Purpose – Page 17 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Red Flag Laws, or, How To Repeal The Second Amendment Soviet-Style Without A Pesky Vote

“Now, you see all these red flags? Trouble spots. Southeastern Asia. The Caribbean. The Congo. I’ll give you one guess as to who’s responsible.” – Doctor Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine

I look much better after I’ve had a cup of coffee. And after I’ve found my axe.

I know that you, gentle reader, have thoughts about guns that are probably pretty similar to mine, so I’d like to take you on a short walk through history, specifically the history of politics and psychiatry. I promise, it will make more sense than the lyrics to the Manfred Mann song Blinded by the Light. What the hell is a go-cart Mozart, and why is he checking out the weather chart, anyway?

The history of psychiatry is tied directly to the political.

I have seen a person suffering from schizophrenia to such a degree that they were sure that MTV® video stars were stealing songs directly from their brain and that they were also a surgeon who regularly performed operations on world leaders and stored their organs in the freezer for safe keeping.

If no one has ever told you that there are human organs belonging to world leaders in their fridge in a completely matter-of-fact “would you like a glass of water” voice, well, all I can tell you is that my first thought was one of complete disbelief that I had heard them right. Yes, I asked for them to repeat that statement. Twice.

I walked over and checked their freezer. Thankfully the only things in it were some frozen pizzas and ancient ice cubes. I assure you I was talking to their shrink that afternoon and they were involuntarily committed by 5PM. They were helped, and after being put on some appropriately industrial levels of anti-psychotic medication, did okay enough to be released back into the wild. As long as they stayed on their meds.

I know that there are actually crazy people that really need help.

But I also know this: psychiatry is still the most politically abused medical profession.

Okay, if Depp isn’t crazy, why does he keep starring in movies like this?

Examples of political abuse of psychiatry? There are many. When I mentioned this topic to The Mrs., she immediately said, “the Soviet Union.” And that’s the example I thought of first, too. The Soviets systematically used diagnosis of psychological disorders such as “philosophical intoxication” and “sluggish schizophrenia” to put people who didn’t like Marxism into mental institutions. And, no, those diagnoses aren’t lame jokes – those were really Soviet-era diagnoses.

How many were caught up in the psychological gulags?

We really don’t know since those records are still secret, but in 1978 at least 4.5 million Soviet citizens were listed as having mental health problems. In 1988, perhaps thinking that they might face their own version of Soviet Nuremburg Trials for Crimes Against Humanity, Soviet leaders had over 800,000 thousand patients removed from the list of the mentally ill. Paperwork error, surely?

Okay, with all those red flags, how did they not see the collapse of communism coming?

Did the Soviets condemn thousands with false diagnosis? Nearly certainly. Hundreds of thousands? Very likely.

Millions?

Probably. Think of it, millions of people falsely diagnosed with a mental illness due to political beliefs and sent to asylums and work camps. Certainly some were executed.

The Soviets allowed ownership of smoothbore weapons for hunting. Except when they didn’t. Which was most of the time. Oh, and the definition of sweet summer child is: a person who doesn’t know the hardships of winter, often used when someone has no experience with a particular (stressful) thing, which may describe a generation that rhymes with perennial.

Okay, it was just the Soviet Union, right?

No. Cuba did the same thing. There is evidence that China is still doing it, and likely on scale similar to that of the Soviet Union. Thankfully the World Psychiatric Association took the lead in investigations. Oh, they didn’t? The World Psychiatric Association pretty much ignored it and said that people associated with Falun Gong are nuts and that putting them in asylums run by the state security apparatus (not the medical directorate) was perfectly normal?

One flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo’s nest . . . and if you haven’t see the movie, you should, it’s a lighthearted comedy and perfect for a first date.

Okay, that’s just China. Thankfully this would never happen in the United States.

Oh, it did?

Sure. In the 1920’s dissidents (like one who protested the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti) were put into asylums. In the 1960’s members of the American Psychological Association smeared presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in the press by diagnosing him. But that wasn’t political, right?

Thankfully it isn’t happening now.

Oh, in 2012 a whistleblower with the NYPD was railroaded on mental health? Ouch. But New York is corrupt.

It would never happen based on political motives, right?

Dinesh D’Souza, author and filmmaker on the Right was convicted of a crime based on giving too much money to a political campaign. He admitted he was wrong. The Federal Judge involved in the case sentenced D’Souza not only to prison, he sentenced D’Souza to years of mental health counselling despite a licensed psychologist saying that D’Souza was just fine mentally.

So, yes. Psychiatry is a political weapon. It’s not like the Left has sentenced political opponents to chemotherapy, but I hear that they’re working on it.

Yes, this is a common sense way to use psychiatry!

This corrupt branch of medicine is the background of the Red Flag Laws.

The idea is that we’ll create laws to remove rights from people without due process, with the presumption that individuals should lose a right guaranteed by the Constitution®. A single accuser, with no evidence can result in gun confiscation to a law-abiding citizen. Sadly this already happens – people with contested domestic restraining orders (a standard tactic in divorces nowadays) lose their rights, although I’ve heard of people fighting these orders and winning – at least there is a pretense at due process.

The claim that the ability to strip people of rights won’t be abused is laughable. In every country that’s been infected by psychiatry, it has been twisted to meet political ends. Yes, there are crazy people. I’ve seen one as I related above. And, if you did a brain scan, there is a physical basis for schizophrenia. It’s real. It is a medical condition. But remember, these are the same psychiatrists that would diagnose me as nuts if I believed I was be five years older than I really am, but are perfectly fine with children younger than the age of five claiming they are a different sex than their genetics have made them.

Po-tay-to, Po-gender reassignment surgery for children is normal-to.

Furthermore, the medical profession as a whole is maybe a bit, well, mental*. In one study it was claimed that 50% of female doctors could be diagnosed with a mental disease. I wonder again why my ex didn’t take up medicine? (*Aesop LINK excluded, unless pimp-slapping in the comments section is classified as a mental disorder.)

Oh, and psychologists have nearly the highest rates of suicide of any profession. Yes, any profession, including the people who make balloon animals in Mauschwitz Disneyland® for chubby children with hands sticky from chocolate ice cream. Perfectly stable. And this is also the same profession whose international governing body (WPA) was just fine with political repression in the name of psychiatry.

Besides being oppressive, the Red Flag laws would not have helped in latest shootings – these people lawfully and legally got their rifles. But they will form the basis for taking away guns for . . .

Conspiracy Theories – Believing anything other than the Official Narrative® will become a basis for exclusion of lawful firearms ownership, despite the fact that throughout history, many conspiracy theories have been proven true. Google® MKULTRA. That happened. But the FBI® is now warning that you are a danger if you don’t believe the Official Narrative©.
Antisocial Behavior – Ever not want to hang around people? You’re antisocial, and that’s dangerous, citizen. No AR for you!
Websites Visited – Going to unapproved sites? Thinking unapproved thoughts? Glockblock™!
Comments Made When You Were 16 – Wow, did you really say that maybe the Crusades weren’t all bad? No pew-pew for you, hater.
Not Believing in the Easter Bunny Socialism – Well, I think I covered that above.

The irony is this will have the impact of keeping people away from mental health professionals. This will keep people from seeking help when they’re a little depressed, because the consequences of having a “health record” might prevent them from future opportunity – the only safe way to live life would be to stay away from health professionals – and not answer certain questions your M.D. might have for you with a polite BFYTW when asked why you’re not answering. Oh, but that probably puts you on the antisocial list.

Texas may or may not be your cup of tea, but they certainly got some things right once upon a time.

Psychiatry is on pretty iffy ground in many cases already. As an experiment, a group of doctors sent people to a psychiatrist with one symptom – they heard a voice. No other symptom. They were perfectly normal, mentally healthy people. In one case, the person was committed to a mental health facility (as I recall) for several weeks with zero symptoms. I tried to look it up, but, surprise, most Google® searches right now link commitment to . . . violence. Even that’s not a comfortable thought.

Soviet mental health nurse. Not shown: tenth guard, who is now an inmate.

The single scariest thing to me is watching a human mind erode – what was once a rational human disappears. It’s what makes (to me) zombies scary. They look like humans. They used to be a normal human. But that rational human being is now gone, replaced by someone who has no real tie to reality while the external form remains.

I realize that there is a time and a place for psychiatric care.

But psychiatrists are already owned by the Left. The Left sees you as crazy already. The Left views your dissent from their agenda as a mental disorder, one punishable by death, if need be.

I’ll leave the last word to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who is really pictured above while in the gulag: “I’ll take Solzhenitsyn on Gun Control for $1000, Alex. Oh, look – the Daily Double®!”

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: what would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? [They] would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If . . . if . . . we didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation . . . . We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

Defeating My Biggest Enemy: Me, Complete with Hairy Kardashians and Video Games.

“I noticed earlier the hyperdrive motivator has been damaged. It’s impossible to go to lightspeed!” – The Empire Strikes Back™

Nah, I got an A. Got a perfect score on the final, plus I got to watch C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate during winter break.

Ever think you could accomplish more? You can. Read on. It’s okay, I’m a trained professional.

When I was in college I took a course called Probability and Statistics, or as we referred to it at the time, Sadistics. During one lecture the instructor told the class a story about how a graduate student working on his Ph.D. was late to a class – so late that he’d missed the start of the lecture. The student saw two math problems on the blackboard. Thinking they were homework problems, he copied them down, and spent the weekend working on them. They were a little harder than usual, but he managed to finish them.

On Monday he returned to class, and showed the instructor his results. Turns out that the problems weren’t homework: these were two unproven theorems in statistics; unproven theorems that George Dantzig (the student) finished because he had no idea that they were too hard for him to do.

In Dantzig’s own words:

“A year later, when I began to worry about a thesis topic, [his teacher] just shrugged and told me to wrap the two problems up in a binder and he would accept them as my thesis.”

At least he didn’t have to shag the professor, baby.

That’s a pretty good story, especially because it’s true and a great example of how much you can achieve when you’re too stupid to know that what you’re doing is impossible. It’s also a very good story to tell the boss the next time you’re late for a meeting at work, because his reaction will likely allow you time for independent exploration of all the employment opportunities this great nation has to offer.

So how do people sabotage themselves so they don’t achieve all that they could? How do they turn themselves into their own worst enemy? Today I’ll present three reasons. There are more, but what do I look like, a budget Tony Robbins?

I was wondering why that seminar only cost $14.98.

I think the worst is negative inner dialogue.

Ever make a mistake? Ever beat yourself up about it? Yeah, me too. But what I noticed is that when I beat myself up, I used to say things to myself that were meaner than any person had ever said to me in real life. Notice I said “used to” – I simply don’t put up with it any more. When I sense that inner beat down coming, I just shut it down.

If your best friend who has your best interests at heart wouldn’t say it to you, why would you say it to yourself?

Recently I read about a research study that indicated that you had more impact when motivating yourself if you encouraged yourself in the third person. Saying to yourself, “You’ve got this, John,” is much more powerful than, “I can do this.” Why? I have my guesses – it’s probably that you don’t want to fail when you’ve got some other person involved, so you dig that much deeper.

If that’s the case, how much more damaging is beating yourself up verbally in the third person? “I’m stupid,” versus “you’re stupid.” Think about it – and I advise you not to put up with your nonsense. Shut it down.

Yes, this happened.

Negative inner dialogue doesn’t help me, especially since whatever mistake I made was generally not even noticed by others. I hate to break this to you, but outside of your family, you’re less important than you think. People don’t notice the things you do all that much, and if they do? They don’t remember.

That may seem like a downer, but it’s really the opposite. It’s freedom, and another reason not to beat yourself up.

Next on the list? Belief that your goal is impossible.

Well, it isn’t possible, until you actually do it. Nobody had solved Dantzig’s theorems until he solved them. Heck, the Kardashians are too dumb to know they shouldn’t have hundreds of millions of dollars despite an utter lack anything resembling talent or a redeeming feature. Oh, unless you count their copious amounts of body hair. And I wouldn’t advise that you count their body hair, since that would take far too long. Plus? You’d get Kardashian grease all over you.

This is right before the hair covers them entirely in a protective cocoon so they can become giant genderless moth people.

I’ll note that nearly every time I was given an assignment that seemed impossible at work, I managed to crack the problem. What was off was my definition of impossible. I eventually ended up working for a boss that pushed me even farther. Nine times out of ten, he gambled and won. The tenth time? They fired him. Don’t feel bad for him – his severance package was about $2 million.

Finally, there’s not giving it all you’ve got.

This one is insidious. Here’s my example: in my career (the one that pays the bills, not this one) I’ve accomplished most things that I’ve ever wanted to do and have a whole batch of odd stories that I’ll maybe get around to telling someday. Does this mean that I aimed too low, that I didn’t push hard enough? Nah, I don’t think so. I’ve seen what some of the people at the top had to do to get there, and I like sleeping well.

It’s tough at the top. Everything is a tradeoff.

But here I can push myself, and sleep well. So, I write. I give that all that I’ve got, especially once I understood that I’d never get better unless I really pushed myself. And I can see results. I had a post that related to one I’d written back in 2017 that I was thinking of linking to. I pulled up the old post. I read it.

What made me happiest about the old post is: I’m better now than I was in 2017 – a lot better. How much better will I be if I keep pushing it, keep focusing on it for 20 hours a week for another decade? I have no idea. But we’ll see.

But I had my own George Dantzig moment before I ever heard his story:

I was in high school and a friend came over to my place. He and I sat down to play some video games, since we didn’t have a car. He went first. Normally on my first guy I’d score 10,000 or so. But my friend scored 50,000. I was amazed – I had no idea it was possible. So, my first guy up? 50,000 points. This was my best score ever.

I know – it looks exactly like a scene from The Empire Strikes Back©. But, trust me, this is really a video game.

What had been missing was belief. Seeing my friend play with no higher a skill level than I had do five times better than my best ever score flipped a switch. I believed. I could perform better than I ever thought possible.

But right now, it’s time:

Time to believe in yourself. Time to believe that your goal is possible. Time to work harder.

Go on, you’ve got this.

Inspiration, Attitude, and Funeral Jokes

“I’m simply seeking to inspire mankind to all that is intended.” – Constantine

See the lengths I will go to in order to deliver top-quality humor three times a week?

Sometimes you find treasures in odd places. Back in 2007, I was working a nightmare job. The days were hectic, filled with emergency after emergency, wailing, and general disarray. And then I had to commute to work. Okay, home life was generally pretty good, but work really was a nightmare. One positive thing I did, though, was clip and print things that I found to be inspiring. No, not a lot of clippings like I’d finally found the missing connection between the Rothschild family and why there are no purple M&M’s®. No, when I found these quotes there were just a few – maybe less than a dozen.

Here’s one of the quotes I found in the clippings:

“If you have a guy with all the survival training in the world who has a negative attitude and a guy who doesn’t have a clue but has a positive attitude, I guarantee you that the guy with a positive attitude is coming out of the woods alive. Simple as that.” – Gordon Smith, Retired Green Beret Command Sergeant Major

Training, preparation, skill and Ruffles® are all wonderful things. I recommend them all, especially if they are cheddar-flavored. The quote above, however, exactly mirrors my own feelings and experience. Stated bluntly:

Attitude matters.

I don’t have that tie, though, and haven’t worn one regularly since ‘08.

I’m a long time reader of Scott Adams dating back into the mid-1990’s. He’s most famous for Dilbert, but he has written books and blogged for decades about everything from management to life skills to persuasion. Daily, Scott Adams writes his goals 15 times (LINK). Why 15? I don’t know. But Adams has reported that it produces amazing results for him, and he’s lived a pretty amazing life. It might also have something to do with him being a genius who works really hard and tries lots of things. Nah. He must be a beneficiary of the structural capitalist patriarchy and the reason people love Dilbert is only due to white privilege. That explains everything, if you’re in Congress.

How the goal writing produces results is probably unimportant – in my opinion the most likely idea is that if you’re focused on a goal, you’ll notice connections, clues or opportunities that would normally pass you by. The focus on the goal, the attitude that you can achieve something great changes the way you look at every aspect of your day. I know that when I believe I can succeed, I seem to keep finding ways to actually make it happen.

It might seem that it’s magic, writing down what you want 15 times a day and having coincidences show up that lead you to your goal. But, perhaps, the magic is just in you – seeing farther and deeper than you normally would is the magic. Having a goal changes you. Having the attitude that you can achieve your goal changes you so you can see the path more clearly.

As Henry Ford said, “Whether you think you can, or think you can’t, you’re right.”

I guess it wasn’t just college papers Creepy Joe plagiarized . . .

We’ve all been around negative people. I’ve had to work with them. I’ve had to manage them, and once I even had to work for one – he was my first supervisor after I graduated college. There was nothing that was good that ever happened to or around him. He’d had a leg injury and was now stuck at a desk job when he really, really hated desk jobs. Enter: happy, enthusiastic, wisecracking, young college graduate (still with hair at that time). I think he wanted to tie me up in a burlap sack weighted down with stones and toss me in the pond behind the office. Frankly, I can see why.

This clip is super short, and from the Clint Eastwood movie Kelly’s Heroes. Haven’t seen Kelly’s Heroes? You have your weekend assignment – it’s from back when movies were fun and not remakes.

Negative People:

Exhaust me.
Don’t accomplish much.
Take the last cup of coffee without making more.
Tend to make themselves a victim of whatever happened to them.
Infect the entire team with negativity and sometimes herpes.
Seem to get energy from talking about their pain and how the world is unfair to them.
Shoot down bad ideas. And good ideas. Any ideas, really.
Find a dark cloud in every silver lining.

I had a professor in college who had one piece of advice for me: “Keep smiling, John.” I took his advice. For most of my life, I’ve kept smiling. Even on bad days at work, I’ve kept a good attitude because most of the time, circumstances don’t care if you’re mad at them. The circumstances continue to exist just the same.

Not everyone agrees with me. On one particular job I actually received feedback that I was too cheerful. I guess being a mortician isn’t a job for everyone.

Okay, I’ve never worked as a mortician, but one of my bosses really did tell me I was too cheerful. But if I could be a mortician that hired Terminators®? I wouldn’t call that a dead-end job.

In most things in life I expect good outcomes, and generally I get them. That’s not unique to me. Throughout the history of humanity most times and most days have been good. Has there been war as long as we can look back into history? Yes. We’ve been fighting each other even before we were fully human. I imagine, though, we’ve been telling each other fart jokes for just as long. The human race has watched sunsets over the Arctic, the Serengeti, and the Atlantic and had pretty good days. An iPhone® isn’t required, but without an endless stream of Disney® live-action remakes, is life really worth living?

Nah, I like making them.

I won’t say that on my worst day there was a bright spot. The worst day of my life just sucked from 2pm until I finally fell asleep in bed. Honestly, it wasn’t much better the next day, but there were a few bright spots showed up. And more the next. And every day since then has been better than that day.

I mentioned magic above, and magic also happens on my worst days. Every one of my very bad days was the start of the time when my life started to get better, and it seemed the worse it was, the better it would eventually be. My best times have come from my worst times. One example was my divorce. The reality is that no matter how bad the marriage was, divorce is difficult. But as difficult as it was, it was the start of the next phase in my life, my marriage to The Mrs.

The longer, and the deeper the dark night of the soul, the bigger the positive that’s eventually come out of it for me.

If I ever were to get involved with the funeral industry, I’d tie the shoelaces of the deceased together in the coffin. That way if we ever had a zombie apocalypse, it would be hilarious. See, I even made zombies cheerful.

I spend time thinking about the future, and about dark possibilities not so much because I’m a gloomy guy sitting in the basement – but because it’s fun. However, in thinking about those possibilities I am prepared, at least a little more, for the uncertainty of the future. I’m cheerful, but I can see reality and know that there is danger ahead.

As I read the news I see a specter of a dark foe bent on creating a world that few of us want to see, one built out of fear and control. It’s even scarier because that foe wants you and I to think that it’s winning, so we will give up and it can win by default. Don’t. As long as people long for freedom, as long as we have each other and a dream of a better day where mankind keeps reaching for the stars, we have light. But in this time of seeming darkness, even a small light burns brightly.

If I were to give advice this Friday it’s this: be of good cheer. Be a spark in the darkness to help others. Understand that, until the last moment of your life, you have the ability to change the world for the better, to help create that better future for all of us.

Or, failing that, there’s always Ruffles®, Netflix©, beer and the couch.

The Roman Emperor, The Navy SEAL, Elizabeth Warren, and Your Future

“You were last seen hiking up Mount Ego.” – Frasier

Jimmy Page could NOT believe it when he found out that Marcus Aurelius would be available as a lead singer.

I know what you’re saying, “John Wilder, how can you be so freakin’ funny three times a week every Monday, Wednesday and Friday?” The answer is simple – my goal to be the funniest person on the Internet, with the exception of those anchors on CNN®. I mean, how do they keep a straight face?

That goal requires work. Really. Oh, sure, “work” includes researching things I’m interested in anyway and (sometimes) drinking a glass of wine or two while I work on punchlines. But I won’t hit publish or stop writing until it’s done. And done means I’m happy as a twit in a toga with a toupee. Speaking of noble noggins in nighties, Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (notice that smooth transition?) said:

Don’t let your reflection on the whole sweep of life crush you. Don’t fill your mind with all the bad things that still might happen. Stay focused on the present situation and ask yourself whey it’s so unbearable and can’t be survived.

Whenever I quote him, I remind everyone that Marcus Aurelius was the Emperor of Rome while it was still at the height of its power. This man had the freedom to make decisions on the literal life and death of citizens and non-citizens alike. He was, no joking, the most powerful man in the world.

What’s the fun of telling the Stormtroopers© that “These aren’t the droids® you’re looking for,” when the Stormtroopers™ work for you? It’s like they were thinking, “Okay, play along, the Emperor is doing cosplay again.”

But despite this worldly power, Marcus took the time to write down his personal philosophy. It wasn’t to pass down to posterity, it was for him. His book is called Meditations because these were the things he meditated about on a daily basis. These were the problems and doubts and issues he dealt with in his everyday life.

You can tell this was the first page of Meditations – later on Marcus used glitter pens and stickers. The historians were so happy when the found the key to the little lock on the diary.

When I was younger, I thought that the solution to my problems existed outside of me. I thought that if I could get more power, I could be happy. If you think being more powerful will automatically ease all of your worries and concerns, Marcus Aurelius is proof that power won’t help you in that way.

Sure, Marcus didn’t have to worry about making a mortgage payment or about not getting a tasty chicken sandwich because he showed up at Chick-fil-a® and forgot they were closed on Sundays, but the passage above shows that the decisions of running an empire and planning military campaigns were still overwhelming and stressful. While outwardly Marcus had to be stoic in the sense of a strong Roman emperor, in his book he could share the truth about his worries with himself.

Let’s look at another quote, this one by Navy SEAL Jocko Willink (LINK):

This is what I want you to be afraid of: waking up in six days or six weeks or six years or sixty years and being no closer to your goal . . . . GET UP. AND. GO.

At first glance, these two quotes might seem separated. They certainly are separated in time and pace, not to mention power. Marcus wrote about the present and living through the moment. He spoke of action in the small moment of “now” to allow him to get back to being able to deal with the big picture.

Jocko writes about failing in that future to spur action in today’s small moment of “now.”

Or maybe he identifies as a SEAL?

Two men, writing about the same thing centuries apart, come to the same conclusion through different methods on escaping the paralysis of fear in day-to-day life: action is vital for you to be the best you. You can’t dwell on what might happen if you make a bad decision – but you have to be afraid of the person you’ll be if you don’t take action, or, worse yet, don’t have a goal.

Why don’t we take action? Probably the number one reason is our egos. Egos are fragile things, and ego in many ways is our enemy. Aurelius wrote about getting through the moment, not being crushed by the overwhelming vastness of life. That’s his ego not wanting to be wrong.

I thought we’d have more of moved off to Canada by now?

Willink writes about wasting that future life. That’s his ego avoiding action today because it might fail. Ego wants to, above all things, not fail. Taking yourself into a future where you have failed by not trying is a sneaky way of using your ego to help you improve. Taken to extreme, it’ll make you single-minded. The biggest danger is that you achieve your goal and don’t have another one.

Don’t let your ego drive your life. Most people really don’t care about you, and that’s a good thing.

They don’t remember that your pants split during that presentation in college and you weren’t wearing underwear. At least I hope they still don’t remember that.
They barely remember when you made a fool out of yourself that one time at the party by walking into that glass front door, making you look like a 200 pound sparrow who left a face imprint, complete with Hot Mustard Sauce® that you were dipping Chicken McNuggets© in.
No one remembers that you time travelled into the past and that your high-school age mom tried to put the moves on you after you hit Biff Tannen.

Those that do care about you . . . don’t care about those oddly specific things I listed above. They care about you and want you to feel better. After you do something embarrassing, an inner voice beats you up. That’s your ego. Your ego is insulting you so you don’t embarrass it again. And, I assure you, if anyone said to you the things you tell yourself when you’re feeling guilty or embarrassed and looking in a mirror, you’d cut them out of your life in a minute. Unfortunately, when I tried to cut my ego out, my family stopped me because the electric drill I used couldn’t find it. The ego is kept behind the drywall of your closet, right?

I mean, that’s where the voices come from.

And his shoes didn’t match his purse!

Ask yourself: how does fear of embarrassment or fear of failure drive your behavior? How many things have you avoided because of fear? How many great things did you miss out on because you weren’t willing to take the risk?

Be the best you. Start today. And ignore or make your own use of that inner voice that your ego uses to punish you.

Risk, Vladimir Putin on a Cat, and Death by Playground

â€œI respect what you said, but remember that these men have lands and castles. Â It’s much toÂ risk.â€ – Braveheart

I would say I want a cat I can ride, I’d just settle for one that wears sunglasses and doesnâ€™t buck me off after explosions.

When The Boy was tiny, he was afraid of slides.Â Any slide.Â Short ones.Â Long ones.Â Plastic ones.Â Metal ones.Â Forget tall ones.Â I would stand at the bottom of the slide, waiting for him to slide down.Â Often there was crying and yelling from behind a tear and snot-covered face.Â And The Boy was even worse.Â But there was no real reason for him to have any fear â€“ I was there and the playground equipment met every Federal standard, even the regulations that made sure that the swings were safe for handicapable lesbian migratory waterfowl of size.

Playground equipment was more dangerous back before the dawn of recorded history, when I was in kindergarten.Â At my school, our playground equipment included a merry-go-round that was missing part of the wooden deck (this is true).Â The missing deck part was close to the center, and a kindergartener could stand in there, and could run and push the merry-go-round a LOT faster.Â The downside was if any of us had fallen under the merry-go-round while pushing it up to speed?Â At that point the merry-go-round would become a quite efficient kindergartner decapitation machine.Â Thankfully, we had already gnawed all the lead and asbestos off of the handles so it was safer for the next batch of kids, and the headless zombies were already our mascot at good old Sleepy Hallow Elementary, so a decapitated kid would have been just displaying a very large degree of loyalty.

Donâ€™t fault a kid for being true to his school.

Our school nurse was excellent at re-attaching spines.Â Lots of practice.

We also played with, I kid you not, the dry ice they used for packing the food they shipped to the school.Â The Lunch LadiesÂ® tossed it on the ground behind the kitchen after they unpacked the peas that had DONE NO WRONG before they turned them into the most ghastly smelling split pea soup.Â They had to stop making that soup after the United StatesÂ© ratified the Geneva Conventionâ„¢ against chemical weapons.

Anyway, we had dry ice.Â Let me write that a bit more specifically:

WE WERE KINDERGARTNERS WITH LIMITED SUPERVISION IN POSSESSION OF DRY ICE!!!!!!!!!!!!

Naturally we competed to see who could hold the dry ice in our hands the longest.Â Dry ice is frozen carbon dioxide, and has a temperature of -109.3 F (which really is -78.5 C).Â The unsurprising answer to â€œHow long can a kindergartner hold dry ice in their hand?â€ is: â€œNot very long.â€

We did much better holding it against each otherâ€™s arms, I liked to hold it until the skin of my classmates turned white.Â To a kindergartner, the pain of other people doesnâ€™t exist, their brain isnâ€™t developed enough for empathy.Â Or maybe I was just a sociopath.Â I will admit that I enjoyed it when the other kindergartners made funny noises.

Okay, Iâ€™m probably a sociopath.

Oh, and I forgot about the high jump pits.Â Weâ€™d crawl between the top foam block and the bottom foam block and then the other kids would jump on the blocks.Â When you have a dozen kindergartners on a foam high jump pit, it pretty effectively blocks out the light in the second layer.Â As well as the air.Â The last time I crawled between them I recall waking up with stars in my eyes after the bell rang and all of the other kids had gone inside.Â Who says near suffocation canâ€™t be a fond memory?

Playground equipment had evolved to the point when The Boy was a young Wildlingâ„¢ the only way to actually hurt yourself on the equipment would be to take a hot glue gun and affix razor blades to the slide, and my restraining order prevents me from being near hot glue, so thatâ€™s right out.Â A good slide designed in the last 20 years will be scary, but yet cozier than a motherâ€™s womb.Â Word is that a Federal Commission is looking to redesign wombs to meet current safety standards, including encasing the fetus in breathable bubble wrap and removing the word â€œmotherâ€ from association with the word â€œwombâ€ because itâ€™s something-ist (I lost my scorecard) to assume that only women can have wombs.

But returning to the original thought – it was hard to get The Boy to take risks as a kid â€“ I remember how he cried the first time I made him rappel out of a helicopter.Â What a baby!Â Youâ€™d think that it was child abuse making a three year old do that!

Isnâ€™t fear the way to overcome fear?

I kid.Â But The Boy really did plug a speaker directly into a power outlet.Â That made a hell of a noise and tossed out some sparks.Â And was far more dangerous than the plastic four-foot high slide at the park.Â This led me to an observation about The Boy.Â What he thought was safe, was risky.Â What he thought was risky, was safe.

And itâ€™s not just kids that judge risk poorly, adults can suck at it, too.Â Pop Wilder got more afraid of ordinary things as he got older â€“ for example, he became unwilling to even attempt to adjust anything electronic â€“ so he left his lights on continually.Â Again, I kid.Â But if it was more complicated than an on/off switch?Â Nope.Â Not his thing.

He also cut off many life choices due to this fear.Â When everyone with three HTML programmers and a business plan was scheduling Hall and OatesÂ® to do a business kick-off concert and was an instant Internet millionaire back in 1999, Pop was complaining about how much his medicine cost.Â I got online (via a 56k modem) and found that his prescriptions could be had for about 10% of what he was paying.Â Just by changing to GonnaGoBrokeSoonRX.com, we could save him about $1000 a month.

A month.

He wouldnâ€™t do it.Â â€œWell, it might get warm.Â One of these medicines needs to stay cold, and only my pharmacy has the Wee Cuckold Striptease ElvesÂ© that keep it at the right temperature.â€Â So he paid $1000 a month more than he needed to.Â I guess he owed something to the Elves.Â Stupid Elves.

Itâ€™s natural to not want to risk it all.Â Unless youâ€™ve been drinking.

As Iâ€™ve observed you humans my fellow humans for the past few decades, Iâ€™ve discovered that Risk is poorly understood.Â Pop Wilder had fallen victim to what Iâ€™m now calling Wilderâ€™s Rule of Risk: Â What he thought was safe, was risky.Â What he thought was risky, was safe.Â He ended up outliving his savings due to decisions that prioritized â€œsafetyâ€ over even minimal risks.Â He built barriers to action over unreasonable and unlikely fears.

Eyepatches.Â Iâ€™ve always wanted one, or a glass eye that has a snow-globe inside.Â Sadly?Â Two good eyes.

I read the above passages to The Mrs. and she (rightly) noted that the risks Iâ€™ve taken in my life have been measured.Â Iâ€™ve never taken all of my money and put it all on red.Â The career choices Iâ€™ve made have been (generally) ones that led to more money and more security â€“ theyâ€™ve been bets of winning versus winning more.Â And when the stock market goes down?Â I lose very little of my net worth.Â Yay!Â But if the stock market doubles, my wealth doesnâ€™t double.Â Iâ€™m giving up some of the upside in return for the safe.

But did I mention there were really good benefits?

But what am I missing?Â Iâ€™ve won enough with the bets Iâ€™ve made that Iâ€™m playing life with house money now.Â The question is, what if Iâ€™d dreamt bigger?Â What if the subs you had delivered were Wilder JohnsÂ©?Â Or Buffalo Wilder Wingsâ„¢?Â Yeah.Â I do have a list of great ideas that Iâ€™ve had but never acted on.Â Primarily because Iâ€™ve followed a path that led to me being pretty comfortable.Â But is that always really safe?Â Probably not, especially when you look at the big picture, and I recognize that.

Oddly, we often donâ€™t realize on a day-to-day basis that some things in life arenâ€™t risks, theyâ€™re certainties:

You will Did that rip the Band-AidÂ© off?Â Oh, wait, I forgot that youâ€™re the immortal one.
Taxes will go up.
Freedoms will disappear. They might come back.Â You might have something to do with that.
Your money will be worth less. Hopefully not worthless in your life.Â But in the long run?
Systems you donâ€™t expect to collapse, will. Like MedicareÂ®, or PringlesÂ©.Â Imagine life without Pringlesâ„¢!
If I described the year 2049 to you in detail, it wonâ€™t be like you think, unless you can imagine life without noses. Noses are so 2022.

So, weâ€™re all going to die!Â Letâ€™s give up.

Never!Â But understand other certainties that may or may not happen in your lifetime.Â Theyâ€™re certain, but their timing isnâ€™t:

The dollar will collapse.
We will run out of economically viable/thermodynamically viable oil. Weâ€™ll never run out of oil, whatâ€™s left will just be too hard or too expensive in dollar or energy terms to harvest.
Star WarsÂ® movies might be good again.
Global WarmingÂ© wonâ€™t doom humanity. Not even close.Â It might flood New York, but probably not in my lifetime, if ever.Â Darn it.
An asteroid will hit George Clooney. A small one.Â (Small asteroid, not a small George Clooney.)

Steinâ€™s Law says:Â If something canâ€™t go on forever, it wonâ€™t.Â Wilderâ€™s Corollary: Â But it might go on so long you canâ€™t make a buck off of it failing.

Seriously, this may be from Risky BusinessÂ®, but Tomâ€™s still four foot three and nearly old enough for Social SecurityÂ©.Â Oh, and he drinks only vegan free range chicken juice.

Life is like Tom Cruise.Â Itâ€™s short.Â Life is also like having sex with a Kardashian.Â Hairy and risky.Â But you have a choice.Â You can be afraid and live in fear.Â You can also live gallantly, and die nobly.

We want to live with certainty.Â We want to, especially when weâ€™re young, and when we are old, avoid risk.Â But we canâ€™t.Â The absence of risk is the absence of life.Â The thrill of the first kiss, the thrill of winning when youâ€™ve bet it all on red, those are life.Â Life is struggle.Â Life is fighting.Â Life is also all about risk.

Step one of living gallantly and nobly?Â Donâ€™t be afraid of risks that arenâ€™t real.

Step two?Â Donâ€™t spend too long in the high jump pit.

Retirement, Bikinis, Churchill, Blake, and Luck

“As a matter of fact, you can hardly call me a fortune hunter. Because when I first proposed to Mrs. Claypool, I thought she only had seven million. But the extra millions never interfered with my feelings for her.” – A Night at the Opera

Update: I just saw David Lee Roth in a rowboat . . . .

Pop Wilder was generally a cautious man. Adopting me was an example – one of the few – of when he stared Caution straight in the eye and said, “I would like to ruin any chance of sleeping well until he’s 18.” He likewise glanced at Fortuna and said, “I really don’t need those thousands of dollars that I’ll have to spend fixing the house. And the television. And the car. And the other car. And the other car.”

Pop really was restrained in his spending. While we never wanted for anything in particular, I certainly wasn’t spoiled, especially by today’s standards. The first vehicle I got to drive around was a pickup that had a rubber mat covering steel a steel floor, vinyl bench seats, AM radio, no air conditioning, and was a decade old. It also had an “engine” that was perhaps slightly weaker than an Ebola patient after a marathon.

Pop kept his cars for a decade or more. He always bought cars with cash – and never paid interest on anything that I know of, ever, even our house. The house was built it in stages over the course of years (by a local contractor crew of farmers who built houses while the crops were growing) until it was exactly the way that he and Ma Wilder wanted it. He owned it outright.

He retired while I was still in school, not long after I got a scholarship. Those things might have been related – after I got the scholarship I think he was pleased to hang up his hat and sit on the porch, and I was the last risk he needed to manage before he could do that. Pop had been working at the same place since he was five, with the exception of a certain all-expenses-paid trip that the government provided him in Europe. He got to see places like London, Normandy, and even the Rhine.

Pop says he saw him. But I’ve never seen any pictures of Pop with Winston Churchill . . . .

Pop’s life was built on the idea of financial stability. That would make sense – he’d seen lots of people do finances poorly. He’d been a small-town farm banker, back when there were such things. Banks back then didn’t have branches, they had roots: the lessons learned from the Depression had led regulators to build resilience in the system by only allowing banks to serve a limited area. A big bank with branches all across the state or even across a county was seen as an unacceptable financial risk and a concentration of power so large that it would invite corruption. I’m glad that we have figured out how to avoid systemic financial risk and that our politicians are now beyond corruption.

Oh, wait, this isn’t the cover for the remake of Dumb and Dumber?

Thus, if you wanted to deal with a banker, you’d drive into town from your farm and go talk to Pop. Pop wouldn’t loan you money if you couldn’t repay it. When he retired, he felt that he had his risks covered. The same year I met The Mrs., Pop Wilder headed off to Europe to revisit the location where he saw a certain Mr. Churchill taking a stroll on a French beach.

I can’t speak to the financial condition of The Mrs.’ family in as much detail. But at the time I met her, her dad had to sell several head of cattle (there weren’t all that many to begin with) to cover a debt from his wife’s business. He was retired, but it was obvious that they were counting on Social Security to cover the bulk of their retirement costs, especially after my mother-in-law shut down her small business and entered semi-retirement herself.

Who does it look like would have the most trouble-free retirement?

Sure, we’d all say Pop Wilder. But in the end, my in-laws have had the better run. What happened to my in-laws was a temporary setback. Within two years, several oil and gas companies began knocking on their door of their farmhouse. Soon enough, they’d sold a lease.

The oil company drilled. Within a few years, my in-laws had their old house (it was held together, The Mrs. said, by the termites and mice holding hands very tightly so it didn’t collapse) demolished. They replaced the house with a new one, and filled in the pit where the basement of their old farm house had been.

My in-laws had been frugal all of their lives, but at this point, retired and on Medicare, they were doing beyond okay – they were thriving. Were they “buying a brand-new Ferrari®” okay? No. But there’s nothing like the peace of mind that having a producing oil well on the property creates. And, yes, production has gone down, so it’s not as much money. But it’s still been a big help.

And whatever happened to the ever-planning Pop Wilder?

No, really, voters, I have eyes only for you.

Pop Wilder spent it all. Slowly, and not at all frivolously, outside of the trip to Europe. Pop had gotten to the point where he was just a little bit under water each month. Not by much – my brother (also named John Wilder) and I could easily help him out by kicking in $200 each month. And that was a small price to pay for all of the cars I’d wrecked.

When Pop passed on, I think he was down to $100 in his account.

William Blake died in 1827, and was far from a conventional thinker. I’d spend more time studying his writing, but from experience I’ve found that when you pick up the book of an esoteric author that died 200 years ago, you miss a lot of what they’re talking about without a great deal of study. I bought a book about the Knights Templar back in 1999, and after reading about eight other books I was able to pick that first book up and follow it.

There’s a lot that they don’t teach you at school.

Anyway, back to Blake. There is one quote from Blake that’s not unconventional and you won’t have to study for three years to figure out: “Life can only be lived forward, but understood in reverse.”

I’ve always loved that quote, and the longer I live, the more that quote makes sense: most of the time as you go through life you can’t really understand the reasons for what’s happening to you. And I wonder what lessons Pop Wilder learned – was it the ability to let go and let fate guide him while he had friendly hands to help? Maybe.

That was a tough final – we had to construct our own universes – from scratch!

And for my in-laws – was the lesson that a life frugally lived can be paid off with comfort in the end? Again, maybe.

I can’t be certain. Those lessons were theirs, not mine.

The Romans had a goddess, Fortuna, who represented luck – both good and bad. This particular goddess had a long life in Rome, she showed up around 600 B.C. and was hanging around in the Medieval days when St. Augustine wrote (not approvingly) about her work as a goddess in his 5^th Century book, City of God. Perhaps the version of Fortuna that inspired Blake was from St. Boethius who reflected in his 6^th Century book the Consolation of Philosophy that (from Wikipedia) “the apparently random and often ruinous turns of Fortune’s Wheel are in fact both inevitable and providential, that even the most coincidental events are parts of God’s hidden plan which one should not resist or try to change.”

That sounds more like Blake.

Is it me, or has Fortuna been lifting?

As for me, by observing this the one thing I know is that the future is uncertain, and as I get closer (not there, yet) to retirement, I begin to understand that, while I can put together spreadsheet after spreadsheet, I certainly cannot control Fortuna. There are too many possibilities in the future that are simply beyond the ability of anyone to control.

Will:

there be inflation?
they strike oil under my house causing Granny, Jethro, The Mrs. and I to move to Beverly Hills? We thought about it, but live next door to a banker? I hear they bring down property values.
civilizational decay make it so I can’t get a decent chili dog?
I live to be 190? I hope not.
government have to change the deal as Medicare eats all of the Federal budget? Nearly certain.

And what will I do in the face of such uncertainty? In the immortal words of David Lee Roth . . . “I’ll just roll myself up in a big ball . . . and fly.”

Unless, of course, my lessons revolve around being Pugsley’s house-television-car repair service.

Procrastination and Learning How to Finish Thi

“He’s finishing his senior thesis. Pigman is trying to prove the Caine-Hackman theory. No matter what time it is, 24 hours a day, you can find a Michael Caine or Gene Hackman movie playing on TV.” – PCU

My solution when I hit a writer’s block on my thesis was to just do something else for three years.

The Mrs. and I both have master’s degrees, but the way that we went about getting them was different for each of us. I finished my master’s before she and I met. The Mrs. finished hers while preggers with The Boy after we’d been married a few years. When The Mrs. went to grad school, she wrote, finished, and defended her thesis (A Comparative Study in Restraint and Self-Control: How I Avoid Strangling John Wilder) before she was even finished with her coursework. I was astonished. Before we had met, I had finished my master’s degree. But mine went something like this:

Year one – do courses.
Year two – do courses. Finish courses.
Year three – get a job.
Year four – write, finish, defend thesis.

Yeah. The stupid way to do it.

But getting a master’s degree was an easy decision. Both of us had our grad school tuition and a salary paid for by being graduate assistants. The education was free, heck, being a graduate assistant paid more than most adjunct professors make today.

What, exactly does a graduate assistant do? One day my friends and I (when we were undergraduates) were drinking and watching a documentary of a scientist who was determining how fish swim. Yes, your tax dollars paid for this study. Anyway, the fish was placed in a tank with a grid, and a high speed camera was suspended over the tank. But they put the fish in the tank and it . . . didn’t swim.

Solution? They put an electrode up the fish’s butt and shocked it to make it swim on command. I swear I’m not making this up. My friends and l laughed – who, exactly had the job of inserting the electrode? Our conclusion: graduate assistants. Eventually we concocted scenarios where we would apply for funding and study the way that graduate assistants exited swimming pools filled with alligators when dropped in. The funding would include all the important aspects of science – gin, a swimming pool, and appropriate patio furniture. Oh, and graduate assistants.

The Mrs.’ degree involved no fishes, electrodes, alligators or even liquor (she was preggers) – in fact she taught freshmen undergraduates, which might be even less fun than the whole “inserting an electrode up a fish butt thing.” But in my case I got a job before finishing my thesis. As a result, I ended up having to keep registering part time for two more years until my thesis (Thermodynamic and Structural Analysis of PEZ®-Based Building Components For Use in Containing a Robotic Elvis®) was complete. My employer didn’t really care when or even if I finished my master’s, so it was all on me.

Thanks to 173dVietVet for rare historical pictures of Robot Elvis after he broke free from the PEZ® containment structure.

So I procrastinated in finishing my thesis – I had a day job, money was coming in, and nobody cared. Except me. Eventually I just started writing the thesis one late night. After finally completing it, defending it, and having my degree awarded, I ended up burning every paper, note, copy, and floppy disc associated with the thesis. It felt good. Really good. I put the pages on the fire one at a time.

But why did burning the thesis feel so good? I was done. Complete. Finished. And I had done it only for me. And it was a good way to get rid of the evidence.

I may have made some mistakes in my thesis. Minor ones.

This is the same reason it feels good to finish my taxes every year on April 14^th: I am ending my procrastination with success even though I can’t just burn it when I’m done. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who procrastinates on doing their taxes, or even on tasks that are much easier. I’m not late doing most things (like my thesis), I’m on time. Just on time.

So why do we do it? By “we” I mean the 20% of people who procrastinate. As near as I can tell, there are several answers.

One person I worked with, Willie, procrastinated at work because he was bored. He is one of the most intelligent and creative people I’ve ever known, and as such, generally lived his own life on his own terms – one time he experimented with not wearing shoes around the office.

That idea went about as well as you might expect.

While we were co-workers I’d noticed a pattern with Willie. He’d spend time at work fairly frivolously, goofing around within the limits of what was acceptable. Breaking his computer by deleting files and fixing it, that sort of thing – it looks like you’re working even when you’re just playing.

Then out of the blue, he’d work nearly nonstop at a furious pace on real, actual work.

John Wilder: “Why do you do that, Willie?”

“I guess I’m bored. I like to wait until I don’t think I’ll have enough time to get the work done before the deadline, and then I’ll do it all at once.” Willie was seeking the thrill of the deadline, and the challenge of performing the work. Wasn’t the work itself challenging? No, not for Willie.

My thesis advisor was encouraging.

Willie’s strategy has merit. I say this because I’ve done it, too. I also noticed a pattern: 80% of the work I was assigned (Pareto and the 80/20 Rule Explain Wealth) wasn’t important, and would get cancelled prior to the deadline. Willie noticed this, too. Most things our bosses wanted us to do (in a professional role) just aren’t important and if we didn’t do them, no one cares because the work wasn’t important. I’ve generally found that the higher up in the organization that the work originated, the less important the work is.

To compound the problem, most middle managers have no idea which things are important, or even why something is important. Often it’s a case where the CEO wants coffee and the middle managers begin a strategy to buy South America. Thankfully the CEO didn’t ask for Belgian waffles – they’ve been invaded enough in the last 100 years and I think the Germans already have it reserved for the next time they decide to invade France.

Procrastination in this case above produces two good things:

Time to Goof Around
Working Only on Things That Matter

My thesis clearly doesn’t fall into this case. I know that procrastination pays off now while work on my thesis pays off later, but the net goofing around in my life is the same so that doesn’t help me – it just makes life more painful for future John. And the thesis clearly matters if I want to get my master’s degree.

What else could cause the procrastination? Some people avoid doing things because they fear failure. Some avoid it because they fear success. I’m not immune to this – as this blog got some big hits one day last year after a post was featured on The Woodpile Report (it’s here), I know that I felt a slight bit of apprehension. “Crap. People are actually reading this now. That’s responsibility.” But my thesis didn’t fall into that category, either. I wasn’t going to be more or less successful. Not one of my employers has cared since I got it. Not a single employer.

It was for me.

I did get tired of people asking me about my thesis. Maybe I was a little touchy.

Other people just think too hard about the plan of action – there’s just too much data. I have been in job situations where there’s so very much work to do that I’ve felt overwhelmed. And when you feel overwhelmed, sometimes you just stare blankly at the desk while the 200 items you have to do today roam around in your mind like Germans in Belgium. What’s always helped me in those moments was to write a list and start doing something. Anything. Generally in an hour or less it’s sorted out. In rare occasions it’s 45 straight 12-hour days. But forceful action in a state of confusion, even if it’s not the right action, is better than inaction.

Sometimes there’s too much information – there are too many factors and the logic portion of the brain is overloaded and it’s hard to make a decision. The Boy is having that problem now. He’s narrowed his college choices down to two. If I were to make an analogy, it would be like having the opportunity to have a nearly free red Camry® or a nearly free blue Camry™. Yes, they’re both the same car. But to The Boy it’s the biggest decision he’s yet made. Or, the biggest decision he’s going to make this year, whenever he gets around to it – which had better be in the next two weeks.

My thesis didn’t fit in those categories, either. I knew (more or less) exactly what I needed to do.

Maybe in hindsight my thesis wasn’t that great.

But I’ve had zero negative health consequences from (not yet) doing my taxes. And none of the explanations above are why I haven’t yet done my taxes, or I procrastinated in doing my thesis. The answer is far simpler.

I’m lazy.

But I have the patience to wait for that grant money for the liquor, alligators, pool, patio furniture and graduate assistants. That would be a thesis I could be proud of!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Entropy – now maintenance free!

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

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

Why isn’t the Earth a closed system?

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

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

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

But we know these things for certain. Without energy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The struggle is the goal.

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

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

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

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

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

You have two choices.

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

All the cool kids are doing it.

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

Dune, Moods, Wrestling, and a Way of Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boo hoo.

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

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

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

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

Why do you need discipline?

Kevin Bacon understands.

Because motivated is a mood.

But disciplined is a way of life.

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

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

Now this is a tough day at the office.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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