Happiness – Page 9 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

28 Things That Make Me Happy

“Happy premise #3: Even though I feel like I might ignite, I probably won’t.” – Bowfinger

Why can’t you make coffee happy? It’s always bitter.

What makes me happy? Oh, sure, like everyone else I love it when Joe Biden falls off a bicycle and want to start a GoFundMe® to buy him a 350 horsepower motorcycle. But beyond that motorcycle, what really makes me happy?

A lot of things. So, the following are a few of them, in an absolutely random order:

Helping people see what they otherwise would not have seen. That’s why I write.
Writing.
Helping people laugh. I stood up in front of several hundred adults when I was in third grade and did a standup routine. It was awful. Why do third graders not do standup? Their material is awful. I have been writing humor since about that time.
A good cigar. I smoke them rarely enough that my insurance company calls me a non-smoker. But sitting down in the hot tub with one and staring out at the peaceful night sky in Modern Mayberry as the coyotes creep out of their dens to howl at sunset?
A good book. I’ve read several this year, and was planning on doing a post about those. Regardless, a book is transformative. I like mine in paper – something about the tactile feel of the book is hypnotic. E-books are convenient, but are less immersive.
A bad book. I generally learn something even from those.

I once mixed a snake with a fruit. I called it a bananaconda.

Cool days. I am really not a fan of summer except at elevations above a mile and a half or latitudes near that of Fairbanks. Winter? Never seen one too cold.
The smooth taste of a cup of coffee in the morning makes me hate waking up a bit less. Don’t get me wrong, I know that I have to get up, and to move from comfort to discomfort if I want to accomplish anything. Coffee is our bitter friend that makes being awake work for me.
Making the world better in big ways. If I can make the world a little bit better for thousands of people I don’t know, awesome. I’ve been lucky enough to do that a time or two.
Making the world better in small ways. I tip well and don’t complain (much) when I go out to eat. Waitresses, even crappy ones, work hard so I don’t want to make their lives harder when for a couple of bucks I can make it better.

Chuck Norris and Superman® wrestled once. Loser had to wear his underwear on the outside of his clothes for the rest of his life.

Being with my family. Good heavens, I love those dunderheads. The thing that family provides is, perhaps, the only lasting legacy that I’ll leave.
I had a friend once who is an Orthodox Priest (I seem to attract priests and clergy – I have no idea why) and he asked me a simple, but profound question, “If you love learning, is that a good thing?” Great question! My only answer that I’ve come up with so far is that to know Truth takes us closer to knowing God. To know what is False tells us what is not God. Still a great question, and I can see the idea that learning can sometimes be a distraction that takes us away from Truth.
Making liars uncomfortable. I have no idea why, but I cannot abide by those that aren’t faithful, and those that lie (there’s a difference). I’ve heard it said that we all lie, and I must admit that in my youth I told a few. I’ve since learned that I cannot escape the Truth so I try to be as faithful to Truth as much as I can be. Has telling the Truth cost me when a lie would never have been caught? Was it worth it? Yes. My honor is clean. It’s not my job to judge, but when I can make them feel pain? I love it.
Good music. What do I like about music? I like optimistic music, music that looks to a future that, while it might mean there’s a fight, means that there is hope. Rock and roll used to be that music before it got whiney.
A good mystery. I love being able to take clues and figure out the real answer. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

In the 1970s, Led Zep™ went on vacation, so Pink Floyd® tended their gardens. So, Roger Waters Robert’s Plants?

Knowing that the main limitation to what I do in the world is me. I am lucky enough to be able to choose what (mostly) I want to do. Because of that, my choices define my destiny. Not Destiny, that’s a stripper that works down in McMaynerbury.
Camping is a way to get away from the things that make us comfortable. Huh? I thought comfortable was happy? No. Comfortable is comfortable. When camping away from all of the things that mask us from the realities of the basic functions of life it leads me to focus on them, and understand that life in a cold tent in the rain after eating food that was poorly cooked is . . . still pretty good. Comfort isn’t happiness.
Knowing that there is much more on Heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in my philosophy. I believe, as the man said to those dudes in Corinth, we “see through a glass, darkly.” I know that there is imperfection in what I know, and what I understand. I also know that, (at least) as long as I’m alive, I’ll never understand it all. How cool is that!?!? We live in a time and place where we’ll never have all the answers. The game is afoot.
Being on time. I hate being late – I think it shows disrespect to those that you’re meeting. When I’m on time, and not rushed? It’s wonderful. So, I try to do that because it makes me happy.
Sleeping in. I love to sleep in. It’s awesome. What makes it awesome? Getting up early. I hate that – that’s why getting up early is awesome.

Fush u mang?

Knowing that I have to do things that are uncomfortable to grow. Getting up early is one. So, doing things I don’t like, things that are uncomfortable make me happy because I know that’s a chance to grow.
Knowing that the most important thing I’ll ever do is probably in front of me.
Or not.
Fixing something. When something is broken it actively makes me unhappy every time I see it or have to deal with it. Weirdly, I get an outsized amount of happiness in dealing with the things that I fixed or made better.
Starting something. Every start is a new journey. What an adventure!

After reading the dictionary, every other book is just a remix.

Finishing something. Every completion is something in the past, something that I’ve done to my standard. What’s next?
Doing something pure. I used to make models, and sometimes I’d look at the unpainted model and love the purity of the completed plane or tank or starship. I almost hated to paint it. And then when the painting was done? Also awesome. But building something new and perfect is a thumb in the eye of entropy.
Watching my children achieve. Like I said above, my children are perhaps my only legacy. In three generations, most memories of me will likely be gone, so I’ll live on in the world only in the legacy of my children. And maybe that makes me happiest.

Now about that motorcycle. A Harley® or a Ninja™?

It Came From 1982

“The Alan Parsons Project is a progressive rock band in 1982. Why don’t you just name it ‘Operation Wang-Chung’?” – Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me

A hipster asked me if I liked Indy films, “Sure, I loved The Last Crusade.”

The last time I did a movie list, I did a list based on an entire decade: the 1990s. It was an interesting list, but Aesop made a comment I’ll paraphrase because I’m too lazy to look it up to get the exact quote: “If you did the 1980s, you’d break the Internet.”

And he’s right. The 1980s were, very clearly, a much better decade for movies than any decade since. Before? Probably. There are great movies before and after the 1980s, but I think this was peak movie.

Why? In the 1980s it was very much Reagan’s country: “It is morning in America.” People were starting to feel optimistic after the recession, and people were starting to feel proud again. The movies of the period reflect that. Also, Hollywood® was able to experiment – it didn’t have to get a blockbuster because it invested $600,000,000 in a movie. No, it could do stupid, cheap movies. It could do daring movies. And that let it do exceptional movies. I’m picking 1982, because, like Aesop warned: I don’t want to break the Internet.

Why 1982? Because when I got into the hot tub tonight to smoke a nice Rocky Patel Decade Toro cigar and prepare to write, a video about my favorite movie from 1982 showed up. The following are a list of eighteen movies from 1982 that were better than most movies that show up today. For the most part, they’re in alphabetical order because, again, I’m too lazy to rank them.

But number one for me from 1982 has got to be:

The Thing.

But at least they’ll have lots of pasta to eat down there: penguine.

I had always loved John W. Campbell’s work, and The Thing is one of his best films. No, it doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test where it has women talking to each other. There are no women in the movie. At all. And it kicks ass, so I’m beginning to think the Bechdel Test shows me what movies will suck.

The film featured all practical effects – and that made them more visceral, in some cases literally. Kurt Russell in a beard losing a chess game against a computer and then tossing scotch into the computer from his nearly infinite supply of J&B®. And the result? One of the best action/horror/science fiction movies. Ever. It was considered a flop at the time, and now is considered one of the best movies of all time.

See? That’s why I love the 1980s.

The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Burt Reynolds. Singing about whores, in a movie about LaGrange, Texas, which if I believed ZZ Top®, is just filled with whores. With Dolly Parton? No, there’s nothing particularly good about this, but, someone in Hollywood thought it was a good idea.

Blade Runner. Stark. Grungy. Set a few years ago. Everyone was sweaty. Also? Everyone likes this movie more than I do – probably my least favorite Philip K. Dick movie. Bonus? I had a girlfriend who I convinced that she was actually a robot. Dick move? No, a Philip K. Dick move.

This movie begs the question: did they have blow driers in ninja school?

The Challenge. Scott Glenn and Toshiro Mifune in a movie about an American who fights ninja-style with office supplies, and, no, I’m not making that up. Utterly awesome. I believe I am the only person on the continent who liked this movie.

Conan the Barbarian. You’ve all seen it. I had read Conan stories before I saw the movie – I was not particularly impressed, but I had to mention this movie. It featured Arnold after he learned to read, but before he learned to act.

Eating Raoul. The best movie about cannibalistic infidelity for profit I’ve seen. It’s also the only movie about cannibalistic infidelity for profit I’ve ever seen.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Little needs to be said about this classic – carrot eating would never be the same in the cafeteria again in 1982. Plus? Sammy Hagar jamming.

Doesn’t anyone knock?

Firefox. Clint Eastwood stealing Soviet jets because he could think in Russian. Special effects don’t hold up, but still fun.

First Blood. Sly making the best Rambo movie before they started to get silly.

Night Shift. There are some actors that should stick to comedy. It may not be a popular opinion, but I think Michael Keaton is one of them. What is it about 1982 and whores? This movie has the lighthearted subject of a morgue turning into a brothel.

An Officer and a Gentleman. It’s like Top Gun, but no flying. Why would you watch this movie? Because you have nowhere else to go.

Poltergeist. The movie that led to making it a law that if you moved a cemetery for a housing development, that you had to movie the bodies, too. Go to the light, Carol Anne!

What do Italian ghosts eat? Spooketti.

Porky’s. This movie was a series of sketches combined with bad jokes and nudity, and those are the redeeming bits. Gets bad when the plot gets in the way. Paging Michael Hunt.

Rocky III. Sly was busy in 1982. But this movie was a good sequel, and probably better than you remember.

Silent Rage. A Chuck Norris movie. It’s not a great movie, but it’s an awesome movie. I know that makes no sense, but neither does this movie. It’s really my favorite Chuck Norris movie – science fiction with karate.

Yup, sittin’ around without a shirt and with my cowboy hat on. Ahhh, 1982, we miss you.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. This is the sequel that saved Star Trek. Star Trek the Motion Picture was a dud. This was not. It was the best Star Trek movie, ever. It had the joy and exuberance of the best of Star Trek TOS, plus a worthy villain and a chess game in space combat. There has been no Star Trek after this that has been nearly as good, and probably few before this.

Tootsie. The Mrs. loves this movie. Me? Once was enough. Bill Murray was my favorite part of this one.

The World According to Garp. This was the best Robin Williams movie, period. I read the novel, and this was a movie that could never, ever be made today.

Young Doctors in Love. Excellent movie that’s nearly unavailable today. Also, taught me how to easily test for diabetes.

Yup, that’s just one year in the 1980s, picked nearly at random.

Good times.

Why We Are The Luckiest People, Ever.

“Keep a memory of me, not as a king or a hero, but as a man. Fallible and flawed.” – Beowulf

Donate one kidney, you’re a hero. Donate six, and all of a sudden you’re a monster.

We are the luckiest people who have ever lived.

“Why, John Wilder, you must be insane! Look at what’s going on,” you say. Well, the nice men at the sanitarium said that the whole “insane” thing was in the past, especially since the surgery. The doctor said the lobotomy was a no-brainer.

But really I believe that we are lucky.

When you look at the state of society, we see an amazing breakdown. I chronicle that breakdown, week after week with this blog. We see our government falling apart. We see it brimming with fraud. We see our lives mocked and insulted.

I hear summer in Finland is the best day of the year.

Functional cultures run on shared values. The values built over hundreds or thousands of years of hard-fought experience on how to make that culture work? To make a stable government? These are all being subverted.

Discarded.

On purpose.

In a time like that, it’s easy to give in to depression. It’s easy to give in to despair.

Seriously, though, why would you?

We can’t lose. Why?

My boss calls me the computer at work: if left unattended for ten minutes, I go to sleep.

We have the whole world against us. We are called horrible names because we have beliefs rooted in those timeless values. Even though they hate us, they’re more than happy to take the fruits of our labor – to tax and to take our productivity. Despite that, at every point our politicians again and again take the road that gives them power – a road that is rooted in evil and lies.

And the world? Many in the whole world have fallen for the lies, utterly. Timeless values are overturned in the span of less than a decade. In 2000, if young boys were dancing nearly nude in the streets, dressed as women, taking money from men, there would have been arrests.

Now, the pictures are printed and celebrated.

This is not evil, this is the Evil of books for children, of such a caricature that they’re nearly comical. Charles Schumer? Nancy Pelosi? Joe Biden? Soros? Really? They’re so over the top Evil that central casting wouldn’t send them to a serious movie – they’d be given roles as the Wet Bandits from Home Alone.

Pictured: Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.

Their tactics are no better. They brag about being tolerant while using the power of government and media to ruthlessly suppress any opposing voices. They use the levers of government selectively – citizens visiting the Capitol on January 6, 2021 is the worst thing that ever happened. Riots in the streets causing billions in damage, theft so brazen that stores pull out of major metropolitan areas? They celebrate that. Congress is used, again and again, to pass laws that push society away from values, destroy the family, and increase the power of the government over the governed. Oddly, anarchists and Antifa® applaud that, and celebrate things that even thirty years ago would be called tyranny.

They hate us. They are attempting to use the education system to make children hate the very culture and society that allowed the prosperity that they’re leeching off even now. They want to erase the history that built this nation and the heroes that tamed a frontier and invented entire industries.

Galileo said that everything falls at the same speed. He never saw Biden’s stock market.

Why do you think they want to destroy and desecrate our monuments? Why do they hate our flag? Why fill the media with propaganda?

They want parents to fear children in a mirror of the Soviet era. They want to turn wives against husbands. They want to split the atom that makes up society, the family, and replace it with the state. Even religious institutions are rotting from within as the values of the Current Year replace the values that have proven themselves for over 2,000 years.

I started drinking brake fluid – it’s okay, though. I can stop anytime.

That, my friends, is why we’re lucky.

Our backs to the wall, the entire world against us, we owe our enemy nothing. We stand by our beliefs. We stand by God. We stand by our families, our wives, and our children. We stand by the future that we are even now building. To win, we will need to show virtue, courage, and strength greater than any generation that has ever lived.

We will do so.

We are in a place to bring heroism back to our world. The future will remember us, not as the remnants of a world gone past, but as the founders of a world reborn. They will speak of us for a thousand years. They will write stories about us. They will write songs about us.

That is why we are lucky.

Wilder’s Principle Of Greatest Amusement

“Get old, you can’t even cuss someone and have it bother ’em. Everything you do is either worthless or sadly amusing.” – Bubba Ho-Tep

Hunter wanted to start a new delivery service, but Instagram® was already taken.

I’ve stumbled on a principle that I think is currently guiding the flow of history. Being a very humble person, I have named this Wilder’s Principle of Greatest Amusement. Put simply, it’s the idea that if there are two more or less equal outcomes, the most amusing outcome will happen. It’s like instead of being dead or alive, Schrödinger’s Cat had a choice of being a polar bear or nuclear warhead.

Amusing, in this context, doesn’t necessarily mean good. It doesn’t mean beneficial. The late, great comedian Norm Macdonald (PBUH, who I’m sure was part of the branch of the MacWilder side of the family) put it this way, “The job of a comedian is to make comedy. Comedy is when something unexpected happens. So, what’s funnier than a comedian that tells a joke and the audience doesn’t laugh?”

Norm’s joke.

I think, for reasons to be explained below, that we are in a time in history where the most amusing thing that could happen, will happen. And I have evidence. And not the burn a body at a funeral home it’s a cremation, but burn a body at home all of a sudden it’s “destroying evidence” sort of evidence. Nope, most every story is one you’ll be familiar with.

The Trump Election in 2016 was my first clue. I’m fairly sure that Trump thought he was going to lose on election night, but after the polls closed? Amusing as can be. Hillary’s mental breakdown and gin-infused refusal to admit that no one would announce her as “Her Cankleness” at the United Nations?

Amusing.

Also amusing was COVID. Remember the pictures of people collapsing on the street in China? Yeah. People fell for that. In the end, it became a meme. Again, I’m not saying it was positive, but how amusing would it have been if people had said, “Oh, it’s a really bad flu.” Heck, there are still people who so mRNA addicted that they get the Pfizer® shot into their eyes every other week.

Why did Hunter sniff artificial sweetener? He thought it was Diet Coke®.

Amusing. Even more amusing? If the mRNA vax didn’t actually help people and was instead an amazingly irresponsible experiment where we tested it on people before we tested it on mice. Oh, wait . . . .

Not mine.

Although I wanted Trump to be re-elected in 2020, I have to admit that the 2020 election was amusing. What happens when a bunch of well-funded Leftists and Globalists decide they want to change the rules and control information flow so a barely-living reanimated corpse of a political hack so limited in intellect that he plagiarized law school work and so limited in charisma that houseplants regularly get more attention gets close enough that they can commit (what is likely) the biggest electoral fraud in history?

And Biden is doing such a wonderful job that he’s making Jimmy Carter look like an effective and competent President, while displaying worse morals than Teddy “pants optional” Kennedy. Sad that Biden doesn’t remember any of that from day to day, and that his son Hunter doesn’t remember the years 2008-2021, and that the New York Times® doesn’t remember anything bad anyone named Biden ever did.

When NASA shows a picture of a hole at work it’s a scientific breakthrough. When I do the same thing, it’s an HR violation.

It’s certainly amusing, and probably more amusing than if Trump were in his second term. And what if that child-sniffing dementia patient picks the most vapid and, well, retarded mentally challenged person to ever sit as Vice President?

Amusing as can be. Mike Pence was boring, mostly. Kamala Harris regularly shows that her knowledge of foreign policy came through watching game shows and infomercials. Sham-wow®!

If Kamala was amusing, the withdrawal from Afghanistan was even more so. To have Joe Biden state, “There’s going to be no circumstance where you see people being lifted off the roof of a . . . .embassy in the—of the United States from Afghanistan. It is not at all comparable,” less than a month before that exact thing actually happened?

Amusing.

Like salmon return to spawn in the rivers, COVID-19 laid its eggs and became the Ukraine. The Mrs. heard one young high schooler say, “Hey, COVID’s over! We have World War III!” The Ukraine became the Next Big Thing.

And then?

Elon Musk. Pretty much everything he does is amusing. Twitter® is hilarious. Beating NASA with 1/1,000^th of their budget even more. And selling electric meme cars to Leftists that now hate him?

I hear that Amber will soon be touring with Korn.

That’s amusing! He even showed up in commentary at the Johnny Depp/Amber Turd trial.

I think, maybe, that The Market Collapse of 2022 is at least partially from the Left trying to take down Musk and keep Twitter™ as the main source of Leftist indoctrination. It bothers them so much that they actually panicked enough to appoint a Ministry of Truth.

See? Amusing.

Now, just this week, I hear that “men” are lactating. And that “men” can have abortions. Oh, and did I mention the Supreme Court decision?

Yeah. Amusing.

The dead writer Robert A. Heinlein wrote about this (when he wasn’t writing about Oedipus) in his Future History. He called it the Crazy Years. The Crazy Years were just that – the years after society broke down. Heinlein didn’t write about that period much at all, mainly because it’s not a great story.

I do hear he was a savvy shopper, so they called him Bilbo Bargains.

J.R.R. Tolkien was going to do a sequel to The Lord of the Rings. He didn’t. Why? After the One Ring was chucked along with Frodo’s finger (note to self, that would be a good band name) and destroyed, things were good. The world had been saved from Evil, and anything that would be a sequel would have been dark. It would have involved (from his notes) Aragorn’s kids idolizing Orcs and slowly being seduced by a decadence that prosperity brought, eventually leading to degeneracy and corruption replacing morality and virtue.

Heyyyyyyyyyy . . . .

Most years, most decades, haven’t seen as much amusement as these last six years. We live in those dark years that neither Heinlein nor Tolkien wanted to write about because it was depressing.

That’s okay. We’re not in a story.

What we are in, though, is a history moving ever so quickly that the novelty content is ever increasing.

There is one thing that we can do, and one thing only. In the darkness of years where degeneracy and corruption replace morality and virtue, be moral. Be virtuous. Stand for what is right, even when the world flows around you and tells you that good is bad, and men can breastfeed. Be virtuous, especially when those around you count virtue as the greatest sin.

Why? It’s right. And it’s not at all what they’re expecting.

I guess that makes it amusing, right?

24 Random Thoughts In May

“Well, Brian, you’ve lost your bet. I, or rather my alter ego, Zac Sawyer, am currently the most popular boy at James Woods High.” – Family Guy

Pugsley wants to dress as COVID this Halloween, but I told him that doesn’t scare anyone anymore.

It’s a Friday in May, so why not some random thoughts?

Nothing worthwhile happens without discomfort. The things that I have found to be the best for me, personally, started with things that were at first glance tragedy. When times are dark, look for the lessons. They’re there. Be grateful for the difficulty – it’s how we grow. I believe it was either Jon Bon Jovi or Norman Vincent Peale that described the process of birth – I paraphrase: “You’re warm, comfortable, and life is great. Then there’s pressure. For the first time you have to use your lungs. Bright lights. For the first time in your life, you’re cold.” When it sucks, remember that something is being born. You get to determine what it is.
I like James Woods in Vampire$.
A great day at work is when you’ve been given worthwhile challenges that are just at the edge of your ability to solve, and that consumes your entire being, focus, and skill in doing them. The day ends, and it seems like mere minutes have passed. Men need challenges – they need the great game. Without that, a little bit of our soul dies. Play a game worthy of being played.
I like James Woods in Videodrome.

The Mrs. was watching TV last weekend and screamed, “Don’t go in the church, it’s a trap!” Pugsley asked me if she was watching a horror movie. “No, just our wedding video.”

Almost all of the time something makes me mad, it’s not personal. Most people don’t care about me at all. People are like cats and generally act in their own self-interest, and don’t really care who gets hurt.
I think my cat would eat me before my dog did, if it came to that. Unless I was covered in gravy, in which case the dog would be all in.
The biggest fights are over the smallest things.
Never get into a heated fight with your chiropractor. Then you’ll have to spend the rest of your life looking over your shoulder.

What’s the difference between an IRS agent and Styrofoam®? Burning Styrofoam© is bad for the environment.

I’ve done almost everything in my life that I’ve really wanted to do. The main reason I could was because I decided I would do them. Henry Ford said, “If you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.” Henry Ford is dead, so I guess he didn’t think he could live forever. But he was right. And it’s (probably) not too late to do something amazing and important.
One thing Henry Ford didn’t succeed at was being a brothel owner – it was filled with Ford Escorts.
People only understand money within a certain range of orders of magnitude. For most people, $100 million is essentially the same as $100 billion or $10 trillion. These aren’t the same thing. But everyone understands what $7,354 is. This is more important than you might think.
I’m ashamed to admit I donated to the Taliban. I paid taxes.

I got banned from the airport the other day – apparently calling “shotgun!” when you get on the plane is bad form.

The most important economic unit is the family. Why? The family is a unit based on trust, and should be nearly independent of government oversight. That’s why the Left wants to do anything it can to distort and destroy the family. One of the first things the Left did when they took over Spain before the Spanish Civil War was to abolish marriage. This is not a new goal.
Postmen on vacation in Spain should visit Parcelona.
Passion for life and passion for a mission in life is crucial. Otherwise? It’s just one step away from being a Non-Player Character.
Would a video game where you went back in time to kill Adam be a first-person-shooter?

How does bigfoot keep in shape? Sasquats.

One of the biggest gifts is time to focus. The distractions of everyday life (including the great work in 3. above) sometimes pull away from the bigger picture. Take time to take stock.
I tried to set up a retreat for adults to give them time to focus. Perhaps “Concentration Camp” wasn’t the best name to use.
I have lived through the most prosperous period in the history of mankind. The one conclusion I can reach from that experience is prosperity alone doesn’t make people happy, and might make them a little crazy.
A crazed murderer might try to offer corpses for free, but I call that a dead giveaway.

Jokes about murderers aren’t funny unless they’re properly executed.

A study I read once said that most people, regardless of their wage, wanted to make about 10% more and they’d be happy. 10% more is a dream. Happiness, once you can pay your bills, comes from inside – I was once in debt (outside of my mortgage) by the amount of money I made in a year. I was very, very happy.
When I was in debt with a negative net worth, I told Pa Wilder that I felt worthless. He responded: “Son, don’t worry. You’re less than worthless.”
The best decisions are made in the daytime.
Maybe James Woods should only star in horror movies from directors with a last name starting with the letter ‘C’ and starting with the letter ‘V’?

Failure: The Source Of Success

“A wizard is never late, Frodo Baggins. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.” – The Fellowship of the Ring

Next up, Schrödinger’s Hot Pocket®, which is both ice cold and lava hot at the same time.

In my life, I have been bad at a lot of things. I’m still bad at most of them, but there are a few things that I’m good at. The way I got good at them started with being willing to experiment. By experimenting, I learned a lot of different ways to fail, just like the programmer that got turned down by the waitress – he had an error in connecting to the server.

When I failed, I learned how I failed. I then stopped doing those things. But experimenting always has the possibility of failure.

I’ve taken my sons through the same process – I’ve told them many times, “You can figure it out.” Before he left for college, I taught The Boy how to cook steak. I thought about teaching him how to make meringue, but I know the Australians hate it – they usually boo meringue.

I hope this joke doesn’t come back at me.

It’s not a lot for a legacy, but he grills steak like a demigod now. He’s so popular that his college roommates pitched in and bought him a charcoal grill. The Boy told me he grilled a chicken the other night for two hours, but the chicken still wouldn’t tell The Boy why he crossed the road.

How do you learn to cook well?

The same way that you learn anything – by experimenting, failing, and eventually getting it right.

Once you get it right? Then you can exploit the knowledge.

A group of researchers looked at just this pattern. The title of their article says it all: Understanding the onset of hot streaks across artistic, cultural, and scientific careers. You can find it here (LINK).

Related: blind Martians are now known as “brailleins”.

What are hot streaks? In my experience, it is when a person has exactly the right skills and is in exactly the right place. The authors of the article indicate that those skills come from prior experimentation. That is what I’ve observed in my life, too.

One example the authors use is Peter Jackson, who is most known for The Lord of the Rings trilogy and also the billionaire that looks the most like an actual hobbit®. All of Jackson’s previous work had prepared him for his streak, which in this case was The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Originally the studio wanted a product tie-in: Frodo would have connected the keys to JCPenney®, Dillards©, Macy’s™, and all the restaurants in the food court and then tie them to the One Ring. Then they’d have one ring to rule the mall.

What’s the difference between a Halfling and a Hobbit? Copyright.

The work that Jackson had done prior to this was important – it taught him all of the things necessary to make a movie, and making The Lord of the Rings was no ordinary movie, since the movies were all filmed at one time. On top of that, the movie required special effects on a scale that was unprecedented – they had to make Elijah Wood look Frodo-genic.

It was all coupled with Jackson’s fierce devotion to the source material so that the movies would be faithful to Tolkien’s vision. He even explained why the Eagles couldn’t fly the hobbits into Mordor – it turns out they were on tour.

Making the three movies cost around $300,000,000, so there was quite a bit of trust involved. Without his prior experience, no one would have given Peter Jackson the job. Without his prior experiments and his prior failures, he wouldn’t have had the ability to make the film.

But he did have that ability.

Originally Jackson wanted to make a cartoon, but the studio thought that was sketchy.

The movies collectively made nearly $3,000,000,000 (which, for scale, is what we send to the Ukraine every 45 minutes) at the box office, so investing in these films made approximately 10 times the initial investment. The movies weren’t just popular with people, they were popular at the awards, winning 17 out of 30 Oscars® and getting positive reviews and not getting slapped by Will Smith.

By nearly any measure, these are three of the best films ever made, so I’d call that a pretty good streak.

Peter Jackson must be driven, because he made hundreds of millions of dollars and still goes to work, but I’m thinking he only works on stuff he wants to work on.

That’s the power of being on a streak. The components are simple: experimentation, finding a challenge worth taking on that the experiments have prepared you for, and then exploiting those skills to take on the challenge at full speed. That’s when the streak starts – the right person is at the right place at the right time.

I started teaching my sons karate when they were young. I don’t know karate – I just enjoy kicking children.

My comment would be to keep experimenting because the experiments will provide skills. And the combination of those skills will, perhaps, lead to opportunities and places that you’d never expect.

I have learned one secret that I’ll share with you about how to make a steak taste better: eat it around a bunch of vegans.

1990s Movies – Because I Said So

“Flores! Flores para los muertos!” – Quick Change

Someone said the next Bond should be a woman – imagine he car explosions and wrecks, and that’s just when she’s parking.

Movies. I grew up with them – it was where I took my girlfriend on a Friday night before we went to the pizza place and then, um, drove to look at the stars. I once took a date to go see one of those graves that have a constant natural gas torch, but it turns out that is a bad idea – you should never take a date to go see an old flame.

But more than Friday night fun, movies were our cultural mythology. As man 20,000 years ago told stories around the fire to establish and share the history of the tribe, our history was told with movies. In essence, movies and television became our campfire, our shared cultural experience. When people say that the United States has no culture, or is guilty of cultural appropriation, they’re wrong and I want to punch them. But I can’t, because I’m not Irish.

As our shared culture, however, movies have always had a huge power to change our minds. As propaganda, they changed our culture, many times not for the better. Movies were also a huge opportunity to change our culture, change our lives, nearly as much as early metallurgy – after all, those who smelt it, dealt it.

I hear when you eat aluminum, you sheet metal.

I used the term “were our mythology” intentionally. The world has changed. The ‘Rona took movies and fragmented them further. Now, to see a big movie you can still go to the theater, but streaming now allows people to focus on narrow interests. Heck, even Putin watches Nyetflix®.

At work, unless we have the same streaming service, we’re not watching the same things. Better Call Saul? I asked people sitting at a table today if they’d seen it. No one had. It’s a gem, and probably the best thing on television today. But no one else had seen it.

There went a shared conversation, a shared moment.

And, like I said, movies are fragmented and not a part of common culture. Why was no one watching the Oscars®? Because no one cares. The Academy Awards® don’t reflect anything about America anymore, since the moves . . . suck. Even as late as four or six years ago, the movies were better. Now, many are simply unwatchable mainly because many have been infected with “woke” culture.

So, for today’s post, I thought I’d go back into history, to the 1990s. Why? It’s my blog. And movies in the 1990s were far more fun than movies today.

I tried to research LGBT stuff, but I couldn’t get a straight answer.

I’ll say that I tried to pick movies that weren’t propaganda, but were, rather, just fun. So, without any further nonsense, here are my favorite movies of the 1990s, year by year. I probably missed some, but this is the list I’m going with at 1am.

The structure? My favorite movie in each year. My criteria? The one that mattered to me. So, let’s get into the time machine and hit. . .

1990:

Quick Change.

I’m a sucker for Bill Murray. I even watched him in Razor’s Edge, which made me think of Peter Venkman from Ghostbusters as a hollowed-out shell of a man after World War I. Yeah. That movie didn’t work at all. That being said? Quick Change is funny. It has monster trucks, a heist, and mistaken identity.

In a (very) distant second place is Joe Versus The Volcano. Tom Hanks wasn’t so serious, and there was a quirky fun with watching him go to work – we’ve all had that job. Would I recommend it or change channels to watch it? No. But I do remember it. Hula girls, unite.

1991:

1991 was a MUCH better year for movies. Hands down, Silence of the Lambs wins. It’s tense. It’s 100% related to the book, and Hopkins and Foster never have had better roles. Ever. This is obviously a movie that couldn’t be made today because the character that was the baddy was a mentally deranged person. You know the plot. It’s a movie that you can watch once and the writing is branded into your brain, and it’s perfectly cast, perfectly delivered.

I guess we now understand what Biden’s Assistant Secretary for Health was doing in the 1990s.

In second place is Hudson Hawk. I am, perhaps, the only person besides The Mrs. that loves this awful, awful movie. It’s campy. It’s silly. The premise? Ludicrous. Whatever. I loved the stupid movie.

1992:

Reservoir Dogs was amazing, though I didn’t see it until 1994. Wow. There are no reservoirs or dogs in the movie, but despite that, the movie is amazing. It is (perhaps) Tarantino’s best movie. The acting and pacing and tension are amazing.

As honorable mention is . . . My Cousin Vinny. I rewatched it last year with Pugsley, and it was a hoot. Perry Mason crossed with Green Acres. When a movie hinges on the cooking time of grits? Good stuff.

1993:

Army of Darkness is campy fun. Okay, it’s really like the Three Stooges meets H.P. Lovecraft. If that sounds good, watch it. If you hate either of those things? Run. Really. It’s a movie I love because it’s horribly stupid cosmic horror. It also has multiple endings, depending on the version you watch. I can’t pick which one I like best, but I don’t have to.

Honorable mention? Demolition Man. Which isn’t a great movie, but 1993 wasn’t a great year for movies. It takes place in 2032 after Political Correctness takes over the United States. It is not a good movie, but it is fun.

1994:

I would pick Pulp Fiction but I’ve already picked a Tarantino movie so instead I’ll pick Pulp Fiction. I believe this is the only movie on the list where a co-worker said, “Oh, you’re the guy from Pulp Fiction.” Which character was I compared to? The Wolf. That’s me, when I’m at my best.

Mmmm. Good coffee.

I can’t believe this movie isn’t older, but honorable mention is . . . The Crow. If you’re gonna die after one movie, this is the one. Brandon Lee did an amazing job, and the movie would have made him a star, if Alec Baldwin hadn’t been in charge of props that day.

1995:

Wow. I had a big list. 1995 had a raft of great movies. I’m going to pick a movie I hated the first time I watched it: In the Mouth of Madness. In the Mouth of Madness wasn’t what I expected, but every time I watch it, it gets better. Sam Neil in a Lovecraftian (see a pattern yet?) horror by John Carpenter? Yeah.

I have five other movies on my list from 1995. I’m going to pick 12 Monkeys. 12 Monkeys is weird. It bends reality because it involves time travel if Monty Python designed the universe. It’s not funny. It’s also the first time I saw Brad Pitt, and I definitely can’t get the charge nurse to make it yesterday.

1996:

Mystery Science Theater 3000, The Movie. That would mean something if my hands were made of metal.

Hamlet, honorable mention. Mel Gibson chews the scenery as the mad prince of Denmark. Alas, Yorick, I won’t give any spoilers, since this plot is only 400 years old.

Reminder – never go on another vacation with Sam Neil.

1997:

Event Horizon. Sam Neil. Check. Lovecraftian. Check. Yup, I’m a junkie. This is not an easy movie to watch, and the story of how they made it is hilarious – they did second unit filming on weekends when the executives weren’t watching and that’s when they filmed all the disturbing stuff. Not for kids. I mean, not for your kids. Mine are made of sterner stuff. Also, Sam Neil is known around our house as The Evil Sam Neil.

Second place? Fallen. I liked it. It’s a one-trick movie, but I enjoyed the one trick.

1998:

So, this is a tie. Vampire$, which is a great movie with guys who hunt vampires for money directed by John Carpenter and BASEketball, which is (early) South Park mixed with Airplane. It was too tough – but if I had to pick one I’d pick BASEketball because it is so very stupid.

It was losing the truck that really made them mad.

An honorable mention is: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It’s rough, but so is the original source material. Johnny Depp captured the manic intensity of Hunter S. Thompson, but my guess is that’s what Johnny Depp is really like, 24 hours a day. Beware of bat country.

1999:

The best year on the list, easily. Bowfinger. Galaxy Quest. The Matrix (wish they made a sequel, right?). Office Space. Fight Club. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. I’m not picking. Of these, though, I’d probably (if I had to pick one to watch tonight) pick Fight Club or Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, but that’s probably just my mood tonight.

The 1990s was a decade before The Narrative took over, and you can tell – the movies themselves were more innocent than today. We’ll look at more decades in future months – you can bet the 1980s had the best teen comedies. Better Off Dead, anyone?

So, what did I miss? Which movies from the 1990s had the biggest impact on you (assuming you’re not Johnny Depp)?

Now What?

“Well, that’s the end of the film. Now, here’s the meaning of life.” – Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life

When my boss died, I spent a moment at his coffin. “Who’s think outside the box now, Terry?”

I have (sometimes) in my life found myself in a weird and uncomfortable place. No, it’s not the backseat of a VW® Beetle®. No, it is something that normally people are happy about. I had accomplished most of what I wanted to do, and then I asked myself, “Now what?”

That is a difficult question. I have long made it a practice to observe people, or at least I did until the restraining order. Okay. Restraining orders. My observation is that feeling like I felt came normally comes from:

a lack of ambition,
waking up with amnesia
too much success, or
having goals set too low.

In my case, it was probably the last one. I can (happily!) say that I’ve accomplished almost everything that I’ve wanted to do in my career, and I’ve done a lot. Do you know the team that got Osama Bin Laden? Not to brag, but I’ll have you know I read a news story about them once.

It must be nice being a Democrat, knowing who voted before the election.

Could I have accomplished more than I have? Probably.

I suppose that could be viewed as a lack of ambition. In my defense, I’ve seen a lot of jobs that I don’t want. And a lot of those jobs come with compromises I simply won’t make anymore. At one point, when I was much younger, I had a job where I was on the road an average of three days per week. I can recall one time my boss wanted me to travel to Chicago and I didn’t want to go, so we compromised – I traveled to Chicago.

I’ll admit, travel was fun at first. One week I started Monday in Portland, Maine and ate lobster, flew to San Antonio and had Tex-Mex, and ended up in Fresno, which is known as the “Akron of the Pacific”. When I was young, that was a pretty nifty gig, plus the work was fun and varied.

At first.

I ordered a “Chicago style” pizza. It started shooting right out of the box.

It actually got to the point where I was on the road for eight straight months in the southern part of Chicago. I did manage to come home alternate weekends – I will say that Midway airport is the only place I’ve ever been that rents cars with a slot for a tail gunner. The charm of traveling went away. The fortunate thing is that it cost me a marriage.

But I’m done traveling like that. There are compromises that I’m not willing to make. And, as I said, I’ve done most of the things I want to do with my career.

So, it’s not that.

What, then?

If anyone has no family and will be alone this Thanksgiving, let me know. I need to borrow chairs.

What about family? Family is always a challenge because being a parent requires almost as much responsibility from me as that one night when they asked me to be a designated driver. But when kids are grown, it’s up to them to determine what course their lives will take. Oh, sure, they sometimes want to chat with the old man, but for the most part, they’re independent. That’s the way I raised them – drop a Bowie knife and some paracord into the crib and if they make it the first month, they’re keepers. The result of this type of parenting (I think the technical term for it is “neglect”), though, is that the kids are able to make decisions and take action between therapy sessions. No family is ever perfect, but mine is pretty good.

Okay. Work was fine. Family was fine. What now?

That’s what I was struggling with. What now?

Then I remembered Joe.

Joe is a friend that I’ve known for years. Talked to him last week. I’ve mentioned Joe before. Pure genius. Joe, however, wasn’t challenged at his job. So, he’d let projects go until there were almost due, and then start work on them at the point where he thought that it was just nearly possible that he might not be able to make the deadline and then work at a furious pace. If Joe had been a chef, the danger would have been that he might have run out of thyme.

Instead, it was a way to keep himself challenged and in the game.

Being a blanket weaver must be the worst. They always have a looming deadline.

That’s not for me, either. The challenge was a real challenge, but it was artificial. It didn’t make Joe better. It just kept Joe’s job interesting enough so he wasn’t bored enough at work to dial random numbers and say, “I’ve hidden the body. Now what?”

So, I thought about it. And thought about it.

What was a challenge big enough? What could be my vision?

It turned out it was this place. That’s the reason I keep hitting my deadlines on my posts. Not every post ends up the way I imagined it would when the idea came into my head – sometimes the posts take on a life of their own in the writing. And sometimes I have to take two or three runs at an idea until I get exactly the post I was looking for.

I was looking for a challenge, for meaning.

What’s the difference between death and taxes? Death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.

So, I decided to give my life more meaning than that poor man who installs turn signals on BMWs®. Now, on a given day when I come home from work, I’m a bit tired, but when I reach for the keyboard, it feels good. I have a goal, a challenge, and meaning.

These things don’t come from without, they come from within. Even if the circumstances are already there, they have to be recognized and acted upon.

Now what?

If you don’t have a vision of what you want to achieve, make one.

If your life doesn’t have meaning, give it meaning.

These things are in your hands.

That’s what.

Regret And Dread – Two Problems You Don’t Really Have To Have

“I have people waiting for me. They don’t know what I do, they never will. They’re protected. But I do what I do so they can have a better life. And if I live or if I die, it doesn’t make a difference to me, as long as they have what they need. So when it’s my time to go, I will go knowing I did everything I could for them.” – Better Call Saul

If you press your gas and brake at the same time, your car takes a screenshot.

I tend to like writing my Friday posts the most. Why? Most generally, I get away from the reality of the present situations that we are living in. That’s nice.

Why do I feel like I can do this?

Because nothing is done yet, and nothing is settled yet. I’ve written posts about regret. I still feel that regret is a wasted emotion – the past is done. Of course, I try to learn from my mistakes. But I can’t spend my life being upset about them. The real question is how can I incorporate the mistakes so I have a better future? I even told The Mrs. that she should embrace her mistakes, too. She was so happy she hugged me.

Especially of note are those mistakes I made that weren’t mistakes I made based on a lack of virtue. If I did the right thing, for the right reason, the result is the result, and I will live with the consequences. Sometimes bad things happen when you do everything right. I mean, when the doctor told me I had a rare disease, I asked, “How rare?”

“Well, you get to pick a name.”

Those are the breaks.

Firefighters in Athens have it tough – you’re not supposed to put water on Greece fires.

A similar emotion is dread.

I read a quote when I was a kid – Heinlein? Twain? A fever dream while on laudanum writing about Xanadu? – that stuck with me. “Worrying about what might happen is paying interest on money you haven’t borrowed yet.” It’s a good quote.

Regret is looking at the past, dread (or its cousin, fear) is about looking at the future. But they’re the same. Neither of those two things are real. One once was real, and one might be real.

I’ll admit that when I look out at the future, I do see dark days ahead. But right now, I’m sitting in my basement, The Mrs. had gone upstairs for sleep, the basement is perfectly comfy, and all is right with the world. Something might happen next week. Next month. Next year. The price of tires is up. The price of gasoline is up. Heck, Hunter Biden can’t even find decent meth nowadays. It will get worse.

So?

I fell down at the airport once. Almost missed a flight.

I think that often we are more upset by the thought of potential future discomfort than actual, present discomfort. It can be consuming, and all for something that hasn’t happened yet.

And, it used to be me. I used to do the math – how many months could I make mortgage payments if I lost my job? How many days could I feed my family? And, it’s one thing planning for that, but I was also sometimes scared.

Until one day I just decided to not be scared – I’d go through life and do my best, and let the chips fall where they may. I decided that it was fine to plan, it was fine to economize to save money, but it wasn’t fine to worry.

So I stopped.

It was weird – one night I was worried, and the next night I decided that I wasn’t going to worry anymore. I just made the conscious decision I wasn’t going to worry anymore about that. It was the last significant worry that I gave up. I also worried about my short attention span, but that problem seems to solve itself.

The Kamikaze instructor to his class: “Now, class, pay attention because I’m only going to do this once.”

And it’s not like I live in a world where bad things don’t happen. I know bad things happen – horrible things. But today, I can choose not to worry about them.

Heck, I can pick something that is real and we can be certain that is going to happen – death. The shadow of death looms above us all. But to be consumed by it so that it causes a life lived in fear? That’s like already being dead.

It might surprise some people, but death is something that isn’t new. Seneca, the (very dead) Roman stoic philosopher, said:

“No man can have a peaceful life who thinks too much about lengthening it. Most men ebb and flow in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardships of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die.”

Kelvin and Celsius interviewed for a job, but Celsius got it. Kelvin absolutely didn’t have a degree.

Reflect on death – if you knew that you wouldn’t wake up ever again, what would you do with your remaining hours? This reflection on death has multiple values to you and your character:

It reinforces that which is important to us, here today.
It exposes the frivolous that consume too much of our time.
It shows what’s really of value – the money you made will be less important than the lives you’ve changed.
You don’t have to worry about returning that library book.

Today is pretty good. Enjoy it. Skip the regret, the worry, and the dread. While you’re breathing, live.

What can you make happen today?

The Funniest Post You’ll Read Today About The Stoics

“First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?” – Silence of the Lambs

Never trust Hunter Biden to pick up pizza and coke for a party.

The last five posts have been fairly dark, and Monday’s post will be dark, too. I already know that dark humor is like aid for the citizens of Ukraine – not everyone gets it (this is a repeat from 1932, LINK). That’s to be expected. We live in interesting times. But the good news is, it’s Friday. Last Friday, I happened upon a friend. I promise, I have more than one, despite what the NSA says.

In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!

My friend noted that he had to go shopping, and he wasn’t particularly looking forward to it. I responded, “Well, Marcus Aurelius said that you can find happiness in whatever moment, and the limiting factor is often what you feel about the situation, rather than the situation.” I said this even though I haven’t been shopping since Jimmy Kimmel was funny.

He smiled. We continued talking, and he went off shopping. As I was sitting at my table, I found this quote, from the inestimable P. G. Wodehouse’s , as found here (LINK) from his Jeeves and Wooster series of books (also a television series starring Stephen Fry as Jeeves and Hugh Laurie as Wooster). Setup – Jeeves is the intelligent, dry-witted, valet to Bertie Wooster, an idle British aristocrat. Thanks to Wodehouse, hilarity often ensues:

“Who do you think I am, Alfred Einstein?”

I turned to Jeeves. “So, Jeeves!”

“Yes, sir.”

“What do you mean, ‘Yes, sir’?”

“I was endeavouring [Wilder note: the British cannot spell] to convey my appreciation of the fact that your position is in many respects somewhat difficult, sir. But I wonder if I might call your attention to an observation of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. He said: ‘Does aught befall you? It is good. It is part of the destiny of the Universe ordained for you from the beginning. All that befalls you is part; of the great web’.”

I breathed a bit stertorously. “He said that, did he?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, you can tell him from me he’s an ass.”

Bonus points if you knew what stertorously meant. I had to look it up. Snort.

Is she attractive? Neigh.

I’ve heard it said that life is a tragedy to those that feel, a comedy to those that think. Given that, the really funny part of life is that when times are down we don’t want to listen to the simple stoic Truths of life:

Control what you can, don’t let those things you don’t control (like the Wendy’s® drive through line, or Hunter Biden’s amazing appetite for crack) drive you nuts.
There is Virtue. We can spend our lives splitting hairs about what is virtuous, or, we could just be virtuous. Be Virtuous.
Most passions aren’t healthy. Some are, but taken to extreme, even those become unhealthy, like when I lift weights and become so strong that I can rip apart the fabric of the Universe just by tensing my glistening pectoral muscles? See, unhealthy. Understand the difference, and don’t be ruled by emotion. Passion is for 18 year olds, reason is for adults.
Johnny Depp was pretty good in the movie Dead Man.
Seek wisdom to guide your virtue.
Seek justice to create a more virtuous society. Not an equitable society, but a virtuous one. Let Disney™ know that there’s a difference.
Understand that courage is required – Virtue often comes with a price, which may be about $3.50, in 1973. Or a career in 2020.
Living outside of Virtue is the clearest definition of Vice.
Possessions are, for the most part, neither good nor bad, but what we do with them determines their value. Anyone want to buy a slightly used copy of the Necronomicon?

The lures that pull us away from being virtuous are many. PEZ®. TikGram©. InstaFace©. SnapTwit®. PornHULU©. TinderMAX®. EskimoBrotherDataBase (EBDB)™. The idea is that if we’re distracted, we don’t focus on the things that are important in life, like virtue.

One of the things that sets humans apart is that we think about our actions and the consequences. The result of all the lures? It pulls us away from improving ourselves, from having introspection and working through our issues. Issues? I don’t have issues. Like most people, I have subscriptions.

Surround yourself with people who have issues – they always have beer. And 21-year-old nannys.

True life: I was having a problem, something that really, really made me mad, like the Game of Thrones™ parents who named their kids “Daenerys” saw her turn into a war criminal. I didn’t let it consume me like a dragon consuming a daycare center, but in those small, still moments of life that issue managed to creep into my conscious.

Like when I woke up at 3am and it didn’t mean I had to go to the bathroom (which never happens, because I’ve evolved beyond needing liquids to live), I’d think about it. Finally, a hypnogogic conversation with myself provided the answer.

“John, what would you tell your best friend if he had this same problem?”

“Self,” I answered, “I would tell my friend to let it go. It happened a year ago. It wasn’t personal. And it’s probably for the best.”

Coffee spelled backwards is eeffoc. And before I have coffee, I don’t give eeffoc.

I had clarity. I had an answer. I had closure. And it didn’t come from social media. It came from thinking and understanding what advice I’d give my closest friend. Since I hadn’t talked with, well, really anyone, I had to deal with it myself.

I finally did deal with it. And now, when I wake up at 3AM? I worry about the devil since I haven’t had to pee in a month.

Introspection is our friend, as long as we don’t allow ourselves to drown in a sea of self-pity, and as long as we use it to measure ourselves against virtue. How do we measure it?

As near as I can find, Marcus Aurelius was religious, but certainly not a Christian. As Caesar, he was the Humongous Maximus of religious stuff, and his writings wondered about what impact the gods had in the lives of men, at least after he got that petroleum from those pesky kids.

Marcus Aurelius, the early years.

The impact of religion is enormous. When we live without a concept of a greater purpose, it’s like having pancakes without syrup, or thermonuclear weapons without the initial fission core that puts the hydrogen in H-Bomb. With no greater purpose, our lives are less than what they could be. As I’ve said before, most atheists aren’t atheists – they actually hate God, generally because they know that the life they are leading and/or the choices they are making are not virtuous. They know it.

Of course, I’ve met (and almost every atheist reader here) atheists that don’t hate God. Those folks? We’re cool. Generally, they don’t dislike people like me who believe in God, they just approach the world in a different way. But I’ve noticed this about the atheists that don’t hate God – they generally like living in a society where people believe in God. Why? It’s a more virtuous society, and the streets are very empty on Sunday morning.

I won’t hold myself up to be Virtuous, or even virtuous. I will note that I really, really do try. I think I’m more virtuous this year than last year, though I shower less because of my greater virtue. And that’s the point. Every day, I try to be better inside than the last. I try to make the world a bit better than it was the day before. And I try to tell the Truth.

Unfortunately, I bet sometimes people still say after a post like this, “John Wilder? Well, you can tell him from me, he’s an ass.”

Ha!

I’m not even awake.