Category: Significance

Emotional Bank Accounts – Another Form Of Wealth

“I’m yours, Lurch.  My heart.  My soul.  My bank account.” – The Addams Family

If it’s 2% milk, what’s the other 98%?

I generally try to be an upbeat person.  I’ve got good reason to be.  So far, at least, most of the worst things in my life have led to most of the best things in my life.  And it seems the worse the initial event is, the better the final outcome.

The track record is pretty good.  I’m optimistic.  Heck, with a small thermonuclear war, who knows how good things will get for me!

Optimism is one of my personal keys to life.  And it’s key to my relationships.

One thing I’ve learned (besides the fact that cats float but don’t like it) along the way is this:  what I get out of my relationships is just like my job or any other aspect of my life.  The more that I put into the relationship, the more that I get out of the relationship.

“I have become Fluffy, Destroyer of Worlds.”

Stephen Covey called this the Emotional Bank Account®.  I put the little ® there in this case because Stephen Covey ® almost everything under the Sun.

The idea of the Emotional Bank Account™ is simple:  every relationship that you have is one where you’re either doing the things that build the relationship or doing things that cause the relationship to fade faster than Johnny Depp’s career.

A ramen noodle warehouse burned down.  Dozens of dollars in inventory were destroyed. 

This is a simple and important concept.  In my career I’ve worked in lots of different office environments and seen lots of different characters that quickly developed an overdraft situation with me:

  • The Complainer: There’s a problem with everything, in the view of a Complainer.  It’s like working with Goldilocks, but the porridge is never, ever the right temperature.  There is no topic that isn’t complained about.  Heck, if they were the manager of the Tesla® plant, they’d complain that the place smelled musky.
  • The Helpless: Helpless people simply cannot do any particular task, and need help each and every time they do it.  If you allow it, they’ll pawn off as much of the task to you as they can, each and every day.  What’s the name for a collective parasitical group of people like this?
  • The Woe-Is-Me: This is a perennial victim.  Everything in their life that’s bad?  They’re not responsible for it.  How bad is their life?  They have to shop at Wal-Martyr®.
  • The Untrustworthy: Think you’ve told them a secret?  Soon enough the entire office knows.  And untrustworthy people who use marijuana are worse.  They’re guilty of high treason.
  • The Emergency Room Doctor: Everything has to be done now – it’s all urgent.  And there’s a sense of criticality about even the most mundane tasks.  I mean, if your parachute doesn’t open, why panic?  You’ve got the rest of your life to fix it.

Those people are draining.  Don’t be one of them.  How do I know this?  Once I was going through a rough patch, and was slipping into Woe-Is-Me.  I could sense from my friends that I had ridden that pony a little too long, or maybe I needed to up my deodorant game.  I decided to stop complaining.

Then The Mrs. complained that I don’t buy her flowers.  I have no idea when she started selling them.

I decided that if I had a problem worth complaining about, I’d deal with or shut up.  Even my best friends have a max tolerance level for dealing my emotional complaints.  The Mrs. is even more direct.  When I whine, her only comment is:  “And what, exactly, are you going to do about it?”

Oddly enough, though, I found that (in most circumstances) when I’m a positive person, people like to see me around more.  They ask me for help.  They offer help.  My account balance is full.

It’s not just at work.  It’s not just my friends.  It’s my family, too.  If every interaction that I have with them is negative, people aren’t exactly happy when Pa comes home.

Hopefully, this knife joke wasn’t too edgy. 

Being a positive, productive, trustworthy person?  When times are good, it’s important.  When times aren’t good?

Maybe even more important.  And when we talk about wealth, being surrounded by good, trustworthy people is wealthy, indeed.

The Greatest Game

“A member of an elite paramilitary organization: Eagle Scouts.” – Red Dawn

I have a friend who has a trophy wife.  It wasn’t first place.

I once had a position with a certain paramilitary organization aimed at youth who identified as were boys.  I have always raised my own children by a simple rule:  if they thought they were old enough to try something, they probably were.  A related rule was:  if I thought they were old enough, I’d make them try something.  Especially if it made my life easier.

Five-year-olds can do drywall.  I mean, through the tears, that is.

Obviously, this got mixed results.  The judgment of a ten-year-old is not as good as that of even a boy two years older.  When I asked Pugsley to warm up the car one winter evening when he was 10 or so, while sitting in the front seat he did a neutral drop at high RPM.  Right into the house.

Live and learn.  Weirdly, we managed to put the wall back into place (mostly) with a mallet.  Was I irritated he ran a car into our house?  Certainly.  But, independence has costs.

Learning is never free.

I promise to stop using police-related puns.  I’ll give them arrest.

When I later became a paramilitary organization leader to other boys in addition to mine, I found something interesting:  most parents hadn’t taught the boys even rudimentary life skills or woodcraft.  Lessons I had learned just tromping around Wilder Mountain seemed like magic to them.  It made sense.  We don’t really live in a world that values those skills.

In my first campout with the boys, one of the skills we focused on was simple:  building a fire.  To my amazement, half of the boys hadn’t done that, ever.  One of the oldest boys on the campout was around sixteen. He worked on his fire for over an hour.  In that hour, he learned a lot of ways to not start a fire.  Finally, he got it going.

Me:  “Okay, good job!  You can put it out now.”

He didn’t.  It was the first fire he’d ever made, and he stoked and babied that fire like it was the first one that mankind had ever mastered.  And, for him, that was true.  He kept that fire going for hours.

There was a fire at Goodwill® today.  No injuries, just some secondhand smoke exposure.

I learned as much from the boys as they learned from me.  In this moment I learned a real, hard fact of life.  When that boy made his first fire, he didn’t need a badge.  He didn’t need a medal.  What did he need?

Nothing.  He had struggled for an hour to make that fire.  His reward wasn’t anything outside of him.  His reward was the skill.  In a sense, that real, physical fire had started a metaphorical fire in him.

Give that a thought.  Soccer leagues give children participation trophies so their feelings aren’t hurt.  I’m not sure anyone understands the damage done by those hunks of gilt plastic.  The trophies are cheap, but the sense of entitlement created by them lasts a lifetime.

When a man makes a fire, or wins a judo match, or does something that is his and his alone, the medal isn’t the accomplishment, the medal is the acknowledgment.

A child who grows up in Montana who can ride a horse, skin an elk, and shoot a rifle straight and true doesn’t need a medal.  They don’t need outside affirmation.  They are who they are.

Arnold was a great gardener.  They called him the Germinator.

That’s the rule of the Greatest Game.  Struggle.  Learn.  Master.  Repeat.

Missing?  A trophy.  Why is it missing?  It’s simply not necessary.

We live in a culture where people don’t have to struggle.  I imagine the only meal missed in recent memory by readers here is one they chose to miss.  Food in this day may be more expensive than it was last year, but it’s still everywhere.  The calories to feed a person are plentiful.

So why are video games popular?

They’re popular because we’re wired to Struggle, Learn, Master, and Repeat.  Deep down inside, though, we know it’s only a pale shadow of the Greatest Game.

Technology has improved so much that it has interfered with the programming that is at the core of what it means to be human.  To be the best that we can be, the struggle has to be worth our time.  The game has to be worth playing.

No matter how bad you think you are, Moses was worse.  He broke all of the Commandments at once.   

I think that a lot of the dysfunction in our society stems to that – people who would have mattered to their tribe back in 200 B.C. or 1,000 A.D. are simply playing their parts in big machines.  Our technology has changed our culture.  Our culture has changed our roles in society.

These changed roles weren’t made with men in mind, they emerged from the technology.  Even 140 years ago, the typical farmer and his family often had to fabricate many if not most of the things that he depended on.  That led to independence.

The farmer was free in a way that people chained to an international financial system and a technological corporate machine aren’t.  He was free to succeed, or free to fail.

What mattered was how he played the Greatest Game.

We’re still here.  We can play the Greatest Game, because, surprisingly, it’s still out there.  Each day we have the chance:  Struggle, Learn, Master and Repeat.

Me?  I’m still learning to make a fire or two.

Life: We Spend It Every Second

“This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.” – Fight Club

In life, don’t burn your bridges.  They’re all made of steel and concrete now.

I was talking with an acquaintance the other day, and asked him what exactly it was that he wanted out of life.  I know that sounds weird.  But I like to understand people, so I ask them weird questions.  The really odd part of that is if you ask someone a question (especially an odd one), most of the time they won’t lie.

I have no idea why.  It’s the same reason that when you ask Joe Biden a question he says, “Umm, er, ahhh, blonde leg hairs, wanna touch ‘em?”  See, not all politicians lie.  Just the ones who don’t have dementia.

Back to my acquaintance.  “What do you want out of life?”  He paused.  It was a longer pause, so I was expecting something profound.

“You know, I think I’m looking forward to being old enough to retire.”

This particular gentleman is in his thirties, and plans to retire at 65.

Rowan Atkinson is now a has-Bean.

First, retirement at 65 might be a dream for most people in their thirties today.  I have no idea what the future economy will look like.  It may involve Bitcoin® and jetpacks, or it might involve cannibalism and burning old VHS tapes of Who’s The Boss? so Tony Danza can keep us all warm with family-friendly humor and the thermal energy from burning plastic.  In 2021 I’m betting on Tony Danza.

Second, I can recall being in my thirties pretty well.  The one thing I certainly wasn’t thinking about was retirement.  I was thinking of ways to have fun, and ways to contribute to humanity.  Heck, back then I thought I might even start writing at some point in my life to both contribute and have fun.

At some point.

Here, among people I know, is an example of a person who is actively sleepwalking his way to being 65.  My acquaintance is wishing his life away.  Now, I have a lot of faults and have done things that would have made the Portrait of Dorian Gray melt like the reactor at Chernobyl, but wishing my life away isn’t one of those sins.  (I do apologize for green chili flavored-PEZ™, which was sort-of my fault.)

Yes, there have been times that I couldn’t wait for something to finish, especially when it was the end of a seemingly endless stream of 84 hour work weeks.  Yeah, I was glad when that was over.  But I’m also glad I did it.  Nothing tells you what you can do until you’ve done more that you thought you ever could.

What’s Joe Biden’s favorite gum flavor?  Retire-mint.

Ben Franklin said it best, in a quote that I’ve used multiple times:  “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of.”  He was right.  And Franklin was not known for wasting time, especially when it came to the ladies.  The man was a beast on Tinderâ„¢.  Here is his message to Mistress Fancy Pantaloons 1769:

“If thou desire many things, many things will seem but a few.  A few compared to my most magnificent biceps and firmly corrugated abdominal musculature.”

I have become convinced that a significant number of people in society have not only started squandering time, but are intentionally doing so.  They are stuck shuffling their feet, mark time, until some future event when “things will be better.”  What future event?

There are many:

I was ready to go home after a few days on a sleepover, and called my Mom.  “Mom, I’m ready to go home.”  Her response?

Ma Wilder just said, “John, you’re married.”  Yeah, my first marriage was pretty bad.

So, I object to wishing your life away.  I mean, unless I’m at the dentist.  I just want that stuff over with.  But each and every moment of my life has one thing in common – it is a minute of my life that is forever lost.

Died in 1973:  Still releasing books on a more regular pace than George R.R. Martin.

Certainly, there are minutes that I cherish more than others.  But as I get older, I find that I have fewer minutes that I want to spend on bad movies.  If I’m going to spend some time in someone else’s dream, it had better be a damn good dream, and not the ones I have when I’m sleeping about forgetting to wear my pants to the White House and finding that Joe liked that idea.

(shudder)

As I get older, I find that I certainly think differently than I did when I was just a kid.  Fluid intelligence, that innovative creative rush that allows physicists to intuitively feel their way to ever more accurate and complex models of reality at both the subatomic and galactic levels seems to peak at around thirty.  I still wonder why my “the Universe is actually a melty plate of cheesy spaghetti with meat sauce” theory never got the attention it deserved.  I guess that the other physicists thought I was an impasta.

Thankfully, for older folks, there’s more than one dimension of intelligence.  Crystallized intelligence, which consists of the increasing ability to connect ideas and increasing ability to communicate them seems to be dominant later in life.  This may explain while an older professor might not be doing world-shaking innovation, but might still have much to add to science, and would almost always be a better teacher.

Regardless, whatever I end up doing, I know that for me to make the most of life I actually have to live it in the here and now.  Sure, I have to reminisce about the past – that’s how I learn.  And I have to plan for the future – that’s how I avoid criminal charges for tax evasion and fines for my grass being too long.

Communism is like tax fraud.  Both seem great at first, but both end with government agents knocking at your door.

Dwelling in the past is a recipe to live with regret.  Dwelling in the future is a way to live in the false opiate of the dream.  To make the past worth the scars you earned and the future possible, you have to live and take action in the present.

Action.

Action is what men do.

If the action is worth taking?  It requires courage.  Courage, because failure is always a possibility.  Courage, because a future worth taking action for isn’t an easy decision.  And courage is required to stand up to the school bully, even though it’s been quite a few decades since I’ve beaten up a seventh-grader.

I’m not saying it didn’t feel good, but when I had my lawyer sue her?  That was the best.

The good thing about the past is, at least, that it’s over.  The bad thing is that if the scar tissue is too deep, it can cause me to hesitate.  There are tons of different ways that things can go bad, and in my life, I’ve explored more than one of them.  Heck, when I told The Mrs. she should embrace her mistakes, she hugged me.

There is hope, however.  A friend of mine once told me when I was down:  “John, if you had a line of troubles in front of you, half that you’d lived through, and have that you hadn’t you’d always pick the ones that you have already conquered.”

Most problems (not all) that make me the most apprehensive are the problems I haven’t faced.  Is that a lack of faith in me, or a fear of the unknown?

I’m not sure.  And I’m not sure that it matters.

Why did PETA send cats to Mars?  They heard about the Curiosity rover.

But I do know this:  each and every day I have a choice whether to phone it in, or to give it everything I have.  I won’t lie, there are days I phone it in.  And there are days when I get in the car to come home and say, “Yeah, that was utterly worth it.  Nobody could have done that better.”

Those days normally run like a breeze – I walk in the door and can’t believe it’s time to walk out.

Sadly, by doing more and being more, subjectively, I’ll burn through my time much faster than my acquaintance.  That’s okay.  I’m living for something, not just passing the time.

And when I type these words, I’m doing everything.  I’m living in the moment.  I’m using my past.  And I’m doing whatever little bit I can to help the future.

Don’t just exist.  Mean something.  Be significant.

The Wilder Response To Mr. Biden

“It’s perfect. We traded one nuked civilization for another.” – Battlestar Galactica.

Bill Murray wasn’t cast as Thor by Marvel®.  They figured that no one likes an electricity Bill.

I had an utterly different post planned.  It was so funny that the laughing that it would induce would have caused your ribs to exit your body.  It was a post so funny, it was dangerous.  Comedy, as they say, is not always pretty.  I try to do those posts on Fridays.  Why?

I had a boss that gave sage advice:  never give your boss bad news on a Friday afternoon or a Monday morning.  I figure that people need a palate cleanser going into the weekend, and try to provide a bit of fun.  And this post that I had planned?  It would have been banned by the Geneva Convention as a Weapon of Mass Hilarity.

Sadly, that post might now be lost to history, since I have to replace it with this one.  Normally, my posts are created weeks in advance and focus tested against a cross-section of laboratory badgers who have no spleens.  Why no spleens?  They tell me that’s important, something about we don’t need no spleenin’ badgers.

But no, the Occupant-in-Chief decided to make the single most irresponsible statement ever made by someone who was sworn in as President since Richard Nixon said, “What’s the worst that they can do to me?”

I don’t want to be accused of taking Biden out of context (not that there’s much of a chance of that) but here’s his quote, to the most accurate degree I can find:

“Those who say the blood of patriots, you know, and all the stuff about how we’re gonna have to move against the government, if you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.”

First, Biden is as articulate as a fourth-grader with fetal alcohol syndrome who’s just smoked a bowl of Hunter Biden’s crack.  And, yes, his Fraudulency has a son who smokes crack with hookers and takes videos of it.  This is a thing that really happens.  Of course, the response from the Left is to say Putin is corrupt.

Sorry.  I’ll try to stick to the topic.

Second, that’s also the same logic as a fourth-grader with an extra chromosome or three who’s just huffed a can of sparkly gold spray paint.  Abraham Lincoln made the obvious response fairly well:

“All the armies of Europe and Asia could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.”

Lincoln was wrong about a lot of things.  He was right about a lot of things, too.  He is correct about this:

“As a nation of free men, we will live forever or die by suicide.”

Joe Biden could have the armies of the united States get him a drink by force from any river in this land.  But Joe Biden and all the armies of the united States couldn’t hold the length of the Missouri or the Mississippi for a single day by force.

The armies of the united States number some 1.3 million men oh, wait people oh, wait, xim/xers.  Add in the Reserves?  Let’s round WAY UP and call it three million.  Total.

There are three million males in Missouri.  I pick Missouri only because they recently decided they’re going to tell the Feds to attempt to compact a very large object into a very small space when it comes to firearm laws.

Go, Missouri.

Not all of the three million males in Missouri would be on the side of freedom, since there are always some disgusting gelatinous slugs of humanity that will side with Evil over Truth.  But there are enough.  And don’t tell me that neighboring states wouldn’t flow in.

No, Mr. Biden.  The only one who needs F-15s and nuclear weapons for control is you, you disgusting pile of fake hair, fake teeth, Alzheimer’s degraded brain, who gets his only Father’s Day card encrusted in cocaine dust and whore DNA.

The united States governs only, let me make this clear, only by consent of the governed.  As citizens, we’re generally pretty good.  But we are horrible, horrible at taking instruction from tyrants.  It’s in our DNA.

No, literally.  This is not an exaggeration.  My family line came across an ocean to tame a continent.  That was their resume.  That was their job description as they rocked back and forth on little wooden boats in the midst of Atlantic storms.  We didn’t come here because we were weak.  We came here to fight and die and bleed and make this land our own.

We came here because we were strong.

We came here because we yearned for freedom.

Mr. Biden, your butt-sniffing and shoe-licking parents and your degenerate sons and personal weaknesses are abhorrent to every fiber of my body.  Mr. Biden, you are disgusting.  Mr. Biden, your forefathers were horrible.  Mr. Biden, you and your weaknesses represent everything wrong with this country, and everything that has led to where we are today.

How dare you threaten me?

  • To threaten me is to threaten Duncan MacWilder of the Clan MacWilder, who came here before this was a country.
  • It is to threaten Hans Wilder, who came here to leave tyrants behind in Europe before World War I.
  • It is to threaten my forefathers who died hewing a civilization out of this continent with their blood and sweat and toil and dead babies so lazy writers like me could exist.

The deal we made in 1776 is the same one we have today, Bucko.  We are here because we have certain inalienable rights.

Mr. Biden, you want to threaten me with jet fighters?  Mr. Biden, you want to threaten to use nuclear weapons against your own citizens?

We didn’t come here for that.  We didn’t die here for that.  We didn’t bury our sons and daughters on dusty plains and hills and hallows across this country, building it with our blood for that.

Reparations?  We paid for that in blood in places you have long forgotten, like Manassas Junction.  Everyone I’ve ever been able to research on any part of my family has been someone who made the united States better.

Every.

Single.

One.

We taught Eisenhower (really).  We built farms.  We built bridges 150 years ago that still exist today.  We built infrastructure that serves tens of millions of people – this is not an exaggeration.  We built railroads across mountains that mountain goats couldn’t cross.  We took trains up those mountains when the snow was 20 feet deep.  With our kids.

Just for fun.

We raised and nurtured children and taught them freedom.

Our blood is in this soil.  Our children are buried here as payment from sea to sea.

My blood is in this soil.  My forefathers weren’t evil.  They were Big Damn Heroes.  Odin and Thor and Jesus would be proud of them for their courage.

Did other people build this land as well?  Sure.  But Wilder blood is spread here from the Mayflower to today.

  • I can do no less than to tell you, Mr. Biden, what Duncan MacWilder would have said:
  • I can do no less than to tell you, Mr. Biden, what Patrick Henry would have said (distant relative, according to an aunt):
  • I can do no less than to tell you, Mr. Biden, what Hans Wilder would have said:

No.

And, to mark the first time I have ever used this word on this blog?  Each and every one of them would have added:

Fuck you, Mr. Biden.

Bring your jets.  Bring your nukes.  The only way you have to dislodge us off this continent we conquered with our blood and sweat and buried kin is to kill us all.  We will never give up.  We will never surrender.  This will not die with me.  Or my children.

You will never defeat us.  Never.  Our blood is here.  Here we make our stand.  We can go to no other country for freedom.  We can go no further to a distant frontier.  Despite what you will try to do with us, despite the injustices you will visit on us, we will win.  We will mock you, and your grave will be pulled up and your bones used by our children for their amusement.

We will smile, and nod.

We did not choose this.  We do not want this.

You spiked the ball too soon.  Maybe two generations into the future, they would go gentle onto that goodnight.

Too soon, Bucko.

Fuck you.

The Beauty Of The Red Pill

“Hey Samantha, don’t take the Red Pill!” – Grandma’s Boy

If my son wanted to be a fiction writer, I’d send him to college to study journalism.

Have you ever not asked a question because you already knew the answer, but were afraid to hear it?  I’m willing to bet we all have.  I try to leave occasional breadcrumbs here, especially during my Monday and Wednesday posts, but I’ve stopped short of leaving my posts in the forest near a witch’s house.  Besides, I hear Hillary has security guards.

The Truth is shocking.  Many times, the Truth isn’t pleasant.  I remember coming to one unpleasant Truth realization in college:  the college didn’t care if I did well or even if I graduated.

It hadn’t been like that in high school.  But in college?  I was just a number.  It sounds silly to me now, but back then it was quite a realization for me.  Gradually, more Truths started showing up in my life.  In many cases, I denied them as long as I could, but they eventually became inevitable.

They call this the Red Pill, after the scene in The Matrix where Keanu Reeves gets a job painting pills red.

Never let Morpheus do the cooking at a Matrix cast barbeque.  There’s a reason they call him Lawrence Fishburne.

Part of the problem with discovering Truth is that it can make you feel alone.  Much of our society is based on covering uncomfortable Truth with pretty little lies.  It has always been so, but in 2021 it’s at the very worst that it has been in the history of the United States.  People were censored a year ago for telling what are now the (generally) accepted theories about CoronaChan.

The Truth is that we still don’t know where it came from, but vary from any generally accepted truth about COVID on YouTube® and you’ll be censored.  Thankfully, YouTube™ is so committed to “truth” that they gave themselves an award for being so courageous about it.  Really – there isn’t even a punchline.

Here’s another Red Pill:  no one (and I mean no one) is coming to save you.  No one (and I mean no one) is responsible for your actions but you.  If you can’t save yourself, you’ll just have to depend on luck, which is a crappy strategy.  There is no secret cabal of government good guys like Qanon® used to put in his cryptic message board posts.  Q is not coming to save you.

I guess QANON was just another 4Chan teller.

Part of the problem with taking a Red Pill is that, once you’re finally awake and aware of how the world works, just like Ebola, you want to share it with people.  That’s a bad idea.

The unfortunately named Desiderius Erasmus Roterdamus made the silly quote, “In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king,” and with the new Red Pill knowledge, you want to share it far and wide.

Sadly, Desiderius, the one-eyed man is not king.

As H.G. Wells wrote, the blind people can’t see what the one-eyed dude describes.  They think him mad, and if they have a chance they’ll tie him down and remove that silly eye that keeps giving him all of those wild notions and that awful practical joke of leaving the plunger in the toilet.  People will fight nearly to the death to keep a pretty lie alive, especially when the Truth is ugly.

I wrote a check to a charity for the blind, but I’m worried they’ll never see a penny of it.

But there is opportunity for an individual once the first real Red Pill hits.  Seeking Truth becomes a habit.  And you find that Truth exists in many, many more places than you might imagine.  When I go to find Truth, I know one place I can find it very quickly.

Truth is in the Iron.

I started lifting again this week for the first time since COVID raised its head.  I was stunned at how one of my standard lifts was half – HALF – what it had been 18 months ago.

That is Truth.  The Iron is Truth.

Was it at all pleasant to find my strength had dropped that far, that fast?

Of course not.

But it is True.

I gave up on lifting cases of Pepsi® for exercise, it was just soda pressing. 

I cannot hide from the Iron.  I cannot cheat the Iron.  The only things there in the weight room are the Iron, Gravity, and Me.  The only thing that changes in that equation is me.  I can’t blame the Iron.  I can’t blame Gravity.

The Red Pill?

No one will make me physically stronger but me.  And the only way I can do that is to wrestle against Gravity with the Iron.  And, unless I am quite ill, it will always work.

And here is the hope.  Here is where the Red Pill really begins to pay dividends.

I’m the one responsible for:

  • my physical state,
  • what I eat,
  • how I react,
  • what I say,
  • what I watch,
  • how I treat others,
  • my own Virtue,
  • who I am, and
  • where my life ends up.

I’m not responsible for who loves me.  I’m not responsible for how much they love me.  Those are the output.  If I control every bit of input in my life, what happens, happens.

There is nothing, and I mean nothing more wonderful than that realization.  It goes beyond winning and losing.  It goes beyond the opinions of others.

The downside, of course, is seeing all of the pretty little lies and all of the attempted manipulation.  Even worse:  the attempts to numb minds, to distract, and to pretend that the new lie doesn’t contradict the last lie.  The stunning thing to me is how many people will flitter from one contradictory opinion to another like butterflies in the Sun, with never a thought.

When I take responsibility for myself, I am a changed person.

I was born a male, I identify as a male, but according to Stouffer’s Frozen Lasagna®, I identify as a family of four.

That doesn’t mean the battle ever ends.  The first struggle is, always, against myself.  Why am I weaker?

I had weights at home, but didn’t lift.

Why?

Well, I could make any number of excuses, but none of them matter.  I didn’t lift.  That was it.  So, my choice is simple:  will I work to get better every week, or will I be complacent with where I am?

I asked the Iron a question.  It told me the Truth.

Now, my choice is how will I answer?

I have only one answer.  Sweat.

It’s never lonely when you’ve got Truth for a companion.

Blogger Versus Evil

Jack Burton:  “Great.  Walls are probably three feet thick, welded shut from the outside, and covered with brick by now.”

Wang Chi:  “Don’t give up, Jack.”

Jack Burton:  “Okay, I won’t Wang.  Let’s just chew our way out of here.” – Big Trouble in Little China

Never make a deal to buy a guitar from the Devil.  There are always strings attached.

The Exorcist is a feel-good movie.  Well, at least it is for me.

I wanted to watch it when I was an especially wee Wilder, but for whatever reason, Ma and Pa Wilder felt that exposing a first grader to that particular film would be considered a war crime.  I don’t remember how old I was when I finally saw it, but as I recall it was rented on a VHS tape.

By the time I’d seen it, I’d already been exposed to much more brutal horror:  Lovecraft, Stephen King, and Norman Lear sitcoms.  I’ll say this about reading horror – the things I conjured in my mind while tearing through the pages of The Stand were far scarier than anything I’d ever seen in a movie.

But I made a pretty bold statement:  The Exorcist is a feel-good movie, so I guess you’re gonna make me back it up.  Thankfully, I have that not only on my authority, but on the authority of the author of The Exorcist.  William Peter Blatty summed up the reason I like horror films with this very simple quote:

“My logic was simple:  if demons are real, why not angels? If angels are real, why not souls? And if souls are real, what about your own soul?”

Blatty even described The Exorcist as his ministry – it seems he’s religious.  Who would have expected that?

What don’t demons wear hairpieces?  Because there would be Hell toupee. 

Much of what we see in the world we explain through simple materialism.  But when I read novels where the demons are mere humans, well, (with the exception of Hannibal Lechter) I’m generally let down when the Scooby Doo® ending explains away the supernatural mystery at the heart of the story.  Mr. Blatty’s quote describes exactly why.

“If demons are real, why not angels.”

Now I know that several readers are atheists.  As I’ve pointed out before, this blog is sort-of a litmus test.  People that are the kind of atheist that just hates God will generally not opt-in to reading this blog for any length of time.  I have no idea why, but they just don’t.  Actual, rational atheists that don’t turn rabid when the supernatural is discussed don’t seem to mind.

Maybe they look at it like I look at the WWE®:  they can watch it and be amused, even though they’re certain it’s not real.  They especially like it when Hulk Hogan® hits me in the head with a chair.

Where did Randy “Macho Man” Savage™ work out?  The Slim-Jim©.

Regardless, I think most readers here share the same view of Evil (or even evil) in this world.  It’s visible in the raw naked lust for power that we have seen repeated again and again from the Left.  It’s also visible in their unbridled joy at the destruction of Truth, Beauty, and Society.

The Left revels in the Lie, the inversion of Truth, the inversion of Beauty:

  • Billions of dollars in damage in Minneapolis is a “peaceful protest” while a march on the Capitol is, according to President* Biden: “The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War.”
  • They demand, using free speech, to restrict the free speech of those that offend them.
  • The Left demands you look at what is obviously a man, and claim it to be a woman.

It’s simple, really:  everything that’s Bad is presented as good.  And everything Good?  Well, it’s Bad.  How dare you think self-restraint and hard work is virtuous?

Sniff.  “Smells like fraud.”

Let’s look at how a simple Good thing like a married man and woman having a baby is turned on its head:

  • What about the woman’s career?
  • Why not live the childfree life?
  • Why have the baby at all?
  • There are too many people on the planet already.

The last argument is especially Evil, because when the propaganda works, the headlines then sing out:  “since we’re not having enough babies, we need to import multitudes to grow our economy.”  “Meet the New Americans.”

It’s fun to use this technique on Leftists.  I can recall a Twitter® exchange with a Leftist where I Tweeted™ that I opposed immigration to the United States on the grounds that people in the United States had the highest carbon footprint, so by bringing in more people into the United States they were destroying the planet.

Brain lock ensued when they couldn’t deal with the conflict between their two opposing beliefs.  It’s fun to come up with these couplets to invert the Evil right back at them, though, in the end, there is no conversion for a True Believer outside of a gentle helicopter ride.  They have given in to the Evil.  They’ll avoid the conversation.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle:  three ways to dispose of a dead Leftist.

It is especially difficult for parents of children:  what is innocent is sexualized.  A first-grade boy isn’t old enough to decide what he should eat on a regular basis – why would the world think that he should be turned into a she?

It’s all around us, every day.  It’s sold to us in media, it’s in the news, it’s everywhere.

And it’s attacking the Values of what we all know, deep inside ourselves, to be True and Good.  That which is Good, True and Beautiful hasn’t changed within the lifetime of mankind on this planet, but when you’re confronted with people trying to sell that which is a Lie as the Truth?

You can be sure those people are Evil.

Not to say that people on the Right are immune to that – far from it.  Eaton Rapids Joe has a great little story to that effect here (LINK).

To be clear, the ultimate aim of the propaganda of Evil is simple:  to make Good people feel despair.

Why despair?  Despair is the opposite of hope.  It is the opposite of Truth.  It is the opposite of Beauty.  Despair is Evil.

And when propaganda wins?  Evil wins.

H.P. Lovecraft was tormented by doubt all of his life.  Imagine if he hadn’t slept in despair bedroom.

But that’s not what happened in The Exorcist.  Father Karras, who had lingering doubts and was on the verge of Despair, conquered it.

Because he conquered Despair, Father Karras conquered Evil.

When you feel Despair, know that’s nothing more than Evil.  And you can conquer it, too.

Yeah, I told you that The Exorcist was a feel-good story.  And I was right.

———————————————

Extra Meme and Tagline, because I made one too many:

In other news, the 2024 election will be postponed until they find the results in Biden’s desk.

Money Is Not The Only Form Of Wealth

“Well, as I said, time has no meaning here. So if you leave, you can go anywhere, any time.” – Star Trek:  Generations

What do you call a rogue sheep with a machine gun?  Lambo.

When I lived in Houston, my job was all consuming.  It’s been my theory that people move to Houston for one reason:  to work.  The climate is difficult.  The freeways are often lines of cars creeping along like Joe Biden in an elementary school.  One upside is that there can’t be a (Some) Black Lives Matter® protest because the Houston Astros© always steal their signs.

When I was a Temporary Texan, my life was consumed by work – and it was stressful work.  Each day brought a new crisis we had to solve.  It got so bad that   I left home early to avoid the traffic, so I got to work early.  I left work late to avoid the traffic, so I got home late.  A fourteen-hour day wasn’t uncommon.  I put blood, sweat, and tears into that job, so it was good that I wasn’t working at a restaurant.

The last time I went out for dinner, I asked the waiter how they prepared the chicken for frying.  “Nothing special.  We just tell them they’re going to die.”

For many weeks, I was gone every hour that baby Pugsley was awake during a weekday.  I would, however, catch up with The Mrs. when I got home.  That was a priority.  We knew what we were getting into when we made the move from Alaska.  Moving to Houston was, for us, entirely about work.  I should have known during the job interview that something was up:  they asked if I could perform under pressure, but I told them I only knew Bohemian Rhapsody.

Most (not all!) weekends I was able to keep the work at bay.  I’d sleep in on Saturday, and then we’d do something as a family.  By Saturday night I felt, “normal” but by Sunday afternoon I’d realize that I’d have to go back in to work on Monday and repeat the whole thing again.  That made me feel pretty gloomy – it felt like time was slipping away.

This was how Sunday evening felt when I worked in Houston.

One Sunday night, however, I was getting my things ready for the next day.  I was looking for my dress shoes (I was in an office that required them at that time) and couldn’t find them.  Since I always took them off at the same place, that confused me.

After looking in all the logical places, the only choice then was to look in all of the illogical places.  When you live alone, everything is pretty findable.  When you have a wife, things move around on their own.  When you have children under seven?  The toilet gets clogged with decorative clam shell soaps that The Mrs. bought.

So, when I found my shoes under Pugsley’s bed, I wasn’t really surprised.

I was, however, touched.  As near as we can figure, Pugsley had come to the conclusion that I only wore those shoes when I was gone all day.  As near as his Gerber®-addled mind could conceive, if I didn’t have the shoes, I could spend every day at home with him.

Not bad.  And I was touched.

I tried to buy running shoes the other day – but the only ones I saw were stationary.

One of the ideas of wealth is money.  And I was in Houston, like everyone else, to make money.

But there’s another idea of wealth:  time.

There are a group of people who are driven by playing that game and devote themselves exclusively to their business.  That makes sense.  The world needs people who are single-minded in wanting to change it.

Most people have read about people like Edison who never slept more than seven minutes a night and spent most of his life at work while making a fortune, and Elon Musk who famously slept in the factory to get car production worked out.  And Musk and Edison both have another thing in common:  they both got rich off of Tesla.

Meanwhile, the GPS is saying:  “Recalculating . . . recalculating . . . “

If that’s what they choose?  Fine.  The idea of spending time on their passion for business is exactly that – a choice.  Just like having a finite supply of money gives you a set of choices of what you can do in life, there is another budget – a finite number of hours.

And that is life.  Life is made up of those hours that we use.  Just as inflation eats away at the value of money, distraction eats away at the value of life.

What kind of distraction?

Well, pointless things – think Twitter® and most of Facebook™.  I was on Twitter© a while back, and found it was good at exactly one thing:  making me irritated.

I even take this aversion to not wasting the hours and minutes of my life unless it was a conscious decision to absurd levels.  For several years of my life, I ate something I didn’t like all that much for lunch because there was no line.

I hate the idea of waiting five minutes of my life when I don’t to.  This still applies even if I waste those five minutes on something unproductive.  For a long time, I avoided history – I just couldn’t see a future in it.

I’m reading a book about the history of lubricating oils and bearings.  Best non-friction book I’ve ever read.

But now society is built on creating and feeding distraction to people – the more distraction that’s consumed, the greater the profit level for these companies.  And these are not even distractions that make us feel better – but distractions that in many cases just consume time.

I’m not sure that the idea of a “balanced” life is one that exists in reality.  A human life is built up in phases.  The long languid summers of youth give up to days that are packed with all the trappings of a family and work and the fullness of life.  When my youngest, Pugsley, heads out into the world, who knows what I’ll do with the time?

Perhaps I’ll spend it finding places to hide his shoes.

Life Is A Struggle: That’s A Good Thing

“The closer you are to death, the more alive you feel. It’s a wonderful way to live. It’s the only way to drive.” – Rush

A computer once beat me at chess.  It lost at kickboxing, though.

The Mrs. and I have recently been playing chess.  It’s not a lot of chess, it’s mainly on Saturday nights when things are a bit slower.  I’ve been enjoying the games.  If I were to guess, before the last time we played, the games tilted slightly in my favor.

I think I’ve won about 30.  The Mrs. was still sitting at, well, zero wins.

30-0.

Don’t think poorly of her.  The Mrs. is going from a standing start.  At one point in college, I lived with eight other guys in a house, and nearly all of the time a chess game was going.  I could generally beat everyone in the house by the end of the school year.  It took a while for one guy, about four months.  First, he wiped the floor with me, then he and I traded games.  By the end of two semesters?

I usually won.  I have played a lot more chess than The Mrs.  I will say this, though, she’s smart as a whip, and when I give her position analysis and show her why she lost the game, she listens.

The Mrs. doesn’t listen like someone who wants to defend why they did what they did.  She listens with the ears of someone who wants to learn, who wants to get better.  There has been exactly zero ego in learning the game for her.

Did I mention that The Mrs. is competitive?  Really competitive?

Ever notice that Tom Cruise has a tooth perfectly centered under his nose, like it’s one-half tooth too far over?  Now you’ll never be able to unsee that.  You’re welcome.

The last time The Mrs. and I played chess, we played three games.  The first game, I crushed her.  By the start of the mid-game, I was up on pieces and position.  It was like a velociraptor in a room full of bacon-wrapped kittens covered in pudding.  Then the next game.  Again, by the mid-game, I was up.  I was toying with her king like a teacup poodle lords over a pork chop, getting ready for checkmate.

Then, she moved.

Then, I moved.  That’s the rule, right?

But my move made it so she had no legal moves left.  The Mrs. wasn’t in check, but couldn’t move.  I was winning, decisively.

But if she has no legal moves and her king isn’t in check?

It’s a draw.  The score was now 30-0-1.

My blunder, her draw.  The next game went, shall we say, a little differently.  The start went okay.  Then, in the mid-game?  She took control and by the beginning of the end-game?  I was breathing for air harder than Biden sniffing a teenager.  Which Biden?  Apparently any of them.

What mall did they get this picture taken at? 

Then?  I caught a break.  The Mrs. was up on pieces and position, but I found a way out.  I could keep her king in perpetual check.

The Mrs. moved, I moved, check.

The Mrs. moved, I moved, check.

The Mrs. moved, I moved, check.

Note:  I couldn’t win, but I could make the game as annoying as an 8-year-old asking, “Are we there yet?”

Thankfully, there’s a rule for that.  It’s called?

A draw.

We went from me constantly crushing her, to her lucking to a draw, to me grasping to find a way out of a game without a loss.

30-0-2.

Good for The Mrs.

And good for me.  Now I’m going to have to work to bring my A-game.  And Saturday nights just got better.

Why?

Would it be better if I could crush her in chess every evening like Oprah crushes couch cushions?  Of course not.

I told my barber to cut my hair like he would for Tom Cruise.  He made me sit on two phone books.

The best victories in life are going head to head with someone near your level in skill.  Going all out.  Pushing each other to be better.  I mean, I can beat up any number of third graders.  Honestly, I have no idea how many third graders I couldn’t beat up.

I could do it all day.  It’s really not a challenge.  Seriously, I could beat up lots of them.

But fourth graders?  I mean, I could be at least the third-best player on the fourth-grade soccer team.

Life is challenge.  Life is struggle.

And thank heavens for that.  Or thank Heaven for that?  (Stick with me – this isn’t a sermon.)

Speaking of Heaven, from the time I was just a little Wilder, I caused a *lot* of problems at church.  I distinctly recall that I colored a picture of Jesus with His skin being bright purple.  On purpose.

My only excuse is that I was five and had no glitter.

The Sunday school teacher came up to me and said, “Johnny, you know that Jesus wasn’t purple.”

I replied, “Well, please allow me to retort.  Jesus is God, right?  Well, if He wants to be purple, He can be purple.”

How can you argue with logic like that?  Even kindergartners score some points now and then.  I last saw my Sunday school teacher when I was thirty.  She was really thrilled to see me.  I think she was just happy I hadn’t started the Cult of the Glittery Purple Jesus.  And, yes, all of those things really happened.

But back to heaven, or in this case, Heaven.

When they described Heaven to me in Sunday school, I was as appalled and indignant as a precocious five-year-old can be.

Sunday school teacher, describing Heaven:  “You’re happy all the time.  Nothing bad ever happens.  You wake up and everything is fine.”

Five-year-old me thought:  “Well, that sucks.  It’s stupid.  That sounds boring.”  Even then, I was wise enough not to throw out a level-five heresy in the middle of Sunday school.  Jesus might turn me purple or something.  I’m certainly glad they didn’t teach me about Valhalla then, because that sounds much, much better than Heaven:  Wake up.  Fight and get soused and maybe die.  Wake up.  Repeat.

What did the Vikings call English villages?  Chopping centers.

Sure you teach little kids the things that you think they like.  But me as a little kid?  Peace was the last thing on my mind.  But I’m not alone.

When you look at the life of Jesus, He didn’t spend it sitting on fluffy pillows and eating Ding-Dongs®.  Nope.  If you think WWJD, remember, taking a whip and kicking vermin out of church is within the realm of permissible actions.

Jesus was clear in that:  life is the struggle.

  • Life is not about the easy way out.
  • Life is not about running out the clock in the 20 years until you retire.
  • Life is not about being nice.

If you played your life like a video game, your goal isn’t to have a pleasant but non-threatening experience.  You want to climb the mountain, fight for the fair maiden, and drink from the skull of your enemy.  I want The Mrs. to be kick-ass at chess, so when I win, it means something.

It meant something to The Mrs. when I had to force a draw to save my sorry (rare NSFW word coming) ass.

That, my friends, is life.  Life is the struggle.

And my bet at Heaven is that it’s more like this:

LEVEL ONE COMPLETE.

PREPARE FOR LEVEL TWO.

I started a job digging deeper and deeper holes – but that was boring on so many levels.

Yeah.  Let’s go.  Let’s live life.

Bring.

It.

On.

Take big bites.

Who is with me?

When the ship lifts, all bills are paid.  No regrets.

“Have you paid your dues, Jack?  Yes, sir.  The check is in the mail.” – Big Trouble in Little China

Note to regular readers:  This post took a rather strange turn, as they sometimes do.  I had the topic picked, and then started writing, and found that the subject and evening led to a very atypical post.  I’m going to leave this one as it is.  I fully expect Monday’s post to be more of the usual stuff.

One of my favorite quotes was from the science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, “When the ship lifts, all bills are paid.  No regrets.”  I read that line when I was 19 or so.  I found it in The Notebooks of Lazarus Long.  It was displayed in a little indy book store and it was one of those times that it seemed like the book found me, and not the other way around – it was the first thing I saw when I walked into the store.

The book store?  That store stayed in business for about two months.  The problem was that the store only had (and I’m not exaggerating) about three dozen different books.  Looking back on it, I doubt that when the bookstore closed down that all the bills were paid – the landlord really should have seen that coming.

I thought about that phrase when I moved to Alaska with The Mrs.  Moving to Alaska isn’t like moving from one state to another down in the Lower 48.  The only real way out is by plane, and you’re not going unless you planned it.  Were all my bills paid?

I made sure they were.  Pa Wilder was quite old by that time.  Before leaving for Alaska, I was quite clear in knowing that it was possible that when we moved was the last time I would ever see him alive.  I made it a point then to tell him everything I needed to tell him, to share everything I could.  I wanted him to be at peace, and I wanted to be at peace, too.

Prepping is for more than economic collapse.

Thankfully, Pa lived more than a decade after when we moved.  He even visited us in Alaska and finally down into Houston when we moved back to the continental United States.

In my mind, there’s a part of me that always sees him in his prime.  That was back when I was 12 and Pa was the father that would work 50 hours a week at the bank.  Then Pa would come home and work my brother John (yes, that’s his name, our parents were classically uncreative) and me for 20 hours over the long summer weekend days hauling and stacking firewood for the cold winter nights up at the compound on Wilder Mountain.

When I thought of him, I always remembered that impossibly tall and competent man of my youth.  When he visited Alaska I was fully six inches taller than him, and the strong arms that had swung a sledgehammer in a mighty arc to split wood with a steel wedge were now thin with age, his walk hesitant and slow.

But he was still dad.

One thing I always did, however, was try to leave each conversation with him as a complete conversation, a capstone if you will.  I wanted to make sure that absolutely every time I talked to him I was leaving nothing unsaid.  I wanted to make sure he knew exactly what I felt.

Pa Wilder lived twenty-five years longer than he expected.  But around the time I was moving to Alaska, I could sense a change in him.  The emails that he wrote gradually developed grammatical and spelling errors.  This was a change.  Previously, Pa had been as precise as an English-teaching nun in grammar and spelling.

It was a sign.  Pa was declining.

Over time, the decline increased.  I can still recall the last time I talked to him and he recognized me.  After spending two days with him, he finally looked at me and said, “You’re John, aren’t you.”

Beyond that, we had some pleasant times, but I could tell that he didn’t recognize me.  One time he looked at me and said, “Who are you?”

“I’m your son, John.”

There was not even a glimmer of recognition in his eyes.

When word came from my brother that Pa Wilder had passed (this was years and years ago) The Mrs., The Boy, Pugsley, and I went to his funeral.  As The Mrs. and I had a private moment between all of the orchestrated family events, she asked me, “Is there anything you need to share?  Are you doing alright?”

To be clear – I did miss and do miss Pa.  But I had made sure that everything that I ever needed to say to him had been said.  My conscience was clear.  I know that, whenever he had a clear moment, he knew that I loved him.  And I knew he loved me.

I had no unresolved issues.

It’s one thing to read the phrase, “When the ship lifts, all bills are paid.  No regrets,” and another to understand it as time passes and wisdom increases.  When Pa Wilder passed, I understood it.  I looked deep into myself and understood that all the bills were paid.  I had no regrets.

The Mrs. had a different experience entirely with the passing of her father several months ago.  Due to COVID restrictions, he had spent the last months of his life with absolutely no physical contact, no presence of his family.  He had been recovering from surgery in a nursing home, and never recovered enough to be discharged.

For month after month, he spent his time alone, with nothing but phone calls from those he loved.

The Mrs. was very upset about this.  Heck, The Mrs. is still upset about this – the process of paying those last bills was cruelly interrupted.  She had more things to say to him – and I understand that.  There are things I’d dearly like to say to Ma Wilder, but that ship lifted too early, and now those bills can never be paid, at least not in full.

I try now to make each meeting, each contact with those around me that I love one where they know exactly where they stand with me, and vice versa.  The idea of continuing my life with those bills, or leaving those bills with someone else isn’t something I want.

To be very clear:  what brought this topic to mind wasn’t anything in particular, just the thought that this has been a helpful philosophy for me.  I do know that the future is uncertain, so I try to live my life so I don’t have those regrets, and try to manage my relationships so that there’s never anything left unsaid.

The check is in the mail.

Purpose, Virtue, Starlets, And Inexplicable Comments About Italy

“I disagree with what you said about the underlying theme of chapter eight in this book. It’s really not about man’s struggle with double-sided tape. It’s a metaphor for the Mesopotamian social hierarchy during the Bronze Age.” – Homestarrunner

The easiest way to get gold, silver, and bronze Olympic medals?  Kleptomania.

One theme I keep returning to in this blog is purpose.  I have a friend (you’re shocked, I know) and we talk from time to time.  One observation that he’s made is that they’ve done studies of people who have won medals in competitions like the Olympics®.  You’d think that the person who was happiest was the person who won gold.

It’s not.  It’s not the person who won silver, either.

It’s the person who won bronze.

Third place?  Well, they know it wasn’t a fluke that they didn’t win.  There is that “second place” guy who pops that illusion bubble.  But they made it to the big show, and, heck, they’re third.  Not bad!

Bronze is the Libertarian Party of medals.

The person who wins silver is usually very, very unhappy.  Why?  Every minute of the day they have to wonder:

  • What if I had worked just a little harder each day?
  • What if I had listened to my coach?
  • What if I hadn’t spent the night before the Olympic© finals at the strip club drinking tequila shooters with Crystal and Svetlana?

Little things like that begin to nag at them.  Plus they get Brady Cake:

Tom Brady is so old . . . he won his first Super Bowl® while the world was still in Standard Definition.

So, gold medal winners should be happy, right?

Some really aren’t happy.  They’ve climbed the mountain.  They’ve spent, in some cases, tens of thousands of hours in practice at the highest level.  They’ve skipped going to parties when others were having fun.  They lived, in some cases, like monks to climb to the greatest levels of human performance.

Some of them get there and ask . . .

  • Is this all there is?

Those folks who ask that question were working for the wrong purpose.  Their idea wasn’t to be the World PEZ® Flicking Champion, it was someone else’s idea.

So they went with it.

Don’t say this three times fast.

You can see those folks, especially a few years after the Olympics®.  They’re the ones that are on the third DUI or are the 4’6” gymnast that looks like they’ve swallowed a refrigerator.  Which, I will say, does make tumbling easier.  If you call rolling “tumbling.”  Meghan McCain does, especially if it’s toward a buffet.

So, what about those people who win a gold medal and are just fine?  What’s different?

They have purpose.  Their sport was only a part of their purpose, and was only a part of what drove them.  They are centered, and the biggest part of their purpose isn’t achievement.  Achievement is a byproduct.

The folks who win and don’t self-destruct have a purpose, and a purpose rooted in virtue.

To be clear, very, very, very clear:

  • Virtue does not guarantee victory. At all.

Virtue (and a purpose rooted in virtue) just makes victory bearable.

Why do so many early twentysomethings mentally implode when they achieve fame and stardom and immense wealth?  That’s an easy question – they find themselves in a world with no real restraints.  The real question is why don’t more starlets become headlines?  I’m pretty sure Miley Cyrus isn’t in a good mental place.

In Europe, she’s known as Kilometery Cyrus.

In one respect, not being wealthy and famous is a great substitute for willpower:  you can’t end up dead in a hotel room in Thailand surrounded by heroin, empty take-out boxes of food, bottles of Captain Morgan’s Spiced Rum, and vats of industrial-strength skin cream if you have to get to your steady job.

A mortgage and car payments have probably saved a lot of dads uncomfortable phone calls from the Italian Government as to why their 22-year-old was found “improving” the Sistine Chapel painting.  Thankfully, back then they charged the fines in something called “lira”, which is just like money but is instead made of colorful Christmas wrapping paper.

An aside, things to trust Italians on:

  • Food.
  • Wine.
  • Car body design.

Things not to trust Italians on:

  • Anything you need tomorrow.
  • Anything electronic or electric.
  • Anything where the oil or engine coolant is supposed to stay on the inside.
  • Anything remotely resembling fiscal discipline.

Italians are great at soccer – you change sides halfway through.

And, apparently, never trust John Wilder to wander off on a tangent on a Friday post.  I’ll get back to virtue and purpose, and promise not to wander too far again this post.

I’ve written several posts about Virtue.  It’s been a common theme.  Here are a few:

Kardashians, Hairy Bikinis, Elvis, Wealth, and Virtue

Roman Virtues and Western Civilization, Complete with Monty Python

Ben Franklin and his Thirteen Virtues

Why Character Just Might Be A Better Indicator Of Marriage Stability Than What Her Butt Looks Like

Regrets? Don’t Regret Anything, Unless You Want Me To Slap You When You Are Old.

So, have a purpose.  Live your virtue.  And when you have high achievement, when you win the gold, when you achieve amazing business success?  You’re ready to deal with it.

I’ve heard of a village in Africa where they’re dealing with a drought and thirst.  I hope they “Get Well Soon.”

But let’s say that you don’t win the gold.  You don’t have amazing business success.  Virtue allows you to be ready to deal with that, too.

Or you could just win a bronze medal and have a mortgage?

Nah, go for the virtue.  You’ll eventually pay the mortgage off.