27 Thoughts for Friday

“I thought so.  You remember our business partner Marsellus Wallace, don’t you Brett?” – Pulp Fiction

I got a CAPTCHA that asked me to select pictures of tractors and farm equipment.  That’s really not my field.

I’ve trotted out lists of thoughts from time to time.  The lists change based on (hopefully) me getting more wisdom over time.  Anyway, here’s this year’s list:

  1. Be on time. Seriously, it’s simple.  People notice, and people care.  It’s a basic principle of respect for someone not to waste their time waiting for me.
  2. Never be a little late to work or a little early to leave. Especially on a regular basis.  Being late an hour once every quarter is much better than being late a minute each day for sixty work days.  An hour looks like something happened.  A minute looks like I don’t care.
  3. Little changes at the start make big difference in the result. I’ve seen many people start their careers and become experts at the subject of their first assignment.  Many of them made a lot of money by knowing a whole lot about a little.

Who knew Cathy was Haitian?

  1. Choosing not to decide is a choice. I love reminding people that “doing nothing” is always an option.  But it is a choice.  And it has just as many consequences as “doing something”.
  2. For me, opportunities always showed up when I needed them, even if I didn’t understand it at the time. Thankfully in my case the opportunities weren’t subtle.
  3. After college, in a high achieving profession, it becomes rarer and rarer to be the smartest guy in the room, and someone in the room is often an expert at something in which I’m a novice. True humility allows a good leader to understand the capabilities they need, and not have to be “right” all the time.
  4. The biggest fights are over the smallest things. It seems that no one ever snaps over the house being on fire on the day the insurance payment was late – it’s that the trash wasn’t taken out on time and we have to hang on to it for another week.

What does Soylent Green® taste like?  It varies from person to person.

  1. People understand $10,000 more than they understand $10,000,000. The difference between $10,000 and $11,000 means more to most people than the difference between $10 million and $10 billion.  Most people can’t understand more than seven magnitudes of anything.
  2. Outcome is less important than process. When working on life, I try to not care about what the outcome will be.  I go in, make the best choices I can, and do the best work that I can.  If it works, it works, if it doesn’t, I try to adjust to be better next time.
  3. Outcome is still important. Dead is dead, so sometimes the outcome is final.
  4. The last outcome is always final. How many refunds?
  5. No refunds.

My chute didn’t open once when I was skydiving.  I didn’t panic.  I figured I had the rest of my life to figure it out.

  1. Nothing breeds success like success, and nothing breeds failure like failure. I’ve been on streaks where I literally could not lose.  I’ve been on streaks where I couldn’t win.
  2. Corollary to 13: I’m never as bad or as good as my failures or successes.  The streaks where I couldn’t win set me up with the habits I needed to win.
  3. Beating myself up is a loser’s game.
  4. Most people don’t think about me very much and will have a hard time remembering my name after five years. As much as I like to think I’m the center of my story (and I am) I’m only a minor player in the stories of most other people.
  5. Corollary to 16: Except where I’m their personal villain.  Then I live on forever and will definitely have someone who will want to be at my funeral, if nothing more than to make sure I’m dead.

What was the name of that Mexican villain in the Bible?  Poncho Pilate?

  1. Protect the relationships with the people that genuinely do care about me in a positive way so maybe the sad people at my funeral will outnumber the happy ones.
  2. Listen to people, really listen. They tell me amazing things if I just listen.  One time I was interviewing a guy and he mentioned committing a felony at a previous job.  Yeah, I kept a straight face.  No, he didn’t get the job.
  3. If someone says I’m wrong, I need to have the humility to embrace that and see if they’re right. Especially when my first impulse is to try to defend myself.  Even if I’m not wrong, I at least understand why they thought I was wrong.
  4. When I’m wrong, admit it and apologize. It’s amazing how admitting error makes other think I’m more trustworthy.  And apologies?  Why not apologize, have some sort of problem with that?

Okay, he didn’t say that.  But he’s the first person I thought of.

  1. Being good at several things is enough for success, if they’re the right several things. Being an expert at useless things might be fun, but mostly nothin’ times nothin’ is, hmmm, carry the nothin’ . . . nothin’.
  2. If I spend my life waiting for the next thing, I’ll spend my entire life waiting and not living. The journey is the point, and rushing through it just gets me to my grave faster.
  3. Past behaviors are almost always the key to predicting future behaviors. Leopards, spots, etc.  When I listen to a person’s story, I realize that often they’re also telling me their future.
  4. Success is based on the last thing I did, not the next. People pay to keep me around because they think I might be able to do it again.

Orphans are often very successful at business – someone told them “Go big or go home” so they didn’t have much choice.

  1. Could I have done better?   Could I have done worse?  Yes.  I did how I did.  Success is based on how I change what I’m going to do to be better.
  2. Power and money are not the same thing. Just ask the rich guys after Robespierre or Lenin took over.

Okay, that’s 3³ thoughts for Friday.  See you on Monday!

The Unabomber Teaches The Facts Of Life

“Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world?  Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy.  It was a disaster.  No one would accept the program.  Entire crops were lost.  Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world.  But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery.  The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from.  Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.” – The Matrix

I figured out how to turn Alexa® off.  I walked through the room naked.  (Only two memes are not “as found”)

Although he is certainly better known for other things (which I won’t defend), Ted Kaczyinski was very smart.  He did spend a lot of time thinking and writing about the human condition when he was, um, not working on projects.  One of the things that he wrote about was what he called The Power Process.

I’d be surprised if Ted was the first to point out The Power Process, since on its face it seems so . . . logical.  I’ll let him tell the tale, though the added emphasis is mine:

The power process has four elements.  The three most clear-cut of these we call goal, effort and attainment of goal.  (Everyone needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.)  The fourth element is more difficult to define and may not be necessary for everyone.

We’re skipping the fourth element (autonomy) because it doesn’t pertain to the post at hand.  You can read it in Ted’s work.  Remember my wife’s advice about reading Ted Kaczinski:  it’s okay to be seen reading Ted, but never with a highlighter.

Yeah, that’s a picture I made of Ted in front of a Blockbuster®, with A.I.

I am not sure this is universal, but it seems to appear every time I look into human nature and why people aren’t happy.  People like the struggle.  I had a friend who I will call “Joe” because his name is Joe.  Joe would often procrastinate at work, sometimes not doing much of anything for days.  Then, when the deadline approached, he’d work incredible hours to finish.

John Wilder:  “Joe, you did this on purpose.”

Joe:  “Yeah, I wanted to wait until I didn’t know if I could do it.”

The game wasn’t sufficiently interesting to Joe to keep him going until he created the challenge.  Since this was his job, the one he was getting the money necessary to eat and live from, he often flew pretty close to the flame.  But he always managed to keep his wings from being singed too badly.

What do you call a primitive man who liked to take random walks?  A meandertal.

For Joe, a very highly functioning human, effort was the key.  And to get to enough effort to keep him happy, he needed to have real jeopardy.  Without the required effort, it just wasn’t fulfilling for him.  Imagine fighting a kitten.  I mean, there’s no real effort involved, unless you give it rabies or a gun or make a genetically engineered kitten the size of a tank.

Ted goes on:

Consider the hypothetical case of a man who can have anything he wants just by wishing for it. Such a man has power, but he will develop serious psychological problems.  At first, he will have a lot of fun, but by and by he will become acutely bored and demoralized.  Eventually he may become clinically depressed.  History shows that leisured aristocracies tend to become decadent.  This is not true of fighting aristocracies that have to struggle to maintain their power.  But leisured, secure aristocracies that have no need to exert themselves usually become bored, hedonistic and demoralized, even though they have power.  This shows that power is not enough.  One must have goals toward which to exercise one’s power.

This explains why so many actors today are whining GloboLeftists who turn their adopted vanity children into transexuals:  they have everything they want, anything they could imagine, they don’t have to work for it – it’s just there.  All the time.  They (most of them) are fundamentally unhappy unless they have a goal to shoot for, and one that matters to them.  Maybe winning an Oscar™.  If you look at the youth of Robert Downey Jr. and Christian Slater, I can understand with their ludicrous early success why they went on crazy drug and violence benders:  they had it all.

If Ma Wilder had divorced and married a Mongolian, would I have a steppe brother?

There is, of course, a flip side to this:  the run of the mill GloboLeftist foot soldier.  Ted talks about them:

Nonattainment of important goals results in death if the goals are physical necessities, and in frustration if nonattainment of the goals is compatible with survival.  Consistent failure to attain goals throughout life results in defeatism, low self-esteem or depression.

I’ve said before, and I’ll say it again:  the vast majority of GloboLeftists are losers.  They are awful people who hate themselves, the world, and God.  They hate God because they look at how awful they are, and have to blame someone, anyone other than themselves.

See, Ted agrees with me.  Is that good, or not?

Thus, in order to avoid serious psychological problems, a human being needs goals whose attainment requires effort, and he must have a reasonable rate of success in attaining his goals.

Bingo.  Life is struggle, and if we win that struggle, even a bit, we feel good.  I would imagine this is hardwired into almost every living creature because otherwise they’d just give up like Mitt Romney’s spine.

In the current world, especially the First World, most of the struggles that used to occupy our lives are gone.  We spend very little time worrying about starvation or running from bears.  That leaves us in a weird position – we don’t have to fight to live, but we’re wired to like fighting to live.  So we need something more.

Amish women use protection to stop the spread of Abes.

Thus, we come up with other things, hobbies, games, sports and other ways to build a goal, work for it, and achieve it (or not).  One experiment I wrote about in the past (link below), the John Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia where mice were placed in a habitat where they had food and were free from predation and . . .

Want Dystopia?  Because this is how you get Dystopia.

His paper was called Death Squared because the mice, despite having all the food they could eat, died out.  But before they died out, their society collapsed in upon itself.  You can read Calhoun’s paper here (LINK), but it is as grim as remembering Biden is in the White House.  The mice stopped acting as families, rape became rampant, some mice became pansexuals (mate anything, any time) there were gangs, some mice ignored everything and just groomed themselves, and mother mice stopped nurturing their young.

Another A.I. drawing I made.

Sound familiar?

Yeah, I thought so.  Men need quests.  Society needs quests.  We need something worth fighting for, something worth winning for life to have meaning.  And, yes, I realize the irony of writing about Ted Kaczynski’s on a laptop and putting it on the Internet, but I think he’d understand.

Thank you for attending my Ted talk.

Be Bold. Life Is Too Short For Anything Else.

“That’s a bold statement.” – Pulp Fiction

A lion would never drive drunk.  But a tiger would.

One of the problems with life in Modern Mayberry is that it often moves at a fairly slow pace.  Especially in the time when an adult is focused on raising kids, the days tend to blur one into the next.

If your life is good, this isn’t really a problem.  When I was younger, my life was spent going to weddings.  Now that I’m older, more time is spent going to funerals.  It is important to not get mixed up as to which you’re at, although sometimes “My condolences,” is appropriate at a wedding and I’d almost be willing to bet $20 that at least one person will say “Congratulations!” after my funeral.

However, in the event that I’m wrong, collecting on that bet might be a problem.

Maybe I’ll add bikini girls.  Will that put the “fun” in funeral?

One thing that facilitates this blur is reading stuff on the Internet.  One blogger I read (LINK) is giving up doomscrolling (or reading the unending list of negative stories that are available in the news) for Lent.  I suppose you could leave him a comment, but you’d have to wait a few weeks to get a response.

But when it comes to doomscrolling, there are huge numbers of these stories available.  The business model is simple:  scary stuff attracts eyeballs, and eyeballs means revenue.  As I look at my own past posts, I’m thinking that, even though I talk about a lot of scary stuff, that I’m mostly relentlessly positive.  I can even recall a comment section or two where I’m called a Pollyanna because I’m so positive.

What do we want?  Hearing aids.  When do we want them?  Hearing aids.

I can live with that.  Being positive, being for things and knowing that, in the end it’s all going to work out keeps me positive.  In most cases (most, not all!) the things I write about don’t make me angry, either.

Again, stress on the “mostly”.  And I try not to get worked up about events occurring half-a-world away that I can’t control or even much influence.  Things are what they are.

And, for most of us, things are generally pretty good on a day-to-day basis, even when things aren’t perfect.  Even on a bad day, most parts of the day are good.  The thing that gets us is built into the doomscrolling:  spending time worrying about things that simply have not happened.

My friend wrote me a text that said, “What do you get when you mix a gullible person with an optimistic person?”  I replied, “I don’t know!”  He texted back, “Read it again.”

I write about the coming Civil War 2.0 not in hopes that it comes, rather to make people aware that it’s coming.  Do I sit and worry about it daily?

No!

That would take away from the time I spend thinking about the Roman Empire.

In this moment, there are things that I could let bother me.  However, I realize that letting them bother me gives them power over me when that’s the last thing I want.  “Take not counsel of your fears,” is attributed to George S. Patton, Jr.  I’m sure other people said the same thing in similar ways in the thousands of years that people have been saying things, but when Patton says it, well, it’s been said.

“Better to fight for something than live for nothing.” – GSP

If I let my fears fill me up, I live a life of fear regardless of if it’s a perfect 63°F, and I have a wonderful cigar, and a great book beside me while sitting in a comfortable chair.

I think fear comes to people as they age.  I certainly saw Pa Wilder get more and more cautious as he aged.  I could give a few examples, but it doesn’t much matter.  I did notice.  And when I saw the tendency to do it start to crop up in myself, at least I understood what was going on and I could choose to be cautious or choose to be bold.

I think, however, that as I get older it is precisely the time to be bolder.  Life moves in a blur, and days stack up faster, so they should mean something.  If I knew I had only a year?  What would I do?

Something to make that year worthwhile.  If a month?  A day?

The shorter the time left, the more that boldness matters and the less caution should.  If I only had an hour of my life left, you can damn sure bet I’d do something with it, as much as I could.

Oh, that’s Samuel L. Jackson, not the famous English dude Samuel Johnson.  I guess that’s the Netflix® version of the quote.

But life is built on compound interest.  The more I try to write, the better I get.  The more I lift, the stronger I get.  The time to start is now.

The actions should be bold.  While my days may pass fast, the more I can do with them, the more I will do.

When I pass, what will be left are the lives I’ve touched, the children that I’ve raised, the ways I’ve made the world better, and the words that I have written.  Since the restraining order dictates who I can touch, and the lessons to the children are mainly done, that leaves making the world better and writing.

Even a full human lifetime isn’t enough, because they are so very short.  But I’ll make do.  With the remaining decades (hopefully) of my life, how big a dent can I kick in the Universe?

I guess I’ll see.  And I’ll smile some, every day.  And enjoy that cigar, and book, and chair when I’m not being bold.

“L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace.”

It Came From 1987

“That’s good, because she’s a predator.” – Fight Club

I walked into a bar in 1987.  The bartender said, “Hey, the party is in the back.”

I had started doing these more or less in order by year.  It’s a retrospective, and it has nothing to do with box office – it’s me going through the movies of the year and picking the ones I like.  They are in no order.  One thing about these movies – 1987 seems to be a year when the videocassette was fully in bloom, and many of these movies had a much better life on VCR than they did at the local movie theater.

Again, these are in no particular order, but one thing struck me as I went through the list:  this is the strongest list, by far, of any year I’ve done, with amazing, inventive time.  Only two of the movies on this list are sequels:  Evil Dead II, which was a remake; and House II (which was entirely different than the original House), and both were far more comedy than horror.

Movies were better then.  Much better.

1987 might have been Peak Movie.

Outrageous Fortune:  Yes, Bette Midler is annoying, but so is Shelley Long, and both are hilarious in this movie about actresses who get involved in a spy caper.  This movie marks the movie regeneration of George Carlin, whose career had been sitting in a dumpster until this.

Mannequin:  Kim Cattrall really can’t act.  Andrew McCarthy’s main acting skill was his hair.  It didn’t really matter in this amazingly stupid movie about a mannequin that comes to life only with Andrew McCarthy is alone with it.  That’s it.  Silly.  Stupid.  Cheap to make.  And fun.

If your wife was a one-legged mannequin, could you stand her?

Lethal Weapon:  Shane Black was the writer of this movie (more about him later) and it cost $15 million to make and hauled in $120 million before VHS revenues.  It was the origin of buddy cop movies and was from the time when Gary Busey made money by acting, and not acting strange and before Mel discovered tequila.  Helmets on motorcycles, kids.  Helmets.

Evil Dead II:  It’s not really a sequel, it’s a re-make of Evil Dead.  The horror levels are fairly low, and the special effects are really quite good given the $75 budget they were working with.  To describe this movie?  Lovecraft meets the Three Stooges® and Bruce Campbell with a chainsaw hand.

Raising Arizona:  The cover to this movie sucked, but I had seen nearly everything else in the video store, so I popped down my $2.00 to rent it (Be Kind, Rewind!) and cracked a cold one in front of the TV.  Wow.  I was not expecting that.  The Coen Brothers did a great job making a comedy about kidnapping children through the eyes of a convenience store robber.  By the end of the credits, I was hooked, and the last line made perfect sense.  No studio would take a chance on a movie like this today, because it doesn’t make fun of families.

The Secret of My Success:  A smart kid just pretends to be an executive and makes the company successful instead of doing the mailroom job they hired him for?  Micheal J. Fox was born for this role.  He was witty and quick, and Helen Slater was totes adorbs.  Did the movie change my life?  Yes.  I used this idea to start working at a company without being hired and it resulted in a hostile takeover, but thankfully I got probation and can still own firearms.

I never asked A.I. to put in “East Asians” but I guess it decided that Chicago gangs in the 1930s were ruled by Fu Manchu?

The Untouchables:  David Mamet’s first writing credit from this list, and Brian De Palma?  Amazing work.  The big bad guy was Capone, the good guy was Eliot Ness.  Inexplicably, Sean Connery was tossed in, because he needed something to do because he wasn’t making Highlander.  Historically accurate?  Of course not.  Wrap up the whole, big story in two hours?  Yup, including baseball bat management techniques.

I just asked for ponies.

Predator:  I was driving along on a cool night, when I decided to stop at a drive-in movie theater.  Yeah, those existed once upon a time.  The title of the movie looked sketchy, but Arnie was in it, so, maybe it wouldn’t suck.  OH MY!  It was one of those great times when I was shocked by how utterly perfect the movie was in every respect.  Accurate?  No.  Perfect?  Yes.  From the opening credit to the nuclear explosion, it was a perfect movie.  Shane Black, proving he’s a perfect human, didn’t write it, but played a one of Dutch’s guys.  A perfect movie.

Spaceballs:  A silly movie, but I saw it in 70mm, back when theaters used film.  70mm is probably not necessary for a Mel Brooks comedy, but, hey.

Oh, my, what sort of cannibalistic ritual did the A.I. plan for Kevin?

Adventures in Babysitting:  Let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way first:  I am no longer dating Elisabeth Shue.  She’s much older than I am, and I decided the relationship would never work.  Also, I hope to meet her one day.  The director, Chris Columbus, didn’t have enough to do after discovering Hispaniola, so he decided to take up movies, with some small success in movies you may not have heard of, like this one and Home Alone.

If only the cop was Elvis.

RoboCop:  Cop lives.  Cop gets shot.  GloboLeft ruins a city on purpose to get Power and Profits®.  Cop gets reanimated into a robot.  Cop falls in love.  I’m having a hard time determining if this isn’t a documentary.  Regardless, it stars Peter Weller, who got bored with acting and decided to become a college professor – RoboProf.  Seriously, he’s a professor, and probably the second coolest academic on the planet.

Summer School:  Nothing could make me not love this very stupid movie.  Mark Harmon is a loser teacher who has to teach summer school to a group of loser kids.  There’s a dog.  Harmon falls in love with Kirstie Alley before she became the size of a refrigerator.  Odd note:  I have talked to a person who gave me first person testimony that Kirstie Alley was *at least* a decade older than official sources claim.

More accurate than you might guess.

No Way Out:  Sean Young was really hot in this movie, so hot that the crazy might have been worth it.  Kevin Costner continued his domination of 1987 with this second big movie of 1987.  It was a great movie.  Spoiler alert:  You’d never guess that Will Patton was actually Godzilla®.

House II:  The Second Story:  As I said above, House and House II have zero in common except that both were covered by building codes.  There is nothing at all logical about this movie, and it is about as scary as the Building Code Commission Agenda.  It’s silly.  It’s fun.  It’s nothing that Hollywood would make today.

Amazon Women on the Moon:  Another rental.  I had no idea what I was in for.  As a kid growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, late night television was great because 5th graders can’t get dates legally because they can’t drive.  This is a very, very underrated movie.  On a $5,000,000 budget, it produced a box of candy cigarettes and some shiny stones as revenue.  Why?  Gosh, manslaughter charges against the director (on another movie) for starters.  Watch the part “Son of the Invisible Man” for amazing chuckles.

Now with 100% more PEZ®.

Real Men:  John Belushi died, so the world left us with Jim.  Jim?  Not so bad in movies like this.  Is it serious?  NO!  It’s a 1980s comedy with John Ritter.

The Princess Bride:  An utter classic in every respect, as long as you can ignore that Rob Reiner and Mandy Patinkin (huge GloboLeftElite) were involved.  It cost $16 million.  Box office was $31 million.  Cultural impact?  Huge.  Much bigger than that amount.  I read the book (got it from those little book order things that they gave out at school) before the movie came out.  We need more giants in film.

“As you wish . . . ” and I wish there was more Elvis.

House of Games:  David Mamet’s second spot on the list.  Mamet is actually (sort of?) on the TradRight now.  Annnnnnyway . . . this movie is about conmen and con games.  I saw this one on HBO® or Skinemax® and was surprised at the tight plotting and especially liked Joe Mantegna’s acting, even if his name is too long and has too many vowels.

Prince of Darkness:  One of John Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trio.  This movie involves alternate dimensions and the Ultimate Evil all rolled into one, complete with Susan the radiologist (glasses) and Alice Cooper.  It is a horror movie, so if you don’t like those, it’s a skip.  Carpenter at his best.

Arnold needs to pump some iron . . . looking like a girly man.

The Running Man:  I thought this movie was pretty schlocky when I originally watched it back in the day.  Sure, it was fun.  Then I rewatched it with one of my boys and he said, “Dad, this movie is amazing!  Why don’t they make them like this now?”  Indeed.

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles:  John Hughes, Steve Martin, and John Candy make THE Thanksgiving movie.  ‘nuff said.

Overboard:  Kurt Russell as a down-on-his-luck widowed carpenter who convinces amnesiac rich heiress Goldie Hawn that she needs to do the laundry and make the chicken tenders in order to reach mini-golf nirvana.  Amazing.

How good was 1987?  I skipped Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket.  Why?  It was a downer.

1987 was filled with riches compared to the corporate, soulless, paint-by-the-numbers stuff we see today.  What movies do you love that I left out?

Purpose, Calculus, and the “Why” of Life

“As you will find in multivariable calculus, there are often a number of solutions for any given problem.” – A Beautiful Mind

When you take a calculus test, make sure you don’t sit between identical twins – you’ll never be able to differentiate between them.

Often as I go through my daily life, I have to step back and ask the question, “Why?”

“Why” is a really important question, but Sir Isaac Newton was focused in his science on “What”.

Newton figured out (to the best of available information and measurements possible at the time) a very large amount of the “What”.  His equations of motion and gravity are really, really accurate, right up until the point where very large speeds (think how quickly illegals pass over our “border”) or very large masses (think your mother) change the game.  Newton’s rules allow us to predict the orbits of most of the planets with precision.

This is all based on based on 1690’s tech, which your mother would have been familiar with.

He also designed a second Pink Floyd album cover that day, after he set his roommate on fire.

Gottfried Leibniz, though, was really focused on the “Why” question even though he and Newton discovered calculus about the same time.

For Newton, the “Why” was a given.  Newton spent more time in study of the Bible than he did in study of nature or of economics (Newton was the Grand Baron of the Mint, or some such, and was really in favor of executing counterfeiters and people who clipped coins.

Like I always say, for every problem there is a very simple solution.

Leibniz wanted to go further and understand why gravity existed.  Ultimately, that was a question that he couldn’t solve with the measurements available at that time, and we still really don’t have a good idea for the “why” of many basic features of the reality that allows us to make and enjoy PEZ™, watch movies, or sit in a hot tub.

Yeah, things like “time”, “inertia”, “why everyone likes Italian food”, and “why we are even here in the first place”.  Those are things that are, so far, beyond the ability of physics and science in general to explain.

And that’s okay.

What kind of chicken did Leibniz order?  He always Gottfried.

When I look at my own life, I often wonder “why” about a ton of different issues.  I really believe that I’m fortunate in many ways that I really can’t understand the “why” of.  I remember when teachers would tell me that my kids were smart, well, I’d feel proud.

Now?  I realize that I had (almost) no impact on that, at all.  They were born with it – as Rush Limbaugh (PBUH) used to note that he had “talent on loan from God.”  When I first heard that, I thought it was braggadocio, but then realized that Rush was acknowledging that his way with words and skill at communicating, even his sense of humor were nothing for him to be personally proud of – they were on loan from God.

I get it now.

The events of our lives are like that, too.  Some are random, and some have a deeper meaning that either is immediately apparent or is apparent at some future point in time.  The random ones are just that, random.  It doesn’t generally matter (much) if a leaf falls on the east side or the west side of my house – I can ignore them perfectly well on either side.  It’s meaningless.

When a BMW® owner learns to drive, what car do they generally switch to?

But I’ve observed that little delays in my life, the “where did I put my keys” moments that slow me up getting out the door have several times saved me from getting into accidents.  A small thing?

Certainly.  But there are bigger ones that happen, too, things that are so unlikely to happen that they are effectively miracles – those have occurred far too frequently in my life for me to ignore.  Yes, once you’ve lived through 10,000 or more days, 5,000 or more commutes, some unlikely stuff is going to happen.

But we all know the bigger coincidences when we see them – the events that occurred in our lives that, looking backward, were either omens or led to situations we never expected.

This leads, ultimately, to a contradiction in my life there is John Wilder who:

  • Tries to prepare all of the important things so that everything is covered, and tries to live a virtuous and Godly life,

And,

  • Sees the outcome of the planning slowing turning into a colossal mess and the attempts at being virtuous leading to negative personal outcomes and says, “Meh, whatever.”

It’s true – virtue and grace don’t guarantee economic success – soulless creatures like George Soros prowl the world like a Lovecraftian Monster, using their money to spread chaos and disrupt cultural traditions dating back thousands of years.  And he’s rich.  If Soros has even a single positive virtue, I have yet to hear of it.

Kamala got chosen as VEEP for her race and gender instead of for providing sexual favors – which might make it the proudest moment of her life.

There is a scene from that great classic of cinema, BASEketball, where the main character (Joe Cooper) has reached rock bottom, he’s been abandoned by his childhood friend, his girlfriend is filled with contempt for him and he’s being publicly vilified.

His boyhood friend, however, has gotten everything:   public acclaim, money, and gets into a hot tub with a Playboy® playmate (they used to be girls).

Spoiler:  Joe Cooper sticks to the path of virtue, and in the end, everything is returned to him.

That’s the way that, as humans, we want to see life work out, so the good guys win.

What happened to the Russian who told a joke about Stalin?  I don’t know, either.

But it doesn’t always do that, and that’s okay – Soros will be rich until he leaves that money (along with control of dozens of Evil Foundations) to his son.  I can’t change that, and I won’t be upset about it.  It just is.

In the end, I’ll try to be like both Leibniz and Newton.  Like Leibniz, I’ll work as hard as I can to try to understand the “why”, but like Newton, if I don’t get there, I’m good with that.

I mean, they were okay with your mom, so you should cut them some slack.

Christmas 2023 – Looking Back

“It’s like Christmas at the Kennedy Compound.” – The Simpson’s Movie

What happens if you hallucinate and see a psychologist?

I was going to write a story about one of my Christmas experiences, but instead I thought I’d write about more than just one.  Since my only boss at this blog is you, dear reader, I thought you wouldn’t mind.

So, for this Christmas, I’ll share some of the Christmas memories I have of my family while growing up.  Why?  Because those Christmas memories are the strongest in the young, but our understanding of Christmas as well as our experience of Christmas changes as we age.

The very first Christmas memory I recall as a child was of sneaking out of my bedroom, late at night on Christmas Eve.  As an adopted child, I might have been looking for firearms or an exit so I could exit if these adoptive parents wanted me to do chores or something.  Or not.  I was four.  Long after everyone had gone to bed, filled with excitement, I got up and headed towards the fireplace where I had been told Santa would be dropping off presents.  I recall seeing Santa, putting presents in the stockings, his back to me.  Or it might have been an alien.  I was four, so it was probably just a dream.  Or maybe Ma and Pa Wilder put something extra in my eggnog so I “slept well”.

That would have been an uncomfortable parent-teacher conference for them, “Hey, he’s thirty and in the fourth grade, but he sleeps well.”

Jeff Bezos doesn’t sleep naked – he sleeps with pajamazon.

The next year, when I was five, I recall that there were presents under the tree.  Of course, I was drawn to them like the Colorado Supreme Court is drawn to crack cocaine.  Being five and having the coordination of Joe Biden biking, I stepped right one of the presents that was meant for me.  The result?  My foot tore right through the wrapping paper, revealing to me what the gift from Uncle McWilder was. It was awesome:  a tool belt, complete with real tools including a flashlight, screwdriver, and metal pliers.  Immediately, I imagined putting the belt on and helping Pa Wilder fix things, like the sink.

Our sink had never been broken to my knowledge, but if it ever did break, I had a pair of real metal pliers and all the tools a five-year-old could imagine would be necessary to fix a sink.

We never did fix a sink, though I believe I did an unsanctioned fieldstrip of an Electrolux™ vacuum cleaner.  Note:  I still have the pliers.

I once bought a three-foot long ruler at a yard sale.

I don’t recall a particular present from first grade, but I do recall sitting at dinner.  Being an idiot, I announced to Ma and Pa Wilder (who I think had stopped drugging my food by now) that there was no Santa.  My brother, John Wilder, kicked me savagely under the table.

“Ow!  Why did you do that???”

“You idiot, now they won’t give us presents for our stockings!”

I’ve written about second grade before, here:

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

In third grade, we had moved to Wilder Mountain.  We were in a very small place while the rest of Stately Wilder Manor was still being constructed.  Ma Wilder decided to make wine, which involved really good, thick balloons.

My brother John and I decided to play a strange version of volleyball using one of the really thick wine balloons over the small pine tree Ma Wilder had made since we were living in a house the size of Hunter Biden’s sense of morality.  Good times.

In fourth grade my brother John Wilder was proven wrong, as my parents really went all out filling our socks.  In addition to several G.I. Joes®, my brother and I got wind up cars that, when they hit something, all of their body panels flew off.  I had no idea that kind of toy existed.  What was best?  The surprise.

What crayon is in charge of answering the phone?  Yellow.

In fifth grade my parents had said we weren’t going to get any presents.  It was part of a deal – they were going to buy some new snowmobiles, and because of the expense, those would be our Christmas presents.  To be fair I was fine with that – a snowmobile is just awesome.  But, my parents lied, and on Christmas Day we found lots and lots of presents under the tree.  What were they?  Boardgames, galore.  Everything from Mousetrap® to Clue™ to giant checkers.

The present I remember most from sixth grade was one from my brother – he got me the cassette version of Alice Cooper’s album, Alice Cooper Goes to Hell.  An odd Christmas present?  Sure.  But I’ll never cry.

Welcome to my lunchline . . .

Seventh grade brought probably one of the most peaceful Christmas Days from my youth.  I recall on Christmas Day quietly doing a Star Wars™ jigsaw puzzle.  If ever there was a day where there wasn’t a single problem, no strife, nothing but a completely happy time spent with my family growing up, this was the day.

The biggest present I recall for Christmas in my eighth grade year was a Nerf® football, which my brother and I promptly took and threw in the driveway for hours on an unseasonably warm Christmas Day.

As a freshman, my brother and I were out shopping for Christmas presents for Ma and Pa Wilder.  One gift I saw was a towel.  It wasn’t just any towel, but one that had metal snaps and the Everlast® logo.  It looked like boxer’s trunks when you wrapped it around your waist.  This was the era of Rocky™, and I told my brother, “Man, that’s cool.”

He said, “Yes, it is.  I like it, and I’m buying it, for me.”  I was only slightly disappointed, since he had the money, and I didn’t.  Imagine my surprise on Christmas morning when I unwrapped his present to me and found . . . the towel.

I named my pet rock “Rocky” – not because it’s a rocky, but because it has trouble speaking.

When I was a sophomore, all the varsity wrestlers shaved our heads.  Why?  I have no idea.  We were in high school.  Ma Wilder took great amusement in this, and, for Christmas, she made me a knit hat in my high school colors.  The hat was ludicrously long, and perfect in every way.

My junior year was the last year that my brother was with us before he got married, so, in a sense, it was the last, close family Christmas.  Pa Wilder could see the nerd in me, and my present that year was an HP-15C programmable calculator that used reverse Polish notation (RPN).  Back then, HP™ had no equal.

My senior year, I recall that Pa Wilder gave me a metal puzzle – one that he had given all of his friends that year.  Made of brass, it wasn’t a hard puzzle, but I still have it, a memory of the last Christmas before college.

Going through this, it’s interesting (to me, at least) to see the changes over time as I moved from greedy excitement to looking for meaning and peace.  This year?  Not sure I’m getting a present at all, and I’m certain I don’t need one.  I’m also not sure if there’s going to be a Monday post, I’ll give myself permission to skip it if we’re having a good time here at Stately Wilder Manor.

I hope your Christmas is a wonderful one, and brings you peace and meaning as well.

Thanksgiving 2023: PEZ, Garfield, and Lab-Grown Poodle

“Look, sit down, all right.  It ain’t cool being no jive turkey so close to Thanksgiving.” – Trading Places

(All memes A.I. today)

Turkeys can be thankful – they never have to worry about buying Christmas presents.

I’ve mentioned before, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday.  Most of the time it’s four or more days off for me, long enough not to be rushed.  It’s also a holiday that doesn’t have the desperation of Christmas, nor the somber elation of Easter.  Thanksgiving is peaceful for me.

Although I like to do this fairly often, at this time of year, I do like to sit back and think about the things that I’m thankful for.  It’s a long list, so, here it goes the Thanksgiving 2023 version:

I’m thankful for Pa and Ma Wilder, who took me in and then didn’t drown me.  I was an awful child.  How bad?  I caused more damage to our house than the First Gulf War.  To be fair, the First Gulf War didn’t really do much damage to our house.

If we’re not careful, Iraq may have to invade us to make sure our elections are free of corruption.

I’m thankful to my big brother, John Wilder, who pushed me into things that I needed to do, things that weren’t comfortable to me that helped me face difficulty and learn to overcome it.  I also threw up all over his school clothes one year.  Not sure how you get vomit out of a leather belt.

I’m thankful for Joe Biden, because there’s never been an easier, more corrupt, or more incompetent president to mock.  Joe has single-handedly turned more Zoomers to the Right than any living man.

I’m thankful for winter, because no matter how cold it gets I can still put on more clothes.  In the summer, there is a limit to how much clothing I can take off, or at least that’s what the police tell me.

I’m thankful for hot coffee on a cold winter morning when it’s silent as the snow keeps falling.

I’m thankful for PEZ®.  Because it’s PEZ™.

The Abyss, it speaks through Garfield®.  Odie™?  Not so much.

I’m thankful for each morning.  I hate mornings, but they’re better than the alternative.  Oh, wait, I like afternoons.  Sadly, everyone gets cross when I sleep into the afternoon.

I’m thankful that I have so few moments in life that are truly awful, and knowing that I can get over them because the world is actually a pretty great place, and I always know that there’s someone I can talk to, if I need to.  Thankfully, I don’t have many feelings like you humans er, nevermind.

I’m thankful for firearms.  They cause a lot of damage in the wrong hands, I’ll admit.  But they cause even more damage when they’re only in the hands of the government.  So if the government wants to have a gun-free world, they can disarm first.

I’m thankful for cats and dogs, but sorry cows taste so good.  Cows look like they might be good bros and fun to hang with, but, sorry.  They’re just too tasty.

I’m sorry, but how else will I create cowlamari?

I’m thankful for my close family, {The Mrs., kids).  For whatever reason, most of them seem to put up with me, or at least haven’t filed restraining orders.

I’m thankful that you, reader, come here on a regular basis to share your ideas with me.  I’m hopeful you get a chuckle or two.

I’m thankful for the taste of a turkey sandwich the day after Thanksgiving.  Toasted bread, mayo, turkey, mustard, some salt and pepper are enough.  Add in some lettuce and tomato if you have them, but they’re not required.

I’m very thankful for the time I have, and just wish there were more hours in a day.  As I grow older, I know the most precious of all things is our time and attention.  Of course, if I hadn’t eaten in a month or so, I’d probably be even more thankful for a gnawed pork chop bone.  But sitting here, right now?  It’s time.

In the future, will the Chinese be satisfied with lab-grown poodle?

I’m thankful to live in the time and place that I do.  I’m sure the past was wonderful, and I’m sure the future will be wonderful.  But, you know, there’s a problem with both of those.  My stuff is all here, and I’m not even sure how to pack for 1850 or 2432, I mean, what’s the weather like?

Lastly (and firstly), I’m thankful to the Creator.  It has been a weird ride so far, but enjoyable.  I’m sure I’ll figure out the “why” part in the end.  As Soren Kierkegard said, we can only understand the past from the vantage point of the future.  But he said it in Danish, so he probably sounded like the Swedish Chef® when he said it.

If the Swedish Chef™ is actually Danish, does that make him an artificial Swedener?

I hope that your Thanksgiving is peaceful, joyful, and that you are surrounded by those that love you, or at least by PEZ™ dispensers from another cosmic realm that may eat your soul.  Whichever you prefer.

What did I miss?  What are you thankful for?

Think Movies Suck Now? You’re Right.

“Freedom costs a buck-oh-five.” – Team America:  World Police

I’ve lost to a computer at chess, but never at kickboxing.

I write about movies (and books) sometimes because they are important – very important.  They are a part of the myths and backstory that defines a people and a country.  Part of this entertainment is (often) a reflection of who we think we are, or who we aspire to be – those are the characters and stories that endure and grow over time.

Comedies certainly have their place, as well.  Comedies can be rooted to universal truths that are (more or less) unchanging with time, think greed, yappy women, and farting.  Yes.  The oldest recorded joke in history that we have yet discovered is a (not very good) fart joke.

Why can’t you make fun of Steve Jobs dying?  It’s not PC.

Part of comedy, especially movie comedy, is the unexpected.  For that to happen, most of the time someone is the object of the joke – the person who is being made fun of.  In comedy in the 1970s, that person was almost always a white male, and almost always was the father and was almost always on the Right.

Why?

Feminism.  Comedy of the 1970s and onward was almost always written from the Leftist perspective.  Think Archie Bunker, who ended up being popular in spite of them trying to make him a buffoon.  Who had the first flush of the terlit on television?  Archie.  To make fun of white men who were on the Right.

Another tip:  don’t use the toilet brush as a microphone when you sing in the shower.

Heck, when I was in junior high and wondering why the only funny things were Leftist (I was on the Right, even then).  Then I read P.J. O’Rourke, and understood that it was more than possible, it was far, far funnier than Leftist humor ever imagined it could be.

The Right is funnier because the Right has Truth on its side.

For a long time, movies have been propaganda of one type or another.  Top Gun?  There’s a reason that the Navy spent millions to help make the movie – they approved the script.

There have been wild cards – people who make fun of everyone and everything – think Airplane.  One that really pushed the boundaries was Team America:  World Police.  South Park used to be funny, back when the stories were about the kids.  When the stories started to be about the adults?  Less funny.

But Team America:  World Police was something else.  It made fun of jingoistic movies while at the same time gutting hard-Left, virtue signaling idiot actors like Sean Penn, Janeane Garofalo, Alec Baldwin, Michael Moore, Danny Glover, and Tim Robbins.  They were all part of the Film Actors Guild, or F.A.G.

Yes.  They went there.  They also made fun of AIDS and homosexuals.  And Moslems.  And movies like Top Gun.  The rumors are that the studio approved it because it was so politically incorrect, and might be cheap because it was made with puppets instead of actors.

I’m glad COVID didn’t come from a Chinese bear.  Then we’d have had a pandademic.

Needless to say, making a movie that makes fun of any protected group is no longer allowed.  Why are comedies dead?  Because it gets really old, really fast, when the only person you can make fun of is the same person who buys all the movie tickets:  heterosexual white Christian men who have XY chromosomes.  You know, “literally Hitler”.

Comedy is now unfunny, mostly.  Please feel free to leave exceptions in the comments.  And movies as a whole are borderline unwatchable.  Part of the collapse of the box office (and small theaters) was COVID.  The other part is that movies suck.

The reason that movies suck is that they’re now just blatant propaganda, start to finish.  The latest Marvel® movie, The Marvels™ is a commercial failure, and a box office flop.  The studio is blaming the usual suspects:  the actor’s strike, superhero fatigue, white supremacy, anti-feminism.

That’s easy.

Harder to face is that their stupid movie sucks.

This was even in his speeches . . . remember him saying, “Let me be clear”?

Why does it suck?  It’s about women that don’t need no man.  Oh, and couples who have kids don’t want to spend money to have their kids watch Gay Buzz Lightyear™ and ask questions about why Buzz© has two mommies.  That’s it.

Who is the primary consumer of superhero movies?  White men.  Who is the primary consumer of movies for children?  People capable of making children, which, for every year in the history of mankind before 2020, were known as “men” and “women”.

Yes, white men like to look at attractive women in skintight costumes, but only the most Leftist is willing to sit and watch a movie that makes fun of them and marginalizes them.

Why does Marvel© (and Disney™) lose money?  Because they forgot who buys the tickets.

Men.

I’ve gotten to the point that, unless I’ve heard about a movie, if it was made in the last four years, it’s a hard pass, even if it looks interesting.  The movies started going south in, say, 2018.  My take is that was a reaction to Trump.  It so triggered nearly everyone who writes or acts in a movie that all they wanted to do was attack a relatively Centrist guy who just happened to be President.

What do your get if you take an entire human digestive tract and lay it out on a football field?  Arrested.

The reaction led to . . . crap.  Every Leftist simply had to get their message out that trans was the new normal and white men were awful and stupid and that NASA stuff on the Moon was a fluke.  Oh, they tried to take credit for that, too.  Because white guys, you know, can’t do math.

I also noticed it with books.  I was a lifelong reader of science fiction – I loved the ideas.  Then, around 2010, I started to notice that the books in Barnes and Noble® mainly . . . sucked.  I thought it was me.  I thought I was old and jaded.  But, nope, I read some of the old stuff and it was still great.

Science fiction was destroyed by The Narrative, too.  The people who picked the books that made it to the shelves only picked Leftist crap filled with weak people who hated themselves and hated everything True, Beautiful, and Good.  In this breakup, it wasn’t me, it was them.

They came for comics and killed them.  They came for books and killed them.  Lastly, they came for movies, and killed them.  Every book and every movie has a message, and most are propaganda of some sort or another, for good or bad.  Propaganda to get kids to brush their teeth?  That’s good.

But propaganda to turn them into self-loathing transexuals?  That’s 100% against the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.

This was the 2022 “woman” of the year.  Guess guys do everything better.

Watch what goes into your mind.  Watch what goes into the minds of your children.  Help them to aspire to be noble and virtuous and strong.  Help them to understand that jokes about yappy, farting women have been funny for 4,000 years, and will be funny for as long as women fart.

There are still good books out there.  There are still good movies, though they are uncommon, since the rot is very, very deep.  But freedom?

It still costs a buck-o-five.

Forgiveness: It’s Not Just For Breakfast Anymore

“But when you forgive, you love.” – Into the Wild

Dogs go to Heaven, cats go to Purrgatory.

Each and every person has been wronged.  Everyone, but the degree differs for everyone.  Me?  I have approximately three people on my “you’re so morally repugnant that I wouldn’t set them on fire if I were peeing on them” category.  Or did I get that wrong.  Whatever.  In my entire life, only three people.  I’m pretty sure two will drop off the list fairly soon, but it really takes a lot to get on that list.

But at least one of those people I’m fairly certain hasn’t thought of me in a few years.  Yet, for a while I would wake up in the middle of the night and be angry at how I’d been wronged.  There’s nothing worse than being mad an awake at 3 A.M., with the possible exception of having to watch Amy Schumer pretend to do comedy.

So, what did I do?

I let it go, for several reasons.  First, I’ve seen that karma is real and doesn’t have a sense of humor.  Almost everyone who has wronged me in the past has come to great difficulties that my attorney advises me to tell you that I had nothing to do with, and that, besides, I was out of town that weekend.

The Irish gunslinger killed five people with one shot.  His name?  Rick O’Shea.

I have to learn to get past my old grievances.  It’s not for them, you see, it’s for me.  That grief that the person caused me is done.  Heck, they might not even know that they caused it in the first place.  In most cases, the people who wrong us don’t care about us, at all.  It’s less than personal.

In general, when I share your problems, it helps me.

Grievances don’t count.

Grievances aren’t one of those problems.  I don’t know about you, but when a person is constantly bringing me down about things that happened years ago, the evil John Wilder that lives in my head often screams, “LET IT GO!  Who is this complaining helping?”

I’m giving up drinking for a month.  Oops, wrong punctuation.  I’m giving up.  Drinking for a month.

Generally, no one.  Yes, when a wound is raw, it’s fair to have others share the burden.  But after a while, complaining about it makes it easy to stay stuck in the pain.

That’s why I try to not complain.  Fix a problem?  Yes.  Complain about something I can’t fix?  No.  Complaining makes me a victim.  Now, there’s a person who wronged me, and I put myself in the place of a helpless victim.

Tell me again how this is winning?

So, this is one I choke down and don’t share.  In reality, it helps me.  First, people don’t run away or throw themselves into woodchippers when I walk up to avoid hearing me whine.  Second, it removes the subject from my mind, and eventually removes the power over me.

If I started a zoo I’d want to have at least a panda, a grizzly, and a polar bear.  That’s my bear minimum.

The Mrs. and I have talked about the power of forgiveness.  The last time we talked, I was on the favor of, “Nah, they don’t deserve it.”  The Mrs. was relatively constant, however, and I’ve rethought it.  Forgiveness isn’t for them, it’s for me.

The rationale for this is simple:  every time that I think of a tool who wronged me, it results in me being angry.  Who is the only person who should create that emotion?  Me.

Yes, there are times I enjoy being angry.  It’s like taking a shower in chocolate syrup, sure it’s fun once in a while, but I wouldn’t want to make a habit of it, mainly because of the yeast.  But once in a while?

Sure.

Never be angry at lazy people.  It’s not like they did anything.

I have, in the last month, consciously let myself get angry because it felt good.  But forgiveness allows me to get angry when I want to, and not every second of every day and be the emotional puppet of some other person, or worse, some event.

Yeah.  An event.  To be clear, if I stub my toe in the dark of night on the couch while going to get more vodka some water, does the couch care?

No.  The couch doesn’t care.  Events don’t care – they just are.  Being mad at events is has a similar impact to being mad at Tuesday.  Just like that damn, lazy couch, Tuesday doesn’t care.  It just is.  Being mad at something in the past is understandable, but it doesn’t make any sense.

I can be mad about (spins wheel) the Franco-Prussian War, but, well, why?  If I am mad at a situation the way to review it is to understand if I can change it or not.  If I can’t change it, it’s merely a fact, like Tuesday or those damn raisins that keep existing no matter how much I hate their wrinkly expressions taunting me in my dreams.

According to an online survey, 0% of people are Amish.

If there’s a lesson from the past event, I pick it up.  If there’s something I decide I need to change, I change.  If I wouldn’t do anything different, well, what then?

Being upset or angry is okay, but I’ve learned I have to let it go or it’ll eat me up inside, wreck my sleep, and make a situation I’m obviously not happy about worse.

I’ll leave vengeance on people that wronged me to the Manager, since He does that far better than I ever could.  If it’s a situation or event and there’s nothing I can do, I have to let the Manager take care of that, too.  I mean, that’s why He has a job, right?

Don’t avoid difficulty in your life, but don’t take negative situations or people that you can’t control and turn them into situations or people that control you, since I’m officially telling you that you don’t have to pee on them if they’re on fire, I mean, firemen don’t even do that.

Shaving, Emotions, And Having A Good Day

“I have gold. What can I buy with gratitude?” – Game of Thrones

I’d tell you a joke about a broken pencil, but there’s no point.

I was in a meeting with a guy that I worked with. We were discussing a project and an everyday task that one of the employees would have to do. “Well, that shouldn’t be controversial. It’ll take, what, a minute for someone to do that every day?” It would have taken something like $50,000 to automate the function, and people would still have to check that the automation was working.

He responded, “John, that’s how you and I think. It’s part of our jobs, right? But I know these guys. They’re gonna fight this with all the power of Oprah Winfrey fighting Whoopi Goldberg to get the last piece of cheesecake on Earth. To you and me, it’s a minute of our day. No problem. To them? These are people who get up in the morning and think, ‘What, do you mean I have to shave? Every day? For the rest of my life?’”

He was right. We still didn’t spend the money, thankfully.

This comment about shaving . . . every day . . . for the rest of my life . . . always cracks me up. There is a category of people that are eternally and forever upset about everything, and get upset about every aspect of life, even (and maybe especially) for things they had no control over.

Those people? I avoid them as much as possible, and I’d rather spend a day chewing aluminum foil or having someone take a cheese grater to my spinal column (the bone part, not the fleshy bits).

Then The Mrs. asked me why I lost the whisk. I told her, “It beats me.”

Instead, I’ve just started a simple experiment to control my own mood. The first part of the day, I try, even before the toothbrush hits my teeth, to think about the things that I’m grateful for.

This is not the first time that I thought about feelings the first thing in the morning. That would have been in sex ed in high school, which I took because I needed something first hour and the teacher was so mellow, I don’t think he left any pot unsmoked in the 1960s.

One exercise that he asked us to do was to think about our feelings and make a (I kid you not) feeling wheel the first thing in the morning. As a man, I only have a small number of feelings available to me: salty, drunk, hungry, cold, and sleepy are the three that come to mind.

Newton walks into a bar. Or did the bar walk into Newton?

Other guys on the wrestling team in the class with me would, I kid you not, copy my answers for their feeling wheel. The other reason I didn’t have much to write is because I was 17. The only way I ever felt for every day of my 17th year on Earth was AWESOME! Being 17 rocked. Gratitude? What was that, I was too busy enjoying life and feeling awesome every day.

Now I’m no longer 17. I find that, for no reason at all, something hurts every morning when I get up. I look in the mirror and can see I’m definitely not 17, at least after my eyes focus, but thankfully the mirror is blurry because I haven’t put my glasses on yet.

I could choose (and I see many people who do this) to feel a little grumpy. To be clear, I did notice that I was waking up grumpy recently. And I thought is this fun? Do I enjoy this?

No, no I do not.

If it’s not enjoyable to me, and it doesn’t serve any purpose, then why am I doing it?

I read that someone in New York City gets stabbed every 43 seconds. Poor guy.

So that’s why I started the experiment. I would, from the first moment that I got up avoid thinking about:

  • Things I wasn’t looking forward to that day.
  • Things that make me mad.
  • Situations that I couldn’t control.
  • How warm the bed was and how cold the room was.

Instead, I decided, I would think about something that made me happy or something that I was grateful for. It didn’t have to be a big thing – the way that the coffee was going to taste, for instance, or the idea that I was going to get ready for the day faster than usual, or a song I liked that I could play while I brushed my teeth.

I also learned that you should never brush your teeth with your left hand. A toothbrush works much better.

Instead of being mad, I would focus on something that made me want to get out of bed, something to look forward to, no matter how small. Maybe today I could do just a little more than I did yesterday, or serve just a little more than I did yesterday, or be just a little bit better than yesterday. It’s possible, right?

Immediately, my mood was better. Oh, I certainly wasn’t skipping down the hall, but I was not in the mood to complain, in fact, I was feeling happy about things that

I would think about something that made me want to get out of bed.

Oh, sure, the chaos of thoughts about things I had to do would come, but I could push those off until after I had a cup of coffee. Each day I have is a unique day, and the biggest variable is how I deal with it.

If someone gave me a dollar for every time I didn’t understand what was going on, I’d be like, “Hey, why are you giving me all these dollars?”

As I’ve mentioned before, I get to choose how I feel, and I get to choose how I react. In this world, sometimes those are the only things fully under our control. So, if I have to choose?

Today, I chose to be grateful. And, it felt pretty good. Maybe sometime I’ll choose to be grumpy, or angry, or mad.

But not today.

And the good news about having a beard? I didn’t have to shave today, either.