – but the electrical infrastructure required to run the United States has to be in, well, the United States.

One final advantage:  you can start your own company, buy your own truck, and work the hours you want as a contractor to bigger electrical companies.  It’s a business where if you want to be a contractor or an entrepreneur, you can be without too much difficulty investment.

The nice thing about working with kids is they often teach you things, too.  The standard advice you give a bright kid with good values is go to college.  This is clearly the wrong advice for many kids.

A kid growing up today will face more challenges in employment than any generation in history.   Competition will take place in ways that I never had to consider during my career.  And this is after automation removed thousands of jobs from factories as machines replaced skilled workers.  In this new revolution, expertise from “knowledge workers” will be replaced by algorithms and databases that allow, for instance, computers to diagnose skin cancer at a 95% correct rate, versus an 87% success rate by actual human dermatologists.  I know it sounds bad for the human dermatologists, but I got a 0% correct rate since all I would do is look at the picture and say, “ewww, gross.”  Let’s see a machine beat that.

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Okay, maybe I shouldn’t be a doctor.

I’m not sure that there is, in the future, a truly safe job or career to go into, unless we experience Lord Bison’s Deep Fried Econopocalypse® (and if you’re not reading The Bison Prepper, you really should be (LINK)) and then the guy who makes costumes out of leather and football shoulder pads has probably got a good career ahead of him.   Owning a scrapbooking store?  Maybe not so much.

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Okay, I was going for Mad Max Mel, but this works.  I hear they worked out their differences and went to Hooters® afterwards.  Man, Jesus can put down the wings and Coors Light©.

What are the attributes of a safe job?  I mean, assuming Mel Gibson doesn’t show up at your house tomorrow?

  • Local – If you can’t do it over the Internet, that cuts out billions of people from getting that job.
  • Certifications Required – A job, like the lineman example, isn’t something that should be done by just anyone – it requires a minimum intellect as well as training and experience. Many medical jobs are similar.  I hate the way that we have, in my opinion, over-certified our world.  But you can use that to your advantage.
  • Other Bars to Entry – It used to be that you could give applicants for jobs an IQ test, weed out those that weren’t smart enough, and be fairly sure that you were getting someone who was at least smart enough (or not too smart) for the job. Now?  You have to use something that works like an IQ test, like a college degree.
  • Hard to For A Machine to Do – Blogging.   That’s hard for machines, right fellow humans?  I have been told that 93.2% of you like to hear that.

But there are ways that even “safe” jobs might be at risk:

  • Carpenter: Carpentry, in many cases, requires no certification – any illegal aliens have taken many of these jobs in certain areas.
  • Teacher: Why do we need all of these teachers?  We can get a YouTube® lecture up, and have a teaching assistant give the standardized test.
  • Store Associate:   Check out the product features on the Internet – seriously stop.  You’re not my supervisor.  Leave me alone!
  • Checkout Clerk: Self-service checkouts are pretty common now.  I refuse to use them, period, but I can see that I’m rapidly becoming a minority.
  • Johnny Depp’s Sinus Cavity Cleaner: Okay, this one is really a safe job.

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Okay, I’ll admit, she’d be perfectly acceptable working picking strawberries or in some sort of insect control responsibility. 

But there are other problems.  I maintain that too many people go to college.  In 1959, only about 45% of high school graduates went to college, and only 70% of students graduated from high school.  That’s a little less than a third of the US population.

In 2016, 84% graduated from high school, and 70% of those went to college.  That’s nearly 60%.  If you break down the math, almost twice as many people are going to college as a percentage of people in the United States.  There are only two possible conclusions:  either people have gotten smarter, or college has gotten easier.

Me?  I’m betting that college has gotten easier, since if you poke around a bit you can find that the average grade given to students at Harvard© is an A-.  It might just be my opinion, but the only thing competitive about Harvard® might be how much a parent has to pay to get a student accepted.

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See, if you build a new building on campus – not a bribe – call it Skank Hoe Hall.  But having your skank daughters get in because you’ve bribed a coach?  Yeah, that’s a bribe. Allegedly.

I’m pretty sure that the economy has no need of many of these college graduates in any role other than cashiers at Billy Bob’s Wiggle Striptease Hootenanny©.  Many of the degrees granted are not really economically valuable – 5% of degrees, for instance, are in “fine or performing arts.”  Last time I checked, we here in Modern Mayberry had our quota of mimes filled at our historical demand of zero mimes and there was a bounty on any mime caught within 5000 yards (3 meters) of the county courthouse.  There just aren’t very many jobs available in “fine or performing arts” to justify 5% of college students getting a degree in that field.  Thankfully, many of them have experience in their true field, food service.  I hear that Florida will have a degree in Pre-Barista© next year, so there’s hope yet.

One thing I did note in the hour I spent sifting through the data is that many degrees are more helpful, and, potentially more stable.  Health and medical sciences accounted for 10% of graduates, and those jobs are hard to replace with a machine.  You have to have people helping people.  Robots can diagnose, but at least for now, a doctor has to do the cutting, and a nurse the nursing, until Arnold Schwarzendoctor 2000™ arrives.

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That’s a realllllllly long thumb.

I would speculate that we have twice as many people going to college as necessary, and we could replace the expense and time wasted at college for many people simply by allowing employers to give IQ tests.  Yes, doctors and nurses need school.  But we have approximately 1,000,000% more anthropology degrees than required to maintain our civilization, and an infinite amount of Women’s Gender Studies degree recipients than required.

I advised The Boy on how he could take what he enjoys doing, and turn it into something useful.  Don’t compete with billions of people – find ways that you can provide higher value services to people in ways that have to be local and are hard to reproduce.  I think he has a pretty good plan.

Given the accelerating pace of change we’ve seen in the last two decades, I imagine that anyone starting a career in 2020 may have to make multiple changes during their life.  From what I’ve seen so far, I think The Boy is well prepared for school and the changes that he’ll see in life.  I think he’ll do fine.  It’s time to let that eagle fly.

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Unless it’s Putin’s Eagle.

Only 3% of Your Decisions Matter, or, Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There!

“We’re very lucky in the band in that we have two visionaries, David and Nigel.  They’re like poets, like Shelley and Byron.  They’re two distinct types of visionaries, it’s like fire and ice, basically.  I feel my role in the band is to be somewhere in the middle of that, kind of like lukewarm water.” – This is Spinal Tap

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Oh, I don’t need alcohol to make bad decisions.  But it doesn’t hurt.  Just ask Tiger Woods.

Life is filled with events.  Some of them are predictable, some not.  But I generally break the events that will influence the course of my life into three categories because I’m sitting in a meeting and it kind of looks like I’m actually working when I take blog notes:

  1. Certainties

Certainties are just as shown on the label – things that are certain to happen.  These are one extreme of the spectrum, for instance unless a race of aliens is intent on destroying humanity so that Bono™ doesn’t escape the Earth and infect the galaxy and drops a Moon-size batch of anti-matter into the Sun causing a solar flare that extinguishes life, the Sun will come up tomorrow.  Notice I didn’t say that the race of aliens was evil, in fact it seems entirely logical and rational and a good choice – Bono© as a trade for the rest of humanity.  Other examples of certainty:

  • Death.
  • Taxes.
  • Someone saying “Death and Taxes” when they write about certainties (at least every year since Christopher Bullock first wrote the phrase in 1716 in Ye Olde Bloge Poste on the Worlde Wilde Web).
  • Gravity.  Like Bono®, it also sucks.
  • Celebrities flying in private jets to protest global warming.
  1. Impossibilities

Impossibilities are things that cannot happen in this Universe.  Okay, it’s not a creative title, like calling your dog “dog” and your cat “cat” – and we both know people who have done just that.

The number of things that I thought were impossible were nearly zero when I was under age five or so.  Starships were only 20 years in the future.  I would own a tank.  And I’d marry Miss Roberts, my first grade teacher.  About the time I went to high school, the number of Impossible things started to climb.  I think this happens when you start experiencing disappointments in life, like the Space Shuttle.  I mean, why did humanity spend so much time trying to get to space with a ship that had the glide ratio of a brick?

I think my Impossibles peaked in my thirties.  After a divorce and NOT winning a MacArthur© Grant for my incredible ability to sleep on the couch while the kids watched Saturday morning cartoons, my view of what was possible shrank.  But as I grew older, I kept seeing the same pattern – if people tried things, they often achieved them.  There are, however, things that are really Impossible.  What are some Impossible things?

  • A Beatles® reunion.   A living Beatles™ reunion.
  • The molecules of Leonardo Dicaprio spontaneously rearranging themselves to form something useful, like a ham sandwich or a beer.
  • A good, new Star Wars® movie will be made during my lifetime.

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Is it me, or have John and George lost weight?

I think one of the really neat things about being human is the curiosity and creativity that allows us to think of things that could never, ever happen, like Johnny Depp learning to read.  It’s a great day to be alive!

 

  1. Things That Might Happen

Most things in life are neither Certain nor Impossible.  They fall into that grey area of possibility that makes life interesting.  I find it fascinating that so much of life consists of these contrasts – in between the chaos of fire Venus and the stasis of icy Mars lies, well, us.  The other day I heard an astronomer state if you take average star weight and the weight of an atom, you end up at about 50 kilograms©, whatever that is.  But the average human weighs . . . 62 kilograms®.  It’s almost like this place was made for us.

Hmmm.

Anyway, while not everything interesting happens in the middle, most interesting things happen in the middle.  But, in the interest of continuing to subcategorize, I see two types of events in that sweet middle region:

A.  Events You Can’t Influence

Sometimes, whatever’s going to happen is beyond your control.  Despite what you want or any action you might take, the outcome will be the same.  You can’t change a thing.  Call it fate.  It’s not certain that the event will happen, mind you, it’s just that you can’t control it.  Some examples are:

  • How much Oprah will weigh tomorrow morning.
  • Collapse of the global financial system.
  • Whether Ilhan Omar will join the Hair Club for Men.

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Baldness – I hear it’s more common if your family interbreeds too often . . . oh.  Sorry. H/T WRSA (LINK).

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So, this is a record – my first back-to-back meme.  Is that not MacArthur Grant® worthy?

B.  Things you can influence or control

Here is where it gets interesting.  In my option (and in my experience) most people can control more about their lives than they want to admit.  Personally, it’s scary how many things that I’ve tried to do in my life that I’ve accomplished, which makes me wonder if I haven’t aimed too low.  I’ve recently changed one of my goals to be horribly unrealistic (learn how to make a tasty pizza, or at least buy a tasty pizza) so I’ll keep you updated on the progress on that stretch goal.

But what sorts of things can you control?

  • Your weight.
  • If you shower.
  • If you smoke.
  • Your psychic power to make Taylor Swift love you using only your mind.
  • If you go broke.

Now, I didn’t say you have total control of your life, but some actions you take (not decisions you make, mind you, but actions that you take) can influence most things about your life, including how you die and when you die.

But even as beautifully written as the preceding was, it’s not the where the post is going to end up.  The point I’m getting to is, how many events that occur in your life, choices that you make, should you really worry about.

I’m thinking about 3% or less.

From my vantage point, most things don’t matter.  Examples?

  • Yellow or blue Post-It™ notes?
  • Romaine or iceberg lettuce?
  • Tom Brady’s 2015 clone or Tom Brady’s 2018 clone.

Most decisions that you make simply do not matter at all.  My personal difficulty is that I sometimes don’t process a decision like that.  I want to make the right decision so I’ll spend time researching and learning online about a purchase I’m going to make . . . of something I’ll use exactly once and then toss into a closet.  Heck, as an example tonight I’ve spent about half an hour trying to decide between one type of laptop and another.  Does it matter?

Probably not.

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What I did with the flowchart was just start with a random decision or event.  Does it matter?  I pulled out Pareto’s rule, and off the bat, 80% of decisions in your life . . . don’t matter at all.  Paper or plastic.  .556 or .762.  Drilling a hole in your head or spending time with five year old children.

That means that 20% of the events matter.  Cool.  How many can your actions influence?  I’m betting 80% of that 20%.  That’s a huge number and from my experience it seems about right.  You’re rarely a complete victim.  That’s 16% left.

Is it the effort worth it.  I came up with . . . 80% of the time, no.  The time and effort to manage every event, even just 16% of them, is a lot.  You have to let some things go, since even if it matters, it’s not worth your time to influence everything around you.

The math is simple.  97% of decisions in life you should make with either no care or minor care.  They just don’t matter.  The good news is that means if you manage and select the decision you make, you can live, more or less, the life you want by only dealing with 3%.

Why?  I find that things we think are important, that society tells us are important decisions or important actions are not.  Here’s what I’ve found:

  • We bought Stately Wilder Manor© about a decade ago. The Mrs. was living in Houston, and the house that we’d fallen in love with had cheated on us and was purchased by two doctors.  I was working outside of Houston, but we still needed a place to live, because we were going to move.  I kept looking.  I found a house.  Given that (then) the market was hot, I put in an offer.  The Mrs. had never even seen the house until the day we moved in.

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How do you get the dead hooker smell out of carpet?  Asking for a friend.

  • The last care I bought was a replacement for The Mrs.’ MUV (Mrs. Utility Vehicle). I was passing through a large city in Midwestia, stopped off at a car lot, and bought a car.  They delivered it to Modern Mayberry the next day.  Again, The Mrs. hadn’t driven or seen the new car.

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Okay, it’s not that bad.  But while The Boy was driving it some woodland critter ran straight into the side of it.  The dent does not look hooker related.

Within relatively broad parameters, most decisions, even decisions that society says are “big” decisions, don’t matter.  Which house we got didn’t matter all that much, we just needed a house.  Admittedly we are horrible neighbors, so it’s best if there are no pesky homeowner associations.

And I wasn’t like that on the first house I bought.  We must have seen dozens of houses over months until we found . . . the one.  The first car I bought, I agonized over the decision.  Until I found . . . the one.

Strangely, I didn’t spend nearly enough time selecting my first wife she who will not be named and that had a much larger impact than any house or car ever could to my life.  There’s a joke in here about test driving and rentals, but I’m just gonna skip it.

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It’s all the aftermarket add-ons that get you.

The point is not that I was young and stupid, although I really was young and stupid.

The point is:  Don’t worry.  Plan?  Sure.  Prepare?  Absolutely.  But like Pop Wilder always said, “Don’t pay interest on money you haven’t borrowed yet, son.”

97% of actions you take . . . don’t matter.  Don’t sweat them.  And don’t spend a second worrying about things you can’t change or influence.

But on those things you can?  Strike hard, like the fist of an angry god.  Never give up.  You can move mountains that way.  Feel motivated?  Good!

Now go out and get it done!  Oh, it’s Friday?

Kick back and get it done Monday.

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Okay, I did once upon a time pretend my toy Thompson submachine gun was a phaser®.  Once.

Defeating My Biggest Enemy: Me, Complete with Hairy Kardashians and Video Games.

“I noticed earlier the hyperdrive motivator has been damaged.   It’s impossible to go to lightspeed!” – The Empire Strikes Back™

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Nah, I got an A.  Got a perfect score on the final, plus I got to watch C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate during winter break.

Ever think you could accomplish more?  You can.  Read on.  It’s okay, I’m a trained professional.

When I was in college I took a course called Probability and Statistics, or as we referred to it at the time, Sadistics.  During one lecture the instructor told the class a story about how a graduate student working on his Ph.D. was late to a class – so late that he’d missed the start of the lecture.  The student saw two math problems on the blackboard.  Thinking they were homework problems, he copied them down, and spent the weekend working on them.  They were a little harder than usual, but he managed to finish them.

On Monday he returned to class, and showed the instructor his results. Turns out that the problems weren’t homework:  these were two unproven theorems in statistics; unproven theorems that George Dantzig (the student) finished because he had no idea that they were too hard for him to do.

In Dantzig’s own words:

“A year later, when I began to worry about a thesis topic, [his teacher] just shrugged and told me to wrap the two problems up in a binder and he would accept them as my thesis.”

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At least he didn’t have to shag the professor, baby.

That’s a pretty good story, especially because it’s true and a great example of how much you can achieve when you’re too stupid to know that what you’re doing is impossible.  It’s also a very good story to tell the boss the next time you’re late for a meeting at work, because his reaction will likely allow you time for independent exploration of all the employment opportunities this great nation has to offer.

So how do people sabotage themselves so they don’t achieve all that they could?  How do they turn themselves into their own worst enemy?  Today I’ll present three reasons.  There are more, but what do I look like, a budget Tony Robbins?

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I was wondering why that seminar only cost $14.98.

  • I think the worst is negative inner dialogue.

Ever make a mistake?  Ever beat yourself up about it?  Yeah, me too.  But what I noticed is that when I beat myself up, I used to say things to myself that were meaner than any person had ever said to me in real life.  Notice I said “used to” – I simply don’t put up with it any more.  When I sense that inner beat down coming, I just shut it down.

If your best friend who has your best interests at heart wouldn’t say it to you, why would you say it to yourself?

Recently I read about a research study that indicated that you had more impact when motivating yourself if you encouraged yourself in the third person.  Saying to yourself, “You’ve got this, John,” is much more powerful than, “I can do this.”  Why?  I have my guesses – it’s probably that you don’t want to fail when you’ve got some other person involved, so you dig that much deeper.

If that’s the case, how much more damaging is beating yourself up verbally in the third person?  “I’m stupid,” versus “you’re stupid.”  Think about it – and I advise you not to put up with your nonsense.  Shut it down.

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Yes, this happened.

Negative inner dialogue doesn’t help me, especially since whatever mistake I made was generally not even noticed by others.  I hate to break this to you, but outside of your family, you’re less important than you think.  People don’t notice the things you do all that much, and if they do?  They don’t remember.

That may seem like a downer, but it’s really the opposite.  It’s freedom, and another reason not to beat yourself up.

  • Next on the list? Belief that your goal is impossible.

Well, it isn’t possible, until you actually do it.  Nobody had solved Dantzig’s theorems until he solved them.  Heck, the Kardashians are too dumb to know they shouldn’t have hundreds of millions of dollars despite an utter lack anything resembling talent or a redeeming feature.  Oh, unless you count their copious amounts of body hair.  And I wouldn’t advise that you count their body hair, since that would take far too long.  Plus?  You’d get Kardashian grease all over you.

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This is right before the hair covers them entirely in a protective cocoon so they can become giant genderless moth people.

I’ll note that nearly every time I was given an assignment that seemed impossible at work, I managed to crack the problem.  What was off was my definition of impossible.  I eventually ended up working for a boss that pushed me even farther.  Nine times out of ten, he gambled and won.  The tenth time?  They fired him.  Don’t feel bad for him – his severance package was about $2 million.

  • Finally, there’s not giving it all you’ve got.

This one is insidious.  Here’s my example:  in my career (the one that pays the bills, not this one) I’ve accomplished most things that I’ve ever wanted to do and have a whole batch of odd stories that I’ll maybe get around to telling someday.  Does this mean that I aimed too low, that I didn’t push hard enough?  Nah, I don’t think so.  I’ve seen what some of the people at the top had to do to get there, and I like sleeping well.

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It’s tough at the top.  Everything is a tradeoff.

But here I can push myself, and sleep well.  So, I write.  I give that all that I’ve got, especially once I understood that I’d never get better unless I really pushed myself.  And I can see results.  I had a post that related to one I’d written back in 2017 that I was thinking of linking to.  I pulled up the old post.  I read it.

What made me happiest about the old post is:  I’m better now than I was in 2017 – a lot better.  How much better will I be if I keep pushing it, keep focusing on it for 20 hours a week for another decade?  I have no idea.  But we’ll see.

But I had my own George Dantzig moment before I ever heard his story:

I was in high school and a friend came over to my place.  He and I sat down to play some video games, since we didn’t have a car.  He went first.  Normally on my first guy I’d score 10,000 or so.  But my friend scored 50,000.  I was amazed – I had no idea it was possible.  So, my first guy up?  50,000 points.  This was my best score ever.

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I know – it looks exactly like a scene from The Empire Strikes Back©.  But, trust me, this is really a video game.

What had been missing was belief.  Seeing my friend play with no higher a skill level than I had do five times better than my best ever score flipped a switch.  I believed.  I could perform better than I ever thought possible.

But right now, it’s time:

Time to believe in yourself.  Time to believe that your goal is possible.  Time to work harder.

Go on, you’ve got this.

Stonewall Jackson, Patton, Wrecked Cars and Dealing with Fear

“Yes, well, I imagine if it were fear, my eyes would be wider.” – Serenity

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Sadly, I’m a Sagittarius and my name’s not Morris or this could have been comedy gold.

I had a Ford® Taurus©.  Yes, that’s an admission of guilt.  Even worse?  It was a pale-lime green.  I imagine someone in marketing called the color “seafoam”, but if the sea has foam that color, it’s probably in a congealed blob off the coast of China and consists of anti-freeze, extra kidneys, and despair.  After 150,000 miles the Taurus© died on impact with a pickup whose driver decided stop signs were optional on Tuesdays.  But the other driver made up for wrecking my car by not having insurance, so there was that benefit.

As I recall, there were three buttons on the dash of the Taurus® to program the display.  Since I am a man, reading the manual was out of the question.  The display had the option to show various things – it had a compass mode, a thermometer, and a countdown timer to show the number of days until Obama left office.  I only knew it had a compass mode because when I bought it (used) it had the compass on.  After I changed the battery, it reverted back to the “Only this many days until Obama is gone” mode.

I wanted it to show the thermometer.

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Clearly it never gets hot in summer, so it must be global warming.

I had no idea how to change modes – since the manual was only two feet away in the glove compartment, it might as well have been in Mongolia, and not the easy to reach parts of Mongolia.  I reached my hand out to start mashing the buttons with all of the skill of a baboon wearing a pink tutu attempting to clear a paper jam while making double-sided color copies at Kinkos®.  I hesitated.  What if I ended up turning the car’s language into French?  Would I have to wear a beret and learn to smoke cigarettes while being nihilistic?

Then I started to panic.  Being French was awful, but what would happen if I accidently turned the car’s units into metric?  I don’t even know how to drink in metric.  Is sixteen a lot of kilometers of beer to drink?  How many metric days until Christmas?  How many milliliters of cheeseburger do I order at Sonic®?  Perish the thought of being French and metric.  That’s how we got Canada, after all.  Sure, the Canadians look like us, but that’s how they infiltrate.

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Sure, they look polite.  But just try to dissect one to see if it’s an alien from outer space and they get darn grumpy.

The thought then hit me – I’ve spent literally my entire life tearing stuff apart to see what was inside, and then trying to put it back together.  That’s been my mode since, much to Pa Wilder’s dismay, I discovered screwdrivers.  If I wasn’t tearing stuff apart, I was experimenting in other ways.  Sometimes the result wasn’t that great, like the time in fifth grade when I took a letter opener and put it across both prongs of an electrical plug.

An electrical plug that was plugged into the wall.

Oops.

Immediately there was a big spark, smoke, the smell of ozone, splattering molten metal, and then complete darkness in my room.  I knew where the breakers were, and went to flip mine back on.  I’m pretty sure Ma Wilder smelled the ozone, but didn’t say anything since my bedroom wasn’t actively on fire.

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I’ve done stupider things.  Some of them even when I was sober.

So, there I was sitting in my car.  Once I was brave enough to slam a letter opener between into an active electrical circuit, and now I was hesitant to push some buttons.

What?  I came to my senses.  It’s just a car.

I pushed buttons, didn’t turn French, and even better, just like the Apollo program, I avoided having to use the metric system entirely.  And I got rid of the hesitation.

What led to the hesitation?

Fear.  It’ll creep up on you, first in small ways, and then in large if you don’t fight it every time it shows up.

General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson said, “Never take counsel of your fears.”  And Jackson didn’t – he even got his nickname by being famously fearless at Bull Run when he rushed his troops to fill a gap in the line.  “Look, men, there is Jackson standing like a stone wall!”  Not a bad way to get a nickname.

Stonewall understood that fear was his most potent enemy.  Well, fear and that musket ball his own troops accidently shot him with.

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For the record, he didn’t ever have a microbrew or a nonfat anything. 

So, why is fear so bad?  What’s wrong with a little fear?

That’s simple:  fear is at the root of every significant problem in the world.  Period.  I understand that’s a pretty bold statement.  Can I back it up?  Sure.

Let’s take envy.  It’s at the root of lots of bad things, like Leftism which is almost entirely based on envy.  What causes envy?

Insecurity.  Think Elon Musk feels envy?  Probably not, and I could name a dozens of people who don’t feel envy.  They’re not envious because they’re not insecure.  They don’t feel uncertainty, anxiety, or self-doubt.  All of these emotions are based in fear and lead to envy.

That’s the same with every other negative emotion – anger, shame, et cetera.  It’s just another face of fear.  And evil things come from evil emotion (and Disney®), not from rational calculation.

Frank Herbert got it right, writing about a rite in his novel Dune:

“I must not fear.  Fear is the mind-killer.  Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.  I will face my fear.  I will permit it to pass over me and through me.  And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.  Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.  Only I will remain.”

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If Dune® had sandcatworms, would the spice be in the hairballs?

Okay, Herbert is a bit flowery.  But the concept is right.  Fear robs you, decision by decision, of your entire life.  And fear is used to manipulate you.  Today I was reading Google® News™ and counted 38 major stories on the main page.  Here’s my analysis:

  • 3 of the stories were mildly amusing or interesting.
  • 2 of them were potentially useful to me – they were stories I could use to make myself better, depending upon my situation.
  • 8 were useful only to manipulate and titillate readers through fear.
  • 25 were utterly useless.

I read the amusing stories.  I read one of the useful stories – the other didn’t apply right at the moment.  I’ll admit, I got caught and read one or two of the useless stories.  I skipped the fear manipulation stories.  Fear is a tool that can be used against you, but only if it makes you forget your values.  There should be no news, no story that can make you waiver from your values.

What’s the cure for fear?

Action.  Press the button.  Ask the girl out.  Lift the weight.  Press the button in your car.  Successful or not, you will have overcome your fear.  You will be stronger.  You will have less fear the next time – the only way to escape your fear, is to go through your fear.  And fighting fears when they’re small (like resetting a car dashboard) is easier than waiting until they grow to the size where they eat away your life like vintage Elvis© on a peanut butter and bacon cheeseburger.

Is fear useless?  No.  Fear can be used.  Fear should be used.

General George S. Patton, riffing off of Stonewall, said:

“The time to take counsel of your fears is before you make an important battle decision. That’s the time to listen to every fear you can imagine. When you have collected all the facts and fears and made your decision, turn off all your fears and go ahead.”

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Fun fact:  General Patton is tired of your whiney crap.

So, maybe Patton is saying I shouldn’t fear the metric French, but maybe I should stop the whole “turning a letter opener into a bedroom arc welder” because, in the words of Robert A. Heinlein:

“Stupidity cannot be cured. Stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death. There is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.”

The Lie of Living Your Best Life (now including cookies)

“Smoking marijuana, eating Cheetos® and masturbating does not constitute plans in my book.” – Breaking Bad

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In a constantly downward spiral, Kermit finally found the downside in living his best life.

A few weeks ago my daughter, Alia S. Wilder was in town.  We were in the middle of preparing dinner of steak, steak, and more steak for the grill when I saw Alia diving face first into a plate of cookies.

When she came up for air I asked innocently, “I thought you were on the keto diet?”

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I did notice a mood change when I was on the keto diet:  I got tired of cheese and my only joy in life consisted of watching television shows about murder.

“No, she said, “I’m living my best life.”  I could even hear the italics in her voice.  It’s amazing how well font choice carries in my kitchen.  I think it’s the tile.

John Wilder:  “Umm, what exactly does ‘my best life’ mean?”  I thought I could tell by context, but I wanted to give her a chance to explain.

Alia S. Wilder:  “It’s living your life by being who you are naturally.  It’s doing what you want.”

I slowly shook my head.  That’s exactly what I thought it was.  Cue volcano erupting:

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One of the nice things about being a parent is that you can be honest with your children when they are being utterly foolish.  This was one of those times.

My first words were:  “You know this is going to go into the blog, right?”

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Is this why they hold the neighborhood block party when we leave for vacation?

I then started a tirade.  As this was the second time that I’d met her boyfriend, you’d think I’d hold back to give a good impression that I was a nice, genteel father who wears cardigan sweaters and puts on loafers and talks to hand puppets as if they were real.  You’d be wrong, and I tried the hand puppet thing, but one of my personalities thought it was creepy.  No, Mr. Rogers© wasn’t here that night.  I let loose with a full broadside worthy of Nelson’s fleet at Trafalgar.

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I was a horrible pirate captain.  They told me, “The cannon be ready,” and I responded “are.”

“You realize that’s the single stupidest piece of advice you’ve ever been given, right?”  I continued, not even having gotten warmed up yet.  “It’s the advice a teenager thinks up in the shower and then considers it a deep thought because, well they’re a teenager in middle school, and middle school age children are the single stupidest subspecies ever set loose on planet Earth.”  I paused for breath.  You need decent lung capacity if you’re going to go into full rage enhanced by spittle.

I continued.  “Why is it stupid?  Because people are awful.  You’re awful.  I’m awful.  We have to work each minute to NOT do what we’d like, because what we’d like to do, if left only to our own desires is . . . also awful.  You, me, every single one of us.”

I could feel the full rolling boil starting.

Living my best life is the strategy of a three year old that wants to eat an entire box of Oreos® at one sitting and then lie about it and blame the poodle.  Living my best life combines all of the worst ideas of abandoning duty, honor, and responsibility in only four words:  ‘living my best life.’  Oh, I decided not to work today.  I’m living my best life.  I decided that I would rather spend my money on avocado-flavored non-fat organic vaping juice rather than baby formula.  I’m living my best life.  I don’t care if I offended you, I have to speak my truth when living my best life.  Oh, I’m sorry Western Civilization, we can’t go back to the Moon and advance the human race to the stars because I’m busy shopping.  I’m living my best life.”

What came to my mind during this tirade conversation were the words of the dead French scientist, mathematician, religious philosopher and part-time Uber driver Blaise Pascal:

“Man’s greatness comes from knowing that he is wretched:  a tree does not know it is wretched.  Thus, it is wretched to know that one is wretched, but there is greatness in knowing that one is wretched.”

In this quote when Pascal wrote “wretched,” he meant, “of inferior quality; bad.”

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Follow your nose, it always knows.  Specifically all about pressure, mathematics, and designing a computer by the age of 19, in 17th Century France.

Pascal didn’t think mankind was naturally awful, he knew that mankind was naturally awful:  prideful, selfish, lustful, mean, and greedy.  I’m not sure how Pascal got that idea, maybe he was picked on about nose size when he was in middle school.  But he was correct.  We’re inferior.  But our greatness comes not from that obvious inferior quality, it comes from knowing that you’re awful; and then not being awful.

If we know that we’re awful, we can do something about it.  If we think that being awful is okay, that we can live our best life, then it’s an excuse to be awful.  In fact, it’s worse than that.  Aleister Crowley wrote, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” which has been appropriated by the Church of Satan® and correctly interpreted to mean . . . do whatever you want to do.

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Apparently living your best life allows you to dress like Dr. Evil on a regular basis.

One particular website (not gonna given ‘em a link, they’re the first one listed when you Google® “living my best life”) has a list, which includes the following gems of personally corrosive advice on how to live your best life (note, my comments are in italics):

  • Do what you want – let your inner three year old make all your decisions.
  • Speak your truth – not the truth, your truth since hearing the actual, real truth from other people might make you sad.
  • Practice sacred self-love – and everyone should celebrate you for your sacred self-love, since you deserve to live your best life because you suffered so much because of your (INSERT VICTIM STATUS QUALIFICATION HERE).

Not all of the advice on the website was horrible, but most of it was shallower than the gene pool that produced Johnny Depp your typical congressman.

  • So, under this philosophy, if I’m fat, the problem isn’t that I’m fat and should have fewer cookies: the problem is the world is fataphobic.
  • If I think I’m a cat, the problem isn’t that I’m delusional: the problem is that the world is transspeciesphobic.
  • If I think that being an American has nothing to do with the values and norms of the last 300 years: the problem is your problem for being tied to the past.

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When the cookies ran out, the monster came out.

So, in summary, living your best life is nothing more than permission to be the very worst person you can be.  All that being said, Alia S. Wilder really does make some tasty cookies.

Inspiration, Attitude, and Funeral Jokes

“I’m simply seeking to inspire mankind to all that is intended.” – Constantine

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See the lengths I will go to in order to deliver top-quality humor three times a week?

Sometimes you find treasures in odd places.  Back in 2007, I was working a nightmare job.  The days were hectic, filled with emergency after emergency, wailing, and general disarray.  And then I had to commute to work.  Okay, home life was generally pretty good, but work really was a nightmare.  One positive thing I did, though, was clip and print things that I found to be inspiring.  No, not a lot of clippings like I’d finally found the missing connection between the Rothschild family and why there are no purple M&M’s®.  No, when I found these quotes there were just a few – maybe less than a dozen.

Here’s one of the quotes I found in the clippings:

“If you have a guy with all the survival training in the world who has a negative attitude and a guy who doesn’t have a clue but has a positive attitude, I guarantee you that the guy with a positive attitude is coming out of the woods alive.  Simple as that.” – Gordon Smith, Retired Green Beret Command Sergeant Major

Training, preparation, skill and Ruffles® are all wonderful things.  I recommend them all, especially if they are cheddar-flavored.  The quote above, however, exactly mirrors my own feelings and experience.  Stated bluntly:

Attitude matters.

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I don’t have that tie, though, and haven’t worn one regularly since ‘08.

I’m a long time reader of Scott Adams dating back into the mid-1990’s.  He’s most famous for Dilbert, but he has written books and blogged for decades about everything from management to life skills to persuasion.  Daily, Scott Adams writes his goals 15 times (LINK).  Why 15?  I don’t know.  But Adams has reported that it produces amazing results for him, and he’s lived a pretty amazing life.  It might also have something to do with him being a genius who works really hard and tries lots of things.  Nah.  He must be a beneficiary of the structural capitalist patriarchy and the reason people love Dilbert is only due to white privilege.  That explains everything, if you’re in Congress.

How the goal writing produces results is probably unimportant – in my opinion the most likely idea is that if you’re focused on a goal, you’ll notice connections, clues or opportunities that would normally pass you by.  The focus on the goal, the attitude that you can achieve something great changes the way you look at every aspect of your day.  I know that when I believe I can succeed, I seem to keep finding ways to actually make it happen.

It might seem that it’s magic, writing down what you want 15 times a day and having coincidences show up that lead you to your goal.  But, perhaps, the magic is just in you – seeing farther and deeper than you normally would is the magic.  Having a goal changes you.  Having the attitude that you can achieve your goal changes you so you can see the path more clearly.

As Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can, or think you can’t, you’re right.”

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I guess it wasn’t just college papers Creepy Joe plagiarized . . .

We’ve all been around negative people.  I’ve had to work with them.  I’ve had to manage them, and once I even had to work for one – he was my first supervisor after I graduated college.  There was nothing that was good that ever happened to or around him.  He’d had a leg injury and was now stuck at a desk job when he really, really hated desk jobs.  Enter:  happy, enthusiastic, wisecracking, young college graduate (still with hair at that time).  I think he wanted to tie me up in a burlap sack weighted down with stones and toss me in the pond behind the office.  Frankly, I can see why.

This clip is super short, and from the Clint Eastwood movie Kelly’s Heroes.  Haven’t seen Kelly’s Heroes?  You have your weekend assignment – it’s from back when movies were fun and not remakes.

Negative People:

  • Exhaust me.
  • Don’t accomplish much.
  • Take the last cup of coffee without making more.
  • Tend to make themselves a victim of whatever happened to them.
  • Infect the entire team with negativity and sometimes herpes.
  • Seem to get energy from talking about their pain and how the world is unfair to them.
  • Shoot down bad ideas. And good ideas.  Any ideas, really.
  • Find a dark cloud in every silver lining.

I had a professor in college who had one piece of advice for me:  “Keep smiling, John.”  I took his advice.  For most of my life, I’ve kept smiling.  Even on bad days at work, I’ve kept a good attitude because most of the time, circumstances don’t care if you’re mad at them.  The circumstances continue to exist just the same.

Not everyone agrees with me.  On one particular job I actually received feedback that I was too cheerful.  I guess being a mortician isn’t a job for everyone.

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Okay, I’ve never worked as a mortician, but one of my bosses really did tell me I was too cheerful.  But if I could be a mortician that hired Terminators®?  I wouldn’t call that a dead-end job. 

In most things in life I expect good outcomes, and generally I get them.  That’s not unique to me.  Throughout the history of humanity most times and most days have been good.  Has there been war as long as we can look back into history?  Yes.  We’ve been fighting each other even before we were fully human.  I imagine, though, we’ve been telling each other fart jokes for just as long.  The human race has watched sunsets over the Arctic, the Serengeti, and the Atlantic and had pretty good days.  An iPhone® isn’t required, but without an endless stream of Disney® live-action remakes, is life really worth living?

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Nah, I like making them.

I won’t say that on my worst day there was a bright spot.  The worst day of my life just sucked from 2pm until I finally fell asleep in bed.  Honestly, it wasn’t much better the next day, but there were a few bright spots showed up.  And more the next.  And every day since then has been better than that day.

I mentioned magic above, and magic also happens on my worst days.  Every one of my very bad days was the start of the time when my life started to get better, and it seemed the worse it was, the better it would eventually be.  My best times have come from my worst times.  One example was my divorce.  The reality is that no matter how bad the marriage was, divorce is difficult.  But as difficult as it was, it was the start of the next phase in my life, my marriage to The Mrs.

The longer, and the deeper the dark night of the soul, the bigger the positive that’s eventually come out of it for me.

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If I ever were to get involved with the funeral industry, I’d tie the shoelaces of the deceased together in the coffin.  That way if we ever had a zombie apocalypse, it would be hilarious.  See, I even made zombies cheerful.

I spend time thinking about the future, and about dark possibilities not so much because I’m a gloomy guy sitting in the basement – but because it’s fun.  However, in thinking about those possibilities I am prepared, at least a little more, for the uncertainty of the future.  I’m cheerful, but I can see reality and know that there is danger ahead.

As I read the news I see a specter of a dark foe bent on creating a world that few of us want to see, one built out of fear and control.  It’s even scarier because that foe wants you and I to think that it’s winning, so we will give up and it can win by default.  Don’t.  As long as people long for freedom, as long as we have each other and a dream of a better day where mankind keeps reaching for the stars, we have light.  But in this time of seeming darkness, even a small light burns brightly.

If I were to give advice this Friday it’s this:  be of good cheer.  Be a spark in the darkness to help others.  Understand that, until the last moment of your life, you have the ability to change the world for the better, to help create that better future for all of us.

Or, failing that, there’s always Ruffles®, Netflix©, beer and the couch.

Charity, The Terminator, and Flat Tires

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

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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!

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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?

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Don’t pick a rock that’s too big.

Think how good you’ll feel when he stops!