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Red Pill? Blue Pill? What About The Green Pill?

“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” – The Matrix

What happens if they try to get a new actor to play John Wick?  Keanu leaves.

This is a repost – I’ve got family business (nothing bad, everything’s okay) that’s going to keep me away from the keyboard – I’ll be back Monday!

The movie The Matrix is a classic.  Too bad they never made a sequel or three.  I’m sure they would have been fantastic.  Imagine taking the adventures of Neo™ beyond that big battle with Mr. Smith®!

Regardless, The Matrix did include several ideas that have made their way into the main stream, and stayed there.  The biggest, perhaps, is the idea of The Red Pill and The Blue Pill.  In the movie, Neo© is given the choice of taking The Blue Pill, which will allow his version of reality, the things he knows, to remain, even though they are founded on pretty little lies.

I’ll admit, The Blue Pill is attractive.  It’s comfortable.  But it is, in the end, a lie.  I imagine that since you’re here, lies aren’t the thing that motivates you and more than they motivate me.

If Bill Cosby had played Morpheus, I think he would have pushed the blue pill.

The alternative is The Red Pill.  The Red Pill is the The Truth.  The problem with The Truth is that it’s ugly.  The world we want to believe in is in The Blue Pill, because those lies speak to us so clearly.  When I first took the Red Pill on a particular subject, I felt betrayed.  Here was an entire line of propaganda that I had been fed since I was a child – it was a part of my base programming.

That’s the problem with The Red Pill.  Once I took it, I began to question everything.  Like a potato chip, you can’t have just one.  And once I began looking, I found even more to question.  That was difficult, because I had to reevaluate where I was wrong.  And what ideas I had were built around those incorrect ideas.

The Red Pill is demoralizing.  It’s not pleasant to have to reevaluate basic beliefs, especially those that comforted me and that I now know are wrong.  In part, this website is about that.  It’s looking at the things I think I know, and trying to distill what is true.  On more than one occasion, a post was nearly complete when I found an inconvenient fact.

In algebra class, people always thought I was plotting something.

That meant I was wrong.  That meant my post was wrong.  In one sense it sucks because it kept me up later to write something else.  But it never upset me, because I had learned something new, and was a bit closer to The Truth.

A key to getting through The Red Pill is to embrace The Truth, and improve.  However much.  A little each day is enough.

I suppose you could call that The Green Pill.  Or, for weightlifters, The Iron Pill.

So, which one makes me The Hulk if I’m angry?

It’s the idea that instead of being upset that the world isn’t the way that I want it to be, I don’t focus on that, at all.  Instead, I try to focus on improving myself.  Not a lot, just a little each day.  Can this post be better?  Can I get stronger?  Can I get in better shape?  Can I learn another useful skill?

Life is nothing without difficulty.  There is no honor in fighting weak opponents.  I mean, I could spend my day boxing three-year-old kids.  But my arms would get tired.  Unless there weren’t that many, or if they were all especially weak three-year-olds.  Like vegan-weak.

No, for a victory to have meaning, the challenge must be sufficient.  It would have to at least be boxing six-year-olds.  Or, maybe helping the world, or even one person, see what they normally would never have seen.

I had a globe on my desk, and met the guy who made it.  It’s a small world.

I have to have a quest.  The grander, the better, and I even live with and am comfortable that I won’t live to see the ultimate impact that I have on the world.  That’s fine with me.  Small pushes, over time, change the world.

Never let The Red Pill get you down.  The real choice, even in a world gone mad, is to keep our virtue, and never to give up in making ourselves better, and to improving what we can, even if it’s only a little.

The Red Pill is difficult to swallow, but it is a gift, and victory in finding and spreading The Truth is the challenge that fuels me, and is way less tiring than fighting either endless streams of toddler or endless streams of Agent Smith.

Dang.  Sure wish they had made a sequel to The Matrix.

The Taxidermist Ate My Homework

“The exhaust port is marked and locked in.” – Star Wars, A New Hope

I’ll never end an email with “Regards” again – turns out the G is pretty close on the keyboard to the T.

Things are looking up, very much.  The Mrs. today looks better and more well rested than she has for the past few weeks, perhaps for the last month.  It’s a good thing, and I want to thank everyone who has prayed or shared a kind word during her illness.  She took a medical test today and the tech who administered it noted that The Mrs. was off the charts for someone only three days out of the hospital, which put a bit of pep in The Mrs.’ step.

As for me, I’m just a bit exhausted tonight.  The way I typically do these posts now (for the last six months) is that I work on a rough draft during free time during the day and then finish it, polish it, edit it, and add memification the night before the post.  I think this changed the output for the better, and I’ve certainly been going to bed earlier.  I haven’t had time to draft the latest post, it’s nothing more than a Post-It® note I scribbled seven consonants on along with sixteen arrows pointing in random directions.

Not a great foundation, unless you’re doing scripts for Disney® movies.

This vacation, I had planned to do quite a few things around Stately Wilder Mansion (polishing the drywall, combing the hardwood floors), but had other, more important priorities, obviously, and am still not remotely caught up on my sleep.

My dog’s vet is also a taxidermist.  Either way, I get the dog back.

While the dog didn’t eat my homework, and I have some great posts already planned for January (starting with the Civil War 2.0 Weather Report on Monday) I’m going to plead exhaustion tonight rather than put out a column that’s not the best I can do on a subject I’m passionate about.

In my life I’ve noticed (at least for me), that during times of difficulty and stress, things get simple and I’m usually very calm during the crisis – I’ve always been that way.  Heck, my normal way to deal with stress is make a nice hot, steaming cup of tea and pour it into the lap of whoever is causing the stress.  After the danger is in the past and I relax, that’s when I really notice that I’ve been through something.  I guess we all have to pay the price.  I mean, everyone except those people that visited Epstein’s Island.

So, tonight, a few more hours of sleep, and back to it.

Update On Wilders, Happy 2024

“Happy New Year. Stay fit. Keep sharp. Make good decisions.” – Ghostbusters II

“Call me crazy, but I think it is possible for a Democratic president who spent his first term setting records for inflation, gasoline prices, and low approval ratings to win a second term.” – Jimmy Carter

Hiyas!

Apologies for the delay – for the last few days I’ve been riding vinyl in a hospital room while nice people poked, prodded, x-rayed, EKG’d, CAT-scanned (I think that they use cats instead of dogs because cats keep hospital hours), and measured in such detail that I’ve seen charts, graphs, percentages, statistics, and cross-sections of The Mrs. that I’ve seen at least three of her vertebrae.

People want pictures with women’s clothes off?  I’ve seen pictures of The Mrs. with her skin and muscles off.  At least in slices.  Dang.  That sounds like something Dr. Lecter would say.

Nevermind.

The chair in the hospital room was ungodly uncomfortable, and the vinyl couch was okay since we were at a hospital nearly three hours away in Modern Mt. Pilot.  At one point, a woman I didn’t known came into the darkened room, gently lifted up my blanket, and started to lift up my shirt.

I said, as groggily as a human who only had two hours of sleep in the past 48 could, “Huh????”

“I’m here to replace the battery in your cardiac monitor,” she whispered seductively in my ear.

The Mrs. quickly marked her territory from the actual hospital bed:  “I think you’re looking for me.”

In a hospital, there’s a flurry of activity at the emergency room, and people with amazingly expensive looking pieces of equipment come and stand in line to do amazing tests that provide lots of data so that the hospital doesn’t get sued.  Then comes the long wait as recovery hits, and interaction with the hospital personnel happens only every six hours or so.

This is a good sign.  They have much bigger problems elsewhere.

What’s best in life to get out of the hospital?  Be boring.  The Mrs. tried, but her lungs greedily ate up all the antibiotics the world has to offer and then called for more.

The good news is they booted her out of the hospital so they could give the bed to someone who needed it.  The bad news is that her lungs have not adapted properly for our atmosphere, and we’ll have to seek a planet with more oxygen.

Just kidding, that’s silly.  Why not increase the oxygen content of the Earth, instead?  All we need is a volcanic island lair in the Pacific, the entire GDP of Japan for 30 years, and several dolphins that can play chess at the International Grandmaster level.

So, I filled all of her prescriptions in Modern Mt. Pilot while we waited for discharge.  In one case, the pharmacist said at the consult that the antibiotic might make her poop turn blood red, which apparently alarms weak people who do not welcome the signal that Valhalla is calling.

“Well, that’s an Easter egg I’ll let The Mrs. figure out.”  Sometimes I say what I’m thinking out loud.  It’s usually more enjoyable for me than for others.  The pharmacist gave me a look.  The Look.

I said, “We’ve been married 26 years – I think I know how far I can push a joke.”

She smiled, and shook her head.  “Just like my husband.”

We’re home now, and our Penultimate Day was spent doing precisely nothing.  Pugsley stayed home and didn’t drink all my booze and injected Elderly Dog periodically with insulin, a process we call (in honor of Lisa Douglas, wife of Oliver Wendell Douglas) “Shoosting the dog.”

Now, we’re home.  The Mrs. is touch and go on podcasting Wednesday (if you don’t show up for the livestream, you really should, it’s fun, free and if you have a beer I’ll chug one with you), but (I think) we’re back into that controllable portion of life where we manage the really unimportant things like bills and schedules.

Regardless, we welcome in 2024 with the idea that although we know life is finite, we should enjoy and live each moment with the virtue and faith that you would use in your last moment.

What will anyone pay for pictures of the vertebrae?  We’ll call it Only Organs.

I’ll respond to comments and such tomorrow.

I’m tired.