Inspiration, Attitude, and Funeral Jokes

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

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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

“I respect what you said, but remember that these men have lands and castles.  It’s much to risk.” – Braveheart

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

When The Boy was tiny, he was afraid of slides.  Any slide.  Short ones.  Long ones.  Plastic ones.  Metal ones.  Forget tall ones.  I would stand at the bottom of the slide, waiting for him to slide down.  Often there was crying and yelling from behind a tear and snot-covered face.  And The Boy was even worse.  But there was no real reason for him to have any fear – 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.  At my school, our playground equipment included a merry-go-round that was missing part of the wooden deck (this is true).  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.  The downside was if any of us had fallen under the merry-go-round while pushing it up to speed?  At that point the merry-go-round would become a quite efficient kindergartner decapitation machine.  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.

Don’t fault a kid for being true to his school.

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Our school nurse was excellent at re-attaching spines.  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.  The Lunch Ladies® 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.  They had to stop making that soup after the United States© ratified the Geneva Convention™ against chemical weapons.

Anyway, we had dry ice.  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.  Dry ice is frozen carbon dioxide, and has a temperature of -109.3 F (which really is -78.5 C).  The unsurprising answer to “How long can a kindergartner hold dry ice in their hand?” is: “Not very long.”

We did much better holding it against each other’s arms, I liked to hold it until the skin of my classmates turned white.  To a kindergartner, the pain of other people doesn’t exist, their brain isn’t developed enough for empathy.  Or maybe I was just a sociopath.  I will admit that I enjoyed it when the other kindergartners made funny noises.

Okay, I’m probably a sociopath.

Oh, and I forgot about the high jump pits.  We’d crawl between the top foam block and the bottom foam block and then the other kids would jump on the blocks.  When you have a dozen kindergartners on a foam high jump pit, it pretty effectively blocks out the light in the second layer.  As well as the air.  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.  Who says near suffocation can’t be a fond memory?

Playground equipment had evolved to the point when The Boy was a young Wildling™ 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 that’s right out.  A good slide designed in the last 20 years will be scary, but yet cozier than a mother’s womb.  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 “mother” from association with the word “womb” because it’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 – I remember how he cried the first time I made him rappel out of a helicopter.  What a baby!  You’d think that it was child abuse making a three year old do that!

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Isn’t fear the way to overcome fear?

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

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

He also cut off many life choices due to this fear.  When everyone with three HTML programmers and a business plan was scheduling Hall and Oates® 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.  I got online (via a 56k modem) and found that his prescriptions could be had for about 10% of what he was paying.  Just by changing to GonnaGoBrokeSoonRX.com, we could save him about $1000 a month.

A month.

He wouldn’t do it.  “Well, it might get warm.  One of these medicines needs to stay cold, and only my pharmacy has the Wee Cuckold Striptease Elves© that keep it at the right temperature.”  So he paid $1000 a month more than he needed to.  I guess he owed something to the Elves.  Stupid Elves.

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It’s natural to not want to risk it all.  Unless you’ve been drinking.

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

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Eyepatches.  I’ve always wanted one, or a glass eye that has a snow-globe inside.  Sadly?  Two good eyes.

I read the above passages to The Mrs. and she (rightly) noted that the risks I’ve taken in my life have been measured.  I’ve never taken all of my money and put it all on red.  The career choices I’ve made have been (generally) ones that led to more money and more security – they’ve been bets of winning versus winning more.  And when the stock market goes down?  I lose very little of my net worth.  Yay!  But if the stock market doubles, my wealth doesn’t double.  I’m giving up some of the upside in return for the safe.

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But did I mention there were really good benefits?

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

Oddly, we often don’t realize on a day-to-day basis that some things in life aren’t risks, they’re certainties:

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

So, we’re all going to die!  Let’s give up.

Never!  But understand other certainties that may or may not happen in your lifetime.  They’re certain, but their timing isn’t:

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

Stein’s Law says:  If something can’t go on forever, it won’t.  Wilder’s Corollary:  But it might go on so long you can’t make a buck off of it failing.

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Seriously, this may be from Risky Business®, but Tom’s still four foot three and nearly old enough for Social Security©.  Oh, and he drinks only vegan free range chicken juice.

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

We want to live with certainty.  We want to, especially when we’re young, and when we are old, avoid risk.  But we can’t.  The absence of risk is the absence of life.  The thrill of the first kiss, the thrill of winning when you’ve bet it all on red, those are life.  Life is struggle.  Life is fighting.  Life is also all about risk.

Step one of living gallantly and nobly?  Don’t be afraid of risks that aren’t real.

Step two?  Don’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

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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 5th Century book, City of God.   Perhaps the version of Fortuna that inspired Blake was from St. Boethius who reflected in his 6th 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.

fortuna snack

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

blankthesis

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.

roboelvis

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.

mercury

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 14th:  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.

thesismotiv

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.

thesisdare

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.

bsthesis

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

universe

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

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.

299

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?

braveheart

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.

pulp

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

cover

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

gurneymood

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.

dunecat

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.

wrestlingmood

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.

leemood

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?

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

byebye

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.

project

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.

bikini

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.

art

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 1st 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.

Resolutions, Record Clubs, Susan Anton, and Loneliness

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

firstone

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

hank2

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

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

purepower

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

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

What the heck was a record club, anyway?

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

reeltoreel

I wasn’t making that up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes.  That really happened.

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

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

  • Heart Disease
  • Stroke
  • Blogging
  • Cat Owning
  • Cancer

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

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

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

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

Or?  Get a dog.

Want Dystopia?  Because this is how you get Dystopia.

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

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John B. Calhoun.  Not C.  B.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Calhoun was known to the mice as Godzilla®.

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

“The last surviving birth . . . .”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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