Significance – Page 3 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Failure: The Source Of Success

“A wizard is never late, Frodo Baggins. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.” – The Fellowship of the Ring

Next up, Schrödinger’s Hot Pocket®, which is both ice cold and lava hot at the same time.

In my life, I have been bad at a lot of things. I’m still bad at most of them, but there are a few things that I’m good at. The way I got good at them started with being willing to experiment. By experimenting, I learned a lot of different ways to fail, just like the programmer that got turned down by the waitress – he had an error in connecting to the server.

When I failed, I learned how I failed. I then stopped doing those things. But experimenting always has the possibility of failure.

I’ve taken my sons through the same process – I’ve told them many times, “You can figure it out.” Before he left for college, I taught The Boy how to cook steak. I thought about teaching him how to make meringue, but I know the Australians hate it – they usually boo meringue.

I hope this joke doesn’t come back at me.

It’s not a lot for a legacy, but he grills steak like a demigod now. He’s so popular that his college roommates pitched in and bought him a charcoal grill. The Boy told me he grilled a chicken the other night for two hours, but the chicken still wouldn’t tell The Boy why he crossed the road.

How do you learn to cook well?

The same way that you learn anything – by experimenting, failing, and eventually getting it right.

Once you get it right? Then you can exploit the knowledge.

A group of researchers looked at just this pattern. The title of their article says it all: Understanding the onset of hot streaks across artistic, cultural, and scientific careers. You can find it here (LINK).

Related: blind Martians are now known as “brailleins”.

What are hot streaks? In my experience, it is when a person has exactly the right skills and is in exactly the right place. The authors of the article indicate that those skills come from prior experimentation. That is what I’ve observed in my life, too.

One example the authors use is Peter Jackson, who is most known for The Lord of the Rings trilogy and also the billionaire that looks the most like an actual hobbit®. All of Jackson’s previous work had prepared him for his streak, which in this case was The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Originally the studio wanted a product tie-in: Frodo would have connected the keys to JCPenney®, Dillards©, Macy’s™, and all the restaurants in the food court and then tie them to the One Ring. Then they’d have one ring to rule the mall.

What’s the difference between a Halfling and a Hobbit? Copyright.

The work that Jackson had done prior to this was important – it taught him all of the things necessary to make a movie, and making The Lord of the Rings was no ordinary movie, since the movies were all filmed at one time. On top of that, the movie required special effects on a scale that was unprecedented – they had to make Elijah Wood look Frodo-genic.

It was all coupled with Jackson’s fierce devotion to the source material so that the movies would be faithful to Tolkien’s vision. He even explained why the Eagles couldn’t fly the hobbits into Mordor – it turns out they were on tour.

Making the three movies cost around $300,000,000, so there was quite a bit of trust involved. Without his prior experience, no one would have given Peter Jackson the job. Without his prior experiments and his prior failures, he wouldn’t have had the ability to make the film.

But he did have that ability.

Originally Jackson wanted to make a cartoon, but the studio thought that was sketchy.

The movies collectively made nearly $3,000,000,000 (which, for scale, is what we send to the Ukraine every 45 minutes) at the box office, so investing in these films made approximately 10 times the initial investment. The movies weren’t just popular with people, they were popular at the awards, winning 17 out of 30 Oscars® and getting positive reviews and not getting slapped by Will Smith.

By nearly any measure, these are three of the best films ever made, so I’d call that a pretty good streak.

Peter Jackson must be driven, because he made hundreds of millions of dollars and still goes to work, but I’m thinking he only works on stuff he wants to work on.

That’s the power of being on a streak. The components are simple: experimentation, finding a challenge worth taking on that the experiments have prepared you for, and then exploiting those skills to take on the challenge at full speed. That’s when the streak starts – the right person is at the right place at the right time.

I started teaching my sons karate when they were young. I don’t know karate – I just enjoy kicking children.

My comment would be to keep experimenting because the experiments will provide skills. And the combination of those skills will, perhaps, lead to opportunities and places that you’d never expect.

I have learned one secret that I’ll share with you about how to make a steak taste better: eat it around a bunch of vegans.

Now What?

“Well, that’s the end of the film. Now, here’s the meaning of life.” – Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life

When my boss died, I spent a moment at his coffin. “Who’s think outside the box now, Terry?”

I have (sometimes) in my life found myself in a weird and uncomfortable place. No, it’s not the backseat of a VW® Beetle®. No, it is something that normally people are happy about. I had accomplished most of what I wanted to do, and then I asked myself, “Now what?”

That is a difficult question. I have long made it a practice to observe people, or at least I did until the restraining order. Okay. Restraining orders. My observation is that feeling like I felt came normally comes from:

a lack of ambition,
waking up with amnesia
too much success, or
having goals set too low.

In my case, it was probably the last one. I can (happily!) say that I’ve accomplished almost everything that I’ve wanted to do in my career, and I’ve done a lot. Do you know the team that got Osama Bin Laden? Not to brag, but I’ll have you know I read a news story about them once.

It must be nice being a Democrat, knowing who voted before the election.

Could I have accomplished more than I have? Probably.

I suppose that could be viewed as a lack of ambition. In my defense, I’ve seen a lot of jobs that I don’t want. And a lot of those jobs come with compromises I simply won’t make anymore. At one point, when I was much younger, I had a job where I was on the road an average of three days per week. I can recall one time my boss wanted me to travel to Chicago and I didn’t want to go, so we compromised – I traveled to Chicago.

I’ll admit, travel was fun at first. One week I started Monday in Portland, Maine and ate lobster, flew to San Antonio and had Tex-Mex, and ended up in Fresno, which is known as the “Akron of the Pacific”. When I was young, that was a pretty nifty gig, plus the work was fun and varied.

At first.

I ordered a “Chicago style” pizza. It started shooting right out of the box.

It actually got to the point where I was on the road for eight straight months in the southern part of Chicago. I did manage to come home alternate weekends – I will say that Midway airport is the only place I’ve ever been that rents cars with a slot for a tail gunner. The charm of traveling went away. The fortunate thing is that it cost me a marriage.

But I’m done traveling like that. There are compromises that I’m not willing to make. And, as I said, I’ve done most of the things I want to do with my career.

So, it’s not that.

What, then?

If anyone has no family and will be alone this Thanksgiving, let me know. I need to borrow chairs.

What about family? Family is always a challenge because being a parent requires almost as much responsibility from me as that one night when they asked me to be a designated driver. But when kids are grown, it’s up to them to determine what course their lives will take. Oh, sure, they sometimes want to chat with the old man, but for the most part, they’re independent. That’s the way I raised them – drop a Bowie knife and some paracord into the crib and if they make it the first month, they’re keepers. The result of this type of parenting (I think the technical term for it is “neglect”), though, is that the kids are able to make decisions and take action between therapy sessions. No family is ever perfect, but mine is pretty good.

Okay. Work was fine. Family was fine. What now?

That’s what I was struggling with. What now?

Then I remembered Joe.

Joe is a friend that I’ve known for years. Talked to him last week. I’ve mentioned Joe before. Pure genius. Joe, however, wasn’t challenged at his job. So, he’d let projects go until there were almost due, and then start work on them at the point where he thought that it was just nearly possible that he might not be able to make the deadline and then work at a furious pace. If Joe had been a chef, the danger would have been that he might have run out of thyme.

Instead, it was a way to keep himself challenged and in the game.

Being a blanket weaver must be the worst. They always have a looming deadline.

That’s not for me, either. The challenge was a real challenge, but it was artificial. It didn’t make Joe better. It just kept Joe’s job interesting enough so he wasn’t bored enough at work to dial random numbers and say, “I’ve hidden the body. Now what?”

So, I thought about it. And thought about it.

What was a challenge big enough? What could be my vision?

It turned out it was this place. That’s the reason I keep hitting my deadlines on my posts. Not every post ends up the way I imagined it would when the idea came into my head – sometimes the posts take on a life of their own in the writing. And sometimes I have to take two or three runs at an idea until I get exactly the post I was looking for.

I was looking for a challenge, for meaning.

What’s the difference between death and taxes? Death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.

So, I decided to give my life more meaning than that poor man who installs turn signals on BMWs®. Now, on a given day when I come home from work, I’m a bit tired, but when I reach for the keyboard, it feels good. I have a goal, a challenge, and meaning.

These things don’t come from without, they come from within. Even if the circumstances are already there, they have to be recognized and acted upon.

Now what?

If you don’t have a vision of what you want to achieve, make one.

If your life doesn’t have meaning, give it meaning.

These things are in your hands.

That’s what.

The Coming American Dictatorship, Part III

“No dictator, no invader can hold an imprisoned population by force of arms forever. There is no greater power in the universe than the need for freedom. Against that power tyrants and dictators cannot stand. The Centauri learned that lesson once. We will teach it to them again. Though it take a thousand years, we will be free.” – Babylon 5

I like the electronics DIY store – The Ohm Depot.

Part I of this series can be found here (LINK), and Part II can be found here (LINK).

Thinking about dictatorship is difficult. I was raised in a system that considered dictatorship more or less impossible. We didn’t even have any jokes about dictators because we didn’t speak Spanish, German, Italian, Russian or Chinese. I was raised in the wilds where you could be certain that every house contained more firearms than people, usually many more. And safe? Doors were rarely locked.

They taught us how to use rifles effectively in school. I even won the prize for marksmanship in eighth grade, which was a personally autographed photo of Andrew Jackson. Every boy took the test and got his Hunter Safety card, except me. I’d had my card since second grade.

The girls? Who knows what they did while we were shooting rifles, making models, and talking about football. This class was for boys only, and strangely we didn’t have difficulty identifying what a girl was. We didn’t even have advanced biology degrees to tell the boys from the girls back then, though I will admit to have been an avid amateur biologist while I was in high school. And even I could tell the difference.

So, back to the point, dictatorship was something that I didn’t think a lot of. And there’s no way that it’s a certainty since Civil War 2.0 is still a very real possibility. That being said, I started to research a bit deeper. What are the signposts that a dictatorship is near?

A truck carrying Vicks Vap-O-Rub® overturned yesterday. Thankfully, there was no congestion.

Most of the articles were written by Leftist journalists who wanted to reee! that Trump was the worst tyrant since Stalin’s more evil brother. One of them was even in a magazine for young adolescent females, whatever those are.

I found one article (Trump era, pre-George Floyd, pre-‘Rona) that had the following conditions (LINK). I didn’t think the article was great. But, being written by a writer from India, it was refreshingly free of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Here is (more or less the list, with some minor edits from me):

Control of the Media: CNN®? Leftist think CNN™ is centrist. Outside of dissident media on the Internet and (sometimes) Fox©, I think we can firmly check this box. The denial of Hunter Biden’s laptop, anyone?
Rigging of the Electoral System: That is more than self-evident from the strange and obviously fraudulent results of the 2020 election, but it is also 100% admitted by the Left, in Time Magazine, no less. It’s here (LINK), though it’s now behind a wall.
Control of the Judicial System: This is only mostly, since Trump managed to put several justices on the Supreme Court. All in all, though, the court system has skewed Left for ages.
Spying on the Population: This box has been checked since 2001 and the Patriot Act. Snowden, anyone?
Harassing Dissidents: Compare the reaction to people literally burning down cities and staging insurrection in the streets to truckers peacefully protesting. Also: say something that is against The Narrative on YouTube®, see how long your account lasts. As a website operator, I certainly know when I’m over the target because the site catches flak.
Suppression of Dissidents – Dissident Protest is Terrorism: January 6^th. End of story.
Promotion of Civil Unrest: George Floyd protests were going to happen, regardless of the person. It just needed an appropriate victim and the video spread far and wide, even though drugs killed St. George of Our Lady of Fentanyl and not a police officer’s knee. Riots were going to happen – it was part of the plan.

Ouch!

By my count, that’s seven out of seven, and that’s just since December of 2019. It’s interesting just how much Donald Trump, despite not really achieving much of lasting note, upset the system. Trump didn’t restore law and order. Heck, he couldn’t even restore Firefly. But yet, they were willing to take off the mask just to get him out.

Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!

Or maybe that was the point?

Taking a step back, civilizations have a lifespan. The following cycle is attributed to Alexander Tytler, a dead Scottish guy. There are two problems with this:

There is no evidence Tytler ever said anything like this.
The name Tytler makes me think of an Austrian politician who moved to Germany and was popular in the 1930s and early 1940s and then decided to get breast enhancement.

Okay, deep down, I have the sense of humor of a twelve-year-old.

The real author of the Tytler Cycle is probably Henning Prentiss, an executive, who is also dead and whose name is not nearly as funny. The 1943 speech it’s from is here (LINK).

So, here is what Tytler Prentiss had to say:

“The historical cycle seems to be:

From bondage to spiritual faith;
from spiritual faith to courage;
from courage to liberty;
from liberty to abundance,
from abundance to selfishness;
from selfishness to apathy,
from apathy to dependency; and
from dependency back to bondage once more.

At the stage between apathy and dependency, men always turn in fear to economic and political panaceas. New conditions, it is claimed, require new remedies.”

The end state is what we’re really interested in – the failure of government, the loss of hope, and the dependence on someone, anyone, to save them. All they have to surrender is control. And, in the United States that doesn’t necessarily mean the same party – in many ways the GOP is just the “for God’s sake, don’t put me in charge, they’ll expect me to do something” wing of the Democratic Party.

How did the Roman Senate choose a new dictator? They played rock, paper, Caesars.

The Strong Man himself is certainly out there right now. He might be unknown to us, but he is building, biding his time. It’s almost certainly not AOC, since she’s not anyone’s idea of a problem solver unless your problem is needing a Margarita, no salt. It’s not someone too old like Bernie Sanders who will turn to dust if Sunlight ever hits him – which is why he has coffins in the basement of the multiple mansions he owns.

It’s certainly not the Ad Libber in Chief, since he (like his pants) is in the process of being dumped (you don’t think those releases about Hunter’s laptop are coincidental, do you?). No, someone young, vigorous, yet already sold to The Narrative. Dan Crenshaw (World Economic Forum™ Young Leader®), my eye is on you.

But it doesn’t have to be Dan. Any man who has The Plan, charisma, and reasonable personal hygiene (including regular showers) might become the Strong Man. It won’t be a woman: the masculinity of the “tough” solutions will be a part of the sales pitch, along with the ever so regretful admission that temporary controls are needed to restore the abundance of the past.

So, control is surrendered. Rights are conditional –rights will be honored as long as it is convenient, ignored, or suppressed when not. The budding Kommissars of Australia provided the poster child for the sudden evaporation of rights when inconvenient for government. In a continent where every insect is an inexhaustible vat of poison, every animal has fangs and can disembowel a man with a kick, and the nectar of half the plants does things that would make H.P. Lovecraft shudder, who knew that the most dangerous creatures were . . . government employees?

I went to Australia and they asked me if I had a criminal record. I said, “I didn’t know that was still required.”

Keep this in mind, as well: The United States government is fine with taking $300 billion of Russia’s funds. Think the Strong Man would hesitate to confiscate all the funds of a dissident? Most dissidents I know don’t even have half the nuclear weapons Russia does.

What does the dictator, the Strong Man want to control, then?

Well, all of us.

How does he do it?

Well, the Strong Man can control other things that allow him to control his people:

Food
Money
Pharmaceuticals
Media
Politics
Culture
Technology
Communications
Family Structure
Energy
Immigration
Fertility

If the Strong Man doesn’t like me, he can kill me and replace me with a compliant citizen and use my money to buy himself something nice, like a new watch. All for the greater good, of course. Orwell described the real goal of every Strong Man best: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

Wow – this part got darker and emptier than the space between Kamala’s ears between ideas. I’ll close with this happy thought: Bondage leads to faith, faith to courage, and courage to liberty. And remember, there are large parts of the United States where guns still far outnumber people. Regardless of the detours we take into darkness, there will always be a light for mankind.

I mean, unless the light is the comet that’s going to hit us. Oh, wait, I wasn’t supposed to give spoilers for 2023 yet!

Not my original.

Next: (There will be a delay in this one, perhaps next week, perhaps the week after) Mechanisms of Control

The Space Between The Words

“Well, I don’t care if it was some dork in a costume. For one brief moment, I felt the heartbeat of creation, and it was one with my own.” – Futurama

I love my step ladder, but it’ll never be my real ladder.

It was March of 2005. I remember it fairly well. It was when we were living in Alaska. The move had been a big risk for The Mrs. and I – moving north across the better part of a continent for work. I was fortunate to have a good boss and good co-workers.

It was there that I had what I would normally call an epiphany, but epiphany seems too strong. A realization? Maybe. Regardless, to me, it seemed profound.

The Space Between The Words . . . it was a throwaway line by a guest on a radio show that The Mrs. and I were listening to on KFBX, the local AM station. But sometimes a phrase sticks with you, and this one stuck with me like the phrase “floozy crotch snout” sticks to Kamala Harris.

Or am I the only one who calls her that?

Yup, real quote. Her real words are better than almost any meme.

Regardless . . . The Space Between The Words. It seemed as insignificant as Hunter Biden’s willpower until in that hypnogogic state between wakefulness and sleep I thought about it . . . The Space Between The Words.

What exists there, in The Space Between The Words?

My realization was that The Space Between The Words isn’t made of silence. It is far from that dead and sterile nothingness that silence implies.

My HVAC guy sure has his ducts in a row.

For me, that space is infinity. It is the engine of creation itself.

I wrote “The Space Between The Words” down on a piece of Post-It® note and taped it to my computer monitor. I still have that piece of now-faded pale yellow paper stuck in a book I carry with me every day. To me, it is a touchstone and a personal reminder.

Why does it matter to me?

When I am talking, (or doing public speaking, which I do 10,000% more often than I want to do and potentially 20,000% more than the audience wants me to do) if I ever get flustered, I can just stop. I can pause. I realize that I can tap into The Space Between The Words, that creative power that allows me to choose whichever of the thousands of words I know as the very next one. I get to choose that next phrase. I get to choose the way the conversation can go. I get to create the possibilities with only the choice of my words.

The Space Between The Words is crucial.

If I choose well, I can turn a simple conversation into something meaningful. One of the powers of words is that, when applied correctly, is that they can become something transformative. A simple conversation can change a person’s life forever. Especially if it’s on tape – just ask Richard Nixon.

My buddy and I got a huge contract to make toy vampires. There’s only two of us – I have to make every second Count.

The choice of words is, as I mentioned before, the power of creation. I don’t claim to own that power. Again, the word I would use isn’t that I came up with the idea or invented the concept I’m describing now. I just discovered something that I’m sure many others before me knew was there, just like I discovered that someone was keeping a list of all of my jokes in a dad-o-base.

I won’t claim to be a great or charismatic public speaker. I’ve had my moments. But I do know that I’ve changed at least one or two lives through things that I have said, and I do know that I’ve said more of what I mean with greater clarity when I allowed The Space Between The Words to guide me.

I bet no one expected that meme.

Likewise, when I write, I don’t claim to be a great writer. I do, however (when it’s not 3am!) try to carefully edit what I write so that it has the meaning I want to share. Sometimes I don’t get there. Sometimes, when writing one of these posts, the content takes a sharp turn, and I let it run. I know that the full idea I was trying to get out will get born, eventually.

Or it won’t.

That’s the beauty of The Space Between The Words. Even when writing, it is there.

And, to a certain extent, it has changed me. I’m no longer afraid to stop, to pause, and to collect. In one sense, that vast galaxy of creation that I feel I’ve tapped into is something much greater than I will ever be, especially if I keep losing weight.

I wonder what other planet worms exist on . . . otherwise why do we call them Earth worms?

In a religious sense, it feels like I’ve come into a brief (and unworthy!) contact with Logos – a deep universal well that I can only see dimly. Not Legos®, but Logos. Legos™ just hurt your foot when you walk down the hall in the dark.

In my experience, The Space Between The Words contains wisdom. The Space Between the Words contains creation. The Space Between The Words contains . . . redemption.

Listen for it – I assure you there is no silence there between the words. There is no self-doubt. It is calm. It is patient. It is Good. And, for me, it has certainly been worth keeping that Post-It® note around.

Warning: next week we’ll take a darker turn, probably all week, if not longer. I’ll still try to be the “Mary Poppins of Doom” and interject humor and a smile where I can, but realize – there are many twists and turns ahead, and probabilities leading to a dark future are rapidly coalescing.

The Modern World Part IV: What To Do?

“Would you say I have a plethora of piñatas?” – Three Amigos

He was also the first person to use CTRL-C.

So, I promised three blogs on the Modern World. They are here – The Modern World Part I: Health And Strippers, The Modern World Part II: Wages, Subscriptions, and Dating, and The Modern World Part III: You Exist To Be Farmed. As I sat preparing to do the blog tonight, I realized there was one more post to provide the capstone to the series, which I present in this post.

How do we deal with modernity outside of moving to a cabin in Montana?

Listen, despite the name, Ted made more than one bomb.

First, if you’re not healthy, get healthy. That’s actually horribly simple to do for most people.

Limit the amount of food that you eat – we’re provided with a plethora of food choices daily. Most of it I don’t need. As I’ve railed for years, most (not all!) people in the United States could go without food for two weeks with no ill effects, and many would find the experience a positive, not a negative. Here is some sound advice I’ve incorporated into my life: you can’t outrun your teeth. But I can outrun most Leftists – you can tell they like carbs.
Sure donuts (in metric, doughnuts) are good. Avoid them. Will one a week kill you? No. Will one a day? Maybe. Same with chips. I had a “snack size” bag of chips two weeks ago. Since I’ve been eating well, they made me feel queasy. Same with donuts. When your diet is good meat and real vegetables, donuts and that gooey cheese they serve with movie-theater nachos taste like . . . a chemical product. Which they are. Corollary: don’t let your teeth dig your grave. I wouldn’t want to ruin the gravedigger’s hole career.
Pick foods that are as close as possible to actual food. If you’re gonna have a chicken sandwich at McDonalds®, pick the one that’s made out of actual chicken rather than some sort of processed chicken stuff. A baked potato or French fries? Baked, thank you. Seriously, once I stopped eating crap, crap tasted like crap. If it has vegetable oil or a list of ingredients longer than, say, seven, once a week. At most. Heck, I even had a kid’s meal at McDonalds today. It sure made his parents mad.
The food pyramid is even poor geometry – heck, I read Pharaoh used slaves to build his. Bricks might have been easier? Regardless, real fats and meat (butter, a well-marbled ribeye) are good for you and make you feel full. Flour spikes your insulin and all the breads (except the ones I make from grinding the bones of door-to-door salesmen) are made from flour. Insulin tells your body to store fat. Do the math.
Get exercise. It’s good for you. If nothing else, walk. If you can’t walk, undulate like a snake on a baby oil-covered shower curtain. One thing I’ve seen in life – when a man stops walking, death isn’t far away. Keep moving. Even if your legs are weak, you can still do diddly-squats.
Avoid it, except, say, once a week. Maybe. I’ll have an entire post on that at some point.

The other day I said, “Alexa, turn on CNN®. I want to hear the news.” Alexa responded, “I’m sorry Lord John, you’ll have to pick one or the other.”

Second, feed your mind.

Feed your mind like you feed your body. Go to the source, and check everyone (even me!) and determine what isn’t Truth. Journalists are now being taught in journalism school (it’s like real school, but they use pictures and coloring books) that being an advocate for the globalist, Leftist viewpoint is the point of news reporting. Understand that virtually every news story you are reading today in mainstream media is written by a rich kid who wasn’t smart enough to go to law school and believes that lying to you is ethical, as long as it advances The Agenda and The Narrative. And sometimes they change The Agenda and The Narrative in less than a week. Don’t believe me? Ask Psaki about COVID.
The media lies. But I repeat myself. “Truth is the first casualty of war,” quoted Ethel Annakin-Skywalker in 1915 according to something I read on the Internet. Remember that “nurse” who told Congress of Iraqi soldiers tossing infants out when they took incubators from hospitals when Iraq invaded Kuwait? She was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. Look it up. Before you believe a single thing coming from Ukraine, look it up, and understand this: your emotion is the aim. Heck, I hear manipulating your emotions is all the rage.
Propaganda: even when you’re aware of propaganda, it’s effective.
Look for things that make you happy. When I go on the Internet, sometimes (when I’m in a growly mood) I look for things that will make me mad. There’s plenty. Twitter® is a sea of it. Most social media is a sea of it. That’s why (except for when writing for research purposes) I avoid it like the plague – remember, all work and no plague makes for an entirely different 13^th
For 95% of people, there is no reason you can’t be happy in this moment, right now. There are people in this world who have serious problems, but for the most part you’re really not one of them. Even if you are, why would you let those problems rob you from a moment of being happy? There is a time to grieve, a time to be sad. When you let it rule your life, you’re a victim. Stop it. Don’t make me come over there and make you.

I brought a grenade to a water balloon fight once. It did level the playing field.

Then, there’s marriage. These rules aren’t for 1970, (though they would have worked) but more for today – the world has moved on. It is far harder today to find a good match than it was even when I met The Mrs. two decades ago. If you’re happily married, ignore and skip to the next section.

If you’re not married, take care in picking your partner. A lot of care. A bad match will last just as long as a good one (if you have kids) and be amazingly costly. And never pick woman obsessed with Star Wars® – divorce is strong with this one.
Avoid dating apps. They’re really just casual sex apps. And never go casual. Get competitive.
If you’re a young dude (below 35), try to get a wife who is no older than 20-24 years old and marry for values and character. Why? Nothing good happens with a single woman in their mid to late 20s now.
If you’re a young woman, find a quality guy who has values and character, and stay a virgin until marriage.
If you’re a young person, especially a man, avoid marrying a spouse whose parents divorced when they were young (0-16). Understand their family and their values. Understand that the values on display with the parents are another clue to how your future spouse will be.
If you’re a man, don’t let your wife’s work interfere with raising the kids and keeping the house. Raising kids with decent values are more important than most luxuries.
And while we’re there about kids, understand this – the move to turn government schools into an indoctrination center has never been higher. Which values do you want your children to have? Yours? The governments?

But I hear it’s at a pretty low interest rate. Heck, I think we could refinance New Zealand to make the balloon payment.

What about economics?

Avoid debt to the extent possible. Never borrow to buy a car, unless it’s the only choice. Never buy a new car unless your net worth is over $1 million or a company you own is paying for it. Heck, I hear the best way to get back on your feet is to miss two car payments . . . .
I have one. I could pay it off in cash. Why could I pay it off? Because I never borrow to buy cars (since 1997). I hear Spongebob® isn’t paying his mortgage – his house is underwater.
Understand that luxury has multiple costs: first, there’s the cash that has to be paid every month. Second, there’s a moral cost. Just like a donut, occasional luxury won’t dull the character. But every month, and forever? It robs bank accounts and robs the most precious thing that any person controls – their time.
Video games are a luxury. If a person spends 20 hours a week playing video games, what else could have been done with their time? Imagine if Hemingway spent his spare time playing Grand Theft Auto instead of sitting under the Catalan Sun drinking wine from a bota and watching bullfights? GTA is a life stealer. And for Ernest, so was a shotgun.
Why live in a big city? The high housing cost? The crush of incessant humanity surrounding you? Oh, yeah, you can get Thai food at 3am.
Realize the dollar is going to die. The United States prints them, and then other people take them. When Jen P-saki said that this was “Putin’s Inflation” I asked the question: “When did Putin take control of our money supply and then started printing trillions of dollars?” If you salted away a bit of gold and silver (and lead, too) the best case is that you could give it to your kids when you pass on. The worst case? Well, between you and me, silver and gold might be the biggest bargains of the century in 2022 (I am NOT an investment advisor).
Realize that in the future, there is a high degree of probability that having “divergent” opinions to The Narrative will result in cutting people off from their money – it has already happened in Canada. You may not believe it, but it’s Tru-deau. How will you prepare for that?
You have a year’s worth of food, right? You buy a little extra each month and salt it away? It’s a lot easier to do when the shelves are full, and when shortages hit you’re not part of the problem – you’re part of the solution because you won’t be adding to the panic. It’s not hoarding if you bought it before the panic hits.

I heard he was sad later in life. He had a Kipling depression.

The Modern World thinks that this is a new scenario. It isn’t. Kipling wrote about this many, many years ago in The Gods of The Copybook Headings:

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.”

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.”

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Hedonism Leads To Nihilism

“Shut up and pay attention to me, Bender. Look, I love life and its pleasures as much as anyone here, except perhaps you, Hedonism Bot. But we need to be shut off. Especially you, Hedonism Bot.” – Futurama

One thing I learned in high school – always date homeless girls. It doesn’t matter where you drop them off.

I know that lots of people had it rough in high school, that they felt that they didn’t fit in. They felt as awkward at Whoopi Goldberg at a bris.

Not me.

I’m not bragging, really, it was just how it worked out for me. I had a great time in class, a great time in athletics, had great friends from nearly every walk of life. Heck, I even had hair back then.

I was also really lucky with the ladies. Thankfully there were no small number of girls with daddy issues in town, a drive-in movie theater, and a pizza place. Of course the pizza was not entirely necessary for a seduction, but a guy gets hungry. Seducing girls burns up calories.

Let’s add in the last element of hedonism: beer.

There was a bar where if you had the $5 cover charge, you were of drinking age as long as you weren’t stupid enough to wear your letter jacket. I should know, because I got in when I was 16. I went in with my friend’s (who was of drinking age) license. He was four inches taller than me and was probably sixty pounds less than me. I wasn’t fat, he was just skinny enough to fit down the barrel of a 12 gauge and not touch the sides.

I dived off the stage at an Oktoberfest party. I went krautsurfing.

Yes. At 16 I thought it was a good idea to sneak into a bar holding the license of someone who resembled me only in the fact that they were another human male who had blonde hair and blue eyes and in only those ways. And that same person who barely resembled me was also walking in with me.

I had no idea what sort of ludicrous story I would tell them if they asked. “Oh, sorry, I thought I was another person?” No. “Oh, when I was at his place I accidentally put his license in my wallet and hid my own license?” Hmm. “I was fighting with my multiple personality disorder and physically split into two people?”

Thankfully, the place was nearly empty and the bouncer never asked me for an ID, just took my $5 and stamped my hand.

I saw a drunk caveman walk home once. It was a meanderthal.

Apparently, I made enough of an impression that night that they never once carded me, ever. After one night, I was a regular and knew most of the people that worked there by name. Not so amazingly, about half the people from my social circle made the same discovery, and on a random Friday night, it wasn’t unusual to see a dozen juniors and seniors in the place. Of course in 2022, the Safety Police would probably summarily execute the owner and the staff, but this was a kinder, gentler, drunker time.

It was life on easy mode. Plentiful girls with dubious morals. Cheap beer. Great success in nearly everything I tried. I’m not saying I peaked in high school, no. Heck, I’m not even sure that I’ve peaked yet. But it was easy.

One thing I did was try to connect emotionally with those frolicsome fräuleins of my hometown. That seemed (in many cases) like a lost cause. One night while sitting under the moonlight in the Wonderful Wildermobile, between hickie sessions, I looked up at the Moon and said to my girlfriend at the time, “It’s amazing to look up at that, and think how much smaller it is than the Sun. How much smaller the Earth is than the Sun. It’s a fantastic Universe we live in.”

Her response? “The Sun is larger than the Earth? No way!!!!”

Okay, our relationship was over pretty shortly after that comment. And that also changed me.

I bet my old girlfriend thinks Starbucks® is a currency that aliens use.

I had an epiphany. I was living a life of hedonism. And although I had a life of pleasure, there seemed to be a lack of meaning. I had everything that every guy on the football team could desire.

But I felt empty. Not dead inside, but empty. I felt that the things I was doing were, while extremely physically pleasing, were devoid of meaning. It was like being Hunter Biden without being a Biden, smoking crack (or meth), and getting money from anonymous donors for my retarded attempts at painting to try to influence my dad.

I’m betting that this is the first time Scotty and scotch were used to explain nihilism.

The feeling of empty was a tough one. It helped me see how someone can go from that feeling of empty in the face of pleasure to a feeling of nihilism. I looked up the definition of nihilism, and came up with more definitions than I had girlfriends in high school.

I’ll give this one, which I found after looking at a dozen (many contradictory) definitions on the Internet: “as the view that nothing we do, nothing we create, nothing we love, has any meaning or value whatsoever.” That is the one that mirrors the emptiness that I felt.

It is the inherent danger of a life that borders on the libertine. What matters if life is so easy?

Thankfully, I’m glad I caught that as early as I did. I can see easily of how falling down the rabbit hole of hedonism could lead to nihilism. As I got older, I realized that, whatever definition used, nihilism is the worst of philosophies, and the worst of the human condition.

Even though the Universe is large, and there have been countless years since the start, and, perhaps, countless years until the heat death of the Universe, we matter.

What happens in this world does matter. We have meaning. And fighting the good fight for Good over Evil does matter. Life and meaning are built not in the pleasure, but in the struggle to be better, to do more, to be more, and to add value because we were here. Those are the stories worth telling – they are the ones that will be sung around campfires in 100 years.

I hope Aaron Burr didn’t name his son Tim. It would have been awkward to look for him if he ever got lost in a forest.

Never give up, because what we do here matters. What you do here has value. Even as we stare at the vastness of a Universe that no one can comprehend, it matters that we are here. And it matters what we create.

And our love? It perhaps has the greatest value of all, though it is rarely found in the bottom of a glass of beer, unless there’s a live band.

Did I mention they had live bands at the bar?

How I’m Doing My Resolutions, Complete With Rocky II

“Well, you should have had him! Now don’t let up on this man. This man is dangerous!” – Rocky II

After he got the “Eye of the Tiger” he got a lifetime ban from the zoo.

It’s the new year, so, I have to buy a new calendar. Objective achieved!

When I was a young kid, say eight or nine, there were several things that I never quite understood. The first was the impact of foreign debt flow on monetary policy. The second was why people got so excited about changing from one year to another.

At best, New Year’s Eve seemed a useless waste of an evening. My parents would occasionally go to see friends, occasionally they’d host the party at our house. They’d talk, and drink, and generally have a good time. My interest in hanging out with them approached zero. Oh, sure, they were all nice, but the “got your nose” game loses its luster past the age of, oh, one.

What’s the sentence for shoplifting a calendar? 12 months.

Honestly, I really thought the concept was overblown until 2020 – I couldn’t wait to see that year in the rearview mirror. 2021? Potentially worse than 2020, and I’m glad it’s gone, too. I’m (honestly) not very optimistic about 2022.

But one thing I have learned is that I can use the concept of a new year, as stupid as it is, for me.

The nice thing about most Christmas/New Year holidays is that I have time off – time to think, time to get back with the family, and time to reassess:

who I am,

Am I following the virtues that I value? Am I being honest and truthful? Am I doing the things that provide the most value? Is my driver’s license data correct, I mean, with the exception of the weight because everybody lies about that?

what I am, and

Am I doing the things out in the world that add the most value? Am I changing the world for the better? What are the things I need to stop doing? What am I intentionally avoiding? Did I leave the waffle iron on?

where I’m going.

Am I on a path, or am I just wandering? What is keeping me off the path? Do I really have to wear clothes outside like the court order says?

Drinking alcohol doesn’t solve my problems. On the other hand, neither does drinking milk . . . .

I do this annually now. I find that one of the best places to think about these things is in the hypnagogic state where I’m not awake or asleep. I’ve had some very good insights during those moments. It’s (for me) a great place to find uncomfortable truth – things I really already knew, but that I was hiding from myself. Those insights can be utterly lost in the clutter of everyday life and the constant actions and demands.

Some of the past successes from these New Year reviews have been amazing for me, lost weight, and bad habits quit among them. I’ve used those times to understand me better.

I used to be a taxi driver, but the riders were boring. About all they said was, “Hey, I don’t live in the woods . . .”

I’d give you a list of what I’m doing/changing/quitting this year, but I’m not sure it’s at all interesting. My life is mainly a fairly boring one and except for the “acquire a chimpanzee named Bear and ride around the United States having wacky adventures” most of the items on the list are probably all items on millions of lists belonging to other people.

What happens next, though, is action. Thinking is one part, but once the decisions have been made, life comes down to taking action and making sure that I have sufficient discipline to do what I’m looking to do.

With small goals, discipline is easy. It’s not changing habits and patterns that I have built into my life over the course of decades. Changing habits that have been around since I was 18? Those are far harder. For those levels of issues, the only real solution is fanatical discipline, repeated and sustained. Muscle isn’t built on one good day at the gym. Muscle is built on hours of effort and pain.

And if the unvaxxed are a danger to the vaxxed, aren’t I putting myself in danger from the unvaxxed if I get the vaxx?

For me, the best goals are based on real, hard data. When lifting weights, the iron never lies. Choosing those things that I can describe with absolutes is crucial. “I will not ever . . .” is much better than “I’ll try not to . . .” When I combine “I will not ever” with a value? I have a goal that is stark and sleek, and one I can’t fudge.

I want this to be about the change I want versus me. I want it to be measured, clearly, in absolutes. I want the absolutes to be in my control. If I say, “I will never kill a zebra with a Ronco® Pocket Fisherman™, that’s something that’s absolute, even if that stupid zebra had it coming.

One example of a hard goal is dealing with The Mrs. When we met and dating got serious, I told her simply, “I will never lie to you.” I haven’t. It’s simple.

It’s absolute.

I also don’t have to revisit that every year. Since we’ve been married, that’s been a promise I’ve kept.

I think these absolutes scare the Left. They like to deal in degrees and shades of grey. A fudge here. A cheat there. A value subverted, and then (in many cases) a value inverted.

The last part is about failure.

Just because I start a change, doesn’t mean I have to follow through. I’m allowed to change my goal, especially as my knowledge changes. Heck, I could even be getting the opposite effects from a change that I anticipated. Time to reassess.

The last part is failure. Just because I decided to do something and failed doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t try again. It doesn’t mean that I should be afraid of trying again. In many cases, (like Rocky II, for instance) the difference between failure and victory is just getting up one more time.

Also, with the Biden administration, failure is not an option. It comes with the basic package.

Finally, I’ve learned to not fear success. What happens if I succeed with all of my goals? That has happened, and more than once.

Add more goals. I’m breathing. I’m not done. And I’m not perfect. More discipline, and getting up one more time? That’s the key.

I still think celebrating a new year is silly, but I’m going to use it this time. With enough discipline, 2022? That could be, for me, the best year ever. Heck, might as well put the new calendar to good use . . . .

Dead Romans Agree: Don’t Let The Small Stuff Bother You

“Happy premise number three: even though I feel like I might ignite, I probably won’t.” – Bowfinger

I hear that Marcus’ wife was a perfect X.

Mike, the proprietor over at Cold Fury (LINK), is going through a very difficult time. Big Country has set up a gofundme for him here (LINK). Much more information at the gofundme site.

Now to the post . . .

I woke up this morning just irritated. No particular reason. In all fairness, it was entirely an internal feeling, and I imagine most people never noticed. I was nice and polite to nearly everyone I interacted with. And why not? None of them were my ex-wife.

I wasn’t irritated with them, I was just irritated. There were no issues. I wasn’t in pain. No one around me was in particular trouble. Thankfully I’m not an electrician – people might dislike me not being positive at work.

As I thought about it, what was irritating me? I couldn’t quite put a finger on it. There was no rational reason at all. During a conversation tonight, though, I had a reason to quote Marcus Aurelius:

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”

Not mine, but I couldn’t resist.

Sure, Marcus Aurelius’ kid was an utter tool, but when you become Caesar at 18, well, it might tend to go to your head – think of Commodus as Miley Cyrus, 180 A.D. Back to Marcus, though. Marcus genuinely did his best for the Roman Empire. As near as I can tell, Marcus was a pretty good leader.

And that little quote above wasn’t written for you and me. It was written for Marcus, by Marcus. He was reminding himself that the external things in the world had only the power he gave them. He was giving himself a pep talk.

Marcus Aurelius was right. In the conversation I was having tonight, the person was very upset (most of you don’t know the person, though specific readers in California and Indiana do – hi guys!). The reason she was upset? Nothing rational at all. So I quoted a dead Roman emperor.

Who says that Stoics aren’t compassionate?

Did it help? I don’t know. I’m beginning to see a pattern where crying people don’t stop crying when I quote dead Roman emperors. I’m beginning to see why the kids call The Mrs. when they want actual human sympathy.

My irritation (I think) came from the same place. Nowhere. I felt fine (except for my right knee which is much better now) and the day generally went fairly well. I realized that the advice I gave was meant just as much for me as for the person I was talking to. I was just being irritated because I let myself be irritated.

Once I was done and realized I didn’t have to be irritated?

My hands disappeared today, but I can’t really point my finger at what caused it.

My irritation disappeared. I know that the way I feel is (generally) my choice. I can choose how I feel: salty, Wednesday, or even drunk. The only reason that I’m not happy every morning is if I choose not to be happy on some particular morning.

Are there actual reasons why I might have different feelings? Sure. If I had mental problems (other than an unseemly affection for awful jokes and a desire to consciously be able to make my fingernails grow absurdly fast) that might be a reason to have a feeling other than what I choose.

Don’t know. I do know that there are people with actual mental problems. There’s proof: some people actually voted for Biden. But, going back to Marcus, that’s not external. Being sick or goofy enough to vote for Biden isn’t external.

Marcus Aurelius might have voted for Biden – Marcus is dead, after all.

Physical pain also is an internal source that can destroy moods. I once (for a few months) had sciatica. I was irritable enough every morning to chew nails and spit bullets. Then I discovered that I could work out for a few hours on an elliptical trainer to make the pain go away. A week later?

I was fine. My irritation vanished along with my sciatica, never (hopefully) to return.

That was nearly 15 years ago. Sure, I’ve felt pain since then, but most of it was the good pain from a hard workout. Heck, most days the worst thing that happened was the crisp morning breeze running through my back hair.

My mood depends on me. My attitude depends on me.

Does that mean that I can’t see the actual situation we’re in? Of course not. I see a nation tearing itself apart. It’s worse: it’s not just a nation, Western Civilization seems to be happily thrashing about as it marches down a path to extinction.

Is that good?

Of course not.

Does it mean that I should walk around every day being sad?

Of course not. I am doing, I assure you, everything I can think of to stave off that darkness. I mean, those memes won’t make themselves.

Never buy a sculpture of Bonnie Tyler. Every now and then it falls apart.

And I am doing it cheerfully. I laugh every day. I smile because I know that most of the things that I worry about can have no power over me unless I give them that power.

Make your choices, and understand that while you might wake up irritated – it’s your choice if you wish to stay in that mood for a minute or an hour.

Me? I like being happy, so I choose that, even in moments where it might not be appropriate. I might even need to stop high-fiving people at funerals.

So, I got started late typing this after a day I chose to just be irritated. And, I’m going to choose to end now.

With a smile on my face. Go and have a great day. Most of the time, having a great day is just a choice.

Choose wisely.

Recharge Yourself.

“They recharge? I just keep buying new phones.” – House, M.D.

It’s cool everyone in the world charges their phones with an American Bee. Oh, wait, they call it a USB.

Some things just wear me out faster than the inseam of Oprah’s pants.

Thankfully, some things just make me feel as excited as the Autopsy Club at open Mike night.

Things that wear me out are, thankfully, not so common. Besides, if I listed those, I’d just be whining. Besides, it’s a lot more fun to focus on the positive when I can.

Here are a sampling of things that recharge me:

Learning new things.

The older I get, the more I realize that my ironclad knowledge of youth was . . . wrong.

Not virtue, mind you. What is true and virtuous hasn’t changed. The lessons of morality from my youth from parents and grandparents have been constant guides. So, not that.

But how many things were skipped in history? What’s left to learn in science? Amazing amounts. Heck, I was shocked about some of the things I learned about electricity.

That’s one tough cut of meat.

Writing a post that I like.

When I write a post where I felt that the beginning, middle, and end all work and mesh seamlessly together with the bad jokes and memes? I’m in heaven. I hit the “go” button on the software to schedule the post, and then hit the comments. If it’s a particularly late night, that’s the worst, because I’m excited about what I wrote, but it’s two hours before the alarm goes off.

I took my goldfish to the vet. “He’s having seizures.” The vet responded, “He looks fine to me.” “Sure,” I said, “but wait until I get him out of the bowl.”

It’s worth it even though the two most common synonyms for unemployed are “writer” and “blogger”. One thing to note: some of the posts that I personally like the best aren’t the ones that get the most traction. That’s okay. I’m still learning (see the first point).

Teaching someone something new to them.

When I, with ten minutes and a few hundred words, can change the world view of someone, I cherish that moment. It’s all well and good to go through my daily life just doing my thing, but when I have the opportunity to change the way a human mind works and sees the Universe, forever?

That’s the best. Doing my own thing, I’m limited. The surest way to multiply my impact is to share ideas. I’ll die. If the ideas I taught live on and spread after that?

I still win.

Coming home and sitting down in my chair.

I have a chair upstairs. It’s a nice, soft brown chair, next to a coffee table stacked with too many books. I walk in after a day away, pop my book bag on the floor, and ease down into the chair. From there, I can go anywhere. Most often, The Mrs. will curl up on the couch and we’ll talk about the day. Or if she’s not there? I’ll sit and read. Or sit and sleep. Or . . . whatever.

I told my son that if he’s got a paralyzed girlfriend to take her wheelchair if she wanted to break up. She’ll come crawling back.

Getting up and drinking coffee in my chair in the dark morning in an empty house after everyone but me has headed away.

There is something peaceful about sitting in the chair before the chaos of the day begins. I often turn off all of the lights and sit in a still, quiet house, reading about what happened while I slept. I look at my watch and follow the time until it’s time to go.

A crisp autumn day.

Winter is my favorite time of the year because I love the weather, the colder the better. An autumn day is nice, too. The heat of summer has burned off. The potential for a cool autumn day is endless. Work outside? Sure. Open the windows and paint a room? Sure. Weld up the mailbox supports? Can do. An autumn day gives a last look before winter.

Autumn days are filled with infinite possibility. I guess that makes me a Fall Guy. I got that nickname through the school of hard equinox.

One out of our four cats.

We had one cat, and it is an awful cat. Last November, The Mrs. and Pugsley conspired to bring home a second. I was against it. My reasoning was that atheists own more cats than Christians. Pugsley countered that it’s illegal to own Christians.

But about the cat? Sadly, I was wrong. That cat is a pretty good cat. I like it.

The two cats that showed up afterward? I’ll pass, thank you, and they can stay outside unless the apocalypse comes and we need extra flavor for the ramen.

But I like that one cat quite a bit.

I have the reflexes of a cat. Remember, a dead cat is still a cat.

A full Saturday afternoon reading a good book.

A few weeks ago it was cool during the week, but hot on the weekend. I grabbed a book around 9AM and started reading. I read through the morning (stopping for lunch) and then read until I took a nap.

That was nice. I hadn’t done it in years. There’s a magic in getting lost in a world, letting it open up in your mind. One boss of mine said that, “Books are the only way that one human can talk to another through time.” He was right. But I make it a point to never read a braille horror book – I can always feel when something is coming.

Sleeping in on Saturday but still being the first up.

The stillness of the house in the morning brings possibility. What will happen next? Who will the next person to walk down the hall be?

My friend kisses his wife goodbye every morning. The Mrs. asked me, “Why don’t you do that?” It’s a good question, but I don’t even know my friend’s wife that well.

As I look through the list, there’s a pattern: I seek new knowledge so I can share it. I look for stillness so I can create thoughts, and then put them into action. While I love taking action and making things happen in the real world, I like to think that the knowledge I pick up along the way and share might make any action I take look, over time, quite small.

What charges you up?

Time: It’s The Only Thing You Have

“I didn’t invent the time machine to win at gambling. I invented a time machine to travel through time.” – Back to the Future 2

I have two dogs, Rolex® and Timex™. They are watchdogs.

Time.

Of things that have long fascinated me, time is at the top of the list. Even when I was a little kid, time fascinated me.

The idea that time, of all of the physical parameters of the world there was the one that we couldn’t control. Humanity has mastered the power of the atom, at least partially. We haven’t tamed fusion, but we can create it, and have several fewer islands in the Pacific because of it.

Humanity has dammed the largest of rivers, giving us power. We have used technology to shrink the world. The first recorded circumnavigation of the world took 1082 days. Magellan didn’t quite make the whole trip, but he still gets the credit on a technicality.

Now? The International Space Station does an orbit in 90 minutes or so at 17,150 miles per hour, which is nearly as fast as Haitians are entering Texas.

Humanity has conquered the riddle of steel – we’ve made steel buildings that reach upwards into the sky to please Crom. We have conquered climate – people live at the South Pole in perfect comfort, as well as managing to live in Houston without melting into puddles of sweat.

Batman® couldn’t solve the riddle of steel, but he could name the worst riddle: being riddled with bullets.

We can see at night. We can talk, nearly instantly, with people a continent away.

My phone buzzes every time there is motion outside my front door – it’s like having a superpower of sensing where and when there is activity at a distance. Another superpower is being able to access obscure facts anywhere on the planet that can reach a cell signal.

But time remains fixed. It flows only one way. And it is the most subjective of our senses. Even Pugsley notices it: “This summer was so short!”

He’s in high school. That’s when the transition from the endless summers of childhood begin to transform into the fleeting, never-ending carousel of years that is adulthood.

Best thing about being in Antifa® is that you never have to take off work to protest.

I’ve long felt that I understood why this was. Let me give it a shot.

For a newborn, the second day it’s outside and breathing is 50% of its entire life. For a six-year-old, half of their life is three years – much more. It’s not a big percentage, but it’s much smaller than 50%. For a sixteen-year-old, half their life is eight years.

If you’re forty – half your life is twenty years. 1/8 versus 1/20? It’s amazingly different. We don’t perceive life as a line. We’re living inside of it – we compare our lives to the only thing we have . . . our lives. Each day you live is smaller than the last.

But that’s not everything.

As we age, novelty decreases. When we’re young, experiences and knowledge are coming at us so quickly that we are presented with novel (new and unique) information daily. New words. New thoughts. New ideas. That’s why babies keep falling for that stupid “got your nose” thing. They don’t realize that I can reattach it.

Three clowns were eating a cannibal. One clown says, “I think we started this joke wrong.”

Over time, though, novelty decreases, as does the percentage of your life that each day represents. Ever drive a new route somewhere? When I do it, I have to focus my attention. It seems like it takes longer because I’m having to deal with novelty.

I’ve had my “new” laptop nearly seven years. I had my old laptop for longer than that, yet my “new” laptop still seems like it’s temporary.

There are only so many routes I can drive to work, so much novelty that I can find in a daily drive. Even a commute of an hour begins to fade into a brief moment in time if it’s the same commute, day after day.

Work is similar. Over time, we gain experience. Experience shows us how to fix problems (and sometimes how not to fix them). But that experience of taking a solution and modifying it to fix the next problem isn’t as hard as fixing the first problem.

The fact that each day is a smaller portion of my life, combined with the fact that as I get older, the possibility that I see something new dims. I’ve solved a bunch of problems in my life. Finding a new one is . . . difficult.

Life goes faster, day by day for me. Every endless summer day of youth is in my rearview mirror.

And yet . . .

Each day is still 24 hours. I can still use each day and live it with all of the gusto of a 10-year-old fishing for trout after building a tree fort, playing with his dog, and building a model of a Phantom F-4 to dogfight with the MiG 21-PF already hanging from the ceiling.

They did not see that coming.

Even though those 24 hours seem shorter now than at any time in my life, they are relentless in their exact sameness. I get to choose how I spend those moments in my life. I get to choose what I want to produce, and how hard I work to make it happen.

Humanity may never have the ability to crack time – it appears that even today, outside of sands falling from an hourglass, we can only describe time as a fundamental entity, something we measure against.

Does the flow of time vary? Certainly. But only if we’re moving at large fractions of the speed of light or are caught in a huge gravity well, but let’s leave your mother out of this.

Gravity is just a social construct invented by an English Christian to keep you down.

I have come to the conclusion that I will likely never understand what, exactly, time is, outside of this:

Time is all we have – it is what makes up life. We measure our lives in it, because no man can buy an extra hour of life. We have the hours we have. The only difference is what we do with that time.

I mentioned in a previous post that (during the week) I often get by on scant hours of sleep. That’s because I have more things that I want to do in my life than I can fit in a day that’s less than 20 or 22 hours some days.

I choose to try to do more, to try to make use of this time, because each moment is a gift.

Maybe I can settle for that definition of time: a gift. Each moment is a gift.

Don’t beg for more, or live in fear of losing them. Just make each moment count.

Perhaps that’s the secret and precious nature of time. It is the one thing we should never waste, and never wish away.