How One Texas Court Case Defines The Future For A Seven Year Old . . . and The United States

“There’s no basement at the Alamo.” – PeeWee’s Big Adventure

alamo.jpg

“I guess we’d better turn over our guns.” – No Texan Ever

In 1836, Colonel William Travis surveyed the situation.  It was grim.  He was surrounded.  His troops were outnumbered.  He was out of deodorant.  Defeat was certain.  The information his messengers brought back was clear – there would be no rescue.  With this certain death in mind, Colonel Travis addressed the defenders of the Alamo:

Colonel Travis:  “We must die,” he began. “Our business is not to make a fruitless effort to save our lives, but to choose the manner of our death.  We can surrender and be executed.  We can attack and be butchered.  Or, we can remain in this fort, resist every assault, and to sell our lives as dearly as possible.”

Travis then drew a line in the dirt with his sword.

Colonel Travis:  “I now want everyone here who is determined to stay here and die with me to come across this line.  Each man-”

Captain Triggered:    “Or woman.”

Colonel Travis:  “Or woman, to come across himself-”

Captain Triggered:  “Or herself.”

Colonel Travis:  “Or herself.  Furthermore, every man-

Captain Triggered:  “Or woman.”

Colonel Travis:  “Why don’t you shut up about women, Captain, you’re putting us off.”

Captain Triggered:  “Women have a perfect right to play a part in our movement, Colonel Travis.”

Colonel Travis:  “Why are you always on about women, Captain?”

Captain Triggered:  “I want to be one.”

Colonel Travis:  “What?”

Captain Triggered:  “I want to be a woman.  From now on I want you all to call me Loretta.”

Colonel Travis:  “What?”

Loretta:  “It’s my right as a man.”

Davy Crockett:  “Why do you want to be Loretta, Captain Triggered?”

Loretta:  “I want to have babies.”

Colonel Travis:  “You want to have babies???”

Loretta:  “It’s every man’s right to have babies if he wants them.”

Colonel Travis:  “But you can’t have babies.”

Loretta:  “Don’t you oppress me.”

Colonel Travis:  “I’m not oppressing you, Captain Triggered, you haven’t got a womb.  Where’s the fetus going to gestate?  You going to keep it in a box?”

(Loretta starts crying.)

Davy Crockett:  “I’ve got an idea.  Suppose, Colonel Travis, you agree that Loretta can’t actually have babies, not having a womb, which is nobody’s fault, not even the Mexicans, but that he can have the right to have babies.”

Jim Bowie:  “Good idea, Davy.  We shall fight the Mexicans for your right to have babies, brother.  Sister, sorry.”

Colonel Travis:  “What’s the point?”

Jim Bowie:  “What?”

Colonel Travis:  “What’s the point of fighting for his right to have babies, when he can’t have babies?”

Davy Crockett:  “It is symbolic of our struggle against Santa Ana.”

Colonel Travis:  “It’s symbolic of his struggle against reality.”

norris.jpgI’m just waiting for his next movie:  Walker, Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

This week another line was crossed.  Like the Alamo, it was really just another custody dispute in Texas.  Unlike the case of Santa Ana versus 3,000 crazy Texans, the custody case was about a real child, rather than a typical Texas divorce or Oklahoma tornado – where in either case someone loses a mobile home.

If you haven’t heard about this case, it involved a seven year old boy.

This particular seven year old child has been the subject of an ongoing trial that gathered national attention, and with good reason.  The child is a boy.  The father attempted to gain full custody of the child because the mother saw him liking the movie Frozen and wanting to dress like the main character.  I have never seen the movie Frozen.  Perhaps if Frozen was written by Matt Bracken (LINK) and starred a bunch of Soviet-era tanks, I might have been interested.

But this boy who likes Frozen is seven.  I recall when I was seven.  I wanted to be an astronaut, exhibiting a desire to dress in a helmet and coveralls, and pretending a plastic M-16® was a laser.  Ma and Pop Wilder, being concerned, took me to a psychologist.  The psychologist suggested that they transition me from the real M-16© that I kept by my bedside to a laser pistol and launch me into orbit at the earliest opportunity.  The psychologist explained that I had astro-dysphoria, which could be treated before I reached puberty though gravity blockers.

astro.jpg

I now identify as Tyler Durden.  But so do several people.

Okay, that didn’t happen.  But there was a kid in my class who played with his sister’s Barbie™ dolls.  Even in second grade we made fun of him for that.  Last time I saw him he wasn’t playing with Barbie© dolls.  He was playing nose guard for their high school football team.  What would have happened if he was seven in 2019?  I think he might have been given a dozen needy housecats and a barrel of chardonnay.

But a jury in Texas (Texas!) ordered that the mother get custody of the “trans” child so the mother could raise the child as she wished, which included “transitioning” the boy named James into a girl named Luna.  Included in the order was that the mother had full authority to give the boy hormone blockers as he approached puberty to suppress him becoming more manlike as puberty hit.

gumb.jpg

Keep in mind, Silence of the Lambs was a horror movie, not a “how-to” manual.

On Thursday (10/24/2019) it appears sanity prevailed.  The judge in the case overturned the jury verdict and awarded the husband joint custody – in this case the mother cannot make sole medical decisions about James.  The boy’s father hailed it as a victory, but the judge also issued a gag order – neither party can talk any more in the media about this case.  This may be the last we hear about James until he’s 18.  More about that gag order later.

jury.jpg

The one time the jury voted to acquit me, it was great!  I got to keep all that money!

I did not sit in the jury box.  I’ve often been reluctant to criticize juries because I wasn’t there as the evidence was presented.  I wasn’t there to hear the testimony, to see the people involved in the case.

In this case it doesn’t matter:  I will criticize mercilessly, like a hungover, sleep-deprived Viking named Jen Vilder in the depths of a nicotine fit.  11 out of the 12 jurors, who voted to allow the mother to turn a seven year old boy into a girl, are monsters.

Each of them.

The point of principle is very strong here – as a society we simply do not allow seven year old children to make life changing decisions.

  • We don’t allow them to drink booze.
  • We don’t allow them to vote.
  • We don’t allow them to drive.
  • We don’t allow them to get tattoos.
  • We don’t allow them to own guns.
  • We don’t allow them to have ear hair.

These laws are in place because society rightly realizes that seven year old children have the brain capacity of a slightly mobile houseplant.  I have ice cubes and ribeye steak in my freezer that are older and wiser than your average seven year old child.  Children are malleable – Marx knew that.  Stalin knew that, too.  Stalin said, “Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed.”  This is nothing less than an attempt to devastate an entire generation and demoralize a people.

I speak from the experience of raising children, from being involved in youth organizations, and adopting “a few” random seven year old children from the Wal-Mart© parking lot.  I have never met a seven year old capable of writing a letter to Santa that would get past the screening Elf, let alone making decisions that could lead to permanent deformation and infertility.

clause.jpg

I hope this doesn’t make you Claustrophobic.

I’ll throw this in here:  if you’re an adult, and want to pretend to be a female?  I’m not sure I care.  It appears that this just might be a gimmick for guys to dominate both male and female athletics.  It’s not like women are transitioning to men to become a linebacker for the New England Patriots® – they can’t, because there’s no real affirmative action for football – society takes football seriously.

I have, however, heard that the latest complaint of the trans community is that it’s transphobic when lesbians won’t date trans women.  Yes.  Let me restate the complaint – trans people think that lesbians should be forced to date people with guy parts.

Frankly, that amuses me.

sports.jpg

“Hannah” took “her” team to a world championship.  Yay!

It’s wonderful when the Community of the Woke has to deal with the consequences of Wokeness, and tries to explain that men can have periods and women can drive well.  As long as I don’t have to believe it, I can take a Monty Python® view and wait for the trans community to argue that, even though men can’t have periods, they have the right to have periods.

Genius!

It’s fine to watch adults ignore reality – watching a man that has transitioned to being a woman play rugby with actual women is amazing – it shows that before long that trans women will conquer all of sports.  Biological women?  They can stay home and make sandwiches, I guess.

But kids are different.  Drag queen story hour at the library?  Wow.  That wasn’t a thing since Weimar Germany.  And we all know what happened after Weimar Germany (hint:  it rhymes with “Mitler”).

The remaining part of this story that bothers me is the gag order.  Sure, it’s in the best interest of the kid.  I’ll agree to that.  But if dad loses custody?  If Dad, who gets to see his son 56 hours a month loses the next court battle and his mother transitions him to “Momma’s little girl”?  We won’t hear about it because dad can’t talk about it.  And that . . . could be a travesty.

Colonel William Travis drew a line in the dirt in the Alamo.  The consequences were simple:  step over that line, and fight side by side with Travis, to the death if need be.

But a different kind of line was drawn in Texas this week, a line that is so profound that it should shake every reader to the core.  What bothers me, and what should bother you the most about this case is that it wasn’t the dictate of a crazed bureaucrat or judge.  No – in this case the judge was the sane one.  11 out of 12 jurors in the Lone Star state voted that a seven year old boy should be allowed to become a girl, is a sign not that society is collapsing, it’s a sign that society has collapsed.

I’m thinking that in Modern Mayberry, that wouldn’t go over very well.

Texans?  Stand up.  The line you have held dear has been crossed.

How long will you stand for it?

Hold the line.

On the other side?  Madness.

Life Insurance? Nah, They Can Suffer.

Dot:  I’m sure you have the life insurance squared away?
Ed:  Have we done that honey?  We gotta do that honey!
Dot:  You’ve got to do that H.I.!  Ed’s got her hands full with this little angel.
H.I.:  Yes, ma’am.
Dot:  What would Ed and little angel do if a truck came along and splattered your brains all over the interstate?

-Raising Arizona

aquameme.jpg

Is it just me, or was it Transformers® who started the trans debate with whole “robots identifying as trucks” thing?

A long time ago, Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert®, came up with a handy, short guide to finances.  His quip was, “I’d write a book of financial advice, but it would only be one page long.”  I wrote about it before, but that was two years ago and this will be funnier.  The nice thing is that his list of financial advice is simple, and applicable to most people in normal times (from, say 1950 to 2020):

  1. Make a will.
  2. Pay off your credit cards.
  3. Get term life insurance if you have a family to support. 
  4. Fund your 401k to the maximum.
  5. Fund your IRA to the maximum.
  6. Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it.
  7. Put six months’ worth of expenses in a money-market account.
  8. Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement.
  9. If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, or tax issues), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio.

dilbert.jpg

I don’t carry life insurance – I want to die just as I was born – as a burden to my family.

I think, for various structural reasons, normal times won’t continue, but I’ve blogged about that more than once.  We’re seeing inflation accelerate (10 Years (or less) To A $10 Big Mac – How To Explain Inflation To Your Friends) and we are, perhaps, getting ready to party like its 1859 again.  So, yeah.  It all might be going to hell, but it could also be much better than my worst projections, and some of the above might matter.  Yeah, I know, this is like having a mortician say, “But on the bright side….”

deathstar.jpg

My insurance company is dependable – every month since I’ve had my policy they’ve sent me a bill.

So far, I’ve accomplished most of the things on the list above by Mr. Adams.  When I’ve varied from the suggestions, I’ve actually suffered financially – Scott is a pretty shrewd fellow, and he’s certainly more successful financially than most people.  For instance, if I had kept more money in the market, I would be that much more heartbroken when Netflix™ costs $12.  Not $12 a month, but $12 for the whole company.

Being wrong in my case is okay – I’m in pretty good shape financially – I was able recently to add meat to the Hamburger Helper® (I’m not saying it was hamburger, and what neighborhood will miss a cat or two?), so not being 70% in the stock market has been okay.  I’m able to sleep better at night and not worry.

handy.jpg

Sadly, Hamburger Helper™ only works if the hamburger wants help.

But one thing on Mr. Adams’ list above that isn’t on mine anymore:  life insurance.  Sure, I take the company life insurance policy because it’s cheap super cheap, and if I were to pass away, The Mrs. would get the princess-ly sum of $500,000, which in the year 2029 will buy you a pack of illegal vaping juice.  I hope (on any given day) that I’m worth more alive than dead to her.

Besides, if anything suspicious happened to me, she’s an author and her Internet browser history looks a list of creepy websites the Zodiac Killer was too scared to go to.  The Mrs. could be 100% innocent, but it would still be difficult to explain why she’d spent several weeks researching “undetectable poisons to kill your bald husband with.”  Wait.  That’s just a bit too specific.

ladies.jpg

Mental note:  eat only what The Mrs. eats.  Also:  wear a helmet.

The purpose of life insurance is simple – it’s not a lottery – it’s a mechanism so that if the breadwinner was to die early, the family could be financially secure without the income they provided.  But what financial security does my family need to provide for?  The Boy is off at college, and with his scholarships I think he pays tuition, room and board in pocket lint and beef jerky wrappers because it doesn’t cost very much to go to Bob’s State University and Discount Amateur Asbestos Mine if you do really well on the ACT®.

Pugsley will in a few short years be off at college, too, and that’s it.  Our last financial challenge.  We’re in good shape for that today.  Also, if I were to die, the major source of weird family expense goes away.  The Mrs. is unlikely to spend nearly as much as I do on hobbies like ham radio.  I know that no one was more shocked than I was to find out that you couldn’t use a store bought ham.  I think you have to get a fancy farm raised ham.

pigham.jpg

If a pig eats ham, that must make a really good radio?

So if I passed on, then what?  The Mrs. would have to get by on our nest egg, which should work great as long as she doesn’t’ have any fancy needs, like electricity.  My need for life insurance now is nearly zero.

But it wasn’t always so.

When I was younger, I actually bought the greatest amount of life insurance the company offered.  The nice thing about life insurance is that it’s one product that’s priced appropriately – when you’re youngest, it’s cheapest.  And when you’re older, it costs more.  When I was young, I wanted to make sure that the family had its needs taken care of.  I don’t recall it ever costing much more than $30 a month, and that was for $2 million or more.

That was good.  When The Boy was first born, we didn’t have much as far as savings and we had almost two decades to plan for.  And we had no idea if he would get scholarship after being dropped on his head all of those times.  Now?  We can afford to go bowling whenever we want.  And we can get some of that fancy box wine when company comes over.  And our risks as a family have dropped significantly.

wine.jpg

Think of box wine as juice boxes for adults.

Frankly, I never needed life insurance at all.  It was a product I was paying for that did me absolutely no good.  I would never see a dime of return.  Silly people I live with, wanting to be protected.

But in 2019, what would I add to Scott Adams’ list?

  1. Live in a safe place. Think about population density when you determine safety.  Be there and be part of the community.  If the place is too big to recognize people in the stores regularly?  It’s probably too big.  Be there sooner rather than later.
  2. Have food. Start with a month’s worth – nobody thinks you are crazy for having a month’s worth of food.  More is better.  Farming areas are nice – people are generally friendly, and they make the food.
  3. Be able to get water. Clean water is good, but there are ways to make water clean.
  4. Know what you can’t live without. If it’s PEZ® or insulin or fabric softener, know and either save it up, or learn how to do without.  I regularly shame The Mrs. pancreas to try to get it to produce insulin.  No luck so far.
  5. It teaches you what you need and don’t need faster than anything.
  6. What would you add?
  7. Did I mention PEZ™?

Regrets? Don’t Regret Anything, Unless You Want Me To Slap You When You Are Old.

“Nothing leaves alive.” – Dreamcatcher

stormtrooper

See, now Darth Vader® has no regrets.  Except for being in Episode III.

I’ve never written anything before that made me want to go to a hospice and slap a bunch of old dying people, but this particular post led me there.  I’ll explain.  It’s okay, it’ll all make sense in the end.  I’m a trained professional.

I have made many mistakes in my life.  Most of them I don’t remember – they were small and didn’t have any consequences, or at least any consequences I’ve seen yet.

Then there were some slightly larger mistakes – let’s call them medium size mistakes.  There have been consequences to these.  Again, medium-sized mistakes most often lead to medium-sized consequences.  A scar here (carve away from your thumb, not towards it), a stock gone to zero there (thanks a lot, Enron®) and one really bad car trade when I was 24 . . . medium-sized.  Medium-sized mistakes are big enough for a big sting, but whatever permanent impacts there might be aren’t immediately fatal.

The biggest ones – I won’t give a laundry list of those.  Most of those were where either passion, inexperience, a momentary lapse of character or judgement, or (worst of all) when all three contributed to a mistake.  Some mistakes lasted longer, some were short.  But all stung.  The biggest include a marriage that led to divorce, underestimating a sociopathic boss, and wearing that white dress to my little sister’s wedding.  I mean, I look fabulous in it, but some brides just have to be the center of attention.  Also a bit weird because she wasn’t really my sister.

whitewedding.jpg

Staaaaaart again . . . .

To put it bluntly, I am the author of almost every problem I have.  If I didn’t cause the problem, I’m probably complicit in creating the problem or not dealing with the problem.

But I don’t regret it.  None of it.  Not the victories, certainly, and not the failures.

Why?

Life is a one-shot deal.  And life is a ratchet.  It only turns one way – we can’t take anything back.

Regret isn’t a one-shot deal, though.  If there’s anything that will burn a hole in your soul, it’s regret.  Regret never comes alone – it brings guilt along for the ride.

pi.jpg

My biggest fear is having a heart attack during a game of charades.

If I were to dig more deeply into those feelings – regret and guilt are just ways that fear manifests itself.  Fear of . . . what?  Regret is a fear that the consequences of your choices or actions will impact you negatively, and cannot be changed.  Here is a list of some of the common regrets from people on their deathbed (from a former palliative care nurse named Bronnie Ware, and, yes, I spelled that right – blame her parents, not me):

  1. “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
  2. “I wish I hadn’t worked so hard.”
  3. “I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.”
  4. “I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”
  5. “I wish that I had let myself be happier.”

Even a quick look at this list tells me one simple thing:  regret is for losers.  I have never seen a whinier pack of self-serving weakness since I last watched a Democratic presidential debate.  Everything, absolutely everything on this “top five” list is just, well, sad.

tombstone.jpg

Me?  I’m still holding out hope for a pyramid.

Would you like to go to your grave worrying about any of those things?  I can’t imagine doing it.  I refuse to let regret rule me.  And I refuse to let any decision I made twenty years ago rule me.  Hell, I refuse to let any decision I made last week rule me, except for choosing that convenience store egg/muffin sandwich – I don’t need to explain why.  Deal with the consequences?  Certainly.  But regret?  No.

Let’s go down the “top five” list:

Not living a life “true to yourself”?  I’ve never heard such nonsense in my life.  I was talking with a guy the other day who quit his job because his boss asked him to do something illegal.  That’s being true to yourself – he walked away without a paycheck but with his values and beliefs intact.  If you’re not being true to yourself, you’re either weak or flighty.  The good news?  Anyone who reads this blog is neither.

Wishing you hadn’t “worked so hard”?  That’s also nonsense.  A soul thrives on doing good work that matters.  Doing good work excellently is hard.  The Mrs. teaches, and works hard at it – I can see from her talking about her students, talking about the ones who learned and improved, the ones who keep coming back to her classroom to report on their lives that her work matters.  Working hard at work that matters is what makes us the best humans we can be.  If you think you worked too hard, you weren’t doing anything worth doing.  The good news?  Change now.  You have an entire lifetime to fix that mistake.

bernie.jpg

I got fired from the calendar factory.  They get really mad when you take a day off.

Didn’t have the “courage to express my feelings”?  Wow.  This is the weakest on the list, so far.  Number one:  do you have feelings that matter?  Most feelings are stupid – and I have stupid feelings, too.  Thankfully, I’m not a five year old – I am at least twelve.  I get to examine my feelings and reject those that don’t reflect my values, my virtue, my beliefs.  I get to choose.  If I feel slighted by something silly or petty?  I get to choose to understand what a fool I’m being and ignore that feeling.  Again, if you don’t express your feelings, that’s not always a bad thing.  Your feelings are often stupid.

I’m sorry that “staying in touch with your friends” was so hard.  But it’s really not.  The people you care about, that care about you, are there.  They always have been, they always will be.  I don’t Facebook® much – why?  I call my friends, on an actual phone.  I text my friends.  Am I often the one that calls first?  Sure.  Do we develop different lives, does life pull us away for a while?  Do hundreds or thousands of miles separate us?  Maybe.  But I make quite a few phone calls.  And mostly my friends pick up. Sure, it’s true that the biggest miracle Jesus exhibited in the Bible was having 12 11 close friends (thanks, Judas) after the age of thirty – but you just need a few – a few that will have your back.  A few you can share with.

friends.jpg

Also, as a single guy it was easy to make friends.  Lots of girls I asked out wanted to be friends.

Seriously – number five on the list is a wish for “letting themselves be happier.”  Happy is easy (All You Will Ever Need To Read About How To Be Happy* (*Most of the Time)), being significant is hard.  It requires hard work while being true to yourself.  It requires expressing those feelings that your virtue allows to exist.  Friends?  The good ones will be with you forever, and you can restart your conversations with the slightest hint of time passing, even if you haven’t talked regularly in a decade, if they’re true friends.

I’ve never thought about going to a hospice and slapping someone, but this list made me want to do it.  I know, I know, it’s too late for them.  And this is the list of people who had regrets.  People like me?  I don’t have a single regret at this moment of my life.  Not one.  In a hospice, I hope I’d be the, “Regrets?  No.  More clam chowder, please,” guy.

soupi

The Boy made me some fake ramen noodles this summer – it was an impasta.

To be clear – it’s not that I don’t care.  It’s not that I’m not blameless.  It’s not that I was always right.  Not one of those things is true.  But I have done the most important thing I can think of:  When I do something I regret, I’ve changed myself so that I won’t (Clintoncide, John Bolton’s Waifu, and October Market Crashes: Knock on Wood) do that thing again.  I cannot change the past.  But if I have learned, if I can help others not make the same mistakes while not repeating my own mistake?  Like an algebra teacher for the soul, I have taken something negative and turned it into something positive.  The bonus is I get to end the dreams of high school freshmen in the process.

And I’m not planning on having any regrets tomorrow.  If you have regrets?  Fix them now or recognize them for the dead weight they are and cut them loose.

The alternative?  Trust me, you don’t want to have me chasing you down in a hospice and slapping you silly.

BONUS SOUP MEME!  I made too much soup meme by accident.  Enjoy.

soupii.jpg

 

 

The Funniest Post You Will Ever Read About Meat Being Murder

“All normal people love meat.  If I went to a barbeque and there was no meat, I would say ‘Yo Goober!  Where’s the meat?’  I’m trying to impress people here, Lisa. You don’t win friends with salad.” – The Simpsons

cheezemurder.jpg

Oh, sorry.  I meant a double BACON cheesemurder.

When we lived in Alaska, we got tickets to drive into Denali National Park one year.  On that particular weekend, The Mrs. was feeling under the weather so she decided to send The Boy (then a freshly-minted kindergartner) and I instead while she stayed home with Pugsley, who had yet to be grounded, being all of 16 . . . months.  I stopped for gas, and decided to get some road food for us since this was our first “just the guys” trip.

I grabbed some beverages, some chips, some candy, and, on the wall behind the cash register I saw some jerky.  The brand name was Alaska Jack’s®.  It was a clear plastic package of jerky with a gold foil label.  The picture on the label was of an old Alaska gold miner, a grizzled old timer wearing buckskin, with a beard and a fur hat.  I bought it.

The Boy had never seen jerky before.  He stood alongside me at the cash register and looked at the stringy dried pieces of meat in the plastic bag and turned it over.  He looked up at me.

“What is it?”  He was clearly puzzled.

“Meat.  Dried meat,” I responded.

He took another look at the picture of Alaska Jack™, “What kind?”

A long pause.

“Human?”

I bring this (very true) story up  because a recent study indicates that a food that mankind has been eating for nearly all of its existence is . . . wait for it . . . not bad for you.  Meat has been a staple food for mankind since our grimy, dim ancestors with questionable hygiene first took a bite out of a dead critter and asked, “hey, Ugg, this is pretty good, but do you have any ketchup or A-1®?”

Not only have we been eating meat forever, there is evidence that we have been cooking meat for perhaps a million years, which is almost enough time to make a brisket tender.  It is certain we’ve been cooking meat for 400,000 years, and man has been having backyard BBQ’s on a regular basis for 250,000 years.   So, color me shocked that science shows that the cooked meat we’ve been eating for at least 20,000 generations of people is . . . good for you.

The next part will be really shocking:  meat has changed less in human history than nearly any other food we eat today.  Broccoli looks nothing like broccoli 3,000 years in the past.  Corn?  You wouldn’t recognize it even 1,000 years ago.   The wild spaghetti plant?  Yup.  Similar – wild spaghetti looks just like rice.  Heck wild elbow macaroni wasn’t grown until Benjamin Franklin first cross-pollinated a piece of fettucine with a water pipe in 1321.

Yeah, a cow is different today – it’s bigger and juicier, but the meat is the same.  Sweet, sweet, cow meat.  Heck, I’m making me hungry now.

Given that science is advancing so quickly, I’ll expect to see these headlines soon:  “Water is Wet, New Studies Show” and “Scientists Say:  Possible Link Between Sex and Babies Showing Up Nine Months Later” and “New Research Says Ben Shapiro’s Voice Makes 95% of All People Want to Choke Him Until He Passes Out, Take His Money, Buy Themselves Something Nice.”  If you have any money left over, I’m looking for some cool PEZ® dispensers.

I’ll admit science has some mysteries.  I can’t understand how a cat got a taste for tuna, since I’ve yet to see a deep sea fleet of cats in the wild fishing for them.

catpirate.jpg

Why do people always say they’re having a tuna fish sandwich?  Is there a tuna bird or tuna cow I’m unaware of?

What may amuse me the most is that several of the headlines noted that this finding was “controversial” and that you needed to read another article to see “What the Meat Study Didn’t Say.”  The old conventional view that Meat is Bad® simply cannot be allowed to be refuted.

emo2.jpg

I heard about a new Emo pizza – it cuts itself.  Okay, on that train to hell, I’ll take an aisle seat, please.

The sad truth is this emo-angst-fest is another example of how science, once perverted via either large corporate interests or by Leftist indoctrination, becomes an instrument not of knowledge but of propaganda.  Case in point – in one of the articles about the incredibly shocking finding that meat is both tasty and healthy, the New York Times® said, “An extensive study confirms that red meat might not be that bad for you.  But it is bad for the planet, with chicken and pork less harmful than beef.”

I guess the New York Times© can’t figure out that t-a-s-t-y isn’t spelled h-a-r-m-f-u-l.  Silly New York Times™.  I’ll throw some real controversy out there:  ribeye kicks bacon’s butt.  There.  I said it.  And I stand by it.

But what is this nonsense all about?  In the immortal words of Joe Bob Briggs (LINK),

This means they’ll do anything to avoid simply putting together a bunch of plants and vegetables in a healthy stew/salad/whatever and labeling it as “Healthy Stew/Salad/Whatever.” They want you to think it’s meat. The vegetarians want to consume it as a meat. You don’t need to go to those lengths, though, because we already have a food group that satisfies that need. It’s called, uh, meat.

That’s in response to Impossible Burgers®, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Meat©, Soylent Meat™ or whatever.  The push is to take meat and replace it with either:

  • Mutant cow stem cells cultured in a vat of despair, or
  • A “plant based protein” mixture which I resent on principle because when you eat plants, you’re eating what my food eats, and that’s just not right, or
  • Bug burgers.   Bug burgers. or,
  • The food that will turn us all into Wendigos.

Okay, a Wendigo is a Native American term for what happens to a person when they cultivate a taste for human flesh, it’s based on the tale of a lost hunter who, in a moment of intense hunger, eats his dead buddy.  After that?  He turns into a giant emaciated partially human creature, whose greed knows no bounds.  Sure this sounds like Miley Cyrus or Johnny Depp, but in the Native American tale it was probably a little less scary.

This explains a lot.

The War on Meat brings together the Global Warming™ Cultists, PETA® zombies, and, well, the Leftist Cannibal Brigade©.  Okay, I made the Cannibal Brigade™ up, but it’s not far from being true (LINK):

Stockholm School of Economics professor and researcher Magnus Söderlund reportedly said he believes eating human meat, derived from dead bodies, might be able to help save the human race if only a world society were to “awaken [sic] the idea.”

greta.jpg

Greta loves eating people to save the planet, but she draws the line at clowns.  She says they taste funny.

I’m pretty sure that calling anyone from Sweden a scientist anymore is stretching the definition of scientist to its breaking point.  Magnus Söderlund might have a cool first name, but he’s not a scientist, he’s a political hack who is deluded to such an extent that he thinks eating people is a good idea that he can share.  In public.  He has that opinion, and he’s not worried about people with large nets taking him off to a padded room where he can’t hurt anyone anymore.

Hey, at least he’s not the only one.  At the recent town hall of Super Genius Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, C-NY, at last we got a level-headed answer on what we have to do to save the climate:

The hilarious part when I watched this clip was that Super Genius Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, C-NY had the opportunity to say what 99.999999% of people on the planet would have said: “No, that’s clearly insane,” missed her chance.  She simply said that there are a lot of different ideas on how to save the planet.  This is the equivalent of her pulling a three year old up on stage to protect her from a cream pie in the face.

All of this is based on the ideas of eating plants (Ewww®), bugs (Still Better Than Plants©), cultured cells (Still Better Than Plants©), or human jerky (only good if it it’s the kind from the Alaskan convenience store) is better than having a steak or a burger.  The Left is trying to infringe on the Zero Amendment, so an unrestrained and over-the-top response is required.  What is the Zero Amendment?

“A meatless People being a Danger to a Free State; Congreth thall maketh no law to infringe on the Rights of the People to have great gobbets of meat, with rivers of grease running down their chins after a great feast, with the meat done preferably medium rare.”

venusfly.jpg

Okay, if even plants aren’t completely vegan, why are people?  Oh, because of the Prius®-smug factor.  Sorry.  My bad.

My solution to the whole problem is rather easy.  Since meat is now healthy, I suggest this modest proposal:

Trans-Meat.

Meat shall now be identified as a plant, so vegetarians can eat it.  Cows shall now be identified as bugs, so hippies can eat it.  Meat shall now be identified as a collection of cells, so Elon Musk can eat it.  Cows, pigs and chickens shall now be identified as human, so the Swedes can eat them.  And so they can vote for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, C-NY.

Thankfully, Alaska Jack© has already shown us the way.

morph.jpg

I once heard that a woman from New York went into a store and was upset about wool sweaters.  “We shouldn’t kill sheep for their wool!”

The salesman responded:  “Ma’am, nobody kills sheep for their wool.”

Doing More Than You Ever Thought You Could, Now With Jokes to Offend Everyone.

“Master betrayed us.  Wicked.  Tricksy.  False.  We ought to wring his filthy little neck.  Kill him!  Kill him!  Kill them both!  And then we take the Precious . . . and we be the master!” – Lord of the Rings

fixed.jpg

After this, I doubt he’ll help out and eat my homework anymore.

The Mrs. and I had a discussion – in one respect I think my personality disturbs her.  Okay, it’s more than one respect.  The Mrs. has a list of 73 items, but several of them have multiple parts.  Thankfully for you, this post is only about one.

A while back, The Mrs. was watching an episode of Arrested Development, and thought that there was a really funny segment so she shared it with me.  The setup is that George Michael has set up a fraudulent software company that he thinks is worthless, but has a really hot investor that wants to buy it.  Maeby is his cousin.

betray.jpg

Most investors look like Bernie Madoff, or Bernie Sanders, or um, I seem to be out of Bernies.

Maeby:  She’ll get all our liabilities, and then anything over two million, we get to keep.

George Michael:  I can’t do that to someone that I have feelings for.

Maeby:  So stop having feelings for her.

George Michael:  What?  Is that something you can do with people?

Maeby:  Yeah, once I learned how to do it with my parents, it was easy with everyone else.

It’s like a heart switch, you know?

Click.

I love you.

Click.

I love you not.

Click.

I love you.

Click.

I love you not.

Can’t you do that?

George Michael:  No, but in my defense, I’m not a sociopath.

[DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYS]

Maeby:  Click.

The Mrs. looked at me.  “Isn’t that funny?”

My response, which probably troubled The Mrs. a bit was, “Can’t you do that?”

The reality is I can’t do it with everyone.  Just like most people, I worry about those close to me when they’re ill.  Just like most people, I feel a great loss when those who are close to me pass away, and cry at their funerals.  At my funeral, I hope at least one person shouts in the middle of the eulogy, “Look . . . it’s . . . it’s . . . moving.”  I’ll have $100 in my jacket pocket waiting for you if you do that.

viking.jpg

Let’s put the Fun in funeral.  And the freak back in Ruffles®.  Because I’m out of freakin’ Ruffles™.

But I can do it with people who I trusted who betray me.  If you’re on my side, I expect you to be on my side.  It doesn’t mean that you have to agree with me, in fact, if I trust you and I’m wrong, I expect you to tell me I’m wrong:  I welcome my friends telling me when they think I’m wrong.  The greatest loyalty is truth – we save pretty lies for polite company.

judas.jpg

I told Jesus he should unfriend Judas on Facebook®.  Heck, Judas doesn’t even have hiking sandals.

And the closer you are to me, the greater the expectation of loyalty.  And the second that you betray me, that switch flips, click.  It’s not hate.  It’s not anger.  It’s . . . nothing.  You’re not dead – I would mourn that.  You’re dead to me, and I would rather not have you in my life than to have someone I don’t trust in my life.

Click.

I’m not 100% honest.  I wish I was, but I’m not.  I generally won’t lie, but I’ll certainly answer questions selectively because daily interactions with people require that sort of lubrication of unmentioned truth.  “Do these pants make my butt look big?”

“No.”  The unwritten truth?

“It’s your butt that makes your butt look big.”

The Mrs. has never asked me that question, and the reason is obvious.  I feel loyalty to The Mrs., and if she asked me that question, she’d better be prepared for the answer.

But the real question is can we tell the truth to ourselves?  I think the greatest betrayal can come not only from the outside:  I think that often we are the source of our own greatest betrayal.  I can be honest with those closest to me.  Oh, sure, I call it honesty, but they can’t seem to stop calling it “John’s being a jerk again.”

But can I be honest with myself?

jerk.jpg

I think there is an actual Jerk Phonebook.  It’s called Twitter.  Yeah, I’ve been there a time or two.

I think that’s the difficult part.  Being honest with yourself is hard – I think that the brain is wired to make it difficult.  I was watching a YouTube® video where a psychologist was working with an anorexic girl.  He compared the size of his thigh to the size of the girl’s thigh.  She didn’t see any difference.  The psychologist jumped up on a table covered with paper and used a marker to outline his thigh with the marker.  He challenged the girl to do the same.

It was only then when she sat down on the paper and compared her leg’s width to the width of the leg of the psychologist that she saw how painfully thin her thigh really was – her brain interpreted the size of her leg to be much bigger than it was.  There was genuine surprise.  She wasn’t faking anything – it’s just that her perceptions were out of line with reality.

Watching that brought the question that still echoes in my mind.  How much of the perceptions of reality that you or I have are wrong?  What do our brains do to fool us about ourselves?  How far will our egos go to protect their sense of self?

freud.jpg

Freud:  Invented the Ego and the originator of “Your Momma” jokes.

How often do we betray ourselves?  How often does your brain tell you that you can’t go on, you can’t keep it up, that you can’t take another step?

Don’t believe it when it betrays you.  You can go on.  You can keep it up.  You can take another step.

Time after time, I’ve seen people accomplish things that there is no way that they should be able to do.  The problem wasn’t them – they accomplished it – the problem was my brain.  It said something was impossible that clearly could be done.

We fail because we don’t make our dreams larger.

It’s Friday.  Do something that you’ve always wanted to do but had thought impossible.  Make something great happen.  You can.

And the part of my brain that tells me I can’t do it?  The part of your brain that says you can’t do it?

Click.

Zen and the Art of Marshmallows, Delayed Gratification, Soviet Tanks, and Russian Motorcycles

“Look, the marshmallows aren’t even toasting!  They remain a comfortable sixty-eight degrees!” – The Tick

stay puft.jpg

Come on, we know that the real villain in Stranger Things™ should have been Stay Puft®.

Once upon a time when I was a five-year-old Wilder, my kindergarten teacher gave me a marshmallow.  “Johnny, if you can wait five minutes before eating that marshmallow, I’ll give you a second marshmallow, and you can enjoy them both.”  The teacher then walked out of the room, closing the door behind her.

I thought furiously.  This must be some sort of trap, with stakes that high.  I looked around for cameras.  Aha!  There they were, disguised cleverly as a new box of chalk and a pencil sharpener.  They’re monitoring me, just as I suspected.  Little did they know, I had anticipated this entire scenario when I had debriefed my friend Thomas A. Anderson* (known on the Dark Web® as Neo™) the previous day.

keanu.jpg

Also?  Keanu never ages – he saves that for the picture in his attic.  He looked the same in kindergarten as he does today.

With effort, I slowed the beating of my heart using a technique I had learned from Master Ginsu® during the years I had spent training in Tibet to be a Fake Purse Ninja©**.  I had trained.  I was ready for this.

Very slowly and subtly I pulled a second marshmallow from the front pocket of my Tough Skins® jeans from Sears©.  I put it in my palm.  Quick as a cobra, I then reached out for the marshmallow the teacher had left, but only appeared to leave it there on the plate.  In reality, I had swapped out the marshmallow on the plate for the one I’d brought in my pocket.

In a practiced move, I pretended to pick my nose while in reality I was eating the marshmallow the teacher had left to tempt me, leaving the imposter I’d brought from home in its place.  I felt the rush of the sugars dissolving in my mouth.  Now I could finally understand what Spot was trying to tell Dick and Jane.  The fools!

But I shook my head to clear it of these deep thoughts.  I had finished my surreptitious swap just in time – I heard the footsteps in the hall outside the room, and saw the two dark shadows under the door, letting me know that the teacher was looming like a monster that had slowly slithered out of the bowels of the Earth and decided to go into elementary education.  My heart, despite all of the training began to race again.  The door knob turned.

mission.jpg

Who knew it was that easy?

The teacher had another marshmallow, and started to place it next to my cleverly replaced fake.  She stopped.  She picked up my marshmallow, the one that had brought from home that had been sitting in my pocket for six hours before I made the swap, and studied it.

“Oh, Johnny.  This is gross.  There is lint in this marshmallow.  And bits of string.  And, is that a BB?  This won’t do, this won’t do at all.”  Drat.  I never counted on the relative filth of my pockets giving me away.

I had been caught.  I knew that this would go in my Permanent Record.  Ruined!  And all at the age of five.  Perhaps I could salvage my defeat and defect to the Soviet Union so I could be closer to Bernie Sanders?

Before I could go to Plan B and steal an F-15E from the nearby airbase and leave the country at Mach 2.5 my teacher continued, “No, this won’t do at all.  Let me get you a fresh marshmallow.”  She left the room and came back with two clean, pristine, marshmallows.

marshmallow.jpg

It also felt like this when I swapped our baby for a baby with a better jawline at the hospital just after “Pugsley” was born.  Those nurses hardly ever look away.

Success.  And she never knew what hit her, which would make this the perfect crime.  I ate the second and third marshmallows.

Maybe I overthink these situations?

Nah.

I left the school and then a helicopter exploded behind me as I got into the school bus for the trip home, because that just looks really cool.  And I didn’t even look back.

Okay, absolutely none of that was true, except the exploding helicopter.

But what is true is that a Scientist did a study where they gave a four or five-year-old a marshmallow and promised them a second marshmallow if they didn’t eat the first.  They then followed these kids for 40 years.  Yes.  40 years.  Here’s a (LINK).  Turns out that those kids that waited for the second marshmallow had higher SAT scores, were skinnier, drank less, got stoned less, generally dealt well with stress and had a lot of friends.

ketamine maru.jpg

The best way to win an argument with your wife is if it never happened.  Enough vodka works, too.  Does that make this the “Ketamine Maru” scenario?

To be clear:  they never gave me the marshmallow test, because I would have completely Kobayashi Maru’d*** it.  Besides, they were too busy taking knives away from me.  Yes.  In kindergarten.  That’s how you spell freedom.

The concept of the marshmallow test is that the ability to delay gratification is good, and leads to better life outcomes.  We see this all of the time – the ant and the grasshopper was a famous fable – the ants work all summer while the grasshopper goes to meth parties.  Then winter hits, the ants start to party, but the grasshopper is left all tweaked out, tapping at the window of the anthill.  The ant party then intensifies to drown out the tapping and then everyone cheers when the grasshopper finally shows the good sense to just die already.

anthopper.jpg

Ahhh, Darwinian fables.  They skipped over the part where the ants eat the grasshopper’s frozen corpse.

There is a balance that defines a struggle between now and the future.  If you’re skewed too far to the now, you can certainly bet that all of your decisions will be made without regard to the consequences.  I want the marshmallow now, dangit!  The teacher might not bring me a second marshmallow.  There might not even be a second marshmallow.  Heck, the teacher might not even come back and I’ll be stuck in this room forever.

For most of my life, I’ve lived the “marshmallow later” life.  I think the biggest example of this is that I buy life insurance.  On my life.  I use money that I could use to pay for buying a vintage Soviet T-34 tank (I found one for sale in Poland) and spend it on life insurance.  Okay, $60 a month won’t buy a vintage Soviet T-34 tank from Poland, but you get the picture.

But for the rest of this post, I’ll use (sometimes) Marshmallow to refer to future orientation, and Anti-Marshmallow to refer to “eat it now” orientation.

T34.jpg

It’s a project car, honey.  The guy who sold it to me swore it was one owner.

Future orientation is spending money on something that pays off ONLY IF YOU ARE DEAD.  You will never, ever in your life receive a dime from your own life insurance, unless you have a comically complicated plot to fake your own death.  Yet, if you’re like me, you pay for it so your family can have the best tier of Internet service after you die, because after all, YouTube® isn’t going to watch itself.  In my mind, life insurance is the ultimate Marshmallow test.

Preparing for disasters is another Marshmallow test (Be Prep-ared) that over 90% of your neighbors don’t do at all.  Sticking to a diet is another (The Last Weight Loss Advice You’ll Ever Need, Plus a Girl in a Bikini Drinking Water) that’s not real popular.  I will admit that I buy my share of silly crap on the Internet.  I have several hobbies worth of kits and tools and stuff ready to build when I retire, and that’s Anti-Marshmallow behavior, but the only real hassle with them is finding a great place to store them until I’ve got the time to mess with them, what with the basement being full of ants, grasshoppers, and empty ketamine argument winning bottles.

A few weeks back I made a joke, “I could either spend it on me now, or spend it on an extra box of Depends® when I’m 90.”  If one were to truly be Marshmallow, one would always pick the future comfort, over the comfort of today.  But life is a balance.  If all you do is pick the future, you become the janitor who worked 80 hour weeks for 80 years cleaning schools to leave Harvard® an extra $20 million to turn liberal rich kids into CNN® anchors.

If you become completely Anti-Marshmallow, well, you’re broke.  Those are two extremes.  Maybe this time you want Moderation?

Last week I mentioned that Moderation is for Monks, and Adam Piggott, Gentleman Adventurer added some great thoughts.  You can read it here, and you should (LINK), in fact you should be reading him daily.  Anyone who says, “Be the very best bastard that you can be,” is worth your time.

And he says moderation is good – moderation in having a cigar, and not the box.  Splitting a bottle of wine with your wife on Friday, but not on all days ending in the letter y.  And that’s Discipline, which is very Marshmallow.  But is Discipline moderate in 2019 when the motto of the Western world is if it feels good, do it?  Probably not.

But yet, there’s a time to be Marshmallow, and a time to be (at least a bit) Anti-Marshmallow.  Maybe a T-34 is overkill – I don’t live anywhere near Kursk****.  But maybe, just maybe, I should get a Ural®.  The Mrs. has already signed off on it and said “You should get that.  It looks cool.”  To Marshmallow or to not to Marshmallow.  I guess to be Marshmallow, at some point you have to eat the marshmallows.  Otherwise Harvard© will.

floating.jpg

I hear Elon Musk is including anti-gravity as a new Tesla® feature.  If I bought a Ural®, I’d skip the Russians and the machine gun, because the Russians would drink all my booze and then invade Colorado only to be thrown back by a plucky school Spanish club.*****

Me?  I don’t like marshmallows all that much.  Except on ‘smores®.  And then I roast mine slowly to get the full mushy goodness without it turning into something that looks like a cat caught at Hiroshima.

Which, I guess is the Marshmallow way to eat marshmallows.

 

*The Matrix.  Too bad they never made a sequel to that movie.

**Bowfinger.  If you haven’t seen it, you’re dead to me.  Yes, it’s that funny.

***Star Trek II, The Wrath of Khan.  Really?  Please tell me you already knew this one.

****Sort of like Burning Man®, but for tanks. 1943.

*****Nope.  You can figure this one out.

Moderation* is for Monks (*and Ruffles)

“Xerxes dispatches his monsters from half the world away. They’re clumsy beasts, and the piled Persian dead are slippery.” – 300

slide2.jpg

That may be a slippery slope.  But it’s a tasty slippery slope.

When I was about 19, I was browsing around a new bookstore that had just opened in the college town where I went to school.  The bookstore had an inventory of about sixteen books, and lasted just about that sixteen weeks before it went out of business.  They did, however, have one book out of the sixteen that caught my eye.  I picked it up – The Notebooks of Lazarus Long by Robert Heinlein.  It was beautifully illustrated.  I flipped randomly through it, and as I recall one of the first quotations I found was:

“Everything in excess!  To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites.  Moderation is for monks.”

drywall.jpg

When I was in college, I used toothpaste for spackle because I didn’t know spackle existed – not a square foot of wall in my house wasn’t covered in paneling.  Live and learn, though my dorm room smelled minty-fresh when I checked out.

I bought the book.

Several of the quotes from that book have been mentioned before in previous posts by your ‘umble ‘ost, especially:

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.  Specialization is for insects.”

The age of 19 is a powerful time to introduce ideas to a mind – new ones tend to burn in deeply, especially those that resonate with your belief system.

But, “Moderation is for monks”?  What do I do with that?  Is that a formula for hedonism, a nerdy version of YOLO or The Lie of Living Your Best Life (now including cookies)?  Taken entirely out of context, it could be interpreted to mean just that.  Party on!

I can’t even remotely support that interpretation, however.  When taken into proper context, specifically with the second quote, it means nothing of the sort.  You can’t be a human that’s capable of doing half of those things on the list if you’re not a person of substance, a person who has devoted their life to learning and service, or John Wick.

wickurity.jpg

John Wick kills about 77 people in the first movie because he’s sad they killed his dog, which is more than I’ve killed all year.  I guess that’s just how Keanu grieves.

Moderation may be for monks, but Heinlein wasn’t telling us to party.  He was telling us that we only get one shot at life, so we have to live it to the fullest.  He’s telling us that there’s danger in compromise.  Here’s another quote that gets us closer, from Karate Kid:

Daniel-san, must talk.  Walk on road, hmm?  Walk left side, safe.  Walk right side, safe.  Walk middle, sooner or later, get squish just like grape.  Here, karate, same thing.  Either you karate do “yes”, or karate do “no”.  You karate do “guess so”, just like grape.  Understand?

iyagi.jpg

Thankfully Mr. Miyagi wasn’t from Sweden – then he’d only know Ikea®-do.

There’s a danger to compromise.  The path to freedom as practiced by the Founding Fathers® isn’t a path of tolerance to deviation.  The path to freedom is rigorous.  It requires honest and probing self-analysis.  Once the self-analysis is done, the solution immediately presents itself.  For a real solution, the truth is required – lies are comforting, but never lead to solutions.

Taking an inventory of where your reality is versus where your standards are is important.  We all fall short of our standards from time to time, but if you do it long enough, falling short becomes your new standard.  The only solution, and I mean only solution is to avoid moderation.  If you’ve failed, the “moderate” behavior that got you there isn’t the “moderate” behavior that will get you out of the situation.

Just as the path to freedom doesn’t include tolerance for tyranny, the path to good health doesn’t include tolerance for Snickers® bars every fifteen minutes.  On the flip side, going for a half-hour without downing the bag of Ruffles® on the table doesn’t solve your health problems – it’s only the very smallest of steps.

There are no shortcuts.

slide.jpg

Okay, tubing down that waterfall might be a short cut.  Not a positive one, mind you . . .

For me, avoiding moderation is key – your mileage may vary.  But from what I’ve seen, most people who quit smoking, quit smoking.  They don’t slow down – they stop.  It’s a radical choice.  I’ll share my problem a problem that this girl I knew (she’s from Canada, you wouldn’t know her) had.  I started out with the keto diet (several years ago) and started getting great success.  I was in a time and place where it was possible to follow the diet exactly.  After a while, I started reading that people took a day off.  So I took a day off.

A day became a day and the previous evening.  Which became Friday evening to Saturday evening.  Which became Friday until Monday morning.  Yes, I’m admitting that I allowed the slippery slope in that girl from Canada allowed the slippery slope in.

ruffles.jpg

Thankfully we’re all out of Ruffles® and chewing gum tonight.

For me, moderation didn’t work on that diet – moderation led to failure, and that’s what Heinlein was talking about.  If you have a goal, don’t pursue it half-heartedly – pursue it with everything you have.  Moderation really is for monks.

Kids, Parents, and Happiness (Plus Orphan Jokes)

“Yeah, but I don’t think anybody would adopt me at this advanced development stage that I’m in.” – The Red Green Show

poker.jpg

That’s not true.  But I do know that the favorite beer of orphans is Fosters®.

My brother was an only child*.  I kid.  But he was the only kid in the house when I showed up.  And by showed up, I mean when I was adopted – I was, I think, four years old at the time.  Of course, this was after the whole virgin birth thing and then being found as a three day old baby by the headwaters of the Odense River in Denmark by Pharaoh’s Mom.  But I was just too much for Denmark to handle.  And too much for Head Start to handle – they kicked me out (really).

I actually remember the day I first called my adoptive mother “Mom.”  As I recall, it was in some utterly mundane sentence, such as “Okay, Mom,” just after the court finalized the adoption.  I can even remember my tension while waiting to see how she would react.  Would she be upset and cry?  Would a whirling orchestral theme surround us as she took me in her arms and wept with joy to have a new son?  Would she . . . tell me not to call her Mom?

None of those things happened.  She just said, “Alright,” and continued as if I had called her Mom a hundred thousand times before and that me calling her Mom was the most normal thing in the world for four year old John Wilder to do.

Mom probably picked the right reaction since we were so poor that we couldn’t afford a live-in orchestra at our house.  I often wondered, was Ma Wilder as tense about that moment as I was?  I know she was tense a year later when she was explaining to the doctor over the phone that I ate all of her birth control pills.  Man, that was the nastiest tasting candy ever.  But the pills had a side effect – I’ve never been pregnant, which I hear is a thing guys can do now.

orphan.jpg

One day I was asked by a stranger if I was adopted.  Me:  “Yes, what gave me away?”  Stranger:  “Your parents.”

The advantage of being an outsider dropped into a fully functioning family is that I was able to see a set of customs that were new to me, like having regular meals.  The ordinary day-to-day web of family life was there to see, but it was also there to be disturbed and observed by the alien dropped in the midst of the ranch-style Area 51.

Families have customs, even when they don’t know that they do.  One of the first customs I noticed was when I went to bed, the last thing anyone in the house said to me was, “see you tomorrow.”

For some reason, four or five year-old me found that an odd thing to say.  It wasn’t good night.  It wasn’t good bye.  “See you tomorrow.”  I found it oddly comforting, a promise that I really would see them tomorrow.  That may sound odd to you, but it’s a thing that I really thought about as I stared up at the ceiling from my bed.  It was, I thought, the nicest thing anyone could have said.

arnold.jpg

The original line wasn’t “I’ll be back,” it was “See you tomorrow.”  Everyone in the test audience just said, “awwww.”

“See you tomorrow.”  Perhaps it was the impermanence that I’d experienced in my life up until then – being adopted represented at least the fourth major living arrangement change I’d experienced since I was born – but the simple stability implied in those words made me happy as I snuggled under the covers on a warm winter night.

Please don’t think that I ever felt alienated by my adopted family, but it was certainly recognized that I was an alien – a shock of blond hair and freckles in a family of brunettes.  It was like I was the actor hired to punch up a sitcom and dropped into the season 12 opening episode with no backstory.  Again, I was always treated as a regular cast member, and not a recurring guest star.

My family loved me ferociously, and showed it on a regular basis – not only did Pop Wilder give me his name, he also sat and watched every football practice, came to every varsity football game and nearly every varsity wrestling match, and sacrificed years of his life worrying about me.

Kids need families.  Even odd kids like me.

And kids help families.

oddone.jpg

I’m still the odd one, but that’s okay – sometimes I discover new things – such as not liking the taste of raw fish heads. 

A recent study out of Europe (LINK), where I thought even saying the words “family” or “child” was considered a hate crime found that married couples with kids were happier than married couples without kids.  But there was a catch – the kids needed to have moved out of the house for the parents to be happier.

Why is that?

As a parent who has one kid in the house and some already gone, I can understand that.  Raising a kid is tough:

  • It’s long hours when they’re sick.
  • It’s home surgery that brings to mind a Civil War surgeon performing an amputation.
  • It’s being covered in vomit that smells like formula while watching a parade on a 95°F day.
  • It’s getting a call that they backed the pickup into the lunch lady’s car. Parked car.  Not moving parked car.  In broad daylight.
  • It’s learning how to yell loudly enough so they can hear you explain why you’re choking them.

ampusplinter.jpg

Seven year old kids don’t think it’s funny AT ALL when you tell them that you’re going to have to amputate their arm when they complain about a splinter. 

But those are the dark sides.  There are the positive sides:

  • Seeing your child go from C’s to A’s because they finally figured it out.
  • Seeing your kid finally “get it” and perform better than they ever thought they could at a sport.
  • Watching them solve a problem – by themselves.
  • Getting a text from them on a random day – just because they wanted to send you a text.
  • Seeing them become competent at being an adult.
  • Hearing them tell you that, “I’m doing it, and it’s none of your business,” when they make a decision.
  • Having them pick a very nice nursing home for you because you love them so very, very, very much. (I’m hoping they’re reading this when I’m 103 and drooling.)

The research indicated** childless people are happier than people with kids.  Until the kids move out.  Then the people with kids are happier.  From the list above, I can see that.  From my perspective, children are like incredibly cute parasites until about age 9.  They cost a lot of money, they take up a huge amount of time, and they’re less intelligent than a basset hound who agreed to be on Dancing with the Stars.

Sure, some big headaches come as kids get older.  And around middle school is when the final battle for their soul takes place.  From experience, with my daughters it was one type of battle (“you’re ruining my life”).  With boys it is quite another (“I was supposed to do what?”).  None of the battles are easy, but they represent the last stage, the last opportunity for a major influence.  After that, it’s nothing but minor course corrections until they move out.

I love Pugsley, who is the last chick in our nest.  But I derive a lot of satisfaction from the Wilders who are out in the world – I love seeing them change and grow.  I love seeing them accomplish things.  And I love late night calls where they ask for earnest advice.  I certainly may have given Alia S. Wilder a bit of a hard time in The Lie of Living Your Best Life (now including cookies) and Financial Advisers, Christianity, and Elon Musk’s Hair, but she has displayed a great independence, and has owned her mistakes without blaming others.

But in one way the study is wrong.  Tonight, when Pugsley went to bed, he said, “See you tomorrow.”  I won’t hear that after he moves out, and I’ll miss that beautiful sentiment.  But it will also be their responsibility when they (or their kids) back into the parked lunch lady car.

*For all of you wondering why my brother’s name is also John Wilder?  Is it a joke?  No, he and I have, in real life, the same first name:  John.  Really.  The adoption explains it.  John was born before me, so he had the name first.  I was old enough that they weren’t exactly gonna start calling me by a whole different name after my fourth living arrangement in four years.  Heck, that might have messed me up enough so I would have gotten a doctorate in social sciences.  Thankfully, they already called my brother John by his middle name (Velociraptor, or his nickname “Screech”) before I showed up.

brother2.jpg

This was in the library at my house – I found it one day, and my parents claimed to have no idea where it came from.  Perhaps it was left on the shelf by the Lady of the Lake™ to prepare me for my writing career as John Wilder so I could save the United States?  Or maybe they forgot when they got it, since the book was over 25 years old when I found it.  One of the two.  I’m betting on the Aquatic Tart®.

**Research in social sciences is a problem that we face in society as a whole.  It appears that social science research is better than flipping a quarter, but not a lot better than flipping a coin.  Where scientists tried to duplicate the findings of a social science study, they could only do it about 65% of the time.  Sure, that’s slightly better than just guessing, and probably what you would expect with people who kept going to college so they could get a doctorate instead of following their true calling in the food service industry and then figured out how to use government grant money for gluten free locovore vegan tacos while they study how the patriarchy influenced and controlled t-shirt design in 1978.  Don’t forget, these stories are also reported by journalism school graduates.  Journalism school is for rich kids who aren’t smart enough to qualify to get into Yale Law® or even Maria’s Authentic Taqueria and Law School®.

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

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

igor.jpg

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

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

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

beertender.jpg

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

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

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

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

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

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

deer.jpg

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

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

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

toohappy.jpg

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

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

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

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

brid.jpg

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

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

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

breaking bras.jpg

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

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

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

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

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

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

alcohol.jpg

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

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

  1. Certainties

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

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

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

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

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

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

beatles2.jpg

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

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

 

  1. Things That Might Happen

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

Hmmm.

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

A.  Events You Can’t Influence

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

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

ilhan.jpg

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

economy.jpg

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

B.  Things you can influence or control

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

But what sorts of things can you control?

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

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

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

I’m thinking about 3% or less.

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

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

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

Probably not.

chart.png

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

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

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

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

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

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

house2.jpg

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

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

car.jpg

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

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

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

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

ex.jpg

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kick back and get it done Monday.

decisions.jpg

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