Penultimate Day – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Penultimate Day, 2022

“Well, I simply observed, sir, that I’m felicitous since during the course of the penultimate solar sojourn, I terminated my uninterrupted categorization of the vocabulary of our post-Norman tongue.” – Blackadder the Third

I wish there had been a sequel to “Lord of the Rings” starring Alan Rickman as an elderly Frodo. It could have been titled “Old Hobbits Die Hard”.

First note: If The Mrs. is feeling well enough, her idea was that we should do our podcast on the eve of 2023. I’m thinking 9pm Eastern. I’ll post a note here before the show to remind everyone – and you can get that delivered straight to your email inbox if you subscribe. Like the vaxx or putting river water in your socks, it’s easy and free. Unlike the vaxx, 100% proven to not cause a heart attack, unless from laughter.

Penultimate Day. This is a particular institution of the Wilder family. It started over a decade or so ago. The Mrs. was having problems with her Blackberry® phone (the one with the cool trackball) and wanted a new one. I wasn’t working, and the closest place that sold phones with our carrier was 90 miles away.

So, we popped the kids in the car, and headed south to buy a phone. We went to Best Buy®. We ended up not buying the phone (the deal was awful) and decided to eat at Olive Garden™. As I drove home, I decided to have fun with the kids, and told them that this was the Wilder holiday – one that no one else observed.

The next year, we remembered, and did the exact same thing.

What are the rules of Penultimate Day?

Drive 90 miles south,
Look at cell phones,
Under no circumstances whatsoever, buy a cell phone, and,
Have some Italian food a casual-dining chain.

That’s not a tough holiday. I can testify that (with the COVID exceptions) the Wilder family has kept the spirit of Penultimate Day and have purchased exactly zero cell phones on December 30 of any year.

Our waiter this year spoke Spanish. He asked, “¿Que past?”

This year, we had a different observation of Penultimate Day. The Boy decided to go back to see some friends. So, he headed back and specifically told us he’d be celebrating Penultimate Day with his friends.

That left The Mrs., Pugsley, and me. The Mrs. has been feeling a bit down after her most recent bout with Ebola. She said that Pugsley and I “should go”. Now, if you have been married, you will recognize that there are exactly two ways a wife says that – the first is a deadly trap, indicating that “should go” is the last thing you should consider doing and that there will be much grumpiness.

But she meant it in the second way, the “I’m not feeling well and you boys should go and have a good time” sort of way.

So we did.

Pugsley drove. The first Penultimate Day, he was a backseater, and now he was driving. We ended up talking about various things on the trip, since he was far more interesting than he was a decade ago. We talked about fatherhood, and what my goal had been with him. It has long been my theory that if you can get a boy to 16, that’s the character they’ll take with them for life. But getting them through the minefield of puberty to that character is the difficult part.

We talked about that.

The Mrs. and I are skilled at making the tough choices.

We made it to Best Buy©. I can happily report we didn’t buy a cell phone. I might have bought a cell phone case, but Pugsley immediately called me a heretic, noting that the provision for cell phone purchases should obviously be considered to be prohibited based on the emanations and penumbras of rule three.

Just kidding. My phone is so old that it needs a pull-start and two-cycle oil, so they didn’t have it in stock. Samsung™ has released at least ten versions since I purchased my phone, several versions of which have been nearly explosion-free. So I bought a phone case on Amazon™ when we got home. After midnight.

Just in case.

I found an old Nokia® and hooked it into a charger. The power company ended up paying me that month.

An observation about Best Buy© itself – it was dead. A decade ago, there were shelves of DVDs and CDs and video games. There were a few dozen of each of those, but they were like the lingering holdouts. Why would you buy a piece of physical media when you can just download it over the Internet? That war is over, except for weird titles that are either typed up in legal limbo or aren’t popular enough to stream.

The televisions were amazing, and also not so much. When I was a kid, watching the world on a 24” analog set, the idea of having a television that was five feet across was saved for the main screen on the Enterprise® in re-runs. Now? They’re cheap. The coolest one there was a Samsung™ that, when turned off, looked like a painting.

That was cool. As were the refrigerators. They were (oddly) plugged in and running. One of them was the current version of the fridge we bought seven or so years ago – and was $2,000 more than I paid for it. You could also (oddly) get one with a streaming television in the door.

That confused Pugsley and I, since I didn’t think talking to my fridge would get my beer any colder. Best Buy™ looked more like a visit from Penultimate Days’ past rather than a store that had anything we were much interested in.

I bumped into our fridge once, but it was cool with it.

Olive Garden™ (Motto: when you’re here, you’re here) was pretty good. I had the chicken and shrimp carbonera, and it was quite tasty. We grabbed some to-go food for The Mrs., and headed home. The Mrs. had hers, and then went to bed, since she was still not feeling good.

Although it was the most sparsely-attended Penultimate Day ever, I was mostly happy. The one down note is that The Mrs. is still feeling a bit puny. The up notes, though, were many.

Change is a part of life. By slicing it up to review one single day a year, over the course of years, change becomes so much more observable. The first change is in my sons. Both have grown up, and both are past the danger zone of 16. I’m proud of both of them.

The second change is in The Mrs. and I. We’re growing older, too. I accept that. That is not a bad thing. There is a sense of completion in that. That’s not bad.

I know purists will say that Olive Garden® isn’t real Italian food, but I’m not Italian. It’s tasty. That’s been good over the years, though you can certainly see the prices going up over time, but still with unlimited stick.

And I’d give customers a penne for their thoughts.

In a few years, when Pugsley goes off to college, and The Boy is deeply involved in his own life, it will likely be down to just The Mrs. and I enjoying our family Penultimate Day together.

Well, and all of you. Hope we all have a happy and wonderful 2023!

Penultimate Day: The View From 2021

I invented a time machine so I can view the Resurrection on TV – it’s amazing resolution: ADHD.

Penultimate Day.

This is the only unique Wilder Holiday that I know of. New Year’s Eve? That’s for tourists. It happens every year. It’s the last day of the year. But what about the next-to-last day of the year?

That’s Penultimate Day.

Penultimate Day started as a lark, maybe a decade ago.

The Mrs. decided that she didn’t like her Blackberry™ phone, and wanted to shop for a new phone. We did. The deals were all bad, so we didn’t buy a new phone. What then? We’d driven nearly 100 miles (the closest place to Modern Mayberry that sold phones then) and decided to . . . eat Italian food.

Driving 100 miles home, we made jokes about it, and Christened the day, Penultimate Day. The three tenets:

Shop for a new cell phone (at Best Buy® is best),
Don’t buy a new cell phone (you can decide to not purchase a cell phone nearly anywhere),
Eat Italian food, namely at Olive Garden® (it’s close to Best Buy™). Since, when “You’re Here, You’re Family™” is their motto, I still wonder why they look weird at me when I take off my shoes and put on pajamas to eat with my shirt off.

Where did I go after eating all of those breadsticks? The hospitialiano.

Ta-da! You can celebrate, too! Well, at least you can celebrate next year, since my math shows that December 30, 2021, has (thankfully) perished from the annals of history.

Last year was lame. We were in the midst of (yet another) ‘Rona lockdown – 40 weeks to stop the spread, or something, so we stayed home. This year, though, it was time for a full and hearty observance of Penultimate Day. I arrived from home, ready to not purchase a cell phone.

Sadly, only Pugsley was ready to go. The Mrs. and The Boy claimed that they were deep in the clutches of some evil virus. Since Pugsley was patient zero, and I was in the midst of recovery, well, we let the weak decide the day. Here’s our scorecard:

We didn’t shop for a new cell phone.
We didn’t buy a new cell phone. Win!
We ate Italian food. Win!

We ate Italian food because I made (with assistance) chicken Alfredo for dinner. Since everyone else old enough to drink was sick, it was up to me to drink the wine. I threw myself on that grenade for the family.

I had a real problem when I used a collie for gathering my sheep. I had 48, but he always brought back 50. He was bad about rounding up.

I’m a giver that way.

But what happened this year?

Everybody was sick. Last year? Everywhere was closed. As simple as our task was, we failed it twice in a row.
When we sent Pugsley to buy food for dinner, he reported that one supermarket was entirely out of pasta. Pasta is, well, one of the easiest things to make and distribute. Why is a national grocery store chain out of pasta?
They had chicken. I cooked that, and The Mrs. pronounced it “dry.” She wasn’t being mean – she was being honest. Dry chicken isn’t due to a lack of moisture – dry chicken is due to a lack of fat. My bad. More butter next time. I thought that putting a stick under each of my armpits was enough. I’ll add more in 2022, though I’m unsure of which crevices to put it in.
Pugsley said they were out of Alfredo sauce. Since that’s easier to make than adding water to ice, I gave him the ingredients to make it from scratch. Oops! They had Alfredo sauce. Just the wrong aisle.

The most disturbing thing Pugsley said was this: “It’s weird. It was like there was nothing in the store. Most of the shelves were bare.” Since The Mrs. had just complained, “Why do you tell them to buy more things, our pantry is so full we can hardly buy anything at all,” I smiled. When she said, “And you’ve infected them. When I ask them to buy one, of anything, they buy three.”

I smiled so hard my face ached.

Being a skeleton is nice – nothing gets under his skin.

I will probably go to the store in the next few days. That will be the first time in months. Not because of the ‘Rona, mind you, but because I really hate going to the store because there are people there. I’ll give a look to see what is missing, or what has gone up in price.

But it’s been two years since we’ve properly celebrated Penultimate Day. Before The Boy graduates from college, we have only one more. I’m not thinking that he’ll often decide to come home so we can travel and not purchase cell phones and then eat Italian food. So, we have just one more year where it’s the four of us.

The only hobbit I met was a jerk, a real douchebaggins.

This is the last post I’ll make this year, and even in the 10 years that we’ve been celebrating Penultimate Day I’ve seen very big differences to our lives – Penultimate Day used to be a lark, but now it’s a time to look back. In the failure of this Penultimate Day, I’m wondering – what does it mean? How have we as a nation changed in the last decade? Do we even still like Italian food?

Our nation has split apart farther than I ever thought it could go. There is rarely anything either side can agree on, except that they find the other side awful poopy heads.
The economy is even more poised for collapse. As it is, I think we’re riding a razor’s edge, where on either side is a collapse in prosperity that will last generations.
Alec Baldwin has finally made good on his promise to kill again.
The punchline to a joke since at least 1988 (really, look it up) inhabits the Oval Office despite a (legitimate) doubt that he was elected legally. The Left responds as they always do – by doubling down and declaring him the “most” legitimate President in our history.
We went from energy dependent to energy independent to energy dependent (and in crisis) in four years.
As far as I can tell, yes, everyone still likes Italian food.

We face a very unique crisis – one of cohesion, one of leadership, one of economic collapse. All at the same time. What will happen?

When I was a little kid, my dad made pasta when I was scared – to show me there was nothing to be Alfredo.

Who can know. All I know is that the Alfredo was pretty good tonight. And each day that my family spends together is special, and I cherish each one of those days. I have right now, so I will enjoy it.

As Marcus Aurelius said: “The more we value things outside our control, the less control we have.”

Today I’ll focus and value those things I can control. And when I look at that? Penultimate Day 2021 wasn’t so bad after all. Happy New Year to all.

Penultimate Day And 2021 Thoughts

“The Babylon Project was our last, best hope for peace. It failed. But in the year of the Shadow War, it became something greater: our last, best hope for victory. The year is 2260. The place: Babylon 5.” – Babylon 5

Why did 2020 cross the road? To get to the other cyanide.

This year we didn’t celebrate our traditional Wilder family holiday, Penultimate Day. What does Penultimate Day entail?

Well, you drive south for two hours or so. Then you go to Best Buy® and, under no circumstances do you buy a cell phone. But you must look at cell phones. Then, after not buying a cell phone, you go to Olive Garden® and have some nice pasta.

This celebration started (I think) in 2011 or 2012, I think. The Mrs.’ cell phone (a Blackberry®!) was going south. We drove to the nearest cell phone store that was tied to our carrier, which was a Best Buy™ about two hours from us. We got frustrated attempting to figure out the deals after the phone clerk wheeled out a surgical gurney to take out part of my intestines. I told him, “No way!”

“Really? You need to look at the contract closer. It’s in the appendix.”

We gave up on buying a phone.

Then, frustrated at our lack of being able to find a phone, we gave up and decided to have dinner.

Hobbits always use vibrate on their phones – they don’t want the ring to give them away.

And then we drove home. It was impossibly silly, driving a total of four hours to go to not buy a cell phone. And we did it on December 30. So, I made the joke that since the New Year was a made-up holiday, why not make up our own? Thus Penultimate Day – the next-to-last day of the year – became an official Wilder holiday.

Over the years, we took Penultimate Day seriously. There were one or two exceptions where we skipped Penultimate Day, primarily because Pugsley or The Boy had a sports event. That is, of course, acceptable. The goal of Penultimate Day is to do something fun together as a family.

We stuck to celebrating Penultimate Day. Why? Because it was fun, it was silly, and it was ours.

We didn’t celebrate Penultimate Day this year.

First, traveling into a major metropolitan area didn’t make sense to us – here in Modern Mayberry the case-rate for the WuFlu is relatively low, and we have no idea what the requirements are to even go into Best Buy® in Major Undisclosed Metropolitan Area. Second, while we enjoy going to the Olive Garden™, I’m still convinced that the free breadsticks are some kind of con game. I keep expecting a bill to arrive from them in 2028: “owed to Olive Garden© for “free” breadsticks: $257,065.”

What’s the only pasta you can get during COVID-19 lockdown? Macaroni and sneeze.

Instead, we slept in late, played a few games, and more-or-less relaxed the entire day. Our contribution to the economy of the United States? We had a nice dinner The Mrs. cooked for us at home, used some natural gas to fire our heater, and spent about $3 in electricity for lighting the place. That was it. Our participation in the economy on December 30, 2020 was probably less than $20, total.

That’s the problem if you’re running an economy. No gasoline, no money heading to the Olive Garden©, and no tip to the waitress.

I read that Christmas spending was down this year, to $851 from $976 in 2019. That’s a drop of 13%. But this is Monday, not Wednesday when we talk about economics. On Monday, we talk about the big picture.

But 13% is a huge drop-off. And when you add in all of the activities that people aren’t doing? I imagine it was even more. The big picture? Economic contraction increases instability.

I wrote in 2019’s Penultimate Day that we were entering a period of chaos, where entire edifices that we used to stand behind would crumble. Now, we sit in 2021, and a majority of the people who voted in the national election think it was rigged.

How do you get a baby alien to sleep? Rocket.

Also rigged? The system of justice in the nation. We see Antifa® and BLM© “peacefully” destroy cities. The massive number of unindicted felons? It’s okay to loot.

2020 was a mess, but it looks like we got to get a glimpse of the man behind the curtain.

2021 will certainly start out like a mess. January is going to be chaotic. Regardless, I’m optimistic about 2021 – not because I’m insane, but because I know what starts the upward rise: the upward rise starts after you’ve fallen and hit bottom. While we around the world have fallen and are headed toward the bottom, the biggest lesson is this: bring something back up with you.

That’s the question for today: what can we bring back up with us?

Understanding that the world can change around you in an instant. One moment, the world was normal. The next? Lockdowns, the destruction of an economy.
Understanding where your vulnerabilities are. Food? Toilet paper? What can you do to fix them?
Knowing that your job is not “safe” – the entire economy isn’t safe. Be prepared for more dislocations. What skills are you working on?

These are important realizations. In 2021 and for the foreseeable future, complacency will not be your friend. Constantly question your assumptions. Constantly try to understand your side, but also periodically ask yourself, “What if I’m wrong?” Try to understand the other side of the issue, too.

You may or may not be wrong, but questioning (not doubting, but questioning) yourself is key to deep understanding. Hold your own beliefs up to the same scrutiny you use on opposing beliefs.

Thankfully, hindsight is 2020. Or did I get that backward?

As I wrote on Friday, I’m not sure that 2021 will be a great year, but it will be a birth year for the next phase of what happens to our society. What’s probable this year?

Unemployment continues, and likely gets worse. Ideas of a quick rebuild will be crushed. People at the bottom end – twentysomethings and service workers – are already hoisting a white flag.
Society will become even more fractured. Left and Right are guaranteed to be further apart in 2021 – the way this presidential election has gone is sure to inflame both sides, no matter what happens.
The very mechanisms that we normally see as protecting society will continue to erode. People on the Right who are defending the “thin blue line” will become aware that many (not all!) of the police will do whatever the people signing their checks tell them to do. This is not the year to be a cop in Portland, Oregon.
People will continue to flee California and large Leftist cities in a locust-like plague. They will not leave their Leftist ideas behind.
The debt of the United States will continue to climb. My bet? We add another $4-5 trillion this year. That doesn’t include personal debt and business debt. The idea that printing money is better than earning it will continue and probably increase in 2021. This idea will only stop when events force it to stop.

But as I said in the introduction to Friday’s post, I remain weirdly optimistic that, even given all of these trends, this will be a year that we will look back on and say, “That was the year that things changed.” Certainly, 2020 was a year that will likely be looked on as the start of the crisis. 2021 will be looked at as the year that the seeds of the new are planted.

How can I better describe it?

1776 is they year that most people associate with the birth of the United States. What most people forget is that it wasn’t until 1787 that the Constitutional Congress was held. Likewise, it wasn’t until 1789 that George Washington was sworn in as our first President. That was thirteen years after 1776 – thirteen years where there was war, economic failure, and finally a coming together over a very unique document.

Change takes time.

What did Washington say before his men got in the boats to cross the Delaware to attack the British? “Get in the boats.”

So, if I’m right, people will look back on 2021 and say, “That was when things turned around.”

And the good news is, Penultimate Day or not, you’ll be there for it. Again, I never said it was going to be easy. It will likely be the complete opposite of easy.

Freedom rarely is easy. And I’m still pretty sure that the Olive Garden© has a comprehensive spreadsheet somewhere charting my breadstick consumption . . . .

Happy Penultimate Day 2019, and the Biggest Story of 2019: Society Unravelling

“Well, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but it sounds damn saucy, you lucky thing! I know some fairly liberal-minded girls, but I’ve never penultimated any of them in a solar sojourn, or for that matter, been given any Norman tongue.” – Blackadder The Third

If we have a boogaloo, let’s hope it’s a short one. I’ve got a dentist appointment next Thursday.

If you’re reading this on Monday, December 30, congratulations! It’s Penultimate Day! This is the holiday that the Wilder’s celebrate every December 30. Why Penultimate Day? Back on December 30, 2012, The Mrs. wanted a new cell phone. We drove an hour and a half south to a Best Buy® (the nearest place that sold cell phones) and then didn’t buy a cell phone. After that, we ate at Olive Garden® and drove home.

I think this was, perhaps, the disaster foretold by the Mayans that ended their calendar in 2012. As is inscribed in ancient Mayan on the calendar: “When the pale people from the north can communicate no more, and instead decided to eat a tasty pasta dish, perhaps with fresh-grated Parmesan cheese (say when!), that shall be the end of time.”

Or my translation may be off. Regardless, we are now celebrating our seventh straight Penultimate Day, and as you read this I might be not buying a cell phone, or perhaps having some sort of bottomless salad and breadstick combination at Olive Garden©. Olive Garden’s™ motto is “when you’re here, you’re family©,” so I borrowed $50 and decided I’d never pick up when they call and insult them behind their back.

Remember, when you’re here, you’re part of the Olivegarchy.

You can join in on Penultimate Day, too. Simply go to a place that cells cell phones that is south of your house. Then, don’t buy one. Finally: eat Italian food. Sure, that’s not the purist version and you might be burned at the stake later for heresy, but, you know, Italian food.

My Penultimate Day post is also the post that I use to look back on the year to talk about the biggest story of the year. In 2017, it was the verified UFO video from the military (Penultimate Day and The Biggest Story of 2017), in 2018, it was the loss of trust in our society (Happy Penultimate Day 2018, and the Biggest Story of 2018: Societal Trust). The 2017 link comes with a (very) short story that I wrote in a Marriott® bar.

In 2019, the main story is the unravelling of society.

The main stories in all of the news is about that unravelling this year. And it’s not just in the United States:

Brexit/Boris Johnson in Great Britain.
Yellow Vest Protests in France.
Hong Kong Protests in Cleveland.
Impeachment.
Left and Right Polarity.
Your family at Thanksgiving.
AntiFa® violence in mom’s basement.
Popularity of Stories About Impending Civil War in the United States.

We know trouble is coming. The topic I’ve written about that’s gotten more views than any other this year has been Civil War 2. How divisive is society today? In an example of whistling past the graveyard, a hypothetical future conflict has been referred to as Civil War 2: Electric Boogaloo. This has shortened over time to just Boogaloo. This is, of course, is a tribute to that classic of Western cinema Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, a 1984 film about breakdancing that I’m sure you all have seen.

Deciding that they’d like to prove my point about the unravelling of society and the Left being a bitter, humorless bunch of that make the people at the DMV look like a jovial group of partygoers, members of the Left have decided that even the term “Boogaloo” is nearly hate speech. Yeah, I’m not surprised, either.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

William Butler Yeats wrote the above as the opening of a song for the band Iron Maiden®. Sadly Bruce Dickenson rejected it on the grounds that all of the members of Iron Maiden© took a vote and decided that they would all be born sometime in the future when guitars were just a bit more electric but yet not too boogaloo.

Yes, Iron Maiden did an 18 minute metal song about a poem written in 1798. And it was glorious.

Instead, Yeats settled for using those lines for the opening of his poem The Second Coming a hundred years ago in 1919, and during this time he was writing about what he saw as an unravelling: an unravelling of science, an unravelling of governmental structures, and an unravelling of heterogeneous communities. He looked back at the deaths caused by the pointless World War I and its deformed stepchild – the Russian Revolution, and saw an ending of one world, and the birth of the next.

These destroyed structures were built on speed and modernity. What did Yeats see replacing the modern world?

Kardashians are planning on acknowledging their Wookie heritage in a new reality show.

Yeats continued with a vision as ugly as a Kardashian in a swimsuit:

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

What did Yeats see replacing the modern world? Mysticism. Power. Blood. He was right. 1919 was crappy, but the 20^th Century was about to get a whole lot worse. He concluded:

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Yup. Creepy. And Iron Maiden definitely should have recorded this, whether they were born or not.

Yeats’ vision is what we are living through again right now – the ending of one age, and the beginning of another. This crisis cannot be driven by food shortages. There is more food now than at any time in history. It cannot be wealth – there is more individual wealth in the nations experiencing tumult than at any point in their histories. It cannot be my hair. My shiny scalp? Sure. Not my hair.

Certainly there are problems – I think that the people the Z-Man (LINK) calls the Dirt People (which almost certainly includes every reader of this blog as well as your constant writer, me) are experiencing an economy driven by and for the Cloud People (the Deep State, the Financial Elite). Regardless of who you voted for in 2012, you knew that Mittens Romney and Barry Obama were on the same team, and it wasn’t your team.

This might be where the Z-Man got that meme – at least it was the first thing I thought of. And it explains sky-high real estate costs . . . .

In the end the reactions we’re seeing in society in 2019 (Trump and Brexit) are just that – reactions to a society that has gone too far Left, too fast. Leftists never realize that all they have to do to enact their Socialist Utopia® is wait. Instead, they smell the blood of the Right in the water and decide that it’s time to end the waiting. Right now! Because after making the conscious decision to borrow $375,000 for a degree in cooking, they now know that college (and those vacations to Europe on spring break!) is a right and should be free.

What do Leftist want? Complete control. When do they want it? Now. Impeachment is a technique for power and control, not enforcing the law, since at no point has anyone been able to articulate a law broken by Trump. Nixon? Conspiracy to commit a break-in. Clinton? Perjury. Trump? I still haven’t heard about a law that he broke that isn’t some sort of fashion or etiquette rule.

Trump is not a savior. Trump is a symptom. The Leftist reaction to Trump is yet another symptom. And the inability to wait for an election that is less than a year out is yet another.

The Right is never the instigator of issues like this – there is a reason the Right is called reactionary – it reacts to the Left. The Right just wants history to stop. The Left wants change, and will look for any time to work for it – especially when society is functioning well. The Left is like a wife who sees a fully functioning family, home mortgage nearly paid off, 20 years until retirement and says, “You know what? Things are going well. Let’s burn it all down.”

As long as Stella gets her groove back, that’s all that’s important, am I right?

And the change the Left wants is never gradual – it is Revolution™. The Left wants to destroy the existing social orders and replace them with Leftism. As we’ve seen in the past (Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, Mangos and A Future That Must Not Be), Leftism always ends in a bloodbath, either as those on the Left kill everyone to the Right of them, or a cagey leader like Stalin kills all of the people to the Left of him.

This is the context we see ourselves in today. All time high on the stock market, and all time high (excepting 1859) on the polarity seen in the United States. We are splitting apart.

How does this end? I think, if past trends for America have been true, there will be freedom. America may not look like it does today – I think I’d actually bet money that it won’t. There will be significant changes, and I think it will be very difficult for Washington D.C. to impose its will on Michigan, Montana, or Missouri if the peoples of those states are unwilling.

This is the last post of the ‘teens – my next post will be in the Tumultuous, Turbulent Twenties. Remember folks, you heard that here first. But you won’t hear it here last – I’m pretty sure the centre cannot hold . . . but neither will my belt, not after all of those free breadsticks.

Happy Penultimate Day 2018, and the Biggest Story of 2018: Societal Trust

“Gentlemen, question mark? Put it on the penultimate, not on the diphthongic. You want to brush up on your Greek, Jamison. Well, at least get a Greek and brush up on him.” – Animal Crackers

We had another wonderful Penultimate Day this year. The origins of Penultimate Day are shrouded in mystery, lost to the ages in the murky past before recorded history, way back in 2012. On December 30, 2012, sensing that the world wasn’t really going to end as the Mayan calendar expired, The Mrs., The Boy, Pugsley and I piled into the Wildermobile and drove two hours to buy cell phones. Stupid Mayans, if only they could have managed the whole end-of-the-world I wouldn’t have had to go shopping.

But I did have to go shopping. Our cell phone carrier doesn’t have a store within 100 miles, so we decided to make a day of it. The first time we’d bought phones, we’d bought them at a Best Buy®, so we went back to Best Buy© to look at new ones. We didn’t find something cheap what we wanted. We decided to keep our “has an actual keyboard” Blackberries for another year or two.

After not buying a cell phone, we ate dinner at Olive Garden™. We had joked on the way back that December 31 was the “ultimate” or last day of the year. We used the word “penultimate” to describe December 30, since penultimate means “next to last” and has even more syllables and sounds really nerdy. Thus, December 30 became Penultimate Day.

We’ve celebrated Penultimate Day in proper fashion five or six times now. I think one year a snow storm might have made the trip our pilgrimage impractical, but we did go again this year.

So, to recap, Penultimate Day requires:

Get in the car
Travel two hours
Whatever you do: Do not buy a cell phone
Eat at Olive Garden™

I would like to have Penultimate Day replace New Year’s Day – I’ve never seen the attraction in a holiday that celebrates the obsolescence of millions of calendars and the shared hangover of people who spent the night getting sweaty, drinking Jägermeister©, and saying “woo” in crowds still and have no idea how they ended up in that alley with Johnny Depp, a juicy oven-warm ham, gravy, and that gun.

Some Penultimate Day observations over the years:

Best Buy™ is largely irrelevant and more so every year. Best Buy® sells physical copies of movies, which is like putting a little bit of the Internet on a DVD® and selling it, making it more inconvenient to find when you want to watch it at 11PM. They sell music, which is quaint. Why buy music when I live in a universe where Pugsley’s phone did a Bluetooth© connect to The Mrs. car and we listened to whatever song we could think of on the way home, all thanks to YouTube®?

We introduced Pugsley to Dread Zeppelin on the way back home. What’s not to love about Led Zeppelin® music sung by an Elvis™ impersonator to a reggae beat?

We left Best Buy© without purchasing anything and passed the fourth test of Penultimate Day. No cell phone purchased. Thankfully, the Gods of Corporate Provenance placed the Olive Garden™ pretty close to the Best Buy®. I guess lots of people who don’t buy cell phones like Italian. We got a table immediately and from the beginning I noticed that the service was excellent, which must mean the economy isn’t doing so well.

Wilder’s 80^th Rule of Economics states that the primary effect of a great economy is horrible waiters at corporate chain restaurants. Great waiters get hired to sell stocks or become corporate lawyers or become the district manager for a PEZ™ distribution company. When the economy starts to stall? Great waiters show back up and the bad ones are sent to the Cool Whip® refineries. I’d rather have great waiters than more corporate lawyers, and remember, someone has to pump the raw Whip from deep underground and refine it into precious Cool Whip™.

The food at Olive Garden™ has gotten better every year. Sure, it’s corporate chow whose primary virtue and charm is consistency, but at the rate of once or twice per year it’s pretty tasty. But just before I left the restaurant, I noticed a black and white photo of a little Italian market along a crooked little road between buildings in the restroom. I would have taken a picture of the photo to show you, Internet, but my probation decorum prohibits me from pulling out a camera in a public bathroom. Like Teddy Roosevelt said, “Never trust a man with a camera at a urinal. Nothing good can come of that.”

The picture I saw was kinda like this one.

What really got to me about that picture (the one I saw, not the one sort of like it above) was that there was no one in it, but that lots of food from the market was out in front, for anyone to take. And there was no one around to watch the food. It got me to thinking, what kind of society builds that kind of trust, to leave food outside where anyone could steal it with only a tiny chance that they’d be caught?

Coming from where we live in Modern Mayberry, there is great degree of societal trust. It seems like once a month Pugsley or The Boy leaves the garage door open all night long – I can tell because there’s no way that all of the junk in there is mine – our neighbors must come and put extra tools and tarps and motorcycles on the floor. The Mrs., after several years, has managed to convince me that unlocked cars aren’t much of an issue, either. I do lock the front door to our house – I especially don’t trust thieves at night – they know that you’re home and are prepared to be violent. Thankfully, in our town guns outnumber people by a 2:1 margin, so the occasional murder is about passion or drugs and not random violence.

I mentioned the picture to the family as we drove home. We talked about trust in society. The Mrs. had a great observation: “Not long after we moved to Modern Mayberry, everybody knew who we were and what our business was. In a town that size, there’s no way that you can be a bad person and people not know about it.”

She’s right. There is crime. You generally know who was responsible. They’re generally caught, and generally sentenced to fair sentences, though I will say the latitude for self-defense when you’re being robbed at gunpoint is amazingly high – you don’t want to rob an armed house if people are home unless you don’t want to see how Game of Thrones® ends because, you know, early exit from breathing.

In Modern Mayberry there’s an amazing amount of agreement on ethics, religion, and the law. That provides the backbone for Societal Trust. Societal Trust is important – it provides:

Trust in neighbors to not steal
Trust in business partners to meet their end of the deal
Trust in government to be fair
Trust in media to be unbiased
Trust in elections to be honest

No, Modern Mayberry isn’t a paradise where all of these things are true. But our government isn’t big enough for big corruption. Neighbors don’t steal, but the kid three blocks away does, and we know who he is. And the ladies who count the ballots take it seriously and are sincere when they thank you after having handed you your “I voted” sticker. In high trust societies, things are easier, life is better. People will stop and help you if you have trouble.

The size of Modern Mayberry is small, the residents have been around forever. People are a known quantity. Trust isn’t at the level of “When you’re here, you’re family™” – no, that level of trust is saved for Olive Garden®. But people in Modern Mayberry do and will pitch in to help their neighbors.

I had always thought that there was anonymity in cities. But when I spent some time in a Chicago for work I saw that it wasn’t that way at all. The neighborhoods were tightly grouped, at least on the South Side. The Polish? They maintained the Polish neighborhood. Supermarket signs were in Polish. The Italians? They had a neighborhood that was next to the Polish neighborhood. Nobody crossed the street between the neighborhoods. There was a wall, but it was invisible, and each side patrolled their own side. If you were Polish or Italian, you knew better than to cross the line. They managed to find harmony though minimizing cultural friction along ethnic lines, the same way most modern suburbs divvy up the land based upon economic lines. But that’s not enough. Some leakage across boundaries is inevitable, and some areas fracture within ethnic lines. That’s why Chicago has such a high murder rate.

Trust consists of finding points of agreement. In my first Penultimate post (last year) I talked about what I felt was the biggest story of the year for 2017. In this post? The biggest story for 2018.

We are unraveling. Our trust is fine here in Modern Mayberry. It’s probably good in most of the suburbs. Heck, most of the localities and neighborhoods across the country are fine. 2018, however, has shown the greatest division in at least the last 150 years building nationally. Here’s a previous post on this: Pulp Fiction, Epsilon Theory, and The News Isn’t The News. Really.

But what will bring back our trust nationally when we don’t even agree that we should all throw off our shackles, drive to Best Buy© on December 30^th and exercise our right to not buy a cell phone and then eat corporately-designed Italian food? Unify the United States: replace New Year’s Day with Penultimate Day, a far superior holiday!