Significance – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Less Is More, Plus Camping Fashion Models

“The things you own end up owning you.” – Fight Club

The world spins on its axis. That really makes my day.

I used to be a Scoutmaster®. That was in the time before Scouting™ became fully woke, attempting to appease those who only wanted to kill it. I get it, I get it, those dollars were sexy and the BSA© was a little drunk and just couldn’t say no.

Still, if the BSA™ did it for the money, it’s pretty clear what that makes them.

I digress.

I think Scouting® had been a very valuable program. I know that the scouts in the troop I was the Scoutmaster© for turned out pretty well.

The secret, as far as I could tell, was to allow the scouts to run the program. I mean, it was called “Boy Scouts™” and not “Adult Scouts©”. The program wasn’t set up for the comfort of old men with checkbooks and a La-Z-Boy© at home.

I’m an armchair psychologist. Just yesterday I diagnosed my recliner with schizophrenia.

The first thing that I did when I became Scoutmaster© was to immediately stop the sharing of food between adults and boys. I had noticed that whenever dinner depended on what the kids cooked, the adults got involved because they didn’t want to eat awful food or crap.

Not on my watch.

The boys would plan their meals, cook their food, and clean up without adult intervention. This led to more than one tragic crime against the culinary arts, but I and the other adults always ate pretty well. The big lesson for me was that if I let them alone, they’d eventually figure it out. And if they burned dinner, they could go without or move to the next day’s lunch.

No one starved, but they got better and better at preparing and cooking.

Me? I got better and better at planning.

Don’t talk to me about fashion, it’ll just go in one year and out the other.

My first BSA© camping trip out was some 20 years after my teenage backpacking days on Wilder Mountain. I read the manual, and it said “be prepared” so my first loadout camping was approximately 300 pounds of gear, most of which was entirely unused for the weekend.

After four years and the BSA© abandoning all pretense at being Morally Straight, I packed for my last campout with the troop. My loadout?

A sleeping bag, cot, tent, toothbrush, lamp, folding chair, and book. Maybe there were a few other items, like extra socks. If it had been summer I would have taken bug spray.

I don’t often have international fashion models in my house, but when I do they manifest directly out of the bathroom counter.

The difference in the amount of kit was based on two thoughts: first, I’m going to a campground for a weekend, not attempting a solo summit of K2. Second, being away from the everyday luxuries of life was the point of camping. Over the years, I had determined that I could do without almost anything for a weekend camping trip.

Almost anything. I’m quite fond of air.

That was also one of the purposes for the boys involved in the program. They needed to learn that they could plan and execute a trip, and do without televisions and cell phones and fluffy mattresses and mayonnaise and soda pop for a weekend. That was one of the more enjoyable parts of the job, really, watching kids doing without and building competence and self-determination in a world that wants to make them helpless and dependent.

Sure, watching them fail again and again was hilarious, but failure was the point. And doing without was the point. And coming from a world of plenty, the boys loved the chance to make real decisions, take action, and live with the consequences.

In our current world, I think that we have created a dystopia where whatever isn’t mandatory is prohibited, and the idea of a kid going without a Friday meal because they burned it will make people seethe with anger.

If being a 23 year old Irish swimwear model has taught me anything, it’s that catfishing is surprisingly easy online.

Going to bed with a meagre supper is a consequence of bad skill, and the next time the boys took better care of their cooking so it wasn’t carbonized. To tell the truth, the carbonized noodles looked more edible than the chicken tartare. I mean, it was tartare on the inside, but blowtorched on the outside like it had spent an afternoon in Vulcan’s forge.

I still shudder at that thought, but, hey, I didn’t have to eat it. But in the future . . . ?

It may be that we will soon enter a time where the nation as a whole becomes much poorer than it is today. Poorer means less material wealth, and fewer . . . things. To be fair, the things I need the most don’t cost all that much in the first place. Books are inexpensive, and I have about 20 feet worth of books that I have planned to read. Poorer lands will have fewer dinner courses.

Economists have told us that we are much wealthier now than we were in the 1950s or 1980s. Okay. But I certainly don’t think that the average person is happier now despite being able to communicate with virtually everyone on the planet in an instant.

I hear that the iPhone’s® battery is called Apple© Juice™.

When I grew up, when the phone rang, we ran to it so we could answer it to see who might be on the other end of the line. As phone calls were expensive then, it was rare to get someone wanting to sell me something, so almost every call was someone reaching out, not something to avoid.

In the end, what makes us better is our competence, and what weakens us is being dependent upon luxury.

Except booze. Apparently neither the BSA© nor I turn that down.

Tinder© Tramps, InstaThots®, And The Attention Sump In Your Pocket

“I’m bored! I’m bored and I’m getting eaten by mosquitos. I’m being eaten. And I’m bored as well.” – The Grand Tour

I got a free iPhone© and a free iPad® today! Pistols are magic!

I had my previous cell phone for nine years: from August of 2017 to August of 2026. That’s a good run. I bought a fairly nice one back in the day, and took good care of it.

I lie. Somehow the screen cracked in November, 2020, so I had to make sure it stayed dry. The old phone did its duty. I would still be using it, but it’s full, and there are a number of faults going on that make me think that it is time.

On the advice of Pugsley, I swapped over from the Mao People’s Phone© (Android™) to the Fascist Fisher-Price™ phone (Apple©). I know, it sounds nuts.

What a difference 10 years has made in technology! Steve Jobs once said that he wanted the iPhone© to feel so sexy that people would be tempted to lick it. This 17^th version is a tightly integrated piece of technology. I mean, I haven’t licked it, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not WiFi-curious as to what licking it would feel like.

I used to live on Mars®, but decided that was way too much chocolate.

Civilization has been on a downward slide since, oh, whenever they started welfare and started encouraging poor stupid people to make more poor stupid people by paying them to be poor and stupid. Incentives matter. Welfare was bad, but the iPhone© really took societal collapse from “Hiroshima” to “full Tsar Bomba”. Never go full Tsar Bomba.

The iPhone© is the problem. It allowed interaction on a scale never before seen, and was the platform that empowered Tinder© tramps to seek out Chad to be used for a night and InstaThots® to feed their narcissism. That was bad enough, but it also became the attention sump, turning every waking moment into a distraction.

Distraction and dopamine hits are what the iPhone® was built to deliver. I’ve only had mine a week, but a friend indicates that it is also an amazing device for having Apple® to sink their fangs into my credit card and suck as hard as I’ll let them. They monetize everything.

Like?

Location. How fast I drive. The number of steps I take in a day (not enough) and how steady my gait is (very).

Someone stole all the fruit from my farm in Georgia, that leaves me peachless.

The last two are maybe going to be a net benefit for me, as I can certainly see myself always wanting to be above average, so soon enough I’ll be walking 100,000 steps a day. Well, me and Jason Arday.

Too soon?

The phone is designed to distract, designed to turn every bit of life into a consumption event. With a dizzying array of apps pre-built in, it’s almost intoxicating flipping through the pages of things I could be doing right this second instead of . . . wait, why did I pick the phone up in the first place? Oh, yeah, got distracted. Oh, a notification! The Mrs. let the dogs out!

How does Jeff Foxworthy kill werewolves? With a silver mullet.

The first time I went to Las Vegas the sounds and sights were overwhelming after a few hours. I think that’s the point, but that was also in a world mainly free of the Internet back in 1997.

It may seem like a super-power, but it is a pretty useless superpower, like having the ability to retract my fingernails or hair back into my body.

What is nice, though, is that it tracks and graphs which apps I’m using and when I’m using them, and the option to tell the phone to remind me, “Wilder, time to shut this damn thing down and go to bed”.

That has actually been a positive for me. I shut down the distraction device, pick up a book, and read. I’d already gotten through a novel or non-fiction book every other week since the start of the year (last two: C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, Sweterlitsch’s The Gone World, current: Hawkins’ The Library at Mount Char), but the other alternative is to be bored.

I read a biography of JFK. The end was mind blowing.

I avoid brooding and regret since they are a horrible ways to program yourself to think, and a trap that should be avoided.

Besides, boredom is useful.

Boredom is that innate spark in humans, that makes us feel uncomfortable in sitting in a warm, dark room, well fed, with low effort. Boredom pushes us to create, to learn, to invent. The first person to figure out a bow-drill or decided that stacking rocks in a pyramid shape might be cool or that being the first guy to make it to the South Pole was a good thing.

Boredom is also why some animals die or refuse to mate in captivity. Our full-on stimulation world might be part of the reason that mating seems to be no longer as important to many of the young in 2026.

HR was upset with my urine sample. Apparently they only want them when they request them.

People aren’t meant to be continually distracted. We are supposed to be bored sometimes because for at least tens of thousands of years that was our default programming. Boredom forces us to change.

A society based on waiting for someone else to distract us is madness. Like licking an iPhone©.

Yay! More microplastics in my testicles! That’s nuts!

The Only Freedom They Can Never Take

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.” – Dune

Never forget Cole’s Law: “Shredded cabbage and carrot can make a decent salad.”

Frank Herbert wrote the opening quote for this post about a desert planet full of sand, giant worms, political backstabbing, and SpaceLSD®. He could have been describing a Tuesday on the Internet, or maybe even Elon’s plan to get SpaceX™ stop SpaceX®’s shares from crashing and carving a trillion-dollar crater into the S&P 500©.

But back to fear. Why is it used so often?

It’s because emotions are potent weapons, so they get weaponized.

Constantly.

Every advertisement, every mainstream media news segment, every political social media post is designed to make me feel something specific so I will do something specific.

When my dentist died, his family couldn’t find his tombstone. There was no plaque on it.

Outrage is easy to provoke, and it motivates. Fear moves product. Comfy feels gets votes. The people pushing the buttons understand this better than most philosophers ever did, I mean, have you ever read much about MK Ultra?

Do you really think they ever stopped, or are they using it now through SnapBook™ and InstaFace©?

The O.G. ancient stoic philosophers wanted to believe that reason was what they used to make decisions. Marcus Aurelius sat in his tent writing notes to himself about virtue while his son grew up into the Roman version of Hunter Biden. Using reason as a source of virtue is timeless, but it’s almost completely ignored by actual humans with nervous systems and SnapGram© accounts.

Humans feel first. Only then do we invent reasons.

Five guys with booze will start a fight. Five guys with weed will start a band.

That is really the order of operations. But it also implies that if I guard my feelings then I can guard my decisions. If I let someone else set the temperature while I’m driving and I have already handed them the steering wheel and they say, “Ha! Driver gets to choose what’s on the radio!” have I twisted the metaphor too far to include peanut butter and PEZ®?

Absurdity aside, if I hand someone the ability to control me with emotion, I cease to be anything but that MK Ultra automaton. Thankfully, I tend to run anti-trend anyway.

If the herd is charging one direction, my first move is to imagine that they’re headed toward a cliff at a full gallop. That habit has kept me out of more than one mistake, like investing my 401K in Beanie Babies©. But even I, John Wilder, still have a pulse and a set of instincts.

The difference, though, is whether I treat those instincts as orders or as suggestions.

My decisions are my choice.

Any one practicing for a staring contest should take a good, hard look in the mirror.

Yes, emotions matter. They can be fuel. But I still get to choose how I feel about an issue. In the end, that very well may be the only freedom that cannot be taken from me: I can only give it away.

They can take my money, my job, and MySpace© page. They can take my reputation. They can take the flags and the stories I grew up believing. They can flood every screen with the approved feeling of the week from that high-fructose corn syrup of actresses, Zendaya.

Why high-fructose corn syrup? No one likes it, and it’s in absolutely everything.

Regardless of Zendaya, what they cannot do is reach into my skull and flip the switch.

Unless I hand them the key.

I used to eat at Applebee’s®. Then I saved up enough cash to buy my own microwave?

I have watched people hand over that key in real time. They scroll until the algorithm has told them exactly how angry to be, what to be angry about, and how to soothe that anger.

They outsourced their emotions to the loudest voice in the room and call it being informed . . . “tRUsTinG tHe scIENcE”.

The alternative is to be deliberate.

I notice the emotion when it shows up. Turn it around in my skull, and name it while avoiding the drama.

Then, and only then, do I decide whether it points toward Truth, Beauty, and Goodness or whether it is just another current trying to pull me somewhere I never intended to go.

That pause is the whole game. In that pause I still own the tiller.

I can choose the things that flow from Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. I can choose honor and discipline instead of convenience and shortcuts. I can choose the hard path because, as the old proverb says, calm seas do not make good sailors. Smooth water teaches me almost nothing about flip flops, pop-tops, inexplicable tattoos, or using a mixer to blend iced alcoholic beverages. Oh, wait, that’s Jimmy Buffet talking about his rough time.

My bad. But the point of Margaritaville is that it shows how a life free from discipline leads to hard lessons in the end, anyway. I want storms. I want them early.

It’s rare that a defibrillator fails, but when it happens, no one is shocked.

Discipline looks boring from the outside. And I am boring. Honor looks stubborn. And I’m damned stubborn. Choosing not to feel what the crowd demands can look cold.

Fine.

I don’t control the storms. I do not control the media cycle, the markets, the next manufactured crisis, or the next fashionable cause.

I do control whether those things dictate my next move.

Everything else can be bargained, taxed, regulated, stolen, or canceled. The choice of how I feel about an issue stays mine until I surrender it.

So, I guard it.

I hear they have a new parking meteor at the International Space Station.

The sea will not stay calm, our lives are filled with storms. The only question is to whether I choose to hold the tiller, or if I’ve already given up for a free ride on the SpaceLSD© express.

At least they have Margaritas.

Here We Stand

There are those that thought that when a simple Carpenter was executed on the Cross, “Well, that’s the end of that.” His followers thought that.

But, it seems that was simply not the case. Even if you’re not religious, it’s clear that the Cross was no defeat, just a victory in a fashion that no one would have ever expected.

Western Civilization and the basic concepts that have driven it rest on foundations that endure:

The idea that what is True, Beautiful, and Good is excellent and should be rewarded.

The idea that the elite work for the common good and not merely themselves.

That the basic societal unit is the family and not the individual or the state.

That our leaders are not our rulers.

That merit matters.

That the rule of law is important, but that too many laws smother freedom, and those that skirt the intent of the law are Evil.

And that neither Greece nor Rome improved when covered with foreigners, because nations, those living ties of a people bound by blood, history, language, and shared destiny matter more than any abstract economic ledger.

Western Civilization is unique, and the things that flow from it are likewise unique. Judaism is a fundamentally non-Western religion, yet Christianity is fundamentally Western. The differences are stark, and they matter. One brought a chosen people through covenant and law. The other spread a message of redemption that transformed every people it touched, planting seeds of individual dignity, ordered liberty, and the search for truth that grew into the modern world.

Rome did not exist as a market economy. It existed as a place for Romans. When that sense of shared purpose and identity waned, when the center no longer held because the people no longer saw themselves as one people with one destiny, Rome faded. These lessons repeat again and again whenever we lose the path of what Western Civilization actually is.

But we return.

We always return.

Greece fell into fragmentation and conquest, yet Rome rose from its ruins and carried forward the best of Greek thought wrapped in Roman discipline and law. Rome fell to internal decay, external pressure and a dilution of what being Roman even meant, yet in turn nation after nation in Europe rose. Each nation drew on the same inheritance, each adding its own chapter of courage and creation.

As Europe waned under the weight of its own successes and the forgetting that sometimes follows prosperity, America rose. A new nation built on the oldest principles, tested in fire, and sent forth to carry the torch further.

Again and again, Western Civilization fought back invaders, sometimes with a margin so slim that it is impossible to explain how the West survived except by the hand of Divine Providence. The Battle of Tours in 732 stopped the advance of Islamic forces deep into Europe at a moment when nothing else seemed able to stand in their way. The Siege of Vienna in 1683 saw the city on the brink, the Ottoman host at the gates, until relief came in one of history’s great charges.

These were near-run things.

One different decision, one day of worse weather, one failure of nerve, and the map of the world changes forever.

But Western Civilization returned.

It always returned.

Western Civilization, however, didn’t fall from the sky. It came from things that worked, and they worked because they were True, Beautiful, and Good. And also because long years of struggle and effort revealed them. Greek philosophy asked hard questions about reality and virtue. Roman engineering and administration turned those questions into roads, aqueducts, and systems that lasted centuries. Christian faith added the conviction that every soul matters and that justice ultimately comes from a higher order than any king or mob.

These roots produced the scientific method, the rule of law that protects the weak from the strong, the family that raises the next generation with purpose, and the drive to explore and build that took men to every corner of the globe and then when we’d seen the entire globe, Western Civilization went beyond it.

When these principles are honored, societies flourish. Families stay intact and children grow up rooted. Leaders who see themselves as servants rather than masters earn loyalty instead of resentment. Merit opens doors for the capable regardless of birth. Nations with a clear sense of “us” can absorb newcomers on their own terms instead of dissolving into competing tribes.

The West did not become wealthy and powerful by accident or by exploitation. It became so because it aligned more closely than any other civilization with reality itself.

The challenges of our time are real. We see the forgetting, the dilution, the turning away from the hard work of maintaining what our ancestors built. We see institutions captured by those who view the common good of the nation as an obstacle rather than the goal. We see the slow erosion of the family, the substitution of feelings for truth, the replacement of merit with managed outcomes.

These are not new. Again and again, the same test.

Yet the pattern holds.

When the center seems to be giving way, something in the Western soul stirs. People rediscover the old books, the old stories, the old virtues. They build families again. They demand leaders who serve rather than rule. They remember that a nation is not a hotel or a corporation; it is a home for a particular people.

They choose excellence over ease. They choose truth over comfort. And bit by bit, the tide turns.

This is the record of two and a half thousand years. Every time the West has seemed spent, it has drawn on these same sources and risen stronger. The principles are not fragile. They are battle-tested.

They have survived barbarian invasions, plagues, internal tyrannies, and ideological madness. They will survive whatever is thrown at them now.

As long as we work for what is True, Beautiful, and Good, Western Civilization will not die. We carry it in our hearts, in our homes, in the way we raise our children, in the standards we set for ourselves and for those who lead us. We carry it when we choose the family as the irreplaceable center of human life, when we insist that a nation belongs first to its own people.

These choices are acts of fidelity.

And they are enough.

We will win.

I am certain.

I’m not promising the path that it will take, because I don’t know. The road may be longer and harder than we would like. There may be more losses before the turn. But the destination is not in doubt for those who hold fast.

This is not done.

This is not over.

Here we stand.

My Most Irrational Post Ever. Plus? Hot Chicks.

“Cassandra, in Greek legend, was condemned to know the future, but to be disbelieved when she foretold it.” – Twelve Monkeys

Proof that Jerry Lee Lewis was psychic with at least one of his songs: A man from Florida was arrested for dipping his testicles into salsa.

One of the simplest geometric forms is a triangle. It’s just three points and the lines that connect them. See? Simple. Elegant. The only thing simpler is a circle, but we’ll get to that, at least in passing.

The Greeks were crazy about math, like a geometry teacher on meth and Adderall® who was also genetically spliced with the Taco Bell© chihuahua, and loved dividing things. Every time they divided something, though, they got either a whole number (1/1=1), a fraction that ended (1/4=0.25) or a fraction that repeated the same number or sequence of numbers forever (1/3=0.33333333…).

See, simple rules.

Rational output. Literally rational output, because the numbers could be expressed as a ratio. That’s actually where the word rational comes from: if something can be expressed by a ratio of whole numbers, it’s a rational number. In these combinations of numbers and ratios, these Greeks saw the perfection that came from a designed universe, a place where things made sense.

The one cult died out at ate-a-Glock™ in the morning.

And that was important, since math was a cult back then. Yes, an honest to God, Waco-level showers-optional cult based as near as we can tell on math, mysticism, vegetarianism, reincarnation, and politics. Since they were vegetarians, we know that they had poor grip strength and were shunned by women. Basically, its as if they put your high school math club on an island for six generations and made them wear togas.

Triangles, though, eventually ended up driving the Greeks crazy, even crazier than the hot chicks they couldn’t get to talk to them. Actually, it wasn’t the triangle itself, but what happened when they started thinking about the simplest right triangle, one with two sides that are 90 degrees apart, and are only one unit long.

What’s the hypotenuse of that triangle?

Well, Pythagoras figured it out. With the old a²+b²=c², the Pythagorean Theorem®, right? Turns out that it had been developed as early as 1300 years before Pythagoras became a Grecohipster by the Babylonians. I guess the Babylonians had bad press.

Enough history, back to the hypotenuse.

If a=a²=1, and b=b²=1, then c²=2. Easy. That means that c is equal to the square root of two. Or the speed of light. But let’s stick with the square root thing.

Funny thing is that their friends were imaginary, too.

Some weak, protein-starved pale Greek from the cult of Pythagoras was able to prove that the square root of 2 was irrational. It goes like this:

Assume that the square root of 2 is rational. That means we can write it as a fraction of two numbers p and q that have no common factor:

Square both sides to eliminate the square root:

The right side is clearly even (it’s 2 times something), so p² is even. The square of an odd number is always odd, and the square of an even number is always even.

Therefore, if p² is even, p itself must be even. So, we can write p = 2m for some positive integer m. Substitute this back in:

Now the left side is even, so q² is also clearly even.

By the same logic as before, q itself must be even. But now both p and q are even, that means they share a common factor of 2.

This directly contradicts our starting assumption that p and q have no common factors

Therefore, the original assumption must be false: the square root of 2 cannot be expressed as a ratio of two integers.

It is irrational.

I know it’s irrational, but I do love pumpkin pi.

This baked the gourds of the cult. Rumor has it that they kept it secret and may have even killed to keep it a secret.

This was where the word irrational came from. But the word in our language came from a concept of a number can’t be expressed as a ratio. So, before my ex-wife even existed, people were talking about the word irrational.

The square root of 2 is thus irrational. So are a lot of other numbers, like pi. The Greeks thought pi was irrational because they kept making bigger and bigger models of circles with smaller and smaller units and could never come up with a ratio that made sense because the denominator kept getting bigger, also like my ex-wife.

But here’s the part that bakes my gourd. The square root of two never ends. It’s been calculated to more digits than the weight of my ex-wife in grams, and that’s a lot, and it looks to be very random. But since it goes on forever . . . that means my social security number is in there.

And so is yours, if you have one.

Those Gen Z kids have a lot of nerve, always walking around like the rent the place.

Everyone’s social security number is probably there. And if you did something crazy like do a substitution into a different mathematical base (I used base 28) and have it map to the alphabet plus a comma and a period instead of numbers, you could have something like this for the first 400 digits of the square root of two:

AKPTVWWMVL,BOOLWLVQY..RDWM.BHVFYCFJMIAHGIU.EYMXWLPWZ.V.NT.AUBXB.UEGICHKTBRYATPCKPPUFOPWLDTVOOISWJKN,FJGOHZESKBQHPAKZ.OZHSFTPFZRQDTYDN.N.HCSTLQYYQK,HVKIQQGHYMEYDOMPGFSNNMHJAKSHC,,F,YWKSBJLQPAFZGRDMCEIXQGPVQ.NUEQOLDYFGFSRJPR.WMAXMV,NNSGRIGPGKPKGLXSCQR,SYFPHQCJXEMUEWLHOUMDSSMYDAVNXTFWOC,YBNZHBN.GNIHXSU.UBB,CHQCOATUL.AYPALBNAFHOD.ZQB,SHIWDZPCZIM.OL.TRUP.XGJLEWUUIZTCOHXBNUXGVCSVMUPFFHCBJCWMVTUXSNWHSNS.

You could even map it into the ASCII code that I’m typing in, but I was too lazy to do that, but the Sumerians calculated it in base 60 which may have made them more insane even than the Greeks. But the good news is that every post I’ve ever put up (or ever will put up) is available in the square root of 2. In order.

That also means that, rolled up in an infinite number is every possible thing that could ever exist. Every thought that could ever be had. Every .jpg of Kathleen Turner.

Don’t look up current pictures. She’s gone into Kathleen Turner Overdrive.

All of it. In one number. And in an infinite number of random irrational numbers, like pi. The Greeks couldn’t prove pi was irrational because they didn’t have calculus until one of them was reincarnated as Newton.

Now, the downside is that we have no index to where everything is sitting the square root of 2. Where, exactly, all of my posts are besides my hard drive and on the server of the hosting company are unknown.

But they’re there.

That means that everything that is, ever was, or ever will be is compressed in a single number, yet to us, also unknowable because we don’t have the index. Infinities are embedded in some of the simplest shapes in the universe: that shape which defines a plane contains, well, everything.

But this is a little deep for a Friday.

Who wants to talk about hot chicks?

Excalibur: The Movie The West Needs Now

“My pride broke it! My rage broke it! This excellent knight, who fought with fairness and grace, was meant to win. I used Excalibur to change that verdict. I’ve lost, for all time, the ancient sword of my fathers, whose power was meant to unite all men, not to serve the vanity of a single man. I am . . . nothing.” – Excalibur

I tried to pull the sword from the stone, but I wasn’t Arthurized.

I rewatched Excalibur last weekend for the first time, likely, since Reagan was president and the phrase “press one for English” had yet to be spoken.

It was glorious, and better than I remembered, and that isn’t just the wine talking. Excalibur came out in 1981, directed by John Boorman, who also brought us the underrated epic of Zardoz. Any man who can talk Sean Connery into wearing an orange diaper for an entire film and likes guns as much as Boorman is okay.

Excalibur, however, features no orange underwear or guns. It is, however, one of the most nationalistic, unapologetic, mythic, sword-swinging spectacles ever put on film.

To be clear: it’s not a history lesson. It’s a legend.

First things first: no, the armor isn’t remotely historically accurate. Plate armor like that didn’t show up until centuries after the real Arthur would have been stomping around Britain in the 600s or 700s. The knights look like they stepped out of a 15th-century tournament sponsored by the Stainless Steel Institute® instead of a muddy Dark Ages battlefield.

The wedding party lasted too late into the night for one of Arthur’s Knights. Poor Sir Cadian.

Boorman knew this. He didn’t care because Excalibur isn’t trying to be a documentary. It’s a full-throated retelling of the King Arthur myth, the kind that’s been passed around campfires and tavern tables for more than a thousand years. When I looked back at the overall King Arthur Literary Universe©, I found that there were endless characters and sub-characters and plots and mutually exclusive elements.

Boorman picked the main plot points of the Arthur myth perfectly. As a result, the film knows exactly what it is: a legend soaked in Christianity, fog, blood, magic, virtue, redemption, and destiny.

The critics, when it first came out, whined that the characters weren’t “complex” enough. Arthur wasn’t nuanced. Guinevere wasn’t layered and didn’t have a chance to prove herself on the battlefield as a Strong Independent Woman©. Lancelot wasn’t a tortured anti-hero with a tragic backstory and three therapy sessions.

That’s the damn point.

They’re archetypes.

My favorite dessert at Thanksgiving is made by dividing a pumpkin’s circumference by its diameter: pumpkin pi.

Arthur is the Once and Future King. He is pure, flawed, larger than life and his failings are the point of the movie. Merlin is the scheming wizard who sees the long game. Morgana is ambition and vengeance and hotness wrapped in snakes, silk, and spite. The film doesn’t waste time giving everyone a five-minute monologue about their feelings.

It trusts the myth to simply be what it is.

And with the exception of Helen Mirren, all of the rest of the cast in main roles flailed for the rest of their careers as B and C listers. But in this movie? Nigel Terry is Arthur. Nicol Williamson is a Merlin that is so Merlin that I can’t imagine another person being Merlin. In what probably saved their careers, you’ll spot Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne, and Patrick Stewart in roles that are nearly so brief you’ll blink and miss them.

The actors are the roles they were born to play, and the story moves like a river in flood. That’s why it still works.

Part of the backstory is that Boorman wanted to make a Lord of the Rings movie, but thankfully couldn’t find anyone stupid enough to take the risk on a production far too large for its time. Instead, he made Excalibur.

I imagine Father’s Day was uncomfortable around the castle.

Excalibur is a nationalist British film, made by a British director, for an audience that still remembered what a legend actually was. Men were men. Women were women.

Honor and virtue mattered. Betrayal hurt. Sex was raw and consequential, not a punchline or a sermon. People with good motives weren’t ridiculed.

Boorman put his own flesh and blood into the movie, literally. Boorman had to direct his own young and incredibly hot daughter in one of the more, shall we say, vigorous scenes in the movie.

Yeah.

Imagine Boorman as a director, talking to his daughter: “Honey, can you just, you know, a little more passion on take three? Hip thrusts, dear.” To top it off, Boorman’s son played the young version of Mordred. This is the family business, Boorman style.

The man didn’t just make a movie about myth, he co-wrote the screenplay, directed the film, produced the film, and he dragged his own bloodline into the forge. No wonder the whole movie feels more alive than most things that have been made in the last decade.

That is why Excalibur feels dangerous somehow next to today’s polished, focus-grouped slop.

No one was trying to make Excalibur “relatable for modern audiences.” No one was worried about alienating the overseas market or triggering the comment section. No soulless Disney© corporate executive (but I repeat myself at least three times) was trying to make a tentpole for the Arthur Cinematic Universe© and have three more movies so they could triple the profits.

He just told the damn story.

You know I’m right.

The result is a film that looks like it was shot inside a stained-glass window: every frame drips with atmosphere, every line of dialogue sounds like it was read off of a stone carving. The classical music fills the spots perfectly. The (very inaccurate) battles feel like they matter because the people swinging the swords believe in something bigger than themselves.

The movie is earnest. The actors and writers and crew believe in the story they’re telling.

That’s the contrast that stings in 2026. We’re drowning in corporate product: remakes, reboots, and “elevated” retellings that strip out everything that made the originals mythic.

They give us complexity instead of clarity, messaging instead of meaning.

Excalibur reminds me why the old stories endured: they weren’t about making transgender people or minorities feel seen. They were about making people feel the weight of destiny, the cost of power, and the pull of something ancient and also something that was True, Beautiful, and Good.

Search for “Amelia Meme UK”.

So, if you haven’t seen it, you might correctly guess I’m a fan. If you haven’t seen it in a while, give it another shot. Pour something that Arthur would have quaffed, turn the lights down, put the damn phones up, and let the sword rise from the lake one more time.

In a world that’s forgotten how to tell legends, Excalibur still knows exactly what it is. And just like King Arthur himself, there will never be another like it.

Let’s hope that Great Britain remembers Arthur’s words from the film: “Now, once more, I must ride with my knights to defend what was, and the dream of what could be.”

Life Is Hard For A Reason. A Good Reason. Plus Hot Chicks.

“Life’s short and hard like a bodybuilding elf.” – Bloodhound Gang

Regardless, the people at his funeral will be called Paul-bearers.

I bought the book Dune by Frank Herbert when I was a kid. I still recall buying it as it was on one of the monthly trips we took to the book store when we ventured off of Mount Wilder. Ma Wilder was horribly indulgent when it came to books or other healthy creative outlets, like model kits. Books had an unlimited budget around the house, and she never particularly cared which books, as long as I was reading them. As such, at two or three novels a week from age 10 to 16, I read a lot.

I still do.

Dune was one of those. I read it before I started driving. I remember reading it in the time after finishing mowing Grandma Wilder’s lawn and before I was picked on a beautiful summer day decades ago. One thing that struck me is the description in the book of the planet Salusa Secundus. As a kid I mentally pronounced it “Salsa” Secundus, and, well, it is a pretty spicy planet.

I was told to bring an extra jar of liquid cheese, in queso-emergency.

In Herbert’s description, Salusa Secundus was a hell world, horrible weather, murderous beasts, extreme temperatures, awful terrain. It was also the Emperor’s prison where he tossed away the worst criminals of his interstellar empire. “ . . . the mortality rate among new prisoners is higher than sixty percent.”

Yet, here was where the Emperor got his fanatical and tough warriors, the feared Hardeharhar. Oops, different book. I mean the Sardaukar®.

Why there? Well, if you could survive there, you could survive on any planet that a man could live on. And if you could make it though the gauntlet of prisoners trying to kill you, congratulations, you survived the initiation process.

The guards at Big Ben in London look tired! I guess they’re working around the clock.

The idea isn’t a new one. The Spartans had a similar story, as retold by Plutarch, who, despite his name, was not Mickey Mouse’s™ dog:

Another boy . . . when some of his companions had stolen a young fox and delivered it to him . . . hid it under his gown; and though the angry little beast bit through his side to his very guts, he endured it quietly, that he might not be discovered. When the searchers were gone . . . [his friends] chid him roundly, saying, ‘It had been better to produce the fox, than thus to conceal him by losing your own life.’ ‘No, no!’ said he, smiling, ‘it is better to die than to be detected in a base attempt at theft.’

Our teacher told us this story when I was in second grade. Yes. They told it in a somewhat different variation, but they were telling it to seven-year-olds. No trigger warning. No safe space. Just a story about a kid who was so tough that he’d let a fox eat his intestines rather than show weakness.

I think I have an idea where Herbert took his inspiration for the Hardeharhar from.

But at the Best Buy© in Athens you can get advice from the Greek Squad©.

This is a story that resonates, and the deeper it resonates the truer it is. We don’t become strong by being bathed in rose water and sleeping on satin sheets and eating our fill of lemon-cream PEZ© every day, and sailors don’t become captains on calm seas.

We don’t become emotionally strong by never facing hardship.

We don’t become physically strong by sitting on a couch.

We don’t live lives of purpose without getting bruised. Any thing of purpose and worth that one might do will be opposed. Period. Either the odds are against it, the gods are against it, or other people are against it. Sometimes all three.

These are the good fights, if founded in the True, Beautiful and Good. These are the things that are worth the time and effort and pain. These are the things that my scar tissue prepared me for. A life that is based on something that Epictetus said:

Don’t you understand that amounts to saying that I would so prepare myself to endure, and then let anything happen that will happen?

An Epic Cow is really Legend Dairy.

That’s a strong statement. And in a life filled with challenges, it’s hard to understand sometimes why we faced the challenges we did, why we have the scars and bruises that we do. I think it’s because if they didn’t break us and they made us better prepared. Yeah, even Nietzsche was right a time or two, if you include his magnificent mustache.

What then, does this leave us with?

We have today. We have this moment. We have the amazing gift that we can do anything we wish to right now. We can make vows to change the world, we can dedicate (or rededicate) ourselves to fighting for what we know is True, Beautiful, and Good.

And that’s why we’re here. We’re not here for comfort. We’re not here for leisure. We’re not here for quiet. A quiet universe is a dead universe. A universe without conflict is a dead universe. A universe without purpose is a dead universe.

How much mass is in the universe? All of it.

We do not live in a dead universe. We’re breathing, fighting, aberrations, statistical flukes and inconvenient, stubborn fools fighting against entropy and common sense. We see the world and keep going, because, deep down, we have our choices, our reasoned choices that allow us to get up to fight another day.

Or give up.

Me? I choose to keep going, come what may.

Besides, now I’m hungry and am looking for chips and salsa.

Extra spicy. I think I’m ready.

Novelty vs. Routine: The One Line Every Man Must Guard Or Watch His Life Slip Away

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” – Bladerunner

And to everyone who said I couldn’t do standup, well, I see you’re not laughing now.

Routine is where life goes to die.

On reflection the other day I was a bit amused to note how much of my life is on autopilot. I have three pairs of pants that are all the same that I wear for work that are identical in cut, color, and comfort, so I never have to stand in front of the closet wondering what matches what. I have six shirts that rotate on my torso for daily wear, each one as unremarkable as the last. I get up, generally, within one minute of the same time each day, and the Wildermobile™ hits the pavement within the same thirty seconds each workday. I have cigars three times a week, on the same days and at the same approximate time, rain or shine, good mood or bad.

Why three times a week?

Well, because insurance says that means I’m a non-smoker. It’s a loophole I’m happy to exploit, and it keeps the premiums from getting as high as Johnny Depp jumping on Mount Everest.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I set those things up on purpose. I figure I have only so much energy to make decisions each day, so why not save it up and also pre-make decisions for the time I’m stupidest each day? For me, that’s in the morning when I get up. Brush teeth first, pants second, and if I’m lucky they’re on my legs and not as a unique set of chestless arm chaps. No debate, no drama, just forward motion.

It’s like giving my brain a head start on the real work that comes later. This makes sense to me. Efficient. Practical. The kind of system a man builds when he realizes life is long on demands and short on spare mental horsepower.

But.

I get concerned sometimes that I’ve pre-programmed life a bit too much, and created too much of a routine. The reason I’m concerned is that all of those minutes faced with nothing novel or consequential happening slip away like the replicant played by Rutger Hauer says in Blade Runner: “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

And the mostest lostest will be those moments where I was living life on routine, putting one foot in front of the other with hours of my life slipping by on autopilot. The coffee is hot, the drive is the exact same stretch of highway, the cigar smoke curls up exactly as it did last Tuesday. Comfortable, yes.

But is comfort the same as living?

Time is really one of the biggest fascinations of my life. Even as a kid, I was obsessed with the idea that something new is only bright and shiny when it’s brand new, and after a certain amount of damage it simply can’t be made to look new again. It wears. It gets scratched and dinged, and none of that is, short of melting it down and remaking it new again, reversible.

Time does that to everything, including us. I can go back to the home I left this morning, but I can’t go back to this morning. It’s a lost country, a place where I can only go in my memory. Gone.

Irretrievable.

And what if every morning is the same for a thousand days? Haven’t I just compressed all of my life into one single Groundhog Day, with the only exception that I’m getting older, less shiny and new? Less naïve? Less innocent?

The calendar pages flip, but the days bleed together into one long, grey blur.

I wake up, I do the things, I go to bed, and suddenly a decade has vanished while I was busy being responsible.

The flip side of routine is novelty.

I remember the first night I met The Mrs., the way the room felt electric and the conversation refused to end. I remember my first car. I remember my first touchdown. I remember my last day of college.

I remember building the first Pinewood Derby® car with The Boy and the last one with Pugsley. Those moments and milestones that make up the peaks and valleys of life. Those, certainly, have made my life longer. Not in years, but in the way that life stretches when something real happens. I remember those moments intensely.

There’s a fine line, though.

If my life is nothing but novelty, then what chance do I have of creating something useful, of establishing meaning with my life?

There is none.

Chaos is where life goes to lose meaning. One wild distraction after another, no anchor, no progress, just a pinball existence bouncing from shiny object to shiny object until nothing sticks and nothing matters.

If my life is always routine, I’m pushing every bit of meaning away, becoming a grey man in a gray room on a grey house on a gray hill. Everything blends. Nothing stands out. The days stack up like identical bricks in a wall you can’t see over, and one day I realize the wall is my life and I built it yourself.

I have this thought, mainly because Pugsley is mostly on his own now. I figure the time when I’ve spent half of the hours I’ll ever spend with him was sometime in 2015 or 2016. He’s now out in the world.

That realization sneaks up on a father like a quiet thief. No warning bell when the halfway mark passes. I just look up one day and notice the house is quieter, the schedule has gaps, and the kid you taught to ride a bike is suddenly navigating highways I’ll never drive.

It forces the question: so what now?

Again, routine is where life goes to die, and chaos is where life goes to lose its meaning.

Routine is Scylla; Chaos, Charybdis. I love it when I work a semicolon into a sentence!

We paddle between the two monsters, trying not to get devoured by either. Too much of one and we drown in sameness. Too much of the other and we drown in noise.

I think we as a culture are caught between these two monsters right now. We have chaos in the never-ending rise of technological advancement, which at the same time turns faces toward the black mirrors in their hands, where they take the cold comfort of doomscrolling their life away in an endless sea of other people’s outrage and other people’s highlights. Every notification promises novelty with a new opinion that will surely change everything.

But it doesn’t.

It just scrolls.

The phone lights up, the brain lights up, and another slice of irreplaceable time disappears into the glow. We’ve engineered a world that offers infinite novelty at the cost of any real depth, and we wonder why so many feel hollow.

Reality, I think, is part of the antidote. Writing is, for me. Sure, I do it on a routine: same time, same chair, same keyboard, but each post is something different. Each one starts from a fresh thought, a fresh observation, a fresh wrestle with whatever corner of life is nagging at me that week.

It’s routine that (mostly) invites novelty instead of smothering it.

And getting out and accomplishing something in the physical world is also important, too. Building something with my hands. Moving my body until it complains and then keeps going anyway. These things don’t just fill time; they mark it.

They leave evidence that I was here, that I did something that outlasts the doomscroll.

The balance isn’t perfect and it never will be. Some days the routine wins because the world demands it. Other days novelty crashes in whether I wanted it or not.

The trick, I’m learning, is to guard the line between them like it’s the most important border in your life. Protect enough routine to keep the engine running and enough novelty to keep the engine pointed somewhere worth going.

Because time doesn’t wait for us to figure it out. It keeps moving, wearing us down, turning shiny new mornings into well-worn afternoons.

And if I’m going to lose moments like tears in rain, I’d rather a few of them be the kind worth remembering: sharp, vivid, and undeniably mine, than a thousand identical ones that blur together into nothing at all.

Why Henry VIII Would’ve Killed for Your Tuesday

“Dying in our sleep is a luxury that our kind is rarely afforded. My gift to you.” – Kill Bill: Volume 1

I guess he had a bad heir day.

Henry VIII could have anyone killed in England killed, whenever.

That’s a historical level of flex, right?

“Off with his/her/their/xir head!” and boom, problem solved. The only way he could have had a more complete solution is if he had ye olde Hellfyre Missyll that he could have obliterated the parts with. Hank had more wives than most guys have pairs of underwear, threw parties that made Vegas look like a church potluck, and ate so much roasted swan he probably needed a crane to get out of bed.

Yet the poor bastard was miserable. Hank’s leg was a festering horror show of oozing sores that never healed. Doctors, if you could call them that, mashed it with hot pokers and prayed to Saints who were clearly not looking out for Henry.

Summers? Hank oozed sweat in every royal crevice like a Somalian in a daycare because air conditioning hadn’t been invented yet. Winters? Drafty castles that made your average Motel 6® feel like the Ritz™.

Fresh vegetables in January? Forget it, unless you counted the mold on last year’s turnips. Antibiotics? Nope. He died at 55 looking like a bloated, angry grape because a simple infection laughed at him.

Bill Gates claimed that it was hard to give away $100 billion. Then he discovered divorce.

Meanwhile, the poorest person reading this right now has:

Climate-controlled comfort (except when the power goes out and we all act like it’s the apocalypse)
Aspirin that kills headaches faster than Henry could yell “treason”
Strawberries in February flown in from well, wherever, for $2.99 a pint
A phone in their pocket with more computing power than NASA used to put men on the Moon, back when they still did that sort of thing

And we complain the Wi-Fi is slow.

As a society, we’ve lost the plot. We chase the next luxury like it’s the last helicopter out of Saigon, never noticing we’re already living better than every king who ever lived.

Marie Antoinnette didn’t like the chopper that took her out of France.

That’s where fasting, prayer, and meditation come in.

They don’t add luxury. And they’re not anti-luxury, either. Instead, they intensify life real life by pulling away things that dull it. They rip the blindfold off so you can finally see the ridiculous abundance that’s been hiding in plain sight.

Take camping, which is another life-intensifier. Or better yet, backpacking, because backpacking is camping for people who like suffering without a car nearby. You hike ten miles with everything you own on your back. Hot shower? Nah. Cold beer? Dream on, pal.

Clean socks after three days? Suddenly they feel like silk sheets at the Four Seasons®. That lukewarm instant coffee at sunrise after a 14,000-foot summit? Nectar of the gods. And that single cigar you packed for the top?

It tastes better than the $80 Cuban some hedge-fund guy is smoking in his climate-controlled man cave. The Luxury Meter resets. Hard. The stuff I took for granted becomes decadent again.

I felt motion sickness on the airplane yesterday. It didn’t help having all of those people screaming for lifejackets and rafts.

That’s exactly what fasting, prayer, and meditation do as I get older, except I don’t have to carry a 40-pound pack or sleep on rocks.

Let’s start with fasting, because I actually do this every week and some of my happiest days are while I’m doing it.

Yes, I’m the weirdo who smiles while hungry. Judge away. After 72 hours without food, that first bite of whatever I eat next hits different. It’s not “dinner.” It’s a religious experience.

Last week I broke a fast with a salad of lettuce, and my own dressing (olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and Frank’s Hot Sauce™.

I swear the lettuce tasted like it was grown by angels on Mount Olympus. I actually said “thank you” out loud to vinegar. The Mrs. asked me, “Are you planning on starting a cult?”

“No, it’s too hard to find enough people who are willing to shave off all the hair on their bodies. Just no commitment nowadays.”

Fasting reminds me that food isn’t a background app: it’s a miracle, a gift. My ancestors fought wolves for scraps, and won. That’s why I’m here.

Right now I’m so hungry I could eat my watch, but that would be time consuming.

Henry VIII had entire forests of deer murdered for his gouty pleasure and still died angry. Me? I can open the fridge and there sits last night’s leftover steak and a bag of midget tomatoes.

Fasting turns the volume down on “I want more” and turns it up on “Holy crap, this is amazing,” when one of those ripe tomatoes explodes flavor in my mouth as I bite into it. Prayer does the same thing, but with gratitude instead of hunger and with fewer seeds.

I’m not talking about the fancy stained-glass, organ-music version. I’m talking about the five-minute reciting the “Lord’s Prayer” or just sitting there praying “thanks” for all the little miracles in my life, like cigars. Thanks for the roof that doesn’t leak. Thanks for the truck that started this morning. Thanks for antibiotics that would’ve saved Henry’s leg and probably at least one of his marriages if the Habsburgs weren’t trying to kill him. Thanks for the fact that I can complain about gas prices while eating pineapple from Costa Rica on a pizza in February.

I think that if I do this regularly my brain chemistry changes. I cease envying the guy with the bigger bank account and start noticing that I’ve never missed a meal, except on purpose.

And then there’s meditation, which I used to think was for hippies in hemp pants smoking hemp and praying to a bong with hi-fi playing sitar music in the background.

Turns out it’s just shutting up for five minutes. Sit. Breathe. Notice the thoughts racing around like caffeinated squirrels.

After a few minutes the squirrels calm down. And suddenly I notice things. The warmth of the coffee mug. The feeling of my head against the back of my chair that just happens to adjust six ways. The ridiculous luxury of quiet.

Only self-aware people will understand this joke. You know who you are.

Henry VIII never had five minutes of peace: someone was always trying to poison him or marry him or overthrow him or he had another wife to kill.

I can have it peace and quiet whenever I want, and it costs exactly nothing.

When I do all three together it’s like a factory reset on my soul. The constant “I need more” noise fades.

I’m not saying sell everything and move to a cave and become a monk. I like my truck, my cigars, and my central heat as much as the next guy. But I’m not going to let “luxury” make me the modern version of Henry VIII: rich in stuff, poor in joy, angry at the world because the sores never heal and the wives won’t die. These things remind me that the real luxury isn’t the next thing, it’s realizing the things I already have would’ve made kings weep with envy.

Though say what you want about Henry, he did have a cure for wives who had headaches.

Happiness, Desire, Whiskey, and Purpose

“Is this making you happy?” – Fight Club

Why are mathematicians always happy? They know that the root of anything negative is imaginary.

“Happiness is all that it wants, and resembling the well-fed, there shouldn’t be any hunger or thirst.” – Epictetus

Think back to the moment that were really content. Happy. Maybe it was after a nice steak. Maybe it was after a draw on a good cigar. Maybe it was in on the bench seat of a 1978 GMC® truck on a warm summer night.

Whenever it was, in moments of true contentment, true happiness, you don’t want or need anything. The moment is complete. It is as it is. I feel that way after I write a post I’m especially happy with. I feel that way most mornings after the first sip of coffee. In those moments, in those times, I simply don’t need anything more.

W.C. Fields: “Always carry a whiskey flask in case of a snake bite. With that in mind, always carry a small snake.”

This is why I say that happiness is the easiest thing for most people, most of the time. It’s simple. Stop wanting what you don’t have.

Done. Easy. Unless it’s air. I need that most of the time and get quite cross and panicky when I don’t have it. And water, yeah, I need that on occasion. Food? Not an issue. Like most people in current-day USA, I could skip a meal or a few dozen meals and still be physically fine.

So, happiness is easy.

My brothers Sin and Cos stayed out in the Sun too long. They’re now tanned gents.

Why then, are most people unhappy?

They want what they don’t have. In some cases, they want what they can never have. Some mid-tier 8 who spends a night banging Brad Pitt now wants a Brad Pitt type guy to love her. That’s simply not going to happen in this universe because Brad Pitt has all the twenty-year-old 10s he wants to have, and one of them might be a keeper.

So, our mid-tier 8 is unhappy. If she didn’t think she deserved Brad Pitt, well, she might have a chance to be happy. But, no, she’s made herself unhappy. And, she’s made herself unhappy in the stupidest way possible: she’s pining for something she will never ever be able to have. In her case, it’s confusing being Mrs. Right Now with being Mrs. Right.

After A.I., how will programmers make money? Selling their laptops.

This unhappiness didn’t come from outside her: she made it up. So, whenever I’m unhappy, it’s typically because of a really simple reason: reality isn’t conforming itself to the way I want it to be. You know, the post didn’t say what I wanted to say in the way I wanted to say it.

The post is outside of me. It’s something I made. I can choose what I can do with it. I can abandon it. I’ve done that about five times, I think. I can decide, “You know what, good enough.” I’ve done that a few times. But most of the time, when I press the button that schedules the post, I’m happy. Very happy. I put in the effort on a cause that was worthy of my time.

If I’m unhappy with a post, it’s because I chose to be unhappy about it. I write because it is something that makes me, on balance, very happy.

If it didn’t, I wouldn’t do it.

The problem, though, is happy people don’t get much done. That’s why weed and vidya games are bad. They give bliss without accomplishment. It’s the easy road to happy.

But that sort of happiness, for me at least, is without meaning because it’s without accomplishment. I’m unhappy all the time, but I’m unhappy about (mostly) things I choose to be unhappy about. I rarely choose to be unhappy about things I can’t control. If I can’t control it, it’s just the way the world is.

When you break up with an A.I., does it experience machine yearning?

But if I’m unhappy, and I think it’s worth the effort, even if it’s big, I’ll choose to be unhappy to try to make it happen.

That’s the definition of purpose. It might be small, like mowing the lawn. It might be big, like changing the world. But I get to choose. It should fit my talents. And, as I’ve been prattling on about them, yeah, it should be in service of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.

It needs to be worth it, and that defines what worth it is. Well, at least to me. YMMV.

I think so many people are unhappy because they simply don’t have a purpose, they don’t see a way that they can be of substance, be of consequence in a world where 8 to 10(!) billion people exist. It’s overwhelming.

It makes one feel small, sometimes.

But me? I keep pushing. I’ve even distilled my purpose down to a sentence: “To make visible that which would otherwise not have been seen.” So, the writing is kinda core to a purpose like that, unless I want to sit in the backyard yelling at the squirrels on how they’re being inefficient with their nuts.

Do Catholics ever give up cleaning their drier filter for lint?

Purpose, then, is a double-edged sword. It provokes me to action, and leaves me with a fire inside. But this is one that I choose to carry. It’s one that I wish to have.

I control (mostly) my emotions. Being happy means not wanting. Except when I choose what I want. And right now? I want elimination of Evil, a steak and a cigar.

In that order. But I’ll work on getting rid of the Evil while I enjoy my steak and cigar.