Health – Page 25 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

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.

Maps, the Secret of Weight Loss, and the Source of Coke Syrup

â€œMaps, my dear, are the undergarments of a country! Â They give shape…to continents.â€ â€“ The Englishmen Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain

I call this the Cruel Map.

Excellence requires consistency.Â Consistency does not imply excellence â€“ a visit to any McDonaldsÂ® will prove that.Â But consistency is required for excellence.

And excellence is required for health.

The human body is an incredibly complex device, even when you ignore the brain like most television executives involved in programming selection do.Â The human body is robust.Â The only way that humanity can create something as wondrous as a human is to make a baby, which is generally pretty fun to attempt, even if you donâ€™t succeed.Â About as close as we have gotten to a really complex machine that approaches human complexity is the toaster.Â Bread in â€“ toast out.Â Works every time, but I still canâ€™t figure out where the bread went.Â Maybe the bread powers the toaster?

Humanityâ€™s most complicated machines canâ€™t even come close to the versatility that is a human:Â if your car were able to fuel itself like a person, youâ€™d be able to feed it gasoline or junk mail or plastic bags and it would turn that into a trip to Cleveland leaving only carbon dioxide and water vapor exhaust gas, and some form of car-poop that you presumably would compost so you could grow more car food.Â Oh, and the car would self-repair for decades â€“ your tires would grow back in the middle of the night.Â Unfortunately your car would try to pick up on other cars, and might identify as a truck, but thatâ€™s a longer story.

The human body is excellently designed, and very, very consistent in its response to inputs.Â But the ownerâ€™s manual sucks, and many times we donâ€™t operate it properly or fuel it very well.Â Case in point â€“ achieving excellent health requires measurement.Â Of what?Â Unless youâ€™re an adolescent reading this, youâ€™re not getting taller.Â What parameter might be changing that you could measure, say, every day?Â Besides armpit hair length.Â Thatâ€™s too obvious, and everyone does that, anyway.Â Think harder.

Oh, yes!Â Weight!

There is a discipline in measuring, especially when you ate a cake and donâ€™t want to see what the scale says that those extra calories did to your weight.Â This is no small problem â€“ 74% of Americans were overweight in 2007, and there has been plenty of time since then for more Nachos BellgrandeÂ®, Cheeze WhizÂ® and Twinkiesâ„¢ since then while watching videos from BlockbusterÂ®.Â I was reading an article about it a few months back, and one doctor noted that a â€œbigâ€ patient used to be ~220 pounds early in his career, but now they have to buy equipment that can handle people exceeding 400 pounds in weight.

Fun Fact:Â The number of BlockbusterÂ® video stores in the Roman Empire (117A.D.) is off by one when compared to the number of Blockbusterâ„¢ video stores in the United States today.

Unexpectedly (at least I wasnâ€™t expecting it), heart disease has gone down as weight has gone up (Smoking, Orphans, and the French) but a whole host of other medical problems seem to plague our newly-larger Americans.Â I wonâ€™t go into the details, youâ€™re aware and youâ€™ve read â€˜em all.

But excellence in health is tied (at some level) to excellence in measurement.Â Thankfully, thereâ€™s a $20 item that can provide excellent measurement:Â a scale.Â Oh, sure, counting calories might be your default position, but that simply wonâ€™t work.Â To gain a pound a month, you have to eat an excess 3600 calories during that month.Â How much extra, on a daily basis, is that?Â 2.7 OreoÂ® cookies.Â Each day.Â Itâ€™s 9.6 ounces of CokeÂ® (a can is 12 ounces, or 4,530 liters in communist units).Â On the average American diet of 3,600 calories per day, itâ€™s less than 3% of you your total daily calories.

Okay, maybe the metric system has one use.Â One.

No one measures calories in that closely, at least not for long.Â So, a pound.Â Thatâ€™s not so bad.

No, I said a pound a month.

If you went to college and graduated in four years, that would be 48 pounds.Â All from less than 10 ounces of Cokeâ„¢ a day.Â Measuring the input is futile unless you live in a bubble and measure everything you eat, all day.Â Thatâ€™s why everyone is fat â€“ the wonderful machine we own is adapted to live in a world where food is alternately scarce and plentiful â€“ a world without refrigerators.Â A world where SonicÂ® bacon cheeseburgers are available until 11pm (Midnight on Friday and Saturday!) and an extra 74 ounces of SpriteÂ® are available for only $0.25 wasnâ€™t really planned for when your pancreas was designed.Â If the pancreas had a staff, they would be very, very tired from all of the soda.

â€œOh, hell.Â More soda coming in.Â Insulin production to maximum.Â Again.Â And someone call storage and tell â€˜em weâ€™ve got to get fat production moving.Â Itâ€™s overtime tonight for sure, boys.Â And someone call the liver and wake it up.Â He may be hungover still, but itâ€™s time to get to work.Â This fat wonâ€™t make itself.â€

I drink about a soda a year, so thatâ€™s not a problem my pancreas has.Â The Boy, who is 18, burns approximately 100,000 calories per day between sports and whatever it is he does in the basement that makes him all sweaty, and he drinks soda by the liter.Â A liter is a Canadian gallon, I believe, but it is less expensive in the 2-liter bottle because things that are measured in metric are just not as good so you canâ€™t charge as much as a non-metric premium product which would be sold in pints or quarts or ounces.Â I think Cokeâ„¢ is actually made by Pakistani slave children who are forced to milk genetically engineered badgers for the CokeÂ© syrup.Â Or at least thatâ€™s what I read on WikipediaÂ®, or maybe on Huffington PostÂ© or CNNâ„¢.Â So itâ€™s certain that itâ€™s true.

But while The Boy can consume endless calories, I canâ€™t even think about having a Chick-Fil-Aâ„¢ sandwich without buying larger pants and immediately expanding to the size of the British Empire in 1910.

Does this Empire make my butt look big?Â Â

Okay, if measuring the inputs doesnâ€™t work, how do you manage to eat and manage to be smaller than the USSR?Â You have to measure the output.Â Ruthlessly.Â And donâ€™t gain that first pound.Â If you do?Â Get rid of it.Â That day.Â Or that week.Â But donâ€™t wait.Â And you canâ€™t lose more than one pound at a time.Â And you know how to lose a pound.Â It may not be easy.Â It may not be quick.Â But you know how to do this.

This map shows the USSR and communist bloc countries at their greatest extent.Â Also pictured:Â all of the happy Soviet citizens.

You can afford to compromise â€“ outward, on those things that arenâ€™t intrinsic to you.Â But if you want to have excellence in anything, you can never compromise inward on the things that are important to you.Â You have to have a line. Â And health should always be important to you, unless youâ€™re Johnny Depp.Â If youâ€™re Johnny Depp â€“ you already know that death will be no obstacle to your lifestyle.

Health determines what the quality of your life is really like.Â And Iâ€™ve got some new goals.

The Boy will be out of the house in August, and off to the next stage of his adventure in life.Â But that leaves Pugsley as the only chick in the nest.Â Pugsley needs a sparring partner to practice with so he can defeat the hordes of Orcsâ„¢ that will be unleashed when the monetary system is abducted by SauronÂ® and FrodoÂ© is unable to stop inflation by throwing Ruth Bader Ginsborg into Mount DoomÂ®.Â My goal?Â To be in sparring shape and size by August.

There is no shortcut.Â But I have a map.

Iâ€™ll let you know how it goes . . .

Soviet Map via:Â User:MaGioZal [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0), GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

Mortality, Bill Murray, Art Lessons, and Avatar

“Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes.” – Into the Wild

I’ve left a map.

“That’s so you, Dad.”

It’s an unusual thing for The Boy to say when discussing death. In this case, my death.

First, some context.

I’ve made peace with the idea that I’m going to die. I have no desire to die anytime soon, mind you, but I realize that it’s something that, statistically, happens to 100% of us. Not 99%. Not 99.999%. Not even 99.9999999999%.

100%.

I think the human mind has developed safeguards to distract itself from facing this inevitability, primarily so we don’t spend our days in a corner sobbing uncontrollably when we’re young, muttering, “What is it all about? Why do we even try? What if I never meet Bill Murray?” However, there comes a time in life when you begin to understand that death will come. If I am statistically average, this fate is decades away and again, I’m not particularly interested in hurrying it along.

I’m not sure the exact moment I made peace with the idea of death. It might have been when I was stuck watching a DVD of Avatar®. That will make anyone long for death, so that was probably it.

I kept waiting for Papa Smurf® to show up during Avatar©. Or the movie to be good. Neither of those things happened.

As luck would have it, Pop Wilder lived to be quite old, and was in generally very good physical health throughout his life. At the end he was taking in more calories in pill coatings than food, but he was in good enough shape to walk for miles.

His physical health was fine. What happened to Pop Wilder was that he started forgetting. Perhaps the biggest blow was that, at the end, he had forgotten me entirely. I’m fairly certain that the last few times that I saw him he had no recollection of me. His eyes were blank – worse than blank. When he looked at me he had the wariness one reserves for a stranger or a congressman.

I had been prepared for this – it was obvious that his memory loss was increasing exponentially each time I saw him. I think that the last time he really knew that I was his son was several years before he passed on. And that was okay. I won’t say that it wasn’t difficult, but I will say that I had said everything that I needed to say to Pop before he lost his memory. I was at peace. Again, not easy, not happy, but at peace. I understood that there was nothing that man nor medical science could do for him, so there was no reason for anger.

I hadn’t, however, realized the impact it had on The Boy. The Boy saw the same things that I did, and knew that Pop Wilder was no longer the grandfather he knew. The Boy could sense that Pop Wilder wasn’t present anymore. Perhaps this is the most basic element of horror – watching a human transform from the person you know very well into a person you don’t know at all. It’s implicit in every horror transformation story from vampire to werewolf to zombie. Seeing it when you are young hits you even harder. That transformation is made more terrifying because you didn’t even know it was possible.

Fast forward to Saturday, six days ago. We were driving home from an event, and I mentioned that there were some things I wanted to see from him in the next twenty or thirty years.

“Don’t dawdle. I don’t want to have to wait to die when I’m ready to die.”

It was really meant as a joke. The look on The Boy’s face as he drove, though told me he was thinking about it. Deeply.

“I saw what Grandpa Wilder went through. That was tough.” Pop Wilder had passed on years ago. “I like your idea better.”

“My idea?”

“Yeah. The one where you’re going to go off into the woods with just your .30-06 and enough supplies to live. Or die. That’s so you, Dad.”

It’s true. I had shared with The Boy my thoughts that, should I be judged to be terminal, or if it was pretty clear I wasn’t going to make it, that rather than lingering, undergoing chemotherapy, or having to sit through another Avatar© movie, I’d sling my rifle and enough physical supplies that if I worked at it and was skilled, I could live. Until, of course, I couldn’t. It would be an adventure. Maybe I’d keep a diary. That would be some great blogging from beyond the grave. I could even sketch memes in pencil.

See, drawing is easy!

“I hope that you’d drop me where there are bears.”

“Why?”

“Well, one might attack me and I could fight back with a knife. It would at least allow me to go out of this life like I came into it – screaming and covered in blood that wasn’t mine.” Okay, I stole that joke. At least The Boy thought it was original.

He laughed.

But the point was a clear one. I know that I certainly couldn’t have dropped Pop Wilder into the forest – that certainly wasn’t anything he had ever asked for. Watching him decline, however, was tough. In my mind he will always be 45, at the height of his business acumen, personal physical power, and filled with the vitality that kept him always going. When I think of him, that’s the man I see.

I can’t square the conception of my future as one that ends in a nursing home, surrounded by the never ending too warm room and hollow echo of footsteps on beige vinyl tile and antiseptic smell of hospital grade cleansers. No. The frozen morning’s icy touch on my cheeks, the sound of the wind rushing up the snow covered valley, and the harsh smoke of a campfire. That has a better feel. A truer feel.

An adventure to cap off an adventure, my next day of life dependent upon my wits and the cold steel of my knife and rifle.

If there or no bears to fight, I’m sure I can pick on an owl to fight to the death. Plus? Owls are easy to draw – only two steps.

I’m not sure that walking away into the woods will happen – there are certainly plenty of things that would prevent this from being my destiny: obligations and events beyond number, that chance to hang around and become drinking buddies with Bill Murray.

But right now? This adventure continues. It’s time to make the most of the next few decades . . . there’s only so much time.

Get busy.

Resolutions, Fasting, and Wilder’s Cult of the Blue Bikini

“I’ve never been great at conflict resolution. Not without a blade, and several rolls of plastic wrap.” – Dexter

I would say that the writing of this book is both Original and Crispy. This was actually released for free in 2017 by KFC.

I got home on Wednesday night and the aroma of baked chicken filled the house. It smelled like Colonel Sanders® had developed a scented candle, and it was amazing. I wanted to rub the smell under my arms, in my hair, and maybe on my pillow so I could smell it in my sleep.

I had just dropped Pugsley off for wrestling practice, and The Boy had just gotten back from his wrestling practice and had dropped in to grab his term paper to go meet with a study group before flying out of the house faster than a floozy egghead on a baboon crotch. I am not at liberty to tell you what a floozy egghead on a baboon crotch is, but I assure you it is quite fast.

The Mrs. and I were left alone in the house, a rare enough occurrence, and The Mrs. pulled the hot, plump, greasy, piping-hot chicken thighs and legs from the oven, slowly, letting them linger and adjust to the kitchen air, their moist meat hidden only by the sheerest of skin. Whew. I’m getting goosebumps just reading that.

Given that Pugsley and The Boy were normally there for dinner, she’d made about forty-five pounds of chicken. She had also made gravy and some sort of low-carb mashed cauliflower that was pretending to be potatoes. I generally try to avoid mashed things that aren’t actual potatoes – I’d just as soon use the mashed cauliflower for drywall repair, or execute it for being an impostor.

“Food’s hot, come and get it.” The Mrs. walked back with a single chicken thigh and some of the drywall spackle on her plate, covered with gravy.

“I’m fasting.”

“Okay. Crap. Now who’s going to eat all of this chicken?”

The Mrs.’ dog Emo looked hopeful and fat. Her other dog, BWL (broccoli with legs, because he’s so stupid he’s nearly a vegetable) just looked confused. Which is normal.

Wait, what? Did you say fasting, John Wilder?

Yeah. On a lark, I decided to fast for two reasons. The first one is that it tied into a New Year’s resolution to get in better shape. I’m a strong proponent New Year’s resolutions – they’re a good sign that even when you’re as awesome as me, you have the amazing humility to realize you could be a bit more excellent. Truth: it would not hurt me to lose a few pounds, especially if there’s a good story to it and it was unusual and did NOT involve X-Acto® knives and a vacuum cleaner. I’m not doing that again, at least not without more tarps and duct tape.

The second reason I decided to fast is that I can’t remember going more than, say, two days without eating. Ever. I’ve got an iron stomach, and even when I was sick as a small child I never missed more than a single meal. Could I go longer? I remember when The Mrs. and I were first married that The Reverend Al Sharpton© had declared a “hunger strike” to protest that he wasn’t getting enough media attention a bombing range in Puerto Rico. The Mrs. and I were listening to the radio one day when it emerged that Al’s “hunger strike” included actual food whenever he was hungry. So, immediately we christened it “A Hungry Strike” as in, “I sure am hungry, I could use a lot more soup.” Imagine that line in Al Sharpton’s voice, it’s funnier that way.

Our society is seems to be built on the idea that limitless on-demand food is normal and has existed since the aliens first created us as a slave race to develop PEZ®. It’s also taken as gospel truth that if you don’t eat every four hours YOU WILL DIE. It’s almost like most people think that for all of the history of humanity, we had a Schlotzsky’s Sandwiches© to serve salami subs on sourdough in the Serengeti or a Denny’s™ dishing dinners and desserts to Danes in dusty diluvial Denmark. But the sad truth is that there has been the precedent of a society going from abundance to starvation in short order – just look at the fall of the Soviet Union, or that night that Wendy’s™ was closed because the Frosty© machine exploded.

Cult leader Mr. Fizzlesticks liked Kool-Aid™ before he got beamed to the Mother Ship.

I’d imagine that for most of history (which is before McDonalds®, Taco Bell©, or even agriculture), when you ate, you ate really, really well from that mammoth you took down. When you didn’t eat? Well, that might be a week. I can see that ancient people wouldn’t get all trendy and put out websites and courses devoted to fasting. No, they just didn’t have any food.

But even people you thought were tough, well, I remember watching a biography about T.E. Lawrence, the famed Lawrence of Arabia. In it, a friend (of his, not of mine) related how Lawrence once went 45 hours without eating or sleeping just to see if he could.

Hell, I called that finals week in college. But, again, never can I recall going over 48 hours without food. What the heck, I’d give it a try. And as I write this sentence, I’m on hour 94, so in two hours I’ll have gone four days without food.

I’m not dead.

And the really, really odd thing is that for most of the 94 hours I haven’t been horribly hungry. After I started the fast, I started doing some research. It turns out that there are a very large number of people in the world who fast, not because they don’t have food, but because they think it has more benefits than being Jeff Bezo’s $65 billion dollar ex-wife:

Weight Loss
Cancer Prevention
Increased Lifespan
Make You Telepathic on Wednesday
Reduced Inflammation
Urine Glows So You Don’t Need Bathroom Lights
Lower Blood Pressure
Reduce Type 2 Diabetes
Make You Bulletproof
More Better Braining, er, Thinking

Okay, some of these are sketchy, and not just the ones that I obviously made up. It turns out the “increased lifespan” claim was based on some sort of worm that they starved. The worm lives an average of 21 days and they starved it for a day. Which is like you or I not eating for three years. Yeah. And the cancer claims from starving rats every other day. If there’s one thing medical science knows how to do, it’s how to cure cancer in rats.

The main reason I did it, though, was curiosity. Could I?

Yes.

I started out with the idea of doing three days, or 72 hours. At the end of the third day it was going so well I said, hey, how about doing four days? I’m glad I did. I’ll explain below:

On day one it was like . . . nothing happened, because I regularly go 24 hours without eating, and have done so since I was a kid. I had three mints and a dill pickle. So, yes, this is technically not a complete fast, but the total number of calories was about thirty. For the day.

Day two was a bit tougher, and was about four mints. And three pickles. So, sixty-five calories. I felt fine, and not very hungry at all. Day three was the same, but after exercising (which I do at lunch) for about 40 minutes I felt nearly comatose and my hands were very, very cold all day. Then, almost like a light going on, I felt fine, and had plenty of energy for day four. On day four, I had a pickle and two mints, so, 25 calories.

I justified the pickles based on the tiny amounts of calories and the salt that I wasn’t getting anywhere else, even though I was still engaging in some pretty intense and sweaty exercise. The mints? Those were for my coworkers.

Total calories: 185 in four days, plus all the coffee and water (both plain and carbonated) that I could drink. Which was a lot. 185 calories is 18% of a Double Whopper with Cheese©, or like two bites. Over four days. So, I count that as fasting even though The Mrs. rolled her eyes and made some comment about “sounds like a hungry strike” under her breath.

Bringing snacks at Fasting Cult? Best duty ever.

But I’m an amateur at fasting and I know it. One thing I have learned, however, is if there’s a human activity, there’s a cult on somewhere on the Internet devoted to it. When started researching, I found people were fasting for periods of up to 100 days. My little four day fast wasn’t much in comparison to those people. They had to plan for two things for such long durations without eating, electrolytes/vitamins and refeeding.

It turns out the dangerous part of fasting for a long time, besides starving to death, is starting to eat again. It turns out that if you start eating again incorrectly that you can short out the lithium battery in your heart, or strip the gears on your lungs. Or something. I’m not a doctor, but the Internet Cult of Fasting says you can actually have a fairly dangerous phosphate demand, especially if you eat a lot of carbs when you let your inner fat person out to eat everything in sight. Your body requires phosphates to process carbs, and you can pull ‘em out of your blood (where it’s required to keep the lithium battery in your heart going) and into your cells (where they’re required to process the carbs). It would be really stupid to die because of Pop Tarts™, but they probably kill more people than cookie dough (The CDC, Raw Cookie Dough, and Sexy Theocracy).

There are some cults where recruiting is easy, except for the heretic on the left . . . no respectable cult has maroon bikinis!

Phosphate balance (along with some other conditions) can kill you. I’d try to be funnier, but refeeding really can be fatal and leave a really stupid headline like “Popular Internet Writer Killed By Eating Pop Tarts® After Not Eating On Purpose.”

But hey, if Al Sharpton can make it . . . .

First Meal in 96 Hours Update:

Three pieces of baked chicken, two handfuls of blueberries, and two hamburger patties from the nearby Sonic™ since Pugsley got the wrong order. Still not dead. I’m feeling as full as a French bloomer weasel on Thanksgiving Dinner. But the French bloomer weasel is endangered . . . .

Wombstyles of the Rich and Famous, Sexy Handmaids, Insurance, and Insulin

â€œDon’t listen to him, man.Â TheÂ insulin, it made him crazy.â€ â€“ Con-Air

How do you tell the number of Kardashian women in a room?Â Add the eyebrows and mustaches and divide by two.

Health care is important to people â€“ both as individuals (Early Retirement: Things to Consider (cough Health Care cough), Readers Write: Early Retirement, Health Care, Canada, and Averting A Ben Affleck Marathon) and to Americans as a group.Â It has become so critical that I think that its current level of mismanagement will sink the country within 15 years (More Budget Doom, The Rolling Stones, an End Date, and an Unlikely Version of Thunderstruck), or (more likely) lead to a drastic reduction in overall care for the people who donâ€™t live like The Rich and Famous.Â But I have popcorn, Iâ€™ll probably have the weekend free, and it should be pretty fun to watch, so why not enjoy?

What led to this observation?

Kanye West and Whatever Kardashian have three kids, which surprised me â€“ I always thought that the Kardashians reproduced like a virus â€“ infecting their host cell and then making it explode with millions of copies of Kardashians that go on to infect other cells.Â I guess not, and even my second guess â€“ reproduction through egg-laying was wrong.Â Kardashians reproduce just like a normal human does.

Or, maybe not?

I found out about the West/Kardashian reproductive habits not because I follow them on the news or have a link to their AmazonÂ® Echoâ„¢ – my AmazonÂ© EchoÂ® eavesdropping is generally limited to listening in on Tom Hanks â€“ heâ€™s much more interesting than you might imagine.Â No, the West/Kardashian pregnancy was front and center on Google News Wednesday morning and they wonâ€™t allow me to install a Kardashian blocker on my work computer.

Thankfully the world will be blessed with what it needs most, an additional celebrity child. Â Â This birth, however, will be special.Â Whatever Kardashian is not using her own womb, but is renting one for her baby.Â There will be tons of tests, probably a minimum ACTÂ® score, and payment for services rendered.Â Iâ€™m sure it will all be wonderfully legal.

Different people celebrate differently.

Furthermore, this is the second child of the West/Kardashian hive that will be born via surrogate.Â Now, Internet, I did open up and read an article about this, all for you.Â You really must appreciate the sacrifices I make, this was worse than many horror novels Iâ€™ve read.Â Whatever Kardashian told a thoroughly gruesome description of a previous birth complete with details that I would not tell to a priest during confession, were I Catholic. Â Heck, I remember when I was younger and would go to confession just to brag, but this Kardashian story wasnâ€™t bragging, it was gagging.Â I do NOT recommend that you read about it if youâ€™re at all squeamish.Â Let me rephrase â€“ I donâ€™t recommend you read it at all.

I can understand the desire for more children.Â I understand she alleges that her doctor says she shouldnâ€™t carry another one.Â But when Whatever told the scandal sheet entertainment magazine that she really found it convenient to outsource the breastfeeding of her child, I was as stunned as a kitten in a quantum physics class.Â Here is the class divide in America â€“ a princess grown woman deciding to hire a commoner another grown woman to create and nurse her offspring.Â Maybe I wasnâ€™t too far off with the whole virus analogy.Â Heck, they could even hire a surrogate father to help the surrogate mother raise the kid.

I looked up what this would cost, and itâ€™s probably at least a quarter-million dollars to have a surrogate deliver your kid in California, but thatâ€™s probably the entry level cost.Â Iâ€™m willing to bet that the Kardashian/West family has a great number of requirements, like having the surrogate mother eat the Royal Kardashian Jelly while sheâ€™s pregnant so it smells like a Kardashian when itâ€™s born and therefore wonâ€™t be eaten by the other Kardashians at birth.Â I even imagine they pay her to live with them for up to another year to nurse the child, and likewise restrict her diet and activities.

Iâ€™m sure this is how Margaret envisioned the costume.

The Handmaidâ€™s Tale was a novel from the 1980â€™s by Margaret Atwood.Â In it, Atwood raises the ever so certain prospect that evil Christians were going to institute a Christian theocracy and force women to wear red outfits and have babies for powerful men.Â I suppose this has parallels the popular allure that zombies have for kids, but for liberal women, but it amuses me the situation has come to pass as an actual Hollywood scheme and nobody seems to mind.

I have a lot of sympathy for childless couples who resort to surrogate mothers for one reason or another, and (really) are generally supportive of new babies being brought into the world â€“ babies are our future, unless the robots take over, in which case I welcome our new robot leaders (who can look this up in my blogging history, and then they will know I always wanted them to take over).Â Also, the surrogate market appears to be (kind of) based on the free market â€“ how much will you pay for another woman to bear your children?Â Iâ€™m also willing to bet that free market competition has brought the prices of surrogate mothers down over the years, especially at that clinic at the unmarked door behind the Dairy QueenÂ® in Encino.Â Whether or not bringing a fourth child into this world via surrogacy is ethical, well, thatâ€™s beyond this post.

But what isnâ€™t beyond this post is that the medical system is still broken.Â Basic procedures and medicine (like insulin, or Epi-PensÂ®) have increased in prices drastically, even though cost of production has dropped.Â Somehow, the market has completely failed.Â Humalogâ„¢ (a form of insulin made from elf tears) was $21 a bottle back in 1995.Â Itâ€™s now $225 a bottle.Â Thatâ€™s 1071% in 20 years.Â Based on that growth rate, in 2037 itâ€™ll cost $2,400 a bottle.Â At some point it will become cheaper to kidnap elves and chain them in your basement for their precious insulin tears.

I think the solution is a drastic one:Â make prescription drug coverage via insurance illegal.Â Once the market takes over, prescription drug prices really will come down.Â The alternative?Â Make importing prescription drugs into the United States legal.Â In Canada, a vial of HumalogÂ® is $50.Â The price discrepancy isnâ€™t the free market at work â€“ itâ€™s a controlled market where Congressâ„¢ and the FDAÂ© have managed to create billions in additional profit for drug makers.Â At your expense.

Medicine is broken.Â Burn it down.

I do find it odd that the Kardashians met their latest surrogate at an unmarked door behind a Dairy QueenÂ® near the Taco BellÂ© in Encino (okay, I do listen to their AmazonÂ® Echoâ„¢).Â I would have thought they would have had better insurance than that.Â Nah. Â Iâ€™m sure itâ€™s legit.

Health, Sexy Hot Water Heaters, and Elven Cultural Appropriation

“Gentlemen, as you all know, a reservoir is composed of water. Except the part that holds the water. Which is made of concrete.” – Green Acres

You should be ashamed! (Found on Pinterest)

“You understand that it’s healthier to take cold showers. The data is clear.”

The Mrs.: “I don’t care.”

“Cold showers stimulate weight loss, increase alertness, and improve your immune system.”

The Mrs.: “I don’t care. And I don’t like it that you’re implying that I’m a fat, diseased, dullard.”

“But, cold showers lower stress and ease depression?”

The Mrs.: “No. You can’t talk yourself out of buying a water heater. We’re getting one today.”

The old hot water heater had stopped being automatically functional. We discovered that Christmas morning. And by “we” I mean The Mrs.

“Got bad news. I think the water heater is out. Shower was cool, like maybe the heater turned off 12 hours ago.” My shower was cold, too. Not “glacier on Everest” cold, more like, “implying that my wife is a fat, diseased, dullard” cold.

The heater would still light, but it would go out after about 20 or 30 minutes. And as much as I don’t respect Pugsley’s time, it seemed a bit much to ask Pugsley to go and relight the burner every 20 minutes for the next six years. Unless I chained Pugsley in the mechanical room, you know, for his own convenience.

But the heater going out was probably a faulty thermocouple. A thermocouple is a magical device made of elves that pokes the fire dragon inside of the water heater to let him know that the pilot light is still going so the dragon doesn’t spew unignited natural gas fire breath inside the house and make it go all Mount Doom. That appears to bother Allstate®, since my policy specifically excludes damage due to any Hobbit-related conditions. Strict, but I understand the business reasons for it.

Wait, this is a picture of Pugsley’s room . . .

I could tell my dragon-poking-fire-elf (thermocouple) had failed because he was singed, and his hands shook noticeably as he drank my scotch. He was used up. A thermocouple replacement is about $18. I think they’re that cheap because they’re made out of Chinese elves nowadays. The water heater is 14 years old, and, like a child, they have to be replaced at around that age. Since the previous owner installed it without a pan underneath it, when it failed we’d first notice when it started soaking everything in the house like a poodle with a bladder condition. Oh, sure I could put a pan under this one, but by that point I’d have to unhook it and do 90% of the work of replacing it. And then I’d have to buy a new one next year.

If we don’t allow illegal alien elves, who will power our iPhones?

So I replaced it. There was yelling, there was cursing, and then we finally got to the store to buy one.

I wasn’t expecting a cold shower on Christmas, I wasn’t expecting to buy a new water heater. But a lesson in health and life is: If you can’t control the situation, embrace it. So, I gave the water heater a big embrace as The Boy lifted it over the edge of the drip pan.

Life is a series of unplanned events. I once read a quote by Yogi Berra, “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.” And life is very much like that – nobody expects a broken water heater on Christmas. Since I saw the Heating and Air Conditioning Repair van outside a neighbor’s house yesterday, I’m betting they didn’t expect to wake up at 40°F in their house this morning. Guess they have elf problems, too. It’s a stereotype that elves don’t want to work after Christmas, but, really, let’s face the fact – the stereotype exists for a reason.

The new water heater is installed. And heating water. Don’t call it a “hot water heater”, because if the water was hot, why would I need to heat it? I’ll admit I did call one model a hot water heater while shopping. But in that case, it was a really sexy water heater. Just check out the nameplate:

I’m too sexy for my heater, too sexy for my heater, too sexy per square meter!

Sadly my family is now unhealthier, stuck as it is without the benefits of cold showers – the increased alertness, lower stress and depression. We are stuck with perfectly warm water for bathing, showering, and cooling down singed elves.