Category: Happiness

Health, Wealth, and Chainsaw Hands

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

Sparks:  Okay, everybody gets x-ray vision.

Captain Murphy:  Yeah, and big chainsaw hands! – Sealab 2021

tats

Hail to the King, Baby.

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

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

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

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

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

stapler

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

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

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

I’d send Pugsley.

He’s younger than The Boy, and we have less time invested in raising him at this point, so he’s the most expendable.

“Go check it out.  Take some pictures.”

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

yodajoke

The only appropriate use of Yoda© themed apparel.

Okay, I don’t really have footed Yoda© pajamas, but I still had a fantasy of being able to get back to sleep, and being soaking wet at 1AM would lower the odds that would happen.  I mean, under those conditions, sometimes it takes me minutes to get back to sleep.  Minutes!

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

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

The Mrs. was not enchanted with my “just wait a few years and they’ll rot away” strategy.  The Mrs. is not in favor of nature’s way, and I bet The Mrs. even doubts Global Warming®, even after having firsthand evidence of the Breaking Wind™.  The bright side?  I had a good excuse to buy a chainsaw.

kill

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

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

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

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

When we lived in Alaska, we heated our home exclusively with firewood, getting massive amounts of firewood each summer.  But it’s been a lot of years and a lot of carbs since we lived in Alaska.  But I figured that Pop Wilder ran a chainsaw until late in his life, much to the consternation of the people running the nursing home.  If he did it, I certainly wasn’t too old.

chainsawfacebook

And his Instagram® is made from real grandmas.

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

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

No permits?  No permission?  No problem.

It’s a thing we call freedom, baby.

But I come by my love of chainsaws, firewood, and the forest honestly.  Pop Wilder also heated his exclusively with firewood when I was growing up.  Cord after cord after cord of wood.  Pop was prepared, and needed to be:  the winters were often -40°F (-273.15°C) for an extended time.  So every summer weekend when Pop wasn’t working at the bank, it was off to the forest to make the forest a little less susceptible to forest fires.

I was the youngest, so I wasn’t allowed to run the chainsaw – they seemed to like the idea of me having two hands.  Pop Wilder and my brother, John Wilder (Yes, we have the same first name, for reals in real life.  My parents forgot about him once I was born and saw my magnificence and accidently named me John, too.) ran the saws.  They told me I had the easy job.  I got to pick the wood off of the ground, put it on the tailgate.  Once there was enough wood on the tailgate to stack in the truck bed, I’d hop up there and stack the wood in the truck in rows.  Then I’d hop back down and repeat the process until the truck was full.

firewood

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

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

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

And that’s all we know about firewood.

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

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

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

No staplers were injured in the creation of this post.

staplerpet

Retirement, Bikinis, Churchill, Blake, and Luck

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

Roth

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

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

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

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

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

dday2

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

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

voters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And whatever happened to the ever-planning Pop Wilder?

distracted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

geometry

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

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

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

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

That sounds more like Blake.

fortuna snack

Is it me, or has Fortuna been lifting?

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

Will:

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

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

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

Dealing With Children In The Idiot Zone

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

piggy

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

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

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

intervention

Now I see where Intervention got the idea.

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

intervention2

I have to be fair.

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

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

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

always be ugly

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

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

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

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

He nodded.

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

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

road kill

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

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

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

same way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That which you desire, controls you.”

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

precious

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

That which you desire, controls you.

Let’s look at common examples:

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

glitterglass

Can’t you feel their magnetic pull?

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

pres

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

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

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

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

stay2

Ahh, Shakespeare at his best.

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

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

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

chelsea

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

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

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

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

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

“Is Michelle in?”

“Michelle, it’s for you.”

Michelle:  “Hello?”

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

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

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

kbusy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Resolutions, Record Clubs, Susan Anton, and Loneliness

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

firstone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the heck was a record club, anyway?

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

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I wasn’t making that up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes.  That really happened.

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

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

  • Heart Disease
  • Stroke
  • Blogging
  • Cat Owning
  • Cancer

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

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

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

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

Or?  Get a dog.

Want Dystopia?  Because this is how you get Dystopia.

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

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John B. Calhoun.  Not C.  B.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Calhoun was known to the mice as Godzilla®.

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

“The last surviving birth . . . .”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why does it bother you?

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

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

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

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Told you so.

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

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

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

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

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

Weirdo.

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

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

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

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

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Maybe we can get the Cat Girls with bacon?

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

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

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

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

Maps, the Secret of Weight Loss, and the Source of Coke Syrup

“Maps, my dear, are the undergarments of a country!  They give shape…to continents.” – The Englishmen Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain

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I call this the Cruel Map.

Excellence requires consistency.  Consistency does not imply excellence – a visit to any McDonalds® will prove that.  But consistency is required for excellence.

And excellence is required for health.

The human body is an incredibly complex device, even when you ignore the brain like most television executives involved in programming selection do.  The human body is robust.  The only way that humanity can create something as wondrous as a human is to make a baby, which is generally pretty fun to attempt, even if you don’t succeed.  About as close as we have gotten to a really complex machine that approaches human complexity is the toaster.  Bread in – toast out.  Works every time, but I still can’t figure out where the bread went.  Maybe the bread powers the toaster?

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Humanity’s most complicated machines can’t even come close to the versatility that is a human:  if your car were able to fuel itself like a person, you’d be able to feed it gasoline or junk mail or plastic bags and it would turn that into a trip to Cleveland leaving only carbon dioxide and water vapor exhaust gas, and some form of car-poop that you presumably would compost so you could grow more car food.  Oh, and the car would self-repair for decades – your tires would grow back in the middle of the night.  Unfortunately your car would try to pick up on other cars, and might identify as a truck, but that’s a longer story.

The human body is excellently designed, and very, very consistent in its response to inputs.  But the owner’s manual sucks, and many times we don’t operate it properly or fuel it very well.  Case in point – achieving excellent health requires measurement.  Of what?  Unless you’re an adolescent reading this, you’re not getting taller.  What parameter might be changing that you could measure, say, every day?  Besides armpit hair length.  That’s too obvious, and everyone does that, anyway.  Think harder.

Oh, yes!  Weight!

There is a discipline in measuring, especially when you ate a cake and don’t want to see what the scale says that those extra calories did to your weight.  This is no small problem – 74% of Americans were overweight in 2007, and there has been plenty of time since then for more Nachos Bellgrande®, Cheeze Whiz® and Twinkies™ since then while watching videos from Blockbuster®.  I was reading an article about it a few months back, and one doctor noted that a “big” patient used to be ~220 pounds early in his career, but now they have to buy equipment that can handle people exceeding 400 pounds in weight.

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Fun Fact:  The number of Blockbuster® video stores in the Roman Empire (117A.D.) is off by one when compared to the number of Blockbuster™ video stores in the United States today.

Unexpectedly (at least I wasn’t expecting it), heart disease has gone down as weight has gone up (Smoking, Orphans, and the French) but a whole host of other medical problems seem to plague our newly-larger Americans.  I won’t go into the details, you’re aware and you’ve read ‘em all.

But excellence in health is tied (at some level) to excellence in measurement.  Thankfully, there’s a $20 item that can provide excellent measurement:  a scale.  Oh, sure, counting calories might be your default position, but that simply won’t work.  To gain a pound a month, you have to eat an excess 3600 calories during that month.  How much extra, on a daily basis, is that?  2.7 Oreo® cookies.  Each day.  It’s 9.6 ounces of Coke® (a can is 12 ounces, or 4,530 liters in communist units).  On the average American diet of 3,600 calories per day, it’s less than 3% of you your total daily calories.

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Okay, maybe the metric system has one use.  One.

No one measures calories in that closely, at least not for long.  So, a pound.  That’s not so bad.

No, I said a pound a month.

If you went to college and graduated in four years, that would be 48 pounds.  All from less than 10 ounces of Coke™ a day.  Measuring the input is futile unless you live in a bubble and measure everything you eat, all day.  That’s why everyone is fat – the wonderful machine we own is adapted to live in a world where food is alternately scarce and plentiful – a world without refrigerators.  A world where Sonic® bacon cheeseburgers are available until 11pm (Midnight on Friday and Saturday!) and an extra 74 ounces of Sprite® are available for only $0.25 wasn’t really planned for when your pancreas was designed.  If the pancreas had a staff, they would be very, very tired from all of the soda.

“Oh, hell.  More soda coming in.  Insulin production to maximum.  Again.  And someone call storage and tell ‘em we’ve got to get fat production moving.  It’s overtime tonight for sure, boys.  And someone call the liver and wake it up.  He may be hungover still, but it’s time to get to work.  This fat won’t make itself.”

I drink about a soda a year, so that’s not a problem my pancreas has.  The Boy, who is 18, burns approximately 100,000 calories per day between sports and whatever it is he does in the basement that makes him all sweaty, and he drinks soda by the liter.  A liter is a Canadian gallon, I believe, but it is less expensive in the 2-liter bottle because things that are measured in metric are just not as good so you can’t charge as much as a non-metric premium product which would be sold in pints or quarts or ounces.  I think Coke™ is actually made by Pakistani slave children who are forced to milk genetically engineered badgers for the Coke© syrup.  Or at least that’s what I read on Wikipedia®, or maybe on Huffington Post© or CNN™.  So it’s certain that it’s true.

But while The Boy can consume endless calories, I can’t even think about having a Chick-Fil-A™ sandwich without buying larger pants and immediately expanding to the size of the British Empire in 1910.

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Does this Empire make my butt look big?   

Okay, if measuring the inputs doesn’t work, how do you manage to eat and manage to be smaller than the USSR?  You have to measure the output.  Ruthlessly.  And don’t gain that first pound.  If you do?  Get rid of it.  That day.  Or that week.  But don’t wait.  And you can’t lose more than one pound at a time.  And you know how to lose a pound.  It may not be easy.  It may not be quick.  But you know how to do this.

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This map shows the USSR and communist bloc countries at their greatest extent.  Also pictured:  all of the happy Soviet citizens.

You can afford to compromise – outward, on those things that aren’t intrinsic to you.  But if you want to have excellence in anything, you can never compromise inward on the things that are important to you.  You have to have a line.  And health should always be important to you, unless you’re Johnny Depp.  If you’re Johnny Depp – you already know that death will be no obstacle to your lifestyle.

Health determines what the quality of your life is really like.  And I’ve got some new goals.

The Boy will be out of the house in August, and off to the next stage of his adventure in life.  But that leaves Pugsley as the only chick in the nest.  Pugsley needs a sparring partner to practice with so he can defeat the hordes of Orcs™ that will be unleashed when the monetary system is abducted by Sauron® and Frodo© is unable to stop inflation by throwing Ruth Bader Ginsborg into Mount Doom®.  My goal?  To be in sparring shape and size by August.

There is no shortcut.  But I have a map.

I’ll let you know how it goes . . .

Soviet Map via:  User:MaGioZal [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0), GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

Wombstyles of the Rich and Famous, Sexy Handmaids, Insurance, and Insulin

“Don’t listen to him, man.  The insulin, it made him crazy.” – Con-Air

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How do you tell the number of Kardashian women in a room?  Add the eyebrows and mustaches and divide by two.

Health care is important to people – both as individuals (Early Retirement: Things to Consider (cough Health Care cough), Readers Write: Early Retirement, Health Care, Canada, and Averting A Ben Affleck Marathon) and to Americans as a group.  It has become so critical that I think that its current level of mismanagement will sink the country within 15 years (More Budget Doom, The Rolling Stones, an End Date, and an Unlikely Version of Thunderstruck), or (more likely) lead to a drastic reduction in overall care for the people who don’t live like The Rich and Famous.  But I have popcorn, I’ll probably have the weekend free, and it should be pretty fun to watch, so why not enjoy?

What led to this observation?

Kanye West and Whatever Kardashian have three kids, which surprised me – I always thought that the Kardashians reproduced like a virus – infecting their host cell and then making it explode with millions of copies of Kardashians that go on to infect other cells.  I guess not, and even my second guess – reproduction through egg-laying was wrong.  Kardashians reproduce just like a normal human does.

Or, maybe not?

I found out about the West/Kardashian reproductive habits not because I follow them on the news or have a link to their Amazon® Echoâ„¢ – my Amazon© Echo® eavesdropping is generally limited to listening in on Tom Hanks – he’s much more interesting than you might imagine.  No, the West/Kardashian pregnancy was front and center on Google News Wednesday morning and they won’t allow me to install a Kardashian blocker on my work computer.

Thankfully the world will be blessed with what it needs most, an additional celebrity child.   This birth, however, will be special.  Whatever Kardashian is not using her own womb, but is renting one for her baby.  There will be tons of tests, probably a minimum ACT® score, and payment for services rendered.  I’m sure it will all be wonderfully legal.

mother's day

Different people celebrate differently.

Furthermore, this is the second child of the West/Kardashian hive that will be born via surrogate.  Now, Internet, I did open up and read an article about this, all for you.  You really must appreciate the sacrifices I make, this was worse than many horror novels I’ve read.  Whatever Kardashian told a thoroughly gruesome description of a previous birth complete with details that I would not tell to a priest during confession, were I Catholic.  Heck, I remember when I was younger and would go to confession just to brag, but this Kardashian story wasn’t bragging, it was gagging.  I do NOT recommend that you read about it if you’re at all squeamish.  Let me rephrase – I don’t recommend you read it at all.

I can understand the desire for more children.  I understand she alleges that her doctor says she shouldn’t carry another one.  But when Whatever told the scandal sheet entertainment magazine that she really found it convenient to outsource the breastfeeding of her child, I was as stunned as a kitten in a quantum physics class.  Here is the class divide in America – a princess grown woman deciding to hire a commoner another grown woman to create and nurse her offspring.  Maybe I wasn’t too far off with the whole virus analogy.  Heck, they could even hire a surrogate father to help the surrogate mother raise the kid.

I looked up what this would cost, and it’s probably at least a quarter-million dollars to have a surrogate deliver your kid in California, but that’s probably the entry level cost.  I’m willing to bet that the Kardashian/West family has a great number of requirements, like having the surrogate mother eat the Royal Kardashian Jelly while she’s pregnant so it smells like a Kardashian when it’s born and therefore won’t be eaten by the other Kardashians at birth.  I even imagine they pay her to live with them for up to another year to nurse the child, and likewise restrict her diet and activities.

handmaid

I’m sure this is how Margaret envisioned the costume.

The Handmaid’s Tale was a novel from the 1980’s by Margaret Atwood.  In it, Atwood raises the ever so certain prospect that evil Christians were going to institute a Christian theocracy and force women to wear red outfits and have babies for powerful men.  I suppose this has parallels the popular allure that zombies have for kids, but for liberal women, but it amuses me the situation has come to pass as an actual Hollywood scheme and nobody seems to mind.

I have a lot of sympathy for childless couples who resort to surrogate mothers for one reason or another, and (really) are generally supportive of new babies being brought into the world – babies are our future, unless the robots take over, in which case I welcome our new robot leaders (who can look this up in my blogging history, and then they will know I always wanted them to take over).  Also, the surrogate market appears to be (kind of) based on the free market – how much will you pay for another woman to bear your children?  I’m also willing to bet that free market competition has brought the prices of surrogate mothers down over the years, especially at that clinic at the unmarked door behind the Dairy Queen® in Encino.  Whether or not bringing a fourth child into this world via surrogacy is ethical, well, that’s beyond this post.

But what isn’t beyond this post is that the medical system is still broken.  Basic procedures and medicine (like insulin, or Epi-Pens®) have increased in prices drastically, even though cost of production has dropped.  Somehow, the market has completely failed.  Humalog™ (a form of insulin made from elf tears) was $21 a bottle back in 1995.  It’s now $225 a bottle.  That’s 1071% in 20 years.  Based on that growth rate, in 2037 it’ll cost $2,400 a bottle.  At some point it will become cheaper to kidnap elves and chain them in your basement for their precious insulin tears.

insulin

I think the solution is a drastic one:  make prescription drug coverage via insurance illegal.  Once the market takes over, prescription drug prices really will come down.  The alternative?  Make importing prescription drugs into the United States legal.  In Canada, a vial of Humalog® is $50.  The price discrepancy isn’t the free market at work – it’s a controlled market where Congress™ and the FDA© have managed to create billions in additional profit for drug makers.  At your expense.

Medicine is broken.  Burn it down.

I do find it odd that the Kardashians met their latest surrogate at an unmarked door behind a Dairy Queen® near the Taco Bell© in Encino (okay, I do listen to their Amazon® Echo™).  I would have thought they would have had better insurance than that.  Nah.  I’m sure it’s legit.

A Wilder Story, or, The BB Gun, The Black Bear, The Soviets, and Me

“You’ll put your eye out.” – A Christmas Story

bear bbgun

Nobody was too concerned with my eyes.  But do NOT make us have to pay for a neighbor’s window.

I’m a believer in Christmas – it’s a time of redemption and rebirth that proves that miracles can happen.  People can escape their past, and become something more than they were before – they can become reborn.  We can become better.  The birth of Christ is an example that we can all be reborn and change our lives in a miraculous and meaningful way.

But, I’m not sure I can recall any particular Christmas miracles.

Oh, wait, here’s one.  It’s mostly true, as well as I can recall, and field tested to read aloud to your family:

On Christmas Day when I was in second grade, the one thing I wanted more than anything else was . . . a BB-Gun.  No, this is not a remake of A Christmas Story, this is A Wilder Story.  And I was there for this one.  As I recall, this was the last Christmas when we opened Christmas presents on Christmas morning.  In all following years, my older brother John Wilder and I wheedled our parents into a Christmas Eve opening of everything but “Santa” gifts.  We were insufferable.  My brother (really) is also named John Wilder – my parents didn’t want to waste those extra birth announcements when they could just change the day and year, but that’s another story.

But that particular Christmas morning when I was in second grade I looked down on a real-life lever-action Daisy® BB-gun.  It looked like a real rifle even though the wood parts were plastic.  I’d never shot a real rifle before, but I knew that all I wanted for Christmas was that BB-gun.  And there it was, all mine, pristine in its oiled metal and plastic perfection.

daisy

It looked very real.  Mine was the one on the bottom.  It was actually mistaken for a real gun several times.  Mainly by me, because everyone who was an adult could see it was just a BB gun.

“Take care of that, and it’ll last you a long time, Son,” Pop said as he handed me my first gun.  This was the first time he’d said that to me, and I nodded gravely, feeling the responsibility and pride deep inside me.  Pop would later repeat that phrase about boots I got in high school, a Buck© pocket knife I got in fifth grade, and my first car.  I still have the BB gun and the boots.  I lost the knife, probably at school.  It was expected then that you had a knife with you if you were in fifth grade, because what if you had to clean a fish during English class?

But I was in second grade, and I had a BB gun.  My BB gun.

And I was ready to use it.  I was given a quick tutorial on how to load it, a list of all the things (mainly windows), people (mainly windows), places (our windows), and forbidden objects (neighbor’s windows) that I shouldn’t even think of aiming my BB gun at, let alone shoot.  I was trusted to take my new BB gun on an expedition, because it was made clear to me in no uncertain terms that the worst punishment in the world would fall upon me if I shot something I shouldn’t.  I would lose (probably until I was 40) my BB gun, be grounded from TV until I had my own children and probably be branded as a BB abuser for the rest of my life in my Permanent Record.  (For kids:  Permanent Record is now called Snapchat©.)

With the earnestness only a second grader can muster, I put on my deep blue Sears™ parka (the ad said it was designed for pilots stationed in . . . the ARCTIC, you know, where we fought the Soviets to save Santa from becoming, I guess, more Red) with polyester fur trim, and a pocket for pens and pencils on the arm, because where else would you keep pens and pencils except your left arm?  I pulled on my black felt-lined snow boots and stiff green plastic gloves, and went outside.  It was cold, certainly below freezing, and probably hovering around zero in non-communist degrees.

sears

Like a pocket knife, every boy had a parka like this.  Every boy. But does anyone know why pilots need parkas if they’re in heated jet airplanes??  Oh, yeah.  Soviets.  Image from E-Bay.

It had already snowed enough that the snow pile in our front yard was 10 feet (43 meters) deep, but we had a packed trail where our snowmobiles had gone onto the snow-packed country road and up into miles of forest roads that dated back to the old prospectors looking for gold way back before Carter was president.

My feet crunched in the snow as I walked due north onto the road, my breath puffing out as if from a small blue fake-fur-trimmed steam engine headed uphill.  I kept going.  What was I looking for?  I’m not sure – I don’t remember, exactly.  I guess, looking at stuff with a BB gun in my hand and shooting anything that wouldn’t get me in trouble with Ma Wilder at the rate of 6 BBs per step.  But I felt like a man, and what would a man with a rifle do?  Hunt.  Win World War II again.  Look for communists.  It’s hazy, but I know I had a purpose.

Snakes weren’t a possibility, since I knew snakes wintered in Florida with baseball players, Santa and the Cubans.  Regardless, I wanted to shoot my BB gun, even if the opportunities to send Soviets back to Russia with a backside full of BBs was limited, at best.  I still don’t recall ever seeing a Soviet in the forest until I saw Red Dawn, and then my BB gun was at home.

reddawn

I guess Europe decided to sit this one out.

I trundled up the road.  I think that’s probably the only time I’ve used the word “trundled” precisely since it implies I moved along slowly, noisily, and in a less than graceful manner.  All of those applied.  But I was ten feet tall with my BB gun, shooting aimed fire into snow banks and sage brush alike.  About a half a mile from my house, more than three quarters of the way to the Old Cemetery, I saw it.

The Bear.

Sitting motionless, huddled against the barbed wire fence, not 20’ away, was the bear.  It was a black bear.  I knew that grizzly bears had been killed nearby, but this was a definitely a black bear, being black and all.  Ma Wilder had told me about them before going hiking and told me to never, ever get between a black bear cub and its mother – she said that was more dangerous than being between Beto O’Rourke and a microphone.  I didn’t know if this bear was cub-sized or mother-sized, but I already knew that this was something way out of my experience level – I mean I still wasn’t even coloring within the lines very well.  Communists?  Sure, I could take down a dozen of them since they were weak because they were Godless and fatherless and mainly starving when they weren’t swilling massive quantities of cheap Afghan vodka.

But bears?  Better call the reinforcements (spelled D-A-D) in.

wilderbear

Calling out an APB on a tiny blonde boy.  He looked tasty.

I backed away from the bear, keeping my eyes on it the whole time.  My BB gun was loaded, a precious brass sphere ready to explode outward on a column of pressurized air at the bear should it charge me.  I knew I was too slow to out-trundle the bear.  Even my candy-cane addled brain knew that the BB was scant protection against a bear, but if I was going to go down, I was going to go down fighting like a man, and not running away like a Soviet child would.  Even though it was nearly zero, I built up a sweat in my green turtle neck under my Air Force Pilot Parka®.

That green turtle-neck was really tight and made me look a lot like an actual turtle, so I only wore it three times.  Why?  A chubby kid covered in the smell of fear sweat and Nacho Cheese Doritos™ isn’t really a winner with the ladies despite whatever Bill Clinton might say.

An aside:  In the safe realm of 2018, I know that it seems insane to allow a second grader to hike up into the forested wilderness alone at temperatures near zero on Christmas morning armed with a weapon that’s patently illegal to arm a second grader with in New York City, and twenty other states that are, no doubt, now deeply under the influence of the Soviets.  Or, does it?   When I last had a second grader (Pugsley) he had a BB gun and trundled off into the backyard with a zillion BBs.  I can attest our backyard is now safely Soviet-free.  But back in the day?  We weren’t building weak Soviet children.  No!  We had backbones of steel and cheap Taiwanese Rambo® knives with compasses built into the handle.

So, yeah, not unusual.  I guess it was a crazy thing called freedom.  Anyway . . .

I got back to the house and threw open the door.  I stamped my snow-covered feet inside.  Yeah, I know.  But I was in a hurry, I had real news and information for the family.

My parents were lounging on the couch, enjoying a quiet coffee.

“A BEAR!”  I yelled.

“I swear, I saw it, a bear!  It was just right up the road, right where the hill starts.  A bear!  A black one!”

Ma looked at Pop, concerned.

Pop Wilder shook his head.  “Bears are hibernating.  None are up this time of year, not when it’s this cold.”

“No, it was there, right by the fence.”

Ma Wilder nudged him, seeing the absolute certainty on my face.  “We should take a look.”

There is a look a man gives a woman when he knows that he has lost the argument even before it started.  I know that look because I saw it then.  Pop sighed, got up, and got dressed.  Half an hour later, he and Ma and my brother were all dressed, and ready to go up the road.  I had my BB gun.  I hoped that the bear would still be there.

We walked.  I pointed, when the Bear came into sight, not 300 yards away.

“See, I told you.”

Ma Wilder looked concerned when she saw visual proof of my story.  I think she had put my bear story into the category of “addled ravings of an overly imaginative eight year old that may or may not process reality like a normal human after he told me that he was worried that Grandma would turn into a zombie (Sleep Deprivation, Health, Zombies, and B-Movies).”  As for me, I was concerned that Pop hadn’t brought bazookas, howitzers, grenades, or maybe a battleship.  Nah, Pop Wilder could probably wrestle a dozen or so bears, if they came up to him one at a time, like in the Kung Fu movies.  We finally got up to the road where we were perpendicular to the black bear, still huddled up against the fence, not 30 feet (432 meters) away.  It hadn’t moved since I’d first seen it.  I felt vindicated, even though I’d never heard the word.

“Hand me the BB gun,” said Pop Wilder.

I did.

Pop shot one BB into the bear, smoothly worked the lever like a cowboy in the Old West, and then shot another BB into the bear.

The bear was motionless.  It must be dead!  Pop Wilder killed it!  Pop handed the BB gun back to me.

He then walked back into the deep snow directly to the bear, reached out, and pulled up the black, plastic sheeting that had blown into a ball up against the fence.

He handed me back the BB gun and handed my brother the black plastic sheet.  We walked home in silence.

So, there was that:  the Miracle of the Transubstantiation of the Bear – where a Christmas miracle transmuted a black bear into a sheet of black plastic.  Not sure of any other explanation.

But the real Christmas miracle, it’s below?  Merry Christmas to all.

Christmas