Creating havoc since 2006. Fair use is claimed for images on this site, but they will be removed (if owned) on request out of politeness. movingnorth@gmail.com
“Or we could stare at an eclipse while screaming at it!” – Upright Citizens Brigade
This picture of the Sun’s corona is courtesy of The Boy, the number 8, and the letter W.
Like millions of other Americans within a short drive, The Boy, Pugsley and I piled into the Wildermobile and headed for destiny. (For the record, millions of Americans didn’t pile into my car. They got into their own cars.)
A week out at the library? Plenty of eclipse glasses were freely available. Three days out? None. Again, people do NOT plan. It seems like that when it’s bright and sunny out, even when they know that winter’s coming, they don’t put up extra food or even minor emergency preparations. After you’re observed people long enough, you learn that most of them . . . don’t learn. (But not you, dear reader, who likely have an IQ high enough to give a normal person a nosebleed due to altitude sickness.)
The Mrs. was skeptical when I tried to get hotel reservations a scant week before, but Marriott gleefully set up the reservation. Originally, she was going to accompany us, but the day before we were to leave for the hotel, we took a nap, and she slept through the time when she was supposed to take the dogs to the kennel for boarding. The Mrs. sighed . . . happily. I’m not sure she was at all excited about an eight hour trip into the deepest uninhabited part of Upper-Lower Midwestia just to not see the Sun.
The Boy, Pugsley and I planned (prior to leaving) on when and how we were going to leave on our great adventure.
My plan was that I wanted to get there so I had about 90 minutes to eat dinner prior to Game of Thrones (spoiler – Ned gets decapitated at the end of season one). Pugsley, however, had configured some sort of alternate reality that involved us getting there at 3pm. The Boy bought into this alternate reality and stubbornly wore his backpack starting two hours before I started packing.
Keep in mind, The Boy is nearly 17.
I think both The Boy and Pugsley were excited. The Boy was even more excited when I tossed him the keys. He drove us from Stately Wilder Manor to dinner, and then to our hotel. My daughter, Alia S. Featherbottom (nee Wilder) was going to meet us, but forgot we were coming as she fell into a pit of Dungeons and Dragons®.
Now, as a general note, we don’t let Pugsley (12) watch Game of Thrones. The reason for this should be obvious to anyone who has watched the show. Tonight? Single hotel room? He sat and watched Galaxy Quest with headphones on. Although The Mrs. and I normally sit and watch the show together, in this case she and I texted back and forth during the episodes. Here is an example exchange:
The Mrs.: “There’s more walking in this episode than in The Lord of the Rings.”
Me: “At least they’re not singing.”
After that I poured my heart and soul into (yet another) post about how stupid NASA is (LINK), but even I am beginning to feel a bit guilty – picking on NASA is a lot like hitting a kitten. The Boy helped by doing my thermodynamics calculations.
I had carefully selected our site. It was about fifteen miles from the nearest town, and it was on a nice corner where the line of totality exactly passed over. It was perfect. The only problem?
Clouds. They were everywhere. I pulled out my cellphone and had the path of the totality map up. On another cellphone I had the cloud cover map. I reviewed first one phone and then the other, cross referencing one map to the other, sort of like Columbus if he was having trouble getting 3G on the Santa Maria like I was out in the cornfields. At least he had WIFI when the Pinta hit Hispaniola, right?
Plotting one map against the other while The Boy drove, I made a decision. The GPS said to turn right. I told The Boy, “Turn left.”
With that, we moved off plan. We had gone rogue, chasing bits of blue sky.
We navigated farther west, and soon, bluer patches of clear sky were NOT obscuring the Sun. We were getting closer . . . finally we stopped in a small town park.
We pulled into position about 40 minutes before the eclipse.
The park was filled with nice, friendly people. Which makes sense. These are the type of people who are intellectually curious, and were patient enough to drive hours to a small town for a two minute eclipse. These weren’t troublemakers.
The eclipse itself was sublime. The Sun was a fat crescent, a slim crescent, and then it was gone. There were some light clouds, but they weren’t a major eclipse of the eclipse. We had chosen our site very well.
My biggest personal surprise about the eclipse was that it didn’t go completely dark – I guess I had expected that. Venus was very visible in the sky, but the clouds surrounding us (35 miles away) were still lit by the Sun, and that lighting left me feeling like I was under the world’s largest sunshade, which I guess that I was.
My picture of the Sun’s Corona. I prefer Negra Modelo myself.
It had been an oppressively hot and humid day. The temperature dropped a bit during the eclipse, and that brought out thick clouds as the water vapor in the air condensed out. We got in The Wildermobile and The Boy started driving us towards home. The worst traffic jam we saw took place at a T intersection about 30 miles south of totality, and it was about a mile of politely and patiently driven cars that took us about ten extra minutes to get through. The traffic apocalypse foretold by Nostradamus did not emerge.
The above fiberglass squirrels were all over this town, and every squirrel I saw was painted differently, but all of them had eclipse glasses on. Who says Midwesterners don’t know how to party?
The Boy drove us back down to a Chili’s® restaurant 90 miles south of totality. It looked like it was closed, with zero cars in the parking lot. I jumped out to check the door, it was open, and they were open. We ordered food, and the waitress said that there had only been one table that had been there for lunch. Apparently, your willingness to eat at Chili’s™ is some sort of predictor for you to go to see an eclipse.
The Boy drove home, and I slept most of the way.
Most of the way.
On the way back I mused on the events of the day – we had seen a solar eclipse – our first total solar eclipse, and I was reminded of something I heard Tony Robbins say: “Money can’t buy happiness, but it can buy experience.”
I guess my takeaway is: “Being nice doesn’t get you Eclipse Viewing Glasses, but angry threats do.”
“When a man of Scotty’s years falls in love, the loneliness of his life is suddenly revealed to him. His whole heart once throbbed only to the ship’s engines.” – Star Trek
Why, oh, why does it not say Texas Pain RELIEF Institute?
Daniel and I were friends from second grade onward, until I moved away.
I’m not sure if it was our mutual love of Mad® magazine, parody, or wearing army fatigues that we found here and there and the unearned ranks, units, and qualifications we’d poorly sew onto the faded olive drab fabric (I’m pretty sure I was a sergeant of a unit that never existed). We’d regularly sleep over at each other’s houses, throw up poorly breathing nylon tents in the back yard, and then go on maneuvers with our toy rifles; fording quickly flowing rivers or assaulting fortified hills. Daniel even managed to find a Korean-era K-ration we were too scared to eat. I mean, it smelled okay, but . . . . And we each shared magazines we certainly didn’t want to let our parents know we had (hint: boobies). And I still have one book he made me promise I’d return to him because it wasn’t his, this really has weighed on me, and I’m not kidding.
What magazines we looked at may or may not have looked like. I plead the fifth.
During the school day we skipped lunch together, talked science fiction together, and told bad jokes together. Our conclusion on Mel Brooks and Hogan’s Heroes? The best things on television, ever. Carrie Fisher and Sigourney Weaver? Our goddesses, along with Madeline Kahn. Especially when we saw Carrie in a bikini one night at Daniel’s house. Wow.
It was also Daniel who taught me that in Tom and Jerry, Jerry was the evil one.
When I visited him at Easter I knelt and did the novena, even though I wasn’t Catholic. We were brothers. Daniel and I belonged to the same tribe, until time and distance pulled us (mainly me) away.
This week a study (really, a metastudy, or summary of other studies, which is like a summary of Game of Thrones for your friends who don’t watch Game of Thrones) was released about loneliness and how being lonely negatively impacts health. (Hint, being lonely is worse than being obese, drinking too much, or not having enough Pez® to stick to your eyebrows on St. Johns’ Day in Nova Scotia.)
AARP commissioned a study that says that 42 million people older than 45 suffer from “chronic” loneliness. Since there were only 120 million people older than 45 when they did the study, that means that over 35% of those people over 45 are . . . sad. And it’s very sad when that many old people with that many wrinkles are sad.
What does chronic loneliness do to you?
Nothing good.
It increases your odds of death by . . . 50%. That sounds like a lot, and it is. That’s almost worse than the wrinkles.
So in the age of Facebook®, people are less connected to one another. In fact, in another study they found that old people who relied less on email and social media for their social connections were . . . happier. Let me write that in blazing letters across the sky:
Facebook® is no substitute for calling the people you know and love and talking to them. Period.
Let this be a reminder, the people on Facebook™ have bad morning breath, have bad armpit smells, and leave their socks all over the place (except, of course, me). But to a lonely spouse, or worse, and idealized memory? Not so much.
Well, my parents had dinner parties. When they were in their 50’s I was still a pup, and had to got to go to their dinner parties, at least when they were at our house. The couples would get together, and they’d immediately split up. The ladies would go the kitchen and drink whatever Mom made for ‘em, even though it smelled like something that would catch on fire if a stray spark veered by.
The men would retire to the dining room (nobody smoked anymore) and drink bourbon, scotch and talk about elk hunting, war (real, actual war) stories, or how the weather was, or what the crops were like. Someone would make an off-color joke, and give me a wink and a nudge. Really, it was always Vern that did that. Honestly, most of the jokes were right over my head unless they were directly and obviously about boobs, but at least I was part of the game.
After drinks, there would be dinner. Which would also include drinks.
The gatherings were even more wide ranging than that – on occasion we’d go spend the night, for instance, at a cabin deep in the mountains that one of the families owned. During the course of that weekend we built a mountain road with a road grader, rode horses, and I outshot all of them with Pop Wilder’s .222. Oh, I and won a game or three of Risk®.
We hunted together with Pop Wilder’s friends. We went on wide-ranging 4×4 trips deep into the forest at 12,000 feet. We rode snowmachines together. Although I was certainly the junior member, more than anything it looked like a tribe – a group of friends that supported each other and shared in each other’s joys and sorrows as we snacked on ziplock-fresh sandwiches at 12,000 feet.
And today I don’t see that. Although I know a zillion adults, most of them don’t get together like this. Most of the adults I could get together with like this (there’s a pretty big implied trust) live very far away.
In our current world, we spend our time chasing our children on their adventures (wrestling, football, academics, Boy Scouts, etc.) and focusing on our spousal relationship, and finally, work. I know that sounds like the best way to spend your time, but . . . is it, really?
Right now, as a family, we depend upon the iron triad of children, work and spouse. All of my adult friends (locally) come from either my children or my work, or, IS The Mrs. What happens when work changes (this is a minority of friends we see, so not much) or the kids get older? Two thirds of the local social network dries up. That day.
And, I recall that the social network for my parents lived on with them after I graduated. After Pop Wilder retired. It was a durable network. They may have been alone, but they were never lonely.
In some weird way, we seem to have taken the informal support networks from men and women. We seem to have replaced them with the evanescence of work and children.
We have, when those support networks crumble over time, ignored those left over. And they get lonely. They don’t have Vern attempting to turn the butter into my thumb when he passed it to me (it never worked, I was young and fast, and he was older and a bit inebriated).
Where are they now? Are they in our past, those who trust us with their very souls?
There is an endless summer.
That endless summer contains every single day young boys spent together in a world bound only by imagination, in a world where each barley field represented a chance to crawl on our bellies toward enemy lines to stop the Germans in their tracks, or to stop the Cylons® before they could hit our main base. One last swig from the canteen before we braved the minefields and tried to take out the German 88mm gun before it savaged our boys to pieces.
We played at life, at courage, at understanding where we fit in our tribe. We discussed love before we knew what it was. We discussed right and wrong when we were living it. We displayed strength because it was intertwined with our being.
I called Daniel’s number tonight for the first time in years. I remember their house, and I know right where they were when they picked up the phone, heck, the number was familiar with me. They remembered me through the fog of ages.
I’ll talk to Daniel soon.
Why did I wait so long? Guilt. I felt (and still feel) that I’m the one who killed our endless summer with the starting of my car and the loss of my virginity. I’d left the fields of play behind. I’d left the best friend that I’d ever had or will ever have behind.
Tonight I gathered up the courage to make the call back towards summer, the call back to the innocence of boys bound together in blood, in bad comedy, in Steve Martin, in mutual, total trust.
And we’ll go back to the summer, where we belong. At least for a few minutes when we talk.
Did it get dusty in here? My eyes seem to be watering.
Nobody gets to be lonely in summer . . . especially not an endless one.
I ended up doing fine in my tests, but can only recall that “Cops On Streets Detain Crime” (Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian) and “Miss Pennie’s Panties” (Miocene, Pliocene, and Pleistocene). I think I’m missing a billion or so years of geologic history because there wasn’t a sufficiently naughty mnemonic involving underwear.
Looking back, it seems so simple. A little effort each day would have paid off at finals. Big time. Study a subject (like geology – lots of memorizing) a little bit each day. By the time finals rolled around? With just a few minutes of study, I’d be ready to take the final, and do so on a full night’s sleep.
However, while study may payoff later, not studying always pays off now. Present Me can have a beer, go to a movie, read a book, watch an episode of Twilight Zone®. These are all better than studying geology. Honestly, a dentist visit is more fun than studying geology, though it’s still probably easier to sleep through geology.
What has all of this got to do with Wealth? It’s Wilder Wealthy Wednesday, so how does all of this tie in?
I’m glad I asked.
Everyone makes choices about how they spend their resources. There are the needs of the Present, and those of the Future. Example: if retirement and putting The Boy and Pugsley through college weren’t issues? I would own a tank. You can buy them, you know. (LINK) Real tanks, sold by Eastern European arms merchants. It sounds like Bruce Willis should be in this movie, right? Oh, and I’d also own a swimming pool filled with Pez® that I would swim in like Scrooge McDuck™.
But I won’t. I value Future Me enough to forego the fun of riding around the neighborhood in a fully functional WWII Soviet tank.
Barely.
And it’s mainly so The Boy and Pugsley can get jobs and not have to live in my basement and borrow my tank. Future Me likes that Future.
This is also the way borrowing money works. Present Me decides he wants something, like a house. Present Me obligates Future Me for thirty years’ worth of mortgage payments. Good deal. Let’s pretend I don’t have the cash to buy what I want.
If that’s the case, I find someone who has cash, and trusts me enough that I’ll pay ‘em for the next thirty years. For their trouble, they get, say 5%, of the unpaid balance each month as rent on their money. They like that deal because they’ll have more money when it’s all done. I like the deal, because I get the house now.
An economist would call the interest rate charged to me for borrowing the money a “discount” rate. It’s the amount that the bank charges you so that they have a durable long-term investment that makes sense for them. If you can’t afford to meet their discount rate? The bank is required by Federal law to invest their reserves in Russian tanks and Pez®.
The discount rate in most cases is simply a numerical rating of your will power. If you knew I was going to give you fifty dollars at the end of the month, how much would you give up to get it today? Of you said, oh, five dollars, that means you are willing to give up 10% of the value . . . for one month. That’s (we can quibble about this number, but we won’t for now) a huge premium, the equivalent of 314% annual interest. If I could get a 10% monthly return, I’d retire . . . this afternoon.
So, our “discount” rate is really a numerical measure of our ability, our willpower, in delaying gratification.
Delayed gratification, it turns out, is a pretty significant human characteristic.
In the 1970’s, Stanford was known for several radical psychological experiments:
The Stanford Prison Experiment – A really creepy experiment where students dressed as guards and inmates and completely cost me my faith in Californians.
The Stanford Pizza Experiment – I think this was a 1970’s B-Movie. Adrienne Barbeau – don’t miss it!
The Stanford Marshmallow Experiment – The one that goes with this post.
In the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment (SME), young children were given a marshmallow. They could eat it now, or be given two marshmallows later. I’m obviously simplifying this – they used cookies, too.
About a third of the children made it long enough to get the second treat. Between this and a previous experiment, there were several primary correlations on just which kids would get the second treat.
The older kids were more likely to get the second marshmallow.
Intact family. If there was a dad in the house? No dads around? No second treat.
So what? A lot, actually:
The longer a child could wait, the:
Better the expected SAT score,
More education the child would likely complete, and
The child would likely be skinnier.
Those are pretty positive, and pretty significant outcomes. And, although there has been complaint about the study (small sample size, flawed methodology) since it matches my biases, I’ll assume it’s right. (Hint: this is how some journalists actually think, or rather, avoid thinking.)
Are there other examples of discount rates/willpower out there? Sure. We keep creating academics, and they have to look busy, so they keep writing papers for each other. Thankfully Jesse Shapiro wrote one (LINK) just to prove a point in my blog. Thanks, Jesse!
Shapiro looked at food stamp recipients. He found that there was a 10% to 15% drop in calorie consumption from the start of the month when the EBT card was filled up to the end of the month. Some people ate enough at the beginning that they had to skip meals at the end. Additionally, it looked like the food that folks ate through the month also was . . . not as good. The overall quality of the food consumed appeared to have dropped during the month as well. Might there be other contributing factors to this? Sure, but the data didn’t seem to indicate that was the case. And that 10-15% discount rate is huge. Over 300% annually (compounded).
So, why should you delay gratification?
When it’s clear that it’s good for you.
When there’s certainty to the payoff.
When the payoff is big enough to make Current You value it almost as much as Future You.
Most of the time we have enough real information to know if it’s good or not and how certain it is. It’s that last bullet point: making Current You care enough. Why do people smoke? Their Current You runs a big discount rate on the first two factors. And maybe Future You just pisses Present You off?
One last thought on willpower. Remember that study that showed intact families mattered? Yeah. If the Mom is impulsive enough to get preggers by a man she can’t have around, or if the man is impulsive enough to bolt?
Bad news for those kids. Willpower and the ability to delay gratification is, like intelligence, highly inheritable. Looks like it’s late nights and No-Doze® for the lot of them.
“What is wrong with these people? They have no willpower. I once went 28 years without having sex. And then again for seven years.†– The Office
How Cheat Day feels.
Fitbit® will not make you skinny. In fact, Fitbit™ might make you fatter (or, make you lose less weight).
Why? Although exercise is very, very, good for you, you still can’t run faster than your teeth (LINK) . . . exercise is not the biggest factor in losing weight – it’s calorie intake(we’ve covered that before, too (LINK) – remember the Scottish dude who didn’t eat . . . for over a year? Yeah. He got skinny. Remember, he started at 456 pounds.
Sure, he exercised, but his ace in the hole was the “not eating†component of his plan. But if he would have had a Fitbit® . . .
It’s not just Fitbitâ„¢ – it’s any fitness tracking device.
Why? Well, it’s all in your head. Really.
The most crucial part of the equation when it comes to weight loss (or, really, kicking any habit) is hacking your own brain first. And if you don’t do it, there are tons of companies that want to do it for you.
Let me give an example:
Once upon a time after I graduated college, I was in a department store (this is in the BA time – Before Amazon) and was looking at a stereo. It was awesome! Speakers big enough to use as a coffin for a large dog. I wanted it, but knew that I shouldn’t. I owed people money, like my mortgage company. I had just moved. It was expensive. Ohhh, but it was pretty! And it had . . . surround sound! I could listen to my TV with speakers located behind my head!
I would have walked away, but the person I was in the store with said, “You studied really hard in school. You work really hard at work. You deserve it!â€
Brain hacked.
I bought the stereo (and ended up paying probably 10% more than the price in interest) since I couldn’t pay it off that month.
But I deserved it, right?
No.
I totally didn’t deserve it. In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and say that Nobody Deserves Anything. If we could just tattoo that on each other’s foreheads, we’d all be better off. I never hear The Boy or Pugsley EVER say deserve. It’s a dirty word around our house, and no one wants to hear the 45 minute lecture that goes with that word.
That word successfully hacked my brain, though. In a way, that was worth the whole price of the stereo, five times over.
So, an activity tracker might just make you fatter. Are there other self-sabotaging behaviors we engage in that might add in to the mess? Sure there are:
“I’ve already slipped up today, so I’ll eat the whole pizza.†– This makes sense – it combines a temporary defeat with a complete and total surrender of the day. Yay!
“I’ll restart the diet after the weekend. And this pizza.†– Ah, the good old future you, paying for the sins of present you.
“My cheat meal can be a cheat day.†– Well, meal is a lot like day in that they’re both words.
“My cheat day can be a cheat weekend.†– And what weekend isn’t made up of days?
“Those cookies will go stale if I don’t eat them?†– And they will slowly kill you if you do . . . .
These have the common theme of “deserve†followed by “victim†followed by “extreme rationalization.â€
And how do these come to mind? These are already tricks I use to convince myself that this makes sense. I’ve had to abandon cheat meals because . . . I’m not good enough to deal with them. Likewise, any system that depends upon your willpower to for long term support, especially when you have a friend like your brain, is doomed.
Scott Adams works the idea that he uses choices to work around willpower. Now I’m not sure that Scott has ever weighed a pound over his ideal weight, but he does have a point – willpower for a long term diet is a difficult partner, so he has a system. Sadly, as a vegetarian, none of his choices involve bacon, and my choice the other night to eat all those chips was probably not as bad as it could have been (I might have tried to inject them into my eyes), but it wasn’t a great choice.
So, an activity tracker might be a calorie enabler, and another tool for your mind to tell you that you deserve something. And whatever you do – don’t make me give you that talk.
Reminder: John Wilder is STILL not a doctor, nor will he regenerate as one. Consult your Doctor, Attorney, Car Mechanic, and Podiatrist prior to following any advice that you might get from here.
“What? Come on! Man, you’re smart. You made poison out of beans, yo. Look, we got, we got an entire lab right here. Alright? How about you pick some of these chemicals and mix up some rocket fuel? That way you could just send up a signal flare. Or you make some kind of robot to get us help, or a homing device, or build a new battery, or wait. No. What if we just take some stuff off of the RV and build it into something completely different? You know, like a like a dune buggy?” – Breaking Bad
Our camp, as viewed by the disembodied spirit of Elvis.
“I can’t believe you did this,” The Boy was flat out surprised.
And, I’ll admit it, when you have a guy that drives a 12 year old car (LINK) until it gets totaled (LINK) it would seem a bit out of character for him to buy what can only be considered a luxury item. Or at least that’s what I thought of, when I thought of RVs.
The Mrs. and I had actually discussed purchasing an RV for the last 15 or so years. At first it was a little pop-up camper that occupied our dreams. When we moved to Alaska, we looked at several different campers and camper types, and were pretty close to offering some money for a little integrated camper with its own engine, etc., but I couldn’t quite get comfortable driving in the bush in Alaska where there were no cell phones with a camper that had 271,000 miles on it. That’s just asking for Hollywood to make an “Into The Wild”-type movie starring your family and a grizzly bear that stalks you for 231 miles of your trek back to civilization while you have to fight it off with marshmallow roasting forks.
I like to think that they’d get Liam Neeson to play me. If he works out and gets some bigger biceps.
Anyway, we put the idea of an RV on the back burner living in Texas, because the last thing you want to be is a Texan with an RV. That’s like ALL Texans, and, since The Mrs. and I have never read Harry Potter, we figured why join the crowd now?
But I like camping, and after a few camping adventures that seem more like a horror movie to The Mrs. (Just a little farther, dear – you can stop throwing up whenever you get to the top!), she decided that she liked . . . showers. And a bed. And not throwing up on the trail.
But, to buy a camper seemed so frivolous. And not that I don’t buy frivolous crap – I do. Right now I’m wearing a 2016 Campaign t-shirt for The Flight of the Conchords (Jemaine & Brett 2016 – It’s Business Time).
It’s worth the watch – 3:55 minutes of New Zealand’s second most popular comedy-folk duo.
Anyway, it seems so frivolous, something that someone with LOTS of money would do. It’s something that . . . rich people would do? Or old retired people who wanted to drive a house around slowly so they could have their house be in different places. Kind of like the Tardis, but with Social Security.
I started stalking Craigslist around where we live. And, after getting a whole lot of free Styrofoam packing peanuts, I finally found two candidates. I’d also looked at a dealer, but the brand new one he showed me had a table that was split open due to humidity. Not a great selling point. The one I liked best was an R-Pod.
An R-Pod was designed to be smaller. We have a generic pickup, and a youth-skewed 4×4 SUV that The Mrs. likes to remind me is older than Pugsley. Pugsley is 12. She is not exaggerating. It doesn’t have a cassette deck, but . . . close. Both of these vehicles could pull the R-Pod, which weighs in at a whopping 2800 pounds, with a cargo capacity of at least another half-ton. This is important, since we’d have two vehicles capable of pulling the beast around, since our 4×4 was capable of “only” pulling 5,000 pounds.
First lesson? If I wanted to do this cheaply (and, Internet, you know I do!) I would have to buy something light, or I’d have to buy a trailer AND a car.
Again, we’d found two of these located two hours away in River City, Lower-Northern Midwestia. We texted and, without hearing back, turned our pickup to go buy an RV.
Now, I’m not opposed to other people buying brand-new RVs. If they didn’t, I wouldn’t have a pool of cheap used ones to pick from. Make no mistake – an RV isn’t an asset. All it does is either take you to the lake for fishing (or gold panning! (LINK)) or sit in a storage space. It creates no income. And every second it sits on the planet it depreciates, until it turns 50 and becomes either “classic” or “constructed entirely of prohibited components like lead and asbestos.”
An RV is not an investment.
So, on our way to River City someone returned my Craigslist email, and said they’d be there when we got there.
They were. They were a nice couple who had bought the RV to go to musical concerts, but the wife couldn’t manage to get around the trailer. I looked the trailer over, checked what I could figure out, and then, consulting Kelley’s Blue Book for RVs® (yes, this is a thing), made an offer of $1,000 less than the asking price. Unbeknownst to me, The Mrs. had been talking to the Mrs. of the owner’s side, and, they’d had it on the market for some time and were just getting ready to lower the price.
So, while I felt like a wheeler-dealer, I probably pegged the number that they really wanted. I wrote out a check, they wrote out a title, and we hooked OUR RV to the truck and headed back home. It looked strange, since most RPods have decals that make them look all pretty. In this case, the original owner (not the one we bought from) had painted over everything to advertise his traveling patent medicine show that he ran with Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves.
I know, I know, but you have to give the 70’s some slack. They’d just discovered polyester.
The Mrs. and I talked about what to do about our generic, white RV. In general, we decided we should either paint it like the mystery machine or like the shuttle Galileo from TOS Star Trek. In general, we both liked the way that we imagined the shuttle . . . . and we’ve gotta paint it . . . but can we bring our phasers?
Upon getting it home and hooking it up to power, I found that everything was functional, except the refrigerator and sensors that indicate the levels in the waste tanks and battery. RV refrigerators are mind-numbingly expensive, since they are configured to run on propane, plug-in power, batteries, and hope. They are apparently only made in Germany by small gnomes that live in the Harz Mountains. I resigned myself to buy a cheap college dorm fridge (there was a plug in) and move on. I went to work (mildy) brooding on this. Primarily I was depressed because the nice man hadn’t told me the fridge was on the fritz. I would have still bought it.
Most RV folks say the sensors are useless, and often stop working quickly. Not a problem.
I decided to not make our new toy a source of sadness. I buried any disappointment in a determination to fix it.
Pugsley had spent the night in the trailer. The Mrs. had bet he’d get in the first night it was home, but he waited until the second night to make his move.
Upon returning home from work, I decided to check out other systems.
Nothing electrical worked. Nothing, except the air conditioning, microwave . . . . hmmm.
It was hot, I was sweating, and I began to check various components. I suppressed the burning desire to choke Pugsley. I really reasoned that he was only a bystander – and honestly, the fact that everything was broken was really encouraging.
I know, that sounds weird. But when one thing breaks? Yeah, that thing is generally broken. When it all breaks? That means your mind can generally fix it if you think smart enough, or have a great deal of experience really screwing things up. Me? I have a great running history of not giving up when I should (LINK).
After a bit of investigation, I found that two main fuses were blown. I sent The Boy to buy new ones. During his absence, I flipped the battery terminals on the brand new battery the previous owner had installed. The Boy arrives. I pop in the fuses.
Everything works. Everything. Including the German Ice Machine! Even the sensors that tell me how much onboard poop we have!
So, in best Star Trek® fashion? REVERSE THE POLARITY AND EVERYTHING WORKS!!!!
The previous owner had flopped the terminals on the battery. Now I had a flawlessly working system. Yay! And, unlike constructing tire chains by hand, this didn’t take sixteen hours to noodle through.
During this time, I remembered that the previous owner had stressed I should look at the wheel bearings. For those of you that may not be aware, a wheel spins. But the trailer does not. The contact part for the spinny-part to meet the non-spinny-part is the wheel bearing. It’s essentially a bunch of greased up balls (no jokes here) that allow everything to spin around without getting hot or grinding the nice metal into a pile of hot, combusting metal dust.
On side had a great place to inject grease into the bearing, which is what we used to do when Nixon was president (or so I’m told). Now most cars have sealed bearings that would last to Jupiter and back, but in the 1960’s (I’m told) you had to grease stuff all the time or else you’d die when the wheels flew off of your Model T at 22 miles per hour.
My crappy $500 trailer has sealed bearings. Not this trailer. Nope. It has bearings that must be greased. So I greased the ditch-side (think about it) bearing. There’s a small dust cap that covers the grease Zerk. The grease Zerk is the fitting that allows grease to be pumped on a one-way journey to the bearing, and is named for . . . Austrian engineer Otto U. Zerk. I know it sounds like a joke. It’s not. It should be. It’s not. Otto. U. Zerk.
Anyway – one side done, new grease covering all the nice bearing parts.
Next side . . . where’s the Zerk? Where’s the cap that holds the grease in?
I pulled the Zerk off the other side – Otto’s THREADED Zerk!!! – and put it on the other wheel. And pumped in a LOT of grease. And resolved on our trip to gold country that I’d pump grease into that wheel every hundred miles. (Spoiler, that seemed to work.)
Things I never really thought about:
It takes a LOT of gas to pull even a small trailer. I thought that perhaps if I had one much larger that I’d need to pull a small refinery behind me to supply me with gasoline.
Even a slight uphill was devastating to our progress. Speeding? Uphill? Ha! Never, never, never going to happen.
What I could normally do at the Real Speed Limit (normal speed limit +5 miles per hour) I now had to do at my Maximum Thermodynamic Speed Limit – which was often normal speed limit -5 miles per hour, sometimes -20 miles per hour.
It matters how you load a trailer. For the first 90 miles, whenever I approached 55 miles per hour, the trailer would start to sway from side to side like a break-dancing backup singer during a seizure. When I stopped to fill the Wildermobile with gas the first time I looked up “Trailer Sway” on the Internets. It turns out you simply have to put most of the weight forward so that there’s more weight on the hitch. I moved a bunch of things forward, and it worked like to stop the sway.
I’m not comfortable running a consumer engine at 5000 RPM for 12 hours. I let it back down to 3000 RPM just so I didn’t wreck the family’s hearing. Mine is already shot. Thank you very much, Iron Maiden.
But it worked. We even had one offer at a gas station (while we were on our way) to buy the trailer from us for what we paid for it. Nope.
The issue we had that concerned me the most was the trailer breaking. Apparently all travel trailers have electric brakes. These brakes interact with the braking system on the vehicle pulling the trailer and have the trailer brakes slow the trailer at a (similar) rate to the pulling vehicle. Why?
Because if not, the trailer would be pushing the pulling vehicle as it tried to stop. Worst case, it would keep going during an emergency stop (Newton’s Second Law – A fully loaded travel trailer in motion without brakes will keep going even when you’ve decided that stopping might be in your best interest.)
What concerned me were the mountain passes in gold country. They’re steep. And, while going up would certainly be slow, I wanted going down to be at something less than the speed of sound and not resemble CW McCall’s Wolf Creek Pass.
For these brakes to work, however, an electric controller has to be installed. While I am pretty sure I could install one okay, I’m not going to settle for pretty sure when it comes to preserving my pretty face, unless I want them to pick my remains up off the highway with a stick and a spoon. I farmed it out. But halfway to the mountains, it wasn’t working – showing a code that it had short circuited.
Well, when we stopped to buy a new fuse because Pugsley had plugged a Cray2200 supercomputer into the power outlet. While stopped, I looked a bit closer, traced the wires from the battery back, and found one of the crimped connections that the mechanic had installed had worked its way loose. Ten seconds later? Electric brakes back in business.
We got the camper to gold country, and then, well, camped. In a never-before-happened event, the family decided to extend the vacation for an additional day.
Here is my personal review of the camper:
Sunday Night: Omigosh. We’re here after 70 hours of driving today. And now? We have to set it up. In the dark. Without waking other campers. Three occupants. Only I will pee in camper restroom, and only when no one around. Camper cold, windows left open by Pugsley. Found the next day. Closed windows.
Monday Night: Everyone now fine with peeing in the camper – bathroom walk way too long at 40˚F. Camper way too hot. Four of us. I open the windows.
Tuesday Night: Four of us. Firefly. The Mrs. closes the windows, causing me to have a dream that I live in Houston again. Aaaaargh!
Wednesday Night: Four of us. Lots more Firefly. Slept great all nights. Too many stupid little dogs with stupid hot dog breath.
Thursday Night: Going to stay in it overnight at some nameless city, but we had the “great rush home” which was unanimously approved by the Family Subcommittee on Travel Hours. Sometimes it’s better to sleep in your “other” own bed. Plus I get to wake the neighbors by trying to back the trailer into my driveway at 3AM.
Once I bought the trailer, I now notice that there are trailers . . . everywhere. There are trailers parked out in front of houses where the trailer would CLEARLY be a better place to live than the home it’s in front of. I’m not sure I understand how you can afford a $20,000 or $30,000 RV when you clearly make less than $50,000; but then again, I don’t understand fashion.
I read that since they look like a home that interest a trailer loan is tax deductible? DO NOT use me as a source, unless you’d like to spend a long time in prison for “Using Internet Blogs As Tax Advice.”
My big financial advice on campers – don’t buy one if you can’t do or pay for:
Maintenance: It’s like owning an additional home. There are electrical systems, plumbing, and structural systems. The first night I got it, it attracted ants from five counties away.
Tow Vehicle: No, your Prius™ (LINK) won’t pull one. If you don’t have a good tow vehicle and need one, can you afford the trailer?
Gasoline: You will have to use more gasoline than you ever have, since Elon Musk hasn’t invented an electric trailer puller. He will, I have no doubt, but it’ll be on Mars.
Economics? Cheapest vacation we’ve taken in years (except for the whole “buying the trailer” thing). Didn’t buy restaurant food except twice. Didn’t spend much on attractions. And we saw things like this:
This is a video I took. Felt like Francis Ford Coppola shooting Apocaforest Now. That’s our trailer at the end.
I did the economics, and it will likely pay out in four or so years, which is better than most investments do. I may bore you with them at a future time. But you’re not Vulcans® so you might not like math jokes.
We are planning on using it for many vacations where we’d normally use hotels, so you’ll hear more about it soon.
Dorothy said there’s nowhere like home. And it’s not home, but it’s like home. So, I guess there is somewhere like home, and it’s on wheels. The Boy and Pugsley and The Mrs. rated it the best vacation except for one where we went to Alaska on spring break (yes, we really did this, and maybe I’ll post about it sometime).
So, verdict? It was wonderful. It was economical. It was peaceful (LINK). I learned about gold panning (LINK).
“Ever prospected? Ever hit pay dirt? I’ve dug for gold, silver, lead, mercury. I’ve dug more holes than a whole regiment of gophers. I ain’t never dug a decent day’s wages yet.” – Bite the Bullet
How can you not find the river???
Mankind has been chasing gold forever (Gold, Relativity, Black Holes, Niburu, and Warren Buffett). Probably the most iconic image associated with prospectors is the gold pan. Oh, and the whiskey. But gold panning has been documented to exist at least since the Romans did it, and gold panning exists across cultures – the Japanese gold pan is called the Yuri-ita, and gets much better mileage than one made in Detroit.
The Boy, Pugsley and I headed towards a small river, intent on prospecting. The Mrs. came with us, intent on trout fishing.
This, of course, is where the trouble started. I had fished this river as a young boy, but it had been many presidents since I had hiked down there, since the only reason that I had gone fishing was for the adventure. I had never had, not one time, even one fish bite on any lure or worm or fly I’d ever put in the water. Half the time I went fishing with my friend, C.R. (you would use initials too if your first name was Clyde) we’d end up just playing in the ice cold river. Because? Because we were 11.
As I said, I’d hiked down there dozens, if not hundreds of times, that had been long ago. The walk to the river started as a nice walk along a sage brush plain. Then there was steep gravel drop off – as steep as a gravel slope could be. As an 11 year old, I’d have half jumped down the slope. Now? Not so much. Plus there was the factor of the gear we were carrying:
Two five gallon pails
Shovel
Pick
Metal detector
Sluice box (only about 36” long, and more about this later)
Waders for The Boy and Pugsley
Gold pans
Snuffer bottle (sucks up itsy bitsy pieces of gold)
Lunch
Fishing pole
Folding chair
Two small dogs on leads
Bug spray
Sunscreen
A drone (that’s what took I took the pictures on)
So, we were carrying nearly everything we own. But the drone allowed me to take videos like this:
The Mrs. was carrying her folding chair, fishing pole, and previously listed two idiot dogs. The dogs, relatively unused to being on leashes, would constantly attempt to kill The Mrs. as she walked down the steep gravel slope by wrapping the leashes around each other and her legs. As we stepped into the thick forest, it got worse, since now, in addition to trying to kill The Mrs., the dogs now had the option of trying to kill themselves by wrapping their leashes around trees.
To top it off, the smaller of the two dogs had to be carried over some of the fallen timber, being, apparently afraid in its dog brain of falling down a cliff on the other side of the dead tree. To top it off, there had been record snowpack, so areas that had never been wet when I was a child were swampy.
Everyone who has a wife recognizes “that” tone, when they’ve nearly reached the end of their rope, and the emotion will be jumping out full force. “That” tone showed up.
“Okay, everybody put the stuff down. I’ll go ahead and find the easiest way.”
I dropped the things I was carrying and headed toward the forest, and, I hoped, the river.
I could hear the river, and started that way. I wove around trees and over fallen trees, and through at least one (small) swamp. Right next to the river, however, I was faced with a relatively impenetrable wall of willows. I could have made it through, but would have needed a machete.
So, falling the wall of willows, I made my way back around and found . . . the steep gravel slope. I had come in a full circle. Fortunately, I found both the way to the river, and an easy way for our stupid, frightened dog to walk. The big plus? An easy path back out for when we left. And right there was the fishing hole I hadn’t seen since the Soviets were a thing.
The Boy, Pugsley and I got to work. We used the metal detector in the water (it’s waterproof) and then The Boy and I began to dig up the area.
Now, I had panned for gold before, but only in a half-hearted way. This time? I wanted to get serious and really understand it.
The gold pan kit that I’d bought (LINK) came with a screen that we used to get rid of the bigger rocks. I figured that if we started getting gold nuggets the size of my fist that I might be able to recognize them, and screening out the bigger rocks allowed us to fill the bucket with smaller material so we could go to step two . . . the sluice box.
A sluice box is a device that uses the current from the flowing river to wash most of the smaller material away. The idea is that gold is quite heavy, and will fall down in the water faster than the surrounding soil and will get caught in the carpet, riffles, and parts of the sluice box. A good picture of the sluice box we used is here (LINK).
After you wash the sluice box, then it’s time to pan.
And one thing I will say – the biggest mistake I made was being too gentle with my initial panning. Again, gold is heavy. Gold is ten times denser than sand. It is four times denser than magnetite sand (also called “black sand”), which is what is left over after you’ve panned out the regular sand, and are getting to the point where you’ve eliminated most of the material. And you won’t just swish the magnetite out of the bottom of your five gallon pail – it, like gold, drops out fast.
So, as we panned, we got down to the black sand, and I’d use the snuffer bottle (it came with the gold pans) to pick out the very, very small flecks of gold – nearly gold dust – that would appear in the bottom of the pan.
I still have about five pounds of black sand to go through to find all the gold dust – I imagine that by the time I’ve gotten through it we’ll have gotten $10 or $20 worth of gold, which is the product of three people working eight hours.
Pretty quickly I realized that gold panning was like life and opportunity.
If you don’t pan, you won’t get any gold. This is true of opportunity. You might have a wonderful idea for a novel. You might have a great business idea. If you don’t get up and get going? You’ll never know.
The more material we processed, the more black sand, and thus, the more gold we’d get. If we had stopped after the first bucket, we’d only have had 1/6 of the gold. And opportunity is like that – the harder you work, the more opportunity you’ll have in life.
Most of the gold is very, very small. Most opportunities are small.
There’s gold everywhere, but in most of those places it’s not worth getting because it’s too diffuse. There’s 20 million tons of gold in the world’s oceans, but only a 13 billionths of a gram in each liter. Nuggets are rare everywhere. Most huge opportunities are rare, too. That doesn’t mean that you should stop looking, but you should look in the right places (LINK).
The better I get at panning, the more gold I’ll find. The better I get at reviewing places that might hold opportunity, the more of them I’ll find.
More experience will tell me what’s worth panning, and what I should ignore. Many opportunities (most!) aren’t worth your time. Experience tells you which ones to focus on.
Most people who strike it rich in gold spend every bit of what they found . . . looking for more gold. I’ve seen this in life, too. How many people look for that same set of conditions to arrive again and again and fail as the moment has past?
Everything goes better with big, heavy equipment. Huge pumps! Water cannons! Now we’re talking! If you have a business with tax lawyers and accountants and experts? The size of the opportunity you can jump on increases.
Oh, and The Mrs. and her fishing? A nice trout hit her lure on her second cast. But she didn’t get that one reeled in. But still that was a better fishing day than any I’d ever had there, but I did get another insight on life, and got to play in the rivers of my youth one more time.
“Mulder, the Internet is not good for you.” – X-Files
The Boy, looking out over the Fruited Plain. Sadly, cell reception is great there.
As I’ve alluded to in the previous two posts (GOLDand SUDDEN WEALTH), The Mrs., The Boy, Pugsley, and our borderline idiot dogs (who try ever so hard) recently went on a vacation. We took off for the Fourth of July, which in Great Britain is known as Benjamin Franklin is a Jerk Day. Part of the idea was to have some fun experiences (which we did, and I’ll describe in future, meaningful posts) but when we finished I had some other observations, as well that I’ll share in the next few posts . . . anyway . . .
We went off to the mountains, because:
that’s where the gold is, and
that’s where the cold is.
Lower Northern Midwestia summers bounce between hellishly hot and molten iron, although this year the summer has been quite mild and pleasant. One other nice thing about the mountains is that they don’t have large populations – lots of solitude is possible. And there are reasons for the low population:
It’s really, really cold in winter, like -40˚F. I know. I grew up there. People (outside of my family) don’t appear to cryogenic levels of cold where plastic turns as brittle as Shia LeBeouf’s temper.
Since there’s not much atmosphere above you when you’re over 8,000 feet in altitude (that’s over 100 meters!), it doesn’t block the Sun’s incoming pain rays. I can walk around in Midwestia all day long without sunscreen. Up high? I burn like a California resort town during a drought in about 15 minutes.
Economic activity (mainly) consists of tourism, which, because of the whole “bitter cold and five feet of snow on October 1 and no ski area” ambiance, only lasts four to six months out of the year, but mortgages are a 12 month out of the year affair. It’s a poor area, except for the really rich people that own cool summer chalets. They’re all Texans.
Services are bleak. From our campground, the nearest gas station was 30 miles away (17 meters). There is no natural gas to any house or business. Propane is trucked from 30,000 miles away. Electrical service is beamed from the moon, since that’s closer than any power plant, and, most importantly for today’s post:
There is no cable, no cell phone service, and only a tiny bit of Internet.
Honestly, that was part of the allure of the camping spot, and part of what we were paying for, that dwindling of focus and distraction . . . we’d had that before . . . in Alaska.
In Alaska, even though we had gotten media from “Outside” (Outside means “Not Alaska”) we just . . . didn’t care. It was too far away. Bush fighting with Democrats (this was 2004-6)? Who cares – not us. Sinkhole swallows Florida? Sounds rough – yawn. A not news story about some subject guaranteed to polarize and produce outrage? Unless it happened in Alaska we didn’t care. At all.
When we moved back down to The States, we started caring again: we got meshed back into The Matrix.
We started worrying about issues that we couldn’t impact – but like attempting to teach a Kardashian to fetch, it just frustrates you since the Kardashian clearly cannot understand the basic concept.
We started using Google® as our arbiter of facts. Around the year 2000, we stopped arguing about facts. In Alaska, we started again. When we moved back to the states? Stopped arguing. Google® is wonderful to find out when Richard Dawson hosted Family Feud®. What have we lost because we don’t argue about facts anymore? In my case, I stretched some mind muscles on this trip I hadn’t used in a while, and we thought about the facts not as discrete digital bits, but as part of the continuum of knowledge. When did that volcano pop up? How did the valley form? Why are the rocks near the stream bed at 8,400 feet in elevation rounded, while the rocks near the ridgeline at 11,000 feet angular? The arguments about facts we don’t know is in and of itself a valuable mental process, and teaches us how to think. (Imagine Kim even understanding that!) We don’t need to know how a Kardashian gets into yoga pants. We can, if we have a strong enough stomach, think it through. (shudder)
As a family we fight back against The Matrix. We have designated activities and times when we unplug. No cell phones when we go out to dinner. Gourmet Night (LINK). These things make us turn away from our distractions, (LINK) and focus on each other, and on the present moment. We have a secondary rule: we don’t allow The Boy and Pugsley begin to huddle in an autistic mind meld about computers. No computer discussions allowed.
And as we travelled? Eventually we hit dead zones with no communication. At our campsite? No communication whatsoever. No cell. No Internet.
No phone, no lights, no motor car,
Not a single luxury,
Like Robinson Crusoe,
It’s primitive as can be.
Okay, we had lights, and a car, and wine, and a dvd player that we watched Firefly® on, and they had something resembling a primitive WIFI made of smoke signals (it’s digital, right?) but it was really isolated. I confiscated devices gently encouraged The Boy and Pugsley to embrace unplugging from the Infosphere.
And it worked.
For over 90 hours (with one small break to visit the gas station) we avoided even radio. Even AM radio.
What did we do?
We talked to each other.
We panned for gold (next post).
Played games. (This one is called Poor Choices and it was a LOT of fun – disclosure: when I start up an Amazon affiliate link I’ll get paid for it, but not as of this writing)
Drove the High Country backroads.
Fished. (no, didn’t catch any)
Focused on now.
Ate the precious, precious Pez® we brought with us.
We moved away from information saturation, from caring about each and every issue to a life where we were free . . . not to care.
Then, too quickly, we headed for home. Like a body returning to life, with each passing mile more information was available to us, first AM, then FM, then finally actual cell phone towers. Then personal email, finally work email. Then, we got home, and found that our DVR had dutifully watched TV for us in our absence.
So, driving to work this week I ditched news radio. I started by trying to listen to music, but at drive time all they want to do is talk about butts and farting. Not that I don’t enjoy having a butt, and, well, the very first joke was probably about a fart and not a no-load mutual fund, so we’re hardwired to find those funny. Today I drove in silence, just listening to my thoughts accompanied with the back beat of the tires on the road.
Listing to talk radio plays on your emotions – no matter what side of the political spectrum you’re on. That’s what the radio folks intend. And I had an idea while driving in silence. Maybe a life changing one. Maybe not. But as Kiyosaki (LINK) tweeted the other day, you control what goes in your mind.
And I do control what goes in my mind. (Which is why you should read this blog, since it is rated totally awesome for your mind!) I even can control the things that I say to myself – after all, would I want to be friends with a person who says as many meant things as my inner dialogue could?
Nope.
And I can control that, too. But there’s no way that I can make the British love Benjamin Franklin, or teach Kim to fetch.
“What’s in the bag? A shark or something?” – Nic Cage, The Wicker Man
How I imagine Elon Musk hunts for ducks.
In panning for gold, I can’t help but wonder what would happen if I found a whole bunch, all at once. My mind wanders. All the beef jerky I could wear. All the Lear® Jets I could eat. I’d be fine, right?
Well, it seems like there are a pair of psychologists (Joan DiFuria and Stephen Goldbart, LINK) who described “Sudden Wealth Syndrome.” They describe the following symptoms (my comments in parenthesis):
Fear of Loss of Control (The idea of being without a mortgage should make us all shake with fear)
Paranoia (Are you threatening me?)
Depression (I’m so sad, I can’t count as high as my money, no matter how long I live!)
From that description, it sounds like winning sucks, eh? I assure you that, in the choice between having money and not having money, I MUCH prefer having money, and as a business model, catering to very, very wealthy people with neurosis is probably very profitable. I like the way those guys think!
But let’s put this in context. Think about the behavior of the typical twenty-something starlet or rock star that’s rolling in cash? They tend to make a lot of poor choices, primarily because nothing in their experience has prepared them for the sudden onset of cash. By contrast, many of the folks who do really well with money at an early age (Think Bill Gates and Paul Allen) had a really well-to-do upbringing. Not rock star rich, but they were going to exclusive private schools. They’d been taught how to deal with money early on, and, likely never had to worry much about not having it.
But let’s pick on Nicolas Cage. Why? Face/Off is probably reason enough. Really? Swapping faces with John Travolta? That’s the movie plot? I won’t pick on Shia Lebeouf because that’s like a velociraptor picking on a kitten.
Nic Cage (he told me he didn’t mind me calling him that when I imagined talking to him) made millions as an actor. He could have done that if they only paid him a dollar a movie, but he made much more, at least $20 per movie. Again, he made millions. $150,000,000. Yes. ONE HUNDRED FIFTY MILLION dollars. American dollars, not fake ones like they print in Canada.
He spent it all. ALL OF IT.
On what?
An $8 million dollar castle in England. He spent millions fixing it up. Never spent a night there.
An island.
Four yachts. At the same time.
A pair of rare albino king cobras.
Let’s face it, the man had a whole small country plus a navy (yes, four boats is more than in all of Canada) plus king cobras. I’m not sure why he didn’t get three albino king cobras, but, he settled for two.
Seriously – was Nic Cage trying to live exactly like the bad guy in an Austin Powers movie? No, I think that there’s something missing, plus nobody can figure out how to tell a guy not to blow all of his money on shiny things.
From observation, I do think that sudden wealth, or worse, sudden wealth and fame is not really good for you. I think that it can greatly distort the sense of self. Bill Murray said that everyone is a jerk (not exactly the word he used, but you get the idea) for the first year after they become rich and famous. He then followed up with the observation that some people never snap out of it.
And, from the way that stars handle fame, it looks like many of them fall into DiFuria and Goldbart’s Sudden Wealth Syndrome. They’ve got money but the feelings that they have wrapped up around the money give them a lot of guilt. Some, however, seem a bit more grounded:
It has been reported that Reeves gave approximately US$80 million of his US$114 million earnings of The Matrix sequels, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, to the special effects and makeup staff. – Wikipedia
That seems a bit more grounded. Warren Buffett lives in a house that (per the Intertubes) is worth $652,000. I’m pretty sure it’s paid for, since Warren is worth $76.7 billion dollars. That also seems pretty stable, since he bought it in 1958.
Lottery winners also seem to have a problem. The first problem they have is the inability to do math. Now, if there’s a tax that I like, it’s a tax on folks who can’t do math. But the general saw is that some sort of karma hits the lottery winners, and makes them miserable. And those stories are the big ones in the news. But the reality? 85% of winners keep going to work (based on one study I saw) and most of those (60%) were still working at the same place they were before they won the lottery.
It seems that we almost want to hear the tragedy, because it suits our sense of fairness – this poor person who didn’t know math lucked out, but, boy, karma got ‘em in the end. Nah. Most of them seem to do just fine – more like Warren Buffett, less like Nic Cage.
Me, if someone bought me a lottery ticket that one, or I hit a pocket of gold worth $150,000,000? An 8,500 pound (that’s about 17 kilograms) pocket of gold?
I’m headed to the Musk’s space habitat. Beer’s on me.
“Sitting here attempting to meditate, I have counted the number of ways I know of killing someone, using just a finger, a hand, a foot. I had reached 94 when you entered.” – Star Trek: Voyager
So, when I meditate? Gotta have a tiger. Nothing makes me calmer than sitting with an apex carnivore, because it allows me to forget materiality.
So, I’ve always thought that meditation must be cool. After all, David Carradine did it as Kwai Chang Caine all through the 1970’s as Kung Fu. And he could give any group of bullies very peaceful and regretful butt-kicking they deserved. And, really, throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s on television, meditation was seen as sort of a way to create super powers from within. The (often Asian, or certainly taught-by-Asians) character would sit down, legs crossed, and would meditate until he got super-strength, super quickness, super pain tolerance, super control of his nervous system, or . . . super control of his ability to quickly grow fingernails at twice the speed of a normal human.
It was everywhere. Meditation was the cure to all of life’s problems. Transcendental Meditation™ would help with:
Lower Stress – People who meditate appear to have lower stress and lower concentrations of cortisol (a hormone associated with stress). Me? Sometimes when I try to meditate it stresses me out because I’m unsure if I’m doing it right, so I focus on that instead of meditating and pretty soon I’m wondering if I’ll have enough money when I’m 80 to parachute into the Super Bowl® and . . .
More Work Output – Some study said that employees that meditate get more work done. I’m pretty sure that if my boss walks by my desk and sees me staring into a blank computer monitor and repeatedly saying “ohmmmmmmmm” he will either assume I’m measuring electronic resistance in my mind, or, more likely, he’ll think I’m off my rocker and rush to fire me before I can charge the company insurance a lot of money for treatment of whatever makes me stare at my monitor and say “ohmmmmmmm” again and again.
Lower Blood Pressure – I thought I needed blood pressure? Oh, not the kind that causes blood to ooze out of my pores like sweat? Got it. I think this is probably compatible with the whole Lower Stress thing.
Lower Risk of Heart Disease – If true, probably tied back to 1. and 3., above. Since heart disease sounds pretty bad, I’d probably like to avoid that.
ADHD Treatment – Is ADHD made up? I don’t seem to recall this even existing when I was a kid – it was called, “being a kid.” And you didn’t get classified narcotics for it. You got a pile of wood to move and split and haul. That typically un-deficited my attention and took all the energy I had stored up for hyperactivity away. Move four tons of wood with a wheelbarrow? Yeah, you’re not going to bug Mom to the point she wants to give you psychoactive drugs. But apparently meditation works to help, too.
Better Home Life – Yes, if you’re not a raging jerk from stress from work, that might help your home life. Or not. Raging jerks seem to do okay, so don’t sell that short.
Increased Intelligence – Unlikely. If you’re reading this blog, you’re already growing your IQ by 3 to 6 points . . . per hour. If meditation increases your IQ? Your head will explode.
Ability to Smoke Weed Like the Beatles – Minus the money and the freedom from repercussions. Oh, wait, I’m describing most everyone. No meditation required.
Finding Chicks Like Yoko – How is this an advantage?
Weight Loss – Yeah, most everyone wants to be skinnier. Except Gary Busey, who just wants to be a fried chicken. Not eat it, be it.
Growing Younger – Apparently (he said skeptically), a 55 year old that meditates regularly has the body of a 43 year old. Probably buried in his crawl space, right? But here I think that there might be a correlation with the type of personality that has sufficient discipline to meditate regularly and not get side-tracked, rather than the meditation itself?
Shinier Teeth – I made that one up. But, why not?
That sounds pretty good. So why don’t people meditate more?
Well, there are some potential risks to meditation, namely a risk to your ego. I’m not making this up. Think about the process of meditation – it ends up bringing clarity and reflection on the way the world is, and, potentially, can strip away many of the constructs that we create in our day to day life.
And that is dangerous.
I had a boss that went to a leadership seminar – but this was an intensive leadership seminar, 12-14 hours a day, meant to rip the illusions about your life right up and out of your nostrils. The theory was that this will allow you to take the risks and live your life unafraid. Turns out that many people have built their entire life on illusions – and ripping those illusions out through your nostrils is painful. Especially if you have to confront that you might be the cause of every problem you have, every repressed emotion, and that is dangerous. According to my boss, one of these Fortune® 500 executives who had paid $25,000 for this course tried to kill himself due to guilt he felt after his illusions were pulled away. (This is also why you DON’T TAKE my blog as ADVICE!)
Psychology Today (also a dubious publication) indicated that meditation can also lead to depersonalization, psychosis, anxiety, seizures, insomnia, and dating Yoko Ono. They also indicated that those who had previous trauma could also be . . . dare I say . . . triggered by meditation.
Buddhist meditation was designed not to make us happier, but to radically change our sense of self and perception of the world. Given this, it is perhaps not surprising that some will experience negative effects such as dissociation, anxiety and depression.
– Psychologists Miguel Farias and Catherine Wilkolm
I have been attempting to meditate, in my own fashion. My best success has been while I’m off, alone, floating in the Wilder Family hot tub (LINK). I’ll sit there, alone, focusing on breathing, and then . . . wake up half an hour later. I know that the instruction manual says never fall asleep in a hot tub, but I’m generally refreshed and have a pretty positive outlook when I wake up. And Yoko Ono is safely far away in New York, living on John Lennon’s massive pile of money.
Also, I’ve learned to think, when I meditate, that I might be good at Kung Fu. And levitating. And . . . being able to grow my fingernails . . . really fast!
“It gladdens me to know that Odin prepares for a feast. Soon I shall be drinking ale from curved horns. This hero that comes into Valhalla does not lament his death. I shall not enter Odin’s hall with fear. There I shall wait for my sons to join me. And when they do, I will bask in their tales of triumph. The Aesir will welcome me! My death comes without apology! And I welcome the Valkyries to summon me home!” – Ragnar, Vikings
Miley Cyrus after some bronzing and a bit of weight loss.
What’s the ugliest word in the English language to a person who is losing weight?
Plateau.
Plateau came from the French, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary (LINK), and first entered into the English language just a decade before when Napoleon was on his Russian Winter Vacation (hint: no land wars in Russia – Napoleon started with about 500,000 French troops on his joy ride to Moscow, and when he crossed back into France he was down to 27,000).
The first recorded use of plateau in the sense dieters dread (The stage at which no progress is apparent) was in 1897, the same year that John D. MacArthur, whose foundation gives out the MacArthur Genius Grant (HINT HINT!), was born.
Plateau comes from the Greek word “platys” which means “flat, wide, and broad.” Wide and broad are the last adjectives a dieter wants to hear, since those are generally the adjectives that started the diet in the first place. Taken together, “flat, wide, and broad” also describe my first girlfriend, but I digress.
Every time I’ve lost weight, I’ve ended up at a plateau (or two, or three) on my way down. I don’t seem to have the plateau problem on the way up, or if I have, I’ve never managed to really notice it because the scale is covered in melted rocky-road ice cream dripping from my chin. And, as plateaus go, this one isn’t horrible, I’m still pleased with the overall weight loss. But it is a marked decrease when compared to the earlier rate, when pounds were dropping faster than Kathy Griffin supporters.
I credit some of the earlier losses to water. One think I’ve noted about the Aktins/Primal lifestyle is that two days or so after I stop eating carbohydrates, my weight takes a significant bump downward, which I attribute either constant prayer to the Norse god Wåysfyärläëss (wears furs, has a wolf and a book containing the carbohydrate content of Norse cuisine) or, more than likely, a drop in pure water weight because I’m no longer digesting carbs.
The second place I lose water is working out, and they sure have noticed at the gym, since they’ve installed an intricate drainage system around the stair climber I normally use. They also are building a vaguely ark-like think near the climber, and the staff runs for life preservers when I wring out my headband . . .
Emotionally, the early, big success helps you a lot. It shows that your efforts really do pay off, that the sacrifice of time, sweat, and sweat chocolate ice cream is worth it. But in the last few weeks I’ve lost the equivalent weight of clothing that Mylie Cyrus normally wears (like an ounce). The change in Jupiter’s gravitational impact on me between night and day is more than that.
From XKCD, reminding me that little changes add up.
I’ve hit plateaus before, and used a variety of techniques to get through them, but hacking off limbs is painful and has a bit of an air of desperation about it. I did some research, and there are some things I’ve started/going to try that I thought I’d share:
Change Up My Cardio – I had been climbing more virtual stairs than the number of times that Stairway to Heaven was played in 1978, but at a constant, Clydesdale pace.
This week I’ve changed it up and am doing interval training, doing four minutes my Clydesdale pace, and one minute like a greyhound. An old greyhound. With hip problems. But, this one change (four minutes medium and one fast, repeat 6+ times) has already increased my stair climbing number by 43% in terms of the number of floors climbed. 43%! Now, I should be increasing my output and going up farther and faster, I weigh less, right? But 43% is a lot. And it feels good.
Verdict: Yup. This will help break the plateau, but the gym folks are now digging a sweat moat.
More Sleep – Studies have shown that people who get less than six hours of sleep a night lose less weight on a diet than those who get eight hours of sleep.
I’ll never average more than 8 hours of sleep a night until I retire. Never. Work happens during the day, and my boss wants me there . . . in the morning. Ugh. My mind has different ideas, though, and I hit my creative peak in the evening. I will put in an effort to get more sleep than the six hours I’m averaging now. But life is really spelled T-I-M-E. I just have all the time I want, even now.
True Wilder Story:
I went up to my friend, Madge, and said, “I’m so tired, I’m just wondering if something is wrong with me?”
Madge: “What time did you go to bed?”
John Wilder: “2AM.”
Madge then, after slugging me, patiently explained that sometimes tired is a symptom of “not sleeping enough,” whatever that is, and perhaps the ultimate cure was sleep.
Why sleep when there’s caffeine? Silly Madge.
Verdict: I’ll try, but . . . sleep is for the weak.
Re-fanaticize About Calories – As time progresses, sometimes lifestyle changes start to slip a little backwards . . . I’m not talking about burying my face into a full box of donuts, but there is part of my mind that likes to pretend that Bud Light® and a single slice of pizza doesn’t have any carbs.
Verdict: Back on it with a passion.
Vitamin C – One website (one) that I reviewed thought that since vitamin C is an anti-oxidant that somehow it does something that might slow weight loss. It was boring, so I can’t remember. Heck, maybe I slipped into a coma.
Verdict: I’ll keep this one in my back pocket for now. Maybe if the plateau doesn’t break in June . . .
Apple Cider Vinegar – Wow. Not sure how I missed this one. I could do an entire post about the supposed benefits of this stuff. The websites mention that the apple cider vinegar should be unpasteurized, unfiltered, and unboxed. Wait, the unboxed is a Sammy Hagar album. I was a bit skeptical about the unboxed part, thinking it might come in a used one liter Miller beer bottle, but, no, Heinz sells the stuff, too, so it seems legit? Some claims about Apple Cider Vinegar:
Helps with upset stomach
Cures hiccups
Soothes a sore throat
Kills cancer cells???? (everything does in a petri dish)
In a 2006 study – Lowers Cholesterol
Aids in weight loss by suppressing appetite and increasing metabolism
Clears acne
Controls blood sugar, especially in pre-diabetic patients
Whitens teeth (SERIOUSLY – DON’T DO THIS! IT WILL DISSOLVE YOUR TEETH.)
Prevents metabolizing starches (not all carbs, like sugars, but somehow slows down metabolizing of more complex carbs)
Verdict: Wow. E, F, H and J are amazing, if true. D would be amazing, but sounds bogus to me. I’ve started taking some of this morning and night and now kinda smell like a salad. Doesn’t seem to be a downside except causing my teeth to turn into a crumbly calcium paste. We’ll see?
I’m pretty sure that the weight loss dam will break in the next week or so, or else I’ll have to pull up the stone altar to Wåysfyärläëss that I put in the backyard and apologize to the neighbors about the wolf and the chanting and drinking of mead late into the night.
Wait, Mead doesn’t have calories, does it?
Nah. On to Valhalla!
Okay, I’m reminding you again – I am NOT a medical doctor, though once the MacArthur Fellowship comes in I’m thinking of becoming a Podiatrist, because feet need love, too – SO DON’T CONSIDER THIS MEDICAL ADVICE OR DO ANYTHING WITHOUT DISCUSSING WITH YOUR OWN PHYSICIAN.
