Health – Page 25 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Entropy, The End of The Universe, Heroes, and Struggle

“The Federation has taught you that conflict should not exist. But without struggle, you would not know who you truly are. Struggle made us strong.” – Star Trek Beyond

Some people think the Universe will last forever. Silly people. We’ll only have stars for the next 100,000,000,000,000 years or so.

The Universe is built on multiple simple principles that interact in ways that make Elvis™, PEZ®, and mayonnaise covered garden gnomes all possible. A light coating of mayo will do – we’re not crazy here at Stately Wilder Manor®. One of those simple principles is that as time passes, disorder in the Universe increases. This tendency towards disorder is called entropy, and it’s not just a good idea – it’s the law: the second law of thermodynamics. The nice thing about this law is you can’t break it, so there’s no need for Thermodynamics Police and Judge Judy can’t preside in Physics Court®.

A way to think about this inexorable drive toward disorder is to imagine that the Universe is a campfire – one that you can’t add wood to. At the beginning it’s a great blaze, because you were an idiot and used gasoline to start the fire and burned off your eyebrows. As the blaze burns, it consumes the wood. After a time there is nothing left but coals, which glow dimly for hours. The current most accepted theory (but not the only one) is that the Universe started with a sudden quantum instability, more commonly known as the Big Bang®.

In the beginning (see what I did there?) the Universe experienced the greatest amount of potential energy it will ever see. The Universe is that blazing gasoline-soaked campfire. Since that moment in time, the amount of energy available in the Universe decreases continually. Like a fire, it burns hot at the beginning. That’s where we are, it’s still hot out there. The embers will glow as the last available energy in the Universe is slowly turned into a starless thin vapor nearing absolute zero, much like Marvel® movies without Iron Man©.

Entropy – now maintenance free!

This tendency toward lower overall energy and thus overall lower order is called entropy.

It’s important to note that entropy always increases in a closed system – like when you store a decapitated human head in a Yeti® cooler – who hasn’t had that problem? The Earth, thankfully, isn’t a closed system. It has a wonderful thermonuclear reactor pumping energy down from millions of miles away, every day. To put it in perspective, the Earth only receives one billionth of the energy that the Sun puts out daily, like you only received one billionth of your mother’s love, since the rest of it was reserved for chardonnay and “Daytime Daddy.”

Why isn’t the Earth a closed system?

The Sun allows us to have surplus energy, and thus order on Earth. With the exception of nuclear reactors, all energy on Earth is solar. Wind is caused by differential heating of the atmosphere. Rain is caused by solar evaporation of water. Even oil is millions of years of trapped sunlight, helpfully stored by God in gas stations. Nuclear fuel used in our current reactors (and the core of the Earth) was forged in the heart of a star. Not Nicholas Cage®. Maybe Johnny Depp™.

This energy is responsible for other things, too. Salt deposits. Sand dunes. And life.

So disorder is increasing across the Universe every day. And not only in the galaxy, but in your house. In your carpet. In your body. In that Yeti© cooler.

But we know these things for certain. Without energy:

Your house will someday be a wreck.
Your carpet should have been replaced Reagan left office. Brown shag is . . . 1980.
Your body will die.

Until you die, you have to have standards. You have to hold the line.

You have to fight for the glorious tomorrow over the whispering of losing your will and relaxing today.

Life is hard. Life is a struggle. If you are lucky, you can struggle for mighty things, good things, virtuous things. Hopefully with a healthy body and maybe a hardwood floor.

But I’ll let you in on a little secret:

We all lose in the end. Entropy will win. Entropy always wins.

The struggle is the goal.

Regardless of where you are, this is your golden age, your moment – it’s the only one you have. When you were six you knew this. What you read, what you watched – what was thrilling, who were your heroes? People who went to work at a bank? No.

In ancient Sparta, apparently they did Cross-Fit® but didn’t talk about it. They were advanced!

Your heroes were people who struggled, who fought. Winning was preferable, but the struggle was enough. A defiant loss like the Spartans at Thermopylae or the Texans at the Alamo is, perhaps, an even stronger example of virtue.

There are plenty of things in life that are worth fighting for, worth struggling for. What are you going to do with your life?

Grandpa McWilder didn’t wear a kilt. He was an overalls kinda guy.

You have two choices.

You can waste your life. Or you can struggle. Do you have the discipline to embrace the struggle?

All the cool kids are doing it.

At least struggle with a rifle cartridge if you’re gonna fight aliens.

Dune, Moods, Wrestling, and a Way of Life

“Look at the symptoms: temperamental behavior, mood swings, facial hair. Uh oh, Dad, I think you have menopause.” – That 70’s Show

There ended up being roughly 732 books in the Dune series. I stopped after book four, which was one book too many.

In our basement we have a wrestling mat. It would be unusual if we had a wrestling mat and dismembered mannequin parts strewn around the room and baby doll heads covered with blood red paint, but we don’t. The Mrs. and I decided we need to leave some projects for after the kids go to college. So we use the wrestling mat for the more conventional purpose of practicing wrestling. Both Pugsley and The Boy enjoy it, and so do I. Pugsley has expressed an interest in winning a lot of wrestling matches, so he fairly enthusiastically led us to doing independent wrestling practice at home so he could improve.

One night it was time to practice. The Boy was ready. I was ready. But Pugsley said, “I’m not in the mood.”

The Boy turned pale. He knew what was coming next – the kraken was about to be unleashed. I did a quick Internet search. I then looked up from my laptop screen and quoted the following:

“Mood? What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises — no matter the mood! Mood’s a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset [JW: a musical instrument]. It’s not for fighting.” – Frank Herbert, Dune

If you’re not in the mood, make it so.

The lecture he got that followed that quote exceeded the amount of time that we would have practiced. It’s the same lecture The Boy had gotten several years earlier, and he joined in to poke his brother with verbal barbs as well. You may call it bullying, we call it raising children with values. Maybe we should have stopped before we gave him a swirly?

The context of the quote is from the novel Dune which has spawned one bad movie (the early 1980’s version) and one underfunded movie (the early 2000’s version). In the novel, young Paul Atreides is the son of a space Duke somewhere in the far future after humanity has spread through the stars. Paul has the benefit of being royal, so he has a rather rigorous curriculum of everything from math, physics, and gender studies to small arms combat. Just kidding. Study math and physics. Ha! Studying math and physics is a sucker game: study those things and you’ll have to pay taxes.

This would have been a better plot than the early 80’s film.

Like all boys, Paul was looking for a day off. His combat arms teacher, Gurney Halleck, rightly told him the truth: when trouble is brewing or there is work to be done, the Universe does not care about your mood.

Like all boys, Pugsley was looking to push and see just how far he could get away with slacking. The answer was simple: he couldn’t. He had made a commitment to his brother, to me, but most importantly to himself. But sometimes, like all boys, he needed a reminder from his father that duty comes before mood. So, he got the big speech. I quote books, I quoted Patton, I quoted my father, I quoted Mr. Rogers®, and I noted that I hadn’t taken an unplanned sick day since before he was born. Call in to the boss on a Tuesday morning with a sore throat? No.

If you’re not familiar with wrestling, the guy in purple is like France at the start of World War II.

As an adult you have to do a lot of things that you don’t enjoy. You have to go to work when you know it’s going to suck. You have to take your punishment when you know you’ve done wrong. You have to pay your bills. You have to work out. You have to meet the commitments you made, no matter how painful.

Keeping your word to other people is how the world sees that you have good character. Keeping your word to yourself is the sign of real integrity. Some days you don’t want to hit the weights. You don’t want to go to work. You don’t want to go to school. You don’t want to go to practice. You don’t want to meet that pesky General Grant at Wilmer’s place in Appomattox.

Boo hoo.

I heard you don’t have to lose the war if you’re not in the mood to lose the war. Also, is it just me or does it look like they’re playing Battleship® on paper?

When you start failing to keep the commitments that you made to yourself, you’ll stop keeping your commitment to others. What matters is turning on the alarm clock, and getting out of bed when it rings or beeps or whatever it does. Every day.

You don’t need seminars. Or pep talks. Or motivational posters. Or Tony Robbins and his weirdly white teeth (I swear that man has the grin of someone who likes to eat things that are small and squirming because they’re still living) and a $2000 seminar.

You need discipline. Discipline is better than motivation any day.

Why do you need discipline?

Kevin Bacon understands.

Because motivated is a mood.

But disciplined is a way of life.

Weed . . . maybe not so good for you.

“Feller told me one time they got a weed down here and they call it loco weed. When the horses and cows eat it they get wilder than all get out.” – Bonanza

Like this meow meme meow?

I used to be in favor of marijuana legalization. The basis for my thoughts went something like this: it’s your own body, so go ahead and put anything you want in it – it doesn’t ruin my day. Add to that, if the criminals are running the marijuana business, we’re just funding the criminals with the profits. If alcohol prohibition funded the Mafia so it’s still giving us problems nearly 90 years after their source of profits ended, we’ve probably funded the Cartels so that they’ll still exist when NASA restarts manned spaceflight for the United States sometime in the year 3224.

Criminals liked marijuana being illegal.

Politicians liked marijuana being illegal.

Anytime criminals and politicians agreed on anything, I figured it would be better to be on the other side of that equation. And it’s just weed, right? Stoners are happy folks, and probably actually do drive a lot better than anyone after a six pack and have plumper, pinker livers.

As a non-participant in marijuana culture (except for the occasional Cheech and Chong movie) my exposure had consisted of the two or so times I’d given it a try in the VERY distant past. Like having hair after 30, marijuana was something that just never had impacted my life. Weed was just weed, right?

Wrong.

What are Chong’s three favorite things? Chicken pot pie.

I was listening to the radio around the year 2000, however, and a radio doctor (he specialized in AM and radios transitioning to FM) came on and said, “Guys, you have to realize – the marijuana today isn’t the same thing as marijuana from the 1960’s and 1970’s. The new strains have been bred so that they are much, much more potent and have much higher levels of THC (the stuff that gets you high) than weed from back in the day.” As a non-toker, it didn’t really matter to me, but I found the fact fascinating. I filed it away, mainly to use in dad-related conversations when I talk to The Boy and Pugsley about not doing weed.

In my weird family (as noted before, my brother’s name is John Wilder, as well) one member (it would be too complicated and ultimately pointless to explain the relationship, needless to say we have a lot of the same DNA) of our family was . . . baked. We’ll call her Jean Wilder, so we can have John, John, and Jean.

I was exceedingly young when Jean, who was thirtysomething at the time, came to live with us. I might have been four or so. It was obvious even to me at the tender age of four that Jean’s elevator was stuck somewhere near floor 13 – often she would sit in a chair, smoking cigarettes, staring blankly off into the corner of the room above and to the left of the 15” black and white television before laughing at something that no one else could see or hear. Sure, this is common behavior today, but since this was before cellphones, this behavior was considered unusual.

More proof that weed is safe.

I asked Great-Grandma McWilder why Jean was so goofy, and Great-Grandma McWilder looked to the left and looked to the right as if to check if invisible elves were monitoring her in the kitchen (this was before Alexa®) and then whispered to me “dope.”

Sure, you guys might think she was talking about me. And I’ll agree – most four-year-olds are pretty dopey. But in this case, dope was what Great-Grandma McWilder called any illicit recreational substance. Having been born in approximately 1732, Great-Grandma McWilder’s knowledge of illicit substances consisted of the illegal gin and untaxed cigars that I think Great-Grandpa McWilder sold at his “pool hall” during prohibition. Or maybe he just read his bible all day?

Anyway, Great-Grandma McWilder whispered “dope” because at that time families felt a thing called “shame” for the misbehavior of their members. I think “shame” has since been replaced with ribbons that say “participation” on it.

“What’s dope?” I asked innocently, because at that time in my life I actually was innocent.

She sighed. It’s difficult when you have to explain to a four-year-old what illegal drugs were. I don’t remember her exact words, but I got the idea that it was like aspirin, but very bad for you in that they hurt your mind. She didn’t have to explain much more. I had seen Jean.

As I grew older, I found out more about Jean. She had been very smart as a child, but willful. Her spacey and other-worldly behavior didn’t change as the calendar pages flipped, however. As my school gave my class more and more details about the drugs we shouldn’t be taking including lots of instructions about how we shouldn’t take them, pre-teen me guessed that Jean had probably taken LSD (not to be confused with LDS) and the experience had changed her. Forever.

By the time I got to my teens, I asked Jean about her past drug use. She said that the only drug she’d ever tried had been marijuana. Back then, I figured she was lying. Certainly grass didn’t cause the delusions and hallucinations I had observed, right? Harmless weed wouldn’t have convinced Jean that Madonna® had stolen the songs from her notebook (this was what Jean believed). Ganja wouldn’t have made Jean phone in a missing person report to the sheriff on ME because a shadowy cabal of evil doctors (I’m not making this up) had kidnapped me, even though I was off in the college dorms safe and sound at the time? Reefer wouldn’t do that, right?

Well, not so fast, Pat Sajak.

A recent study came out this week and showed that instances of psychosis were three times higher in areas where you could get strong weed. And psychosis explained every symptom that Jean had. Jean was very nice, very sweet, and a danger only to herself. She self-medicated with nicotine – she was never without a smoke – but anti-psychotics seemed to work much better.

But trends are troubling – weed THC content has doubled in the last 10 years. But Jean toked up long before then. What happened to her? Some mutant weed? A lot of weed? I have no idea. I’m not a doctor. Jean did live a long, happy, though not particularly useful life, and I’m certain wouldn’t be offended by this post.

Okay, I guess this is my final conclusion.

There appears to be some evidence that marijuana and some marijuana derivatives are useful for things like seizures, overcoming chemotherapy side effects, and playing Red Dead Redemption™ and Fallout® in Mom’s basement. Again, I’m not a doctor, but I will be warning my kids that marijuana is certainly more dangerous than is commonly accepted and should be avoided at all costs for recreation. It’s just not worth the risk of, well, being psychotic for the rest of your life. Plus I’m going to make them get tattoos that say “legal doesn’t mean moral” on their foreheads if I ever catch them lighting up a doobie.

If only there was a way to stop drug use while not funneling money to the cartels.

Oh, wait . . . virtue?

Nah, I must be thinking of something else . . . .

The Ides of March, Bad Drawings, and Why I Write

“All right, why did the soothsayer tell Caesar to beware the Ides of March? Who wants to take a stab?” – Daria

Now this is a tough day at the office.

The Ides of March is today (if you’re reading in real-time) – and it’s been showing up a lot this year in coincidences – even a warning in a comment on this blog! – so I thought I’d write about the historical implications of the Ides of March on the career of the most beloved humor writer in American history.

Me. Hopefully nobody brings up that Mark Twain poseur again.

Historically, the Ides of March was a Roman time for settling debts, and boy did the Roman Senate settle one in 44 B.C., which was the subject of my first long-form humor attempt. In seventh grade, my history teacher showed us films. As an adult, I’m thinking that history teachers show films due to hangovers (it’s dark, quiet, and they don’t have to lecture or even be awake as they sleep the scotch off in second period), but my utterly innocent seventh grade self didn’t make that connection. And make no mistake – this was in the era before video tapes had taken over, so when we watched a film, it was a real reel, sprocket, and stuttering film noise affair projected onto a portable screen smaller than the average computer monitor at the DMV.

This device was wonderful – regardless of the subject, you could coast that day in school.

The film in question was about Julius Caesar, and I do think we watched it around the actual Ides of March. I don’t recall a lot about the film, but I do recall this – Caesar was assassinated. And not assassinated in any sort of short, quick, reasonable way. No. Caesar was stabbed in full cinematic glory dozens and dozens and dozens of times. But it wasn’t graphic – it was G-rated. Consequently the assassination was, in my estimation, was pretty close to the scene with the Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail©. Man, could Caesar take punishment – no wonder he was in charge! And it went on, and on, and on, and on.

This is the second best fight scene in movie history, without question. It was also available on PBS® when I was growing up, and proved the old adage: PBS© – good only for Monty Python™ and Doctor Who©.

So I wrote about Caesar’s assassination. I created the one and only issue of The Roman Times. The lead story of The Roman Times was about Julius Caesar. I think I could nearly do the artwork and story from The Roman Times verbatim. Let me give it a try:

Today’s news from Rome: Caesar stabbed, shot, poked, prodded, speared, impaled, jabbed, skewered, perforated, and bayoneted MMLXVI times. Doctors say he would have survived, however he did also have quite a nasty infected splinter and wasn’t wearing clean underwear, much to his mother’s disappointment.

Okay, I was kinda shocked when I found out that the Romans had bikinis. Not only did they have bikinis, they had a swimsuit mosaic edition of Gladiators Illustrated®.

It’s more of a thesaurus approach at humor than my current subtle use of bikini jokes. But I feel confident that if Julius Caesar would have known that a seventh grader would be laughing about his assassination 2000 years later, well, he could have died happy rather than screaming and bleeding because of the 23 stab wounds. Yup. We know it was 23 stab wounds because Caesar also had the first documented autopsy that we know of. To make it all official, the Roman Senate held hearings and after reviewing all of the evidence discovered that Julius Caesar’s assassination was all the work of a single assassin, Longinus Harvey Oswald, who stabbed twice from the sixth floor of the Roman School Scroll Depositorium.

Artist’s conception, as nearly as I can recall my seventh grade drawing – that thing behind him is supposed to be a bear trap. Apologies to real artists like Steve (LINK).

The end result of all of this Ides of March musing is that I’ve been writing funny things for most of my life. And this is Friday, and Friday means a health post. So what does a dead Julius Caesar and schoolboy drivel have to do with health?

I write because it makes me happy. I think I’ve mentioned before – when I’ve written a good post, one I like, I am happy. It’s hard to sleep. I know that sounds silly, especially since, if I finish the post early I’ll have four or five hours of sleep, and if I get distracted and research ancient Roman bikinis and then somehow end up researching the history of the 1^st Marine Expeditionary Force the post runs late I might only have two or three hours of sleep that night.

But it still excites me to do good work. And I recall that I was giddy when I was in seventh grade, putting together The Roman Times. I enjoyed it so much I put together a sequel: The Medieval Times, although I’m quite sure that I spelled Medieval wrong and I think the lead story was about some knight getting stabbed, poked, speared . . . et cetera. Why does writing humor give me a sense of fulfillment? I think for several reasons – I get a chance to learn and research new things, often with a purpose. I love new ideas, new thoughts, and probably the best thing is when you laugh out loud.

No, not a generalized you. You, dear reader. I write this for me, but also for you, because I know that someplace out there this post made someone’s day better.

But not Caesar. His Ides of March was pretty rough. But at least his fame will live on through my glorious art, because otherwise people might forget all about him.

Dealing With Children In The Idiot Zone

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

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

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

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

Now I see where Intervention got the idea.

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

I have to be fair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Books, Stoics, Immortality (Now Available on Stick)

“I am Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod. I was born in 1518 in the village of Glenfinnan on the shores of Loch Shiel. And I am immortal.” – Highlander

Or maybe it was the scotch that made him immortal? When I drink scotch I’m bulletproof.

I once had a Grandboss (my boss’s boss) that once said, “Reading is the only way that you can know great minds across centuries.” He was deeply philosophical and attempted to use that philosophy to improve business results, and also to use history as analogy for business conditions. Prior to the movie 300 coming out, he was discussing the battle of Thermopylae and the courage of the Spartans to fight to the last man as a business analogy. Needless to say, when you’re using a battle where every single solder dies as an analogy, business isn’t going all that well.

Grandboss also assigned On War (a treatise on war and strategy during the Napoleonic era) by Von Clausewitz for us to read. I’m probably the only guy who actually did read it, and still have my copy. Needless to say, I loved my Grandboss, and still send him cards on Grandboss day. When I quit that job to take a new one, I told him first, and as a goodbye present? I gave him a book.

My Grandboss was right, though – reading allows us to know great minds across centuries. The nice thing is we can read the thoughts of dead Greeks like Epictetus. Epictetus spent his entire life studying and living stoic philosophy, which was a pretty hard thing to do when you were a slave with a gimpy leg. Epictetus eventually became free – we don’t know how, but I imagine he won the annual caddy’s golf tournament and got a scholarship from Judge Smails.

I bet Epictetus just wishes he wrote, “You’ll get nothing and like it.”

One thing we do know is that Epictetus did was spend a lot of time thinking about virtue and vice. We’ll spend more time on virtue on Monday’s post, but Epictetus came to the conclusion that the following things were neither vice nor virtue:

Wealth
Health
Life
Death
Pleasure
Pain

As wealth and health are at least two nominal themes of this blog (this is Friday, so I’m stretching it and saying this is a health post) it might seem a bit hypocritical that I spend time talking about health and wealth and then quote a dead lame Greek that says that neither of those are virtuous. But I would argue that my message on wealth is that true wealth is in having few needs (Seneca, Stoics, Money and You), and although I prefer pleasure to pain, I recognize that a pleasure repeated too often is a punishment (Pleasure, Stoicism, Blade Runner, VALIS and Philip K. Dick). And we also know that health is more controllable by our choices today than Epictetus did.

Immortal and omnipotent. And good on the mariachi trumpet.

Heck, I even got challenged by an Orthodox priest friend on whether or not learning for learning’s sake was, in a religious context, a vice. If so, there goes most of my Monday posts. The priest and I (as I recall, over a BBQ lunch) came to the conclusion that learning for learning’s sake was maybe a vice. Since he was also a fan of learning for learning’s sake, if it was a vice we were both guilty.

Going back to Epictetus’ list, Life and Death are on it as being neither virtues nor vices. I’m not sure about you, but I really prefer Wealth to Poverty, Health to Illness, and Life to Death. Epictetus felt the same way – it was okay to have preferences with the understanding that neither condition is, in itself, virtuous. I finally came to understand that while not virtuous, death is required for life. Oddly, I thank Bill Clinton for this realization.

It was during the Clinton presidency that I first looked around at the national leaders for both parties and thought, “Jeez, what a bunch of bozos.” Both sides were stupid or corrupt. Some were stupid and corrupt at the same time (looking at you, ghost of Ted Kennedy, I’ve imagined you’ve been plenty warm this winter). Back then I was a capital-L libertarian, and could see that both sides had as primary goals the restriction of freedom on their agenda in addition to being incompetent.

Beyond that, they were . . . awful. Spineless. They were tools of groups with different names but the same objectives – objectives that mostly didn’t favor you or me. Throw into this mix that one day at lunch I was thinking about immortality and the implications of living forever, which was spurred on by eating a tuna fish sandwich which might have been as old as Epictetus, who died in 135 A.D.

Elvis will never die. Mobility? That might be an issue.

If people were generally immortal? Our birthrate would plummet – 200 year old women have very few kids. As for me, I’d have plenty of time so rather than putting things off until next week, I’d put stuff off until next century. But the worst consequence?

Bill Clinton would forever be an elder statesman, always trying to increase his (and Hillary’s) power for all of eternity. Our current batch of elected officials would be about the best we’d get, or maybe the only ones we’d get. Senators and congresscritters already stay in office until the only way to keep them alive is though that experimental technique that turns them into zombie-like creatures that feast on living human flesh like Nancy Pelosi, or immortal robots like the Ruth Bader-Ginsbot™ 3000.

Thankfully, we live in a world where things die and the world moves on – just like a cell in a human body ceases to exist so new cells can take over. We have a name for immortal cells – cancer. Just like cells pass away, so do we to leave this world to the youth. I didn’t say death is “good” – just that it serves a purpose.

Okay, this is one boy who loved his mother.

Part of that purpose is focusing us on the here and now: in this way we don’t lose sight that life is precious and fleeting, like sedation dentistry. Perhaps the most precious thing we have is the shared time with those who have meaning to us (like your friendly blogger). But for those who have left us, honor them with the virtue that they helped you obtain. Be glad you had a part of their life, and had a chance to witness their virtue and learn from their vices. Look at how they have changed you, made you better so that they live on through their influence on you.

Lastly, for heaven’s sake, write something down. It’s the only way that someone can know your mind when you’re gone, unless they check your browser history.

“That which you desire, controls you.”

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

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

That which you desire, controls you.

Let’s look at common examples:

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

Can’t you feel their magnetic pull?

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

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

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

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

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

Ahh, Shakespeare at his best.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is Michelle in?”

“Michelle, it’s for you.”

Michelle: “Hello?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Resolutions, Record Clubs, Susan Anton, and Loneliness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the heck was a record club, anyway?

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

I wasn’t making that up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes. That really happened.

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

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

Heart Disease
Stroke
Blogging
Cat Owning
Cancer

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

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

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

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

Or? Get a dog.

Want Dystopia? Because this is how you get Dystopia.

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

John B. Calhoun. Not C. B.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Calhoun was known to the mice as Godzilla®.

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

“The last surviving birth . . . .”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why does it bother you?

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

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

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

Told you so.

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

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

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

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

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

Weirdo.

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

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

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

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

Maybe we can get the Cat Girls with bacon?

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

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

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

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