A Texas Church, Aesop, and the Future of Freedom

“I’m the plumber.  I’m just hanging around in case something goes wrong with her pipes.  (to audience) That’s the first time I’ve used that joke in twenty years.” – Horsefeathers

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“Why a four-year-old child could understand this report.  Run out and find me a four-year-old child.  I can’t make head or tail out of it.”

In a Texas church this weekend, the worst nightmare of the Left happened.  The only thing that could have been worse for the Left would have been a video of Bernie Sanders spending his own money.  A good guy with a gun (Jack Wilson) stopped a bad guy with a gun.  Part of what made it bad for the Left:  clear video evidence showed a good guy taking down a bad guy with a single shot.  To make it even worse for the Left:  the bad guy was a killer, shooting a pair of grandfatherly looking men in a room filled with grandma and grandpa types.

It was quick.  From the time the bad guy pulled his gun to the time the bad guy ceasing to . . . be was five seconds.  Five short seconds.  This was, perhaps, a final blow for the Left.  The idea that the police, who arrived very quickly (four minutes or less) should be the only ones with guns evaporated, especially since two church members were dead within three seconds.  A very well-trained citizen saved lives – how many we’ll thankfully not know, since he acted.

Not a cop.  A citizen.

Every Leftist commenter on the web that was trying to justify gun control in the wake of this tragedy couldn’t do so without defending the shooter as being somehow justified in wanting to rob the church.  The biggest problem in the eyes of the Left, perhaps, is that the churchgoers weren’t sufficiently Christian enough to quietly line up to be shot.  Texas is probably not the state for that.

What made the difference is that the good guy was able to ignore disbelief at the situation occurring right in front of him, and was able to react.  How could Jack Wilson do this?  He didn’t know exactly what threat he was going to face.  He didn’t even know if there ever was even going to be a threat.  But yet, he trained.  Dare I say it?  He was prepped.

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Ok, Zoomer.  (For the record, I’m neither.  I just like stirring things up.)

Jack Wilson scanned the churchgoers.  He was looking for data points.  He saw them and acted.

This week, Aesop over at The Raconteur Report posted his 2019 Quincy Adams Wagstaff Lecture.  It’s here (LINK).  RTWT.  As usual, Aesop writes excellent material – not only to ponder upon, but to act upon.  There are many wonderful points in it, and here is the opening:

Wherever you’re reading this, you’ve had unmistakable evidence that things aren’t going to go all rosy.  Perhaps ever again.  Perhaps just for a long dark winter of the soul, and/or of the entire civilization. There has been more than one Dark Age period in human history, and they will happen again.  You may very well get to see this firsthand, and experience life amidst it.  Howsoever long or briefly.

You’ve had a respite of some 37 months to get your metaphysical crap together in one bag, and use the time prudently.

If you’ve squandered that lead time, woe unto you.

This post made me think, which is dangerous.  At least that’s what my therapist says.  My therapist who says I’m “mentally creative” and “reality impaired.”  Thankfully, she’s imaginary, which really lowers her billing rate.  But what that post made me think most about was:

Mindset.

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This is what would happen if my imaginary therapist talked to The Mrs.  It’s funnier if you read the whole thing in a pirate voice, really.

Aesop mentions mental readiness, and that’s key.  The last 37 months have been, to put it mildly, an indication that we are headed towards a very uncertain future as the culture around us continues to polarize, as the monetary debt we face (all over the world) continues to mount, as soccer is still taken seriously as an international sport rather than a game for attention challenged three-year-olds, and as the international stability that was so hard won with the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War dissolves.

I’m not trying to sell you on any one future, on any one fate, unless there’s money in it.  But I am trying to emphasize the start of your salvation:  your mindset.  If you believe that the world will continue in an unbroken, linear stream, I can assure you that you’re wrong.  We’ve had the precursor warnings of 9/11 and the Great Recession.  If I am correct, this decade will bring tumult of a similar, if not greater magnitude.

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Evacuate the women and children first!  Then we can solve this in silence.

You should believe this, too.  Not on a surface level.  This is a mindset.  Your daily decisions should take these future unknown and unknowable calamities into account.  Why?

Because if I’m right, and you’re prepared a week, a month, or five years before you need to be, you win.  Also?  Society wins, because the more people that are prepared, the better we come through the next crisis/shock.  If we were all prepared, a hurricane could hit the shore and the stores would still be full.  When we prepare, we manage to make sure there will be less stress on the system during an emergency.

The other way to help is with skills, and the longer the crisis, the more important those skills will be.  And, no, your experience in saving the Princess® in Super Mario Brothers™ doesn’t count.  At least my therapist says it won’t.  Real skills provide for a basic human need, like food.  During the Great Depression, people gardened and farms weren’t big factory affairs – they were much smaller Mom and Pop style farms.  Even though there was significant malnutrition, starvation deaths in the United States were minimal.

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He said his New Year’s resolution was 1920×1080.

More evidence?

One of the biggest enemies of seeing reality is seeing the world you think should be, not the world as it really is.  People look at Antifa® rioting and think, “They should be arrested.”  They aren’t.  What does that data point tell you?

The government of Virginia is threatening to take semi-automatic guns, dedicate a team to confiscating guns and the government should allow honest, law abiding citizens to exercise the right to self-protection.  But the government wants to take it away and make honest people felons.  What does that data point tell you?

Government debt today is at 106% of GDP.  During the worst of the Great Depression, debt was less than 50% of the GDP.  During the height of the Vietnam War?  Debt was less than 40%.  What does that data point tell you?

I can’t promise the cause of the next crisis.  But I can promise that it’s coming.  Cultivate the mindset.  It’s the first step.

The key is to avoid despair even though you see the world as it really is.

“I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today.  I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet.  I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.” – Marcus Aurelius Groucho Marx

I have been accused of being too cheerful from time to time throughout my life.  And I plead guilty – with a smile on my face.  Why?

First – I’m naturally an optimist.  I want to achieve the best, but I also know that there’s no fixed way the world should be.  There is just the way that the world really is today.  If I don’t let myself get upset at the difference between an ideal and reality, I sleep a lot better.  Does that mean I’m satisfied?  No.  I work with every fiber to change some things for the better, but I don’t let it wreck my life like a pink-hatted blue-haired creature of fluid gender when confronted with a person who had to ask what their gender pronouns are.

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The first two hours are rough.  Caffeine is my best morning friend.

Second – Life has been awesome for me.  I can think of a LOT of times that I thought it was ruined.  But each of those times resulted in a situation that was pretty good for me.  Am I worth $30 million dollars?  No.  But that’s probably for the better.  If I had that kind of scratch I’d probably make Elon Musk look like the model of public restraint.

Third – I’ll admit, there was a time (about a year ago) where I got a little gloomy myself. But as I looked around me, I looked at what we have done.  I realized that freedom has won here in the United States for hundreds of years against all odds.

There were 2.5 million people living in the 13 colonies in 1776.  That’s less than the population of Utah.  In that 2.5 million we had a Washington, a Franklin, a Jefferson.  Sure, Franklin in 1789 might have drank more than the state of Utah in 1989 all by himself, but there are men that are the equal to our founders, and they exist in every state.  You know they exist, too.  The tricorn hats and powdered wigs are a dead giveaway.

Always remember that there is a line.  If you look at them standing along the church pews, scanning the congregation to keep them safe, they look nice.

Heck, they are nice.  Until they cross the line.

Then they’re not nice.  Then they become good men.

So, to gently change Groucho:  The past we wish to cling to is dead.  The present that we have is generally not so bad.  And we have a future, even if we can only see it dimly now, even if its golden age is years or decades away.

Let us go and make it.

Freedom: Violence is the Answer

“A new age has begun, an age of freedom. And all will know that 300 Spartans gave their last breath to defend it.” – 300

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One night I heard a noise on the deck.  A raccoon was bringing me back a book that I had lost a few years ago.  “It’s a miracle!” I said.  “Not really,” said the raccoon, “your name was written on the inside cover.”

The dogs barked.

The dogs never bark, unless a Terminator® is here yet again looking for that stupid Sarah Conner.  The dogs were safely in their crates for the night.  I’ve spent thousands of hours (yes, thousands) downstairs writing hundreds of thousands of words at night after the family was safely asleep, and not one time ever (yes, ever) had our silly dogs ever barked.

As they barked, I heard something on the deck above.  It sounded like a piece of deck furniture sliding.  Yeah, sure, you say, there aren’t a lot of burglars that move furniture to announce their presence, especially not at 1 AM.  You’re right.

But . . .

There is one thing that I do know – if there was an actual burglar upstairs, the consequences could get bad, and quickly.  Nonviolent burglars try to rob you in the day when they think that nobody’s home.  But a burglar that’s coming into your house when they know that someone is there?

They mean you harm.

Bad guys at night are actually looking forward to doing bad things.  The sound of a shotgun ratcheting a shell into the chamber will scare the Schumer out of a daytime burglar, but it won’t deter an attacker at night.  They’re looking for violence, and fully expecting to kill everyone in the house.

I blame violent video games, or maybe gluten or high fructose corn syrup, or worse yet, them playing video games about violent gluten while snorting high fructose corn syrup.

Regardless, I got up from the solitude of writing on my couch and got a pistol.  Oh, sure, you may leave pistols lying about your palatial residences like we Wilders leave our PEZ® on the coffee tables for the crowned heads of state that come by to feel the perfect shapes of our skulls, but we keep ours out of the public areas.  Mine are in places that I would normally sleep, like under the dining room table, in the hot tub, or behind the wheel of my car while driving to work.

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Oh, yeah, I left one on the bridge!

So I went upstairs.  I quietly opened my bedroom door and had to decide:  the .45ACP or the 9mm?  I chose the 9mm.  Why?  It was closest to the door, and all it required was a longish reach upwards.  Could anyone else in the house reach it?  Nope, but is a 9mm all that dangerous anyway?  I mean, if a Pope can survive it, it can’t be that bad.

I pulled it out of its case as I walked towards the back door.  As I got near the back door, I activated the best feature of the 9mm – the laser mounted right under its barrel, which I bought for $10 from Amazon®.  The idea of the laser mounted on a pistol, for all three of my readers that never saw Terminator®, is to show the shooter right where the bullet is going to go.  In my case, I turned it on because any actual person on the back deck, seeing a laser, would probably think twice about their “invading Wilder Manor” plan.

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9mm – what I teach my daughters to shoot gnats with.

The dogs were still unsettled as I reached for the doorknob.  As these dogs are really not dogs, but barking rats that have tails that wag when you call them a good boy, they’re really always unsettled.  I turned on the outside lights and painted every piece of deck furniture with the laser.

Nothing, except for the overly ambitious spider that builds a web face-high across the back door every day.  I didn’t really expect there to be anything, since I live in Modern Mayberry.

In checking the crime statistics to prepare for this post, I looked up Modern Mayberry.  It shows up as being a crime-ridden area, since there actually was a murder here in 2016.  It was, as I recall, a guy who killed his girlfriend (or vice versa) over infidelity.  But random murders?  Not here.  Gang violence?  Not here, since the closest thing we have to a gang is the pre-school soccer program.  I hate those monsters.

I believe there are petty burglaries that occur here, but those are almost all during the daytime.  Why?

Everyone here has guns.  Okay, that’s an exaggeration.  But I would estimate that at minimum, 10% of the households could be armed and lethal in 2 minutes or less.  I would estimate that 50% could be armed in 10 minutes or less.  And I would estimate that 80% would have a gun in their hands in 20 minutes or less, but by then you’re dead or the cops are here.  However, if you are a criminal, this isn’t good.

Why?

Me.  And my neighbor.  When he moved in, he had no idea that he was living next to The John Wilder, but he showed me his latest toy – a nice AR tricked out with a green laser and a bunch of other bling.  I have no doubt that he’d be happy to explain to the Sheriff why he perforated someone breaking into his house.  That explains most of the residents of Modern Mayberry.  And you can be certain that the District Attorney is one of us, too.  He declined to prosecute a homeowner for emptying a magazine into a criminal that had shot the homeowner, even though the homeowner had shot the fleeing criminal in the back more than once.

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Would this be a neighbor you prefer?  Put me in the “yes” category.

The homeowner is a valued member of the Modern Mayberry community.  The criminal?  In jail.  The criminal’s civil suit against the homeowner?  Yeah.  That was dismissed.  Nobody could be found guilty of that here.

If you were to try to rob a house here at night, the next time you took a drink of water you’d look like a fountain.  A fourteen-year-old kid trying to boost a bike at 3 in the afternoon?  Probably not going to get shot.  But that same kid at 3AM?  You have as much chance of surviving the night as a Snickers® bar does at Rosie O’Donnell’s house.

And let me stress again:  no one here has a problem with that.

But that’s not how it always was.  It used to be that violence was the exclusive right of our rulers.  And it was so not only for legal reasons, but for practical reasons.

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Plus who knows how much for hair spray.

Let’s go back to the middle ages.  Technology had advanced to the point where a knight in a full suit of armor was pretty much only going to be at risk from another knight, and they never fought except over who got the remote control at Knight School.  Their armor was strong steel, and penetrating it was difficult.  To a normal citizen serf of the day?  A knight might as well have been a superhero – there was no reasonable way a normal citizen could hurt a knight.

What did it cost to outfit a knight and his horse?  In the area of $500,000 to $3.5 million.  The higher cost was probably due to the need to decorate it with the 15th Century equivalent of Hello Kitty® stickers, but $500,000 was daunting.  Even the armor of a “man at arms” was probably in the range of $20,000 or more, but one of those would be a poor competitor for a mounted knight.

Swords were huge, double-handed affairs.  Why?  To penetrate the armor of a knight you had to swing a heavy mass of steel at them.

Until.

Until the English longbow came to the front.  The beauty of the English longbow is that, when fired all at once, a mass of them could penetrate all but the best armor of the day.  At Agincourt, Henry V’s archers and knights took down 10,000 French, to (possibly) fewer than 500 English deaths.  It is written on Henry V’s tombstone about conquering the French:  “Look, Ma, no panzers!”

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Oh, sorry.  I’ll leave you to go back to smoking, Ma’am.

A longbow takes, in modern times, at least six weeks to learn to shoot well.  A sword?  Years.

The longbow made warfare more accessible to the common man.  The result is well known – increased freedom for the common man.  Before the king required Englishmen learn the longbow, a knight got pretty much what he wanted.  After the longbow?  A bit more difficult, because if the knight’s demand was too much?  A group of men could make his demand as null and void as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s womb.

This levelling of force included fortresses.  A tall castle with stone walls was impregnable short of a long siege, having been designed to resist stone thrown from catapults.  But after cannon, castles were as done as Facebook® to a teenager after grandma started “Liking” their posts.

This trend continued.  Soldiers shed armor, and the most potent weapons became affordable by even the most common man.  By the time of the Revolution®, any American could hold in their hands the equivalent weapon of a British soldier.  And not be trained in years like a swordsman, or in weeks like an archer, but in days.  The investment in money went down, too – a good musket would cost about a month’s earnings for an American around the time of the Revolution™.

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The Second Amendment wasn’t written about this – it was written about freedom.

People talk about democracy?  In this way violence was democratized.  Never in the history of mankind had a place been as free as America, but only part of it was philosophy – the rest was applied engineering.  The Brown Bess was a British weapon, but it was the most common weapon used on both sides of the Revolution.  Ordinary American citizens had the same weapon as the best armed British soldier.  The result?

Tyranny lost.  Arbitrary will could not be imposed upon free men.  The Congress was stopped from legislating tyranny not only by the Constitution, but by the willingness of good men to accept the legislation.

This situation of increasing freedom kept going.  “God created men.  Sam Colt made them equal.”  Any American could put 12 rounds in a pair of Colts® on his hips after the Civil War, plus another 15 in a Winchester™ in the scabbard on his saddle.  Was the Old West© a killing field?  Well, yes.  In Dodge City, the murder rate at its peak was probably a little over twice what it is today in Baltimore today, but at least there wasn’t any rap music.

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Where’s Selleck?  This picture needs more Selleck.

Today, legal firearm ownership is through the roof.  The weapons are of high quality:  these firearms are nearly the same ability as firearms used commonly by the military.  In many cases, a family home is better armed than the local police department – I’ve been to Modern Mayberry’s office and wouldn’t trade.  We’re better prepared, too.  It might take me three minutes to have an AR ready to go, but it would take our local police twenty minutes at least to mount an effective force to come “save” me.  More than likely if I were unarmed, they’d just be there to photograph the bodies.  Police aren’t the first responders.  Police are second responders.

Prepared or not:  you are the first responder.

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In no case have I ever seen a cop do anything but get ready to fill out paperwork.  The good news?  You’re on your own.

There is no nation on Earth as armed as the United States.  Modern Mayberry is a good example of that, where I’d expect 90% of citizens have more than one gun, and the cost of a decent firearm is $500 or less.  Are we free here?  Certainly.  Do we fear our neighbors shooting us?  Certainly not.  I could toss a pistol on my hip and the biggest thing most people would worry about would be that I got to the counter at Burger King™ to order before them.

Ten drones hit the Saudi oil processing plants recently, taking out millions of barrels a day of the world’s oil production.  Ten drones.  And from what I can see, the drones cost a few thousand dollars each to make.  Today, the parts and programming to make those drones isn’t hard to come by.  Even the GPS tracking wouldn’t add much to the cost.  The ability to destroy targets from hundreds of miles away is less expensive than a used car.  A crappy used car.

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Hey, he went on to drive the Pork Chop Express.

Millions of barrels of world oil production was taken down for less than the cost of a new Camaro®, and a new Camaro™ won’t even get you a date with the local meth tramp.

The implications on freedom of drone technology aren’t clear.  I’d expect, however, that a government would have to take into account the fact that, at least in the United States, they govern a people that that wishes to be governed.  This puts in place limits on government.  The second the government wants to push the people too far, the calculus of violence will rapidly favor the people, and not the government.

Despite all of the nonsense-bragging from the left that a dozen people from flyover Red States aren’t equal to an aircraft carrier, I know who I’d pick.  I’m not stupid, I’d pick both of them – I want the people and the aircraft carriers.  But if I had to pick one, I’d pick the dozen people from flyover states.  They won’t shoot down many F-35 fighters, but I’d be willing to bet if you asked any soldier if he’d rather fight Afghans or Red State Americans unleashed, he’d want to go up against the Afghans any day.

When a country’s leaders want to enforce tyranny, the first thing they do is to take away the weapons of the common man.  After that, atrocity is the playbook.  A free people, with arms, will not suffer tyranny.

Here is Vladimir Lenin’s order to his henchmen in about (I haven’t found the date) 1918:

“Comrades! The insurrection of five kulak districts should be pitilessly suppressed. The interests of the whole revolution require this because ‘the last decisive battle’ with the kulaks is now under way everywhere. An example must be demonstrated.

  1. Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known landlords, rich men, bloodsuckers.
  2. Publish their names.
  3. Seize all their grain from them.
  4. Designate hostages in accordance with yesterday’s telegram.

Do it in such a fashion that for hundreds of kilometers around the people might see, tremble, know, shout: “they are strangling, and will strangle to death, the bloodsucking kulaks”.

Telegraph receipt and implementation.

Yours, Lenin.

Find some truly hard people”

Would Lenin’s order work in Texas?  Would that work in Kentucky?  Would that work in Indiana?  In Michigan?  In Ohio?

No.  Not in 2019.

The war on guns isn’t about keeping schools safe – that’s actually trivial to do without taking guns away.  It’s trivial to do without Red Flag (Red Flag Laws, or, How To Repeal The Second Amendment Soviet-Style Without A Pesky Vote) laws.

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I hear that Lenin’s ghost wants universal health care.  But with rope.

The only thing taking guns away from Americans does is to make it easier for the Lenin Squad® in the House to take whatever they want.  And if Americans are disarmed?  They will take whatever they want.

In Modern Mayberry, it was likely a raccoon or an opossum on my deck.  But if it wasn’t, the red dot of the laser playing across the forest near my house probably convinced the bad guys that this house certainly wasn’t worth ending their life for.  More than likely it convinced a raccoon that a world-famous blogger was willing to fight him to the death for the rights to lick a cat food can clean.

He didn’t have to worry.  A raccoon going after a cat food can isn’t what I worry about – even though it might scare the dogs.

But if it was a government raccoon?  Hmmmm.

Red Flag Laws, or, How To Repeal The Second Amendment Soviet-Style Without A Pesky Vote

“Now, you see all these red flags?  Trouble spots.  Southeastern Asia.  The Caribbean.  The Congo.  I’ll give you one guess as to who’s responsible.” – Doctor Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine

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I look much better after I’ve had a cup of coffee.  And after I’ve found my axe.

I know that you, gentle reader, have thoughts about guns that are probably pretty similar to mine, so I’d like to take you on a short walk through history, specifically the history of politics and psychiatry.  I promise, it will make more sense than the lyrics to the Manfred Mann song Blinded by the Light.  What the hell is a go-cart Mozart, and why is he checking out the weather chart, anyway?

(Related:  Civil War Weather Reports – Civil War II Weather Report: Spicy Time Coming, Civil War Weather Report #2, Censorship, Stalin, and a Bunch of Links, and Civil War Weather Report #3: Violence, China, and Lots of Links)

The history of psychiatry is tied directly to the political.

I have seen a person suffering from schizophrenia to such a degree that they were sure that MTV® video stars were stealing songs directly from their brain and that they were also a surgeon who regularly performed operations on world leaders and stored their organs in the freezer for safe keeping.

If no one has ever told you that there are human organs belonging to world leaders in their fridge in a completely matter-of-fact “would you like a glass of water” voice, well, all I can tell you is that my first thought was one of complete disbelief that I had heard them right.  Yes, I asked for them to repeat that statement.  Twice.

I walked over and checked their freezer.   Thankfully the only things in it were some frozen pizzas and ancient ice cubes.  I assure you I was talking to their shrink that afternoon and they were involuntarily committed by 5PM.  They were helped, and after being put on some appropriately industrial levels of anti-psychotic medication, did okay enough to be released back into the wild.  As long as they stayed on their meds.

I know that there are actually crazy people that really need help.

But I also know this:  psychiatry is still the most politically abused medical profession.

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Okay, if Depp isn’t crazy, why does he keep starring in movies like this? 

Examples of political abuse of psychiatry?  There are many.  When I mentioned this topic to The Mrs., she immediately said, “the Soviet Union.”  And that’s the example I thought of first, too.  The Soviets systematically used diagnosis of psychological disorders such as “philosophical intoxication” and “sluggish schizophrenia” to put people who didn’t like Marxism into mental institutions.  And, no, those diagnoses aren’t lame jokes – those were really Soviet-era diagnoses.

How many were caught up in the psychological gulags?

We really don’t know since those records are still secret, but in 1978 at least 4.5 million Soviet citizens were listed as having mental health problems.  In 1988, perhaps thinking that they might face their own version of Soviet Nuremburg Trials for Crimes Against Humanity, Soviet leaders had over 800,000 thousand patients removed from the list of the mentally ill.  Paperwork error, surely?

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Okay, with all those red flags, how did they not see the collapse of communism coming?

Did the Soviets condemn thousands with false diagnosis?  Nearly certainly.  Hundreds of thousands?  Very likely.

Millions?

Probably.  Think of it, millions of people falsely diagnosed with a mental illness due to political beliefs and sent to asylums and work camps.  Certainly some were executed.

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The Soviets allowed ownership of smoothbore weapons for hunting.  Except when they didn’t.  Which was most of the time.  Oh, and the definition of sweet summer child is:  a person who doesn’t know the hardships of winter, often used when someone has no experience with a particular (stressful) thing, which may describe a generation that rhymes with perennial.

Okay, it was just the Soviet Union, right?

No.  Cuba did the same thing.  There is evidence that China is still doing it, and likely on scale similar to that of the Soviet Union.  Thankfully the World Psychiatric Association took the lead in investigations.  Oh, they didn’t?  The World Psychiatric Association pretty much ignored it and said that people associated with Falun Gong are nuts and that putting them in asylums run by the state security apparatus (not the medical directorate) was perfectly normal?

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One flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo’s nest . . . and if you haven’t see the movie, you should, it’s a lighthearted comedy and perfect for a first date.

Okay, that’s just China.  Thankfully this would never happen in the United States.

Oh, it did?

Sure.  In the 1920’s dissidents (like one who protested the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti) were put into asylums.  In the 1960’s members of the American Psychological Association smeared presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in the press by diagnosing him.  But that wasn’t political, right?

Thankfully it isn’t happening now.

Oh, in 2012 a whistleblower with the NYPD was railroaded on mental health?  Ouch.  But New York is corrupt.

It would never happen based on political motives, right?

Dinesh D’Souza, author and filmmaker on the Right was convicted of a crime based on giving too much money to a political campaign.  He admitted he was wrong.  The Federal Judge involved in the case sentenced D’Souza not only to prison, he sentenced D’Souza to years of mental health counselling despite a licensed psychologist saying that D’Souza was just fine mentally.

So, yes.  Psychiatry is a political weapon.  It’s not like the Left has sentenced political opponents to chemotherapy, but I hear that they’re working on it.

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Yes, this is a common sense way to use psychiatry!

This corrupt branch of medicine is the background of the Red Flag Laws.

The idea is that we’ll create laws to remove rights from people without due process, with the presumption that individuals should lose a right guaranteed by the Constitution®.  A single accuser, with no evidence can result in gun confiscation to a law-abiding citizen.  Sadly this already happens – people with contested domestic restraining orders (a standard tactic in divorces nowadays) lose their rights, although I’ve heard of people fighting these orders and winning – at least there is a pretense at due process.

The claim that the ability to strip people of rights won’t be abused is laughable.  In every country that’s been infected by psychiatry, it has been twisted to meet political ends.  Yes, there are crazy people.  I’ve seen one as I related above.  And, if you did a brain scan, there is a physical basis for schizophrenia.  It’s real.  It is a medical condition.  But remember, these are the same psychiatrists that would diagnose me as nuts if I believed I was be five years older than I really am, but are perfectly fine with children younger than the age of five claiming they are a different sex than their genetics have made them.

Po-tay-to, Po-gender reassignment surgery for children is normal-to.

Furthermore, the medical profession as a whole is maybe a bit, well, mental*.  In one study it was claimed that 50% of female doctors could be diagnosed with a mental disease.  I wonder again why my ex didn’t take up medicine?  (*Aesop LINK excluded, unless pimp-slapping in the comments section is classified as a mental disorder.)

Oh, and psychologists have nearly the highest rates of suicide of any profession.  Yes, any profession, including the people who make balloon animals in Mauschwitz Disneyland® for chubby children with hands sticky from chocolate ice cream.  Perfectly stable.  And this is also the same profession whose international governing body (WPA) was just fine with political repression in the name of psychiatry.

Besides being oppressive, the Red Flag laws would not have helped in latest shootings – these people lawfully and legally got their rifles.  But they will form the basis for taking away guns for . . .

  • Conspiracy Theories – Believing anything other than the Official Narrative® will become a basis for exclusion of lawful firearms ownership, despite the fact that throughout history, many conspiracy theories have been proven true. Google® MKULTRA.    That happened.  But the FBI® is now warning that you are a danger if you don’t believe the Official Narrative©.
  • Antisocial Behavior – Ever not want to hang around people? You’re antisocial, and that’s dangerous, citizen.  No AR for you!
  • Websites Visited – Going to unapproved sites? Thinking unapproved thoughts?  Glockblock™!
  • Comments Made When You Were 16 – Wow, did you really say that maybe the Crusades weren’t all bad? No pew-pew for you, hater.
  • Not Believing in the Easter Bunny Socialism – Well, I think I covered that above.

The irony is this will have the impact of keeping people away from mental health professionals.  This will keep people from seeking help when they’re a little depressed, because the consequences of having a “health record” might prevent them from future opportunity – the only safe way to live life would be to stay away from health professionals – and not answer certain questions your M.D. might have for you with a polite BFYTW when asked why you’re not answering.  Oh, but that probably puts you on the antisocial list.

CATI.jpg

Texas may or may not be your cup of tea, but they certainly got some things right once upon a time.

Psychiatry is on pretty iffy ground in many cases already.  As an experiment, a group of doctors sent people to a psychiatrist with one symptom – they heard a voice.  No other symptom.  They were perfectly normal, mentally healthy people.  In one case, the person was committed to a mental health facility (as I recall) for several weeks with zero symptoms.  I tried to look it up, but, surprise, most Google® searches right now link commitment to . . . violence.  Even that’s not a comfortable thought.

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Soviet mental health nurse.  Not shown:  tenth guard, who is now an inmate.

The single scariest thing to me is watching a human mind erode – what was once a rational human disappears.  It’s what makes (to me) zombies scary.  They look like humans.  They used to be a normal human.  But that rational human being is now gone, replaced by someone who has no real tie to reality while the external form remains.

I realize that there is a time and a place for psychiatric care.

But psychiatrists are already owned by the Left.  The Left sees you as crazy already.  The Left views your dissent from their agenda as a mental disorder, one punishable by death, if need be.

alex.jpg

I’ll leave the last word to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who is really pictured above while in the gulag:  “I’ll take Solzhenitsyn on Gun Control for $1000, Alex.  Oh, look – the Daily Double®!”

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking:  what would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?  Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?  [They] would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!  If . . . if . . . we didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation . . . .  We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

The Roman Emperor, The Navy SEAL, Elizabeth Warren, and Your Future

“You were last seen hiking up Mount Ego.” – Frasier

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Jimmy Page could NOT believe it when he found out that Marcus Aurelius would be available as a lead singer.

I know what you’re saying, “John Wilder, how can you be so freakin’ funny three times a week every Monday, Wednesday and Friday?”  The answer is simple – my goal to be the funniest person on the Internet, with the exception of those anchors on CNN®.  I mean, how do they keep a straight face?

That goal requires work.  Really.  Oh, sure, “work” includes researching things I’m interested in anyway and (sometimes) drinking a glass of wine or two while I work on punchlines.  But I won’t hit publish or stop writing until it’s done.  And done means I’m happy as a twit in a toga with a toupee.  Speaking of  noble noggins in nighties, Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (notice that smooth transition?) said:

Don’t let your reflection on the whole sweep of life crush you.  Don’t fill your mind with all the bad things that still might happen.  Stay focused on the present situation and ask yourself whey it’s so unbearable and can’t be survived.

Whenever I quote him, I remind everyone that Marcus Aurelius was the Emperor of Rome while it was still at the height of its power.  This man had the freedom to make decisions on the literal life and death of citizens and non-citizens alike.  He was, no joking, the most powerful man in the world.

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What’s the fun of telling the Stormtroopers© that “These aren’t the droids® you’re looking for,” when the Stormtroopers™ work for you?  It’s like they were thinking, “Okay, play along, the Emperor is doing cosplay again.”

But despite this worldly power, Marcus took the time to write down his personal philosophy.  It wasn’t to pass down to posterity, it was for him.  His book is called Meditations because these were the things he meditated about on a daily basis.  These were the problems and doubts and issues he dealt with in his everyday life.

meditations.jpg

You can tell this was the first page of Meditations – later on Marcus used glitter pens and stickers.  The historians were so happy when the found the key to the little lock on the diary.

When I was younger, I thought that the solution to my problems existed outside of me.  I thought that if I could get more power, I could be happy.  If you think being more powerful will automatically ease all of your worries and concerns, Marcus Aurelius is proof that power won’t help you in that way.

Sure, Marcus didn’t have to worry about making a mortgage payment or about not getting a tasty chicken sandwich because he showed up at Chick-fil-a® and forgot they were closed on Sundays, but the passage above shows that the decisions of running an empire and planning military campaigns were still overwhelming and stressful.  While outwardly Marcus had to be stoic in the sense of a strong Roman emperor, in his book he could share the truth about his worries with himself.

Let’s look at another quote, this one by Navy SEAL Jocko Willink (LINK):

This is what I want you to be afraid of:  waking up in six days or six weeks or six years or sixty years and being no closer to your goal . . . .  GET UP.  AND.  GO.

At first glance, these two quotes might seem separated.  They certainly are separated in time and pace, not to mention power.  Marcus wrote about the present and living through the moment.  He spoke of action in the small moment of “now” to allow him to get back to being able to deal with the big picture.

Jocko writes about failing in that future to spur action in today’s small moment of “now.”

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Or maybe he identifies as a SEAL?

Two men, writing about the same thing centuries apart, come to the same conclusion through different methods on escaping the paralysis of fear in day-to-day life:  action is vital for you to be the best you.  You can’t dwell on what might happen if you make a bad decision – but you have to be afraid of the person you’ll be if you don’t take action, or, worse yet, don’t have a goal.

Why don’t we take action?  Probably the number one reason is our egos.  Egos are fragile things, and ego in many ways is our enemy.  Aurelius wrote about getting through the moment, not being crushed by the overwhelming vastness of life.  That’s his ego not wanting to be wrong.

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I thought we’d have more of moved off to Canada by now?

Willink writes about wasting that future life.  That’s his ego avoiding action today because it might fail.  Ego wants to, above all things, not fail.  Taking yourself into a future where you have failed by not trying is a sneaky way of using your ego to help you improve.  Taken to extreme, it’ll make you single-minded.  The biggest danger is that you achieve your goal and don’t have another one.

Don’t let your ego drive your life.  Most people really don’t care about you, and that’s a good thing.

  • They don’t remember that your pants split during that presentation in college and you weren’t wearing underwear. At least I hope they still don’t remember that.
  • They barely remember when you made a fool out of yourself that one time at the party by walking into that glass front door, making you look like a 200 pound sparrow who left a face imprint, complete with Hot Mustard Sauce® that you were dipping Chicken McNuggets© in.
  • No one remembers that you time travelled into the past and that your high-school age mom tried to put the moves on you after you hit Biff Tannen.

Those that do care about you . . . don’t care about those oddly specific things I listed above.  They care about you and want you to feel better.  After you do something embarrassing, an inner voice beats you up.  That’s your ego.  Your ego is insulting you so you don’t embarrass it again.   And, I assure you, if anyone said to you the things you tell yourself when you’re feeling guilty or embarrassed and looking in a mirror, you’d cut them out of your life in a minute.  Unfortunately, when I tried to cut my ego out, my family stopped me because the electric drill I used couldn’t find it.  The ego is kept behind the drywall of your closet, right?

I mean, that’s where the voices come from.

embar

And his shoes didn’t match his purse!

Ask yourself:  how does fear of embarrassment or fear of failure drive your behavior?  How many things have you avoided because of fear?  How many great things did you miss out on because you weren’t willing to take the risk?

Be the best you.  Start today.  And ignore or make your own use of that inner voice that your ego uses to punish you.

Entropy, The End of The Universe, Heroes, and Struggle

“The Federation has taught you that conflict should not exist.  But without struggle, you would not know who you truly are.  Struggle made us strong.” – Star Trek Beyond

universe

Some people think the Universe will last forever.  Silly people.  We’ll only have stars for the next 100,000,000,000,000 years or so.

The Universe is built on multiple simple principles that interact in ways that make Elvis™, PEZ®, and mayonnaise covered garden gnomes all possible.  A light coating of mayo will do – we’re not crazy here at Stately Wilder Manor®.  One of those simple principles is that as time passes, disorder in the Universe increases.  This tendency towards disorder is called entropy, and it’s not just a good idea – it’s the law:  the second law of thermodynamics.  The nice thing about this law is you can’t break it, so there’s no need for Thermodynamics Police and Judge Judy can’t preside in Physics Court®.

A way to think about this inexorable drive toward disorder is to imagine that the Universe is a campfire – one that you can’t add wood to.  At the beginning it’s a great blaze, because you were an idiot and used gasoline to start the fire and burned off your eyebrows.  As the blaze burns, it consumes the wood.  After a time there is nothing left but coals, which glow dimly for hours.  The current most accepted theory (but not the only one) is that the Universe started with a sudden quantum instability, more commonly known as the Big Bang®.

In the beginning (see what I did there?) the Universe experienced the greatest amount of potential energy it will ever see.  The Universe is that blazing gasoline-soaked campfire.  Since that moment in time, the amount of energy available in the Universe decreases continually.  Like a fire, it burns hot at the beginning.  That’s where we are, it’s still hot out there.  The embers will glow as the last available energy in the Universe is slowly turned into a starless thin vapor nearing absolute zero, much like Marvel® movies without Iron Man©.

entropy

Entropy – now maintenance free!

This tendency toward lower overall energy and thus overall lower order is called entropy.

It’s important to note that entropy always increases in a closed system – like when you store a decapitated human head in a Yeti® cooler – who hasn’t had that problem?  The Earth, thankfully, isn’t a closed system.  It has a wonderful thermonuclear reactor pumping energy down from millions of miles away, every day.  To put it in perspective, the Earth only receives one billionth of the energy that the Sun puts out daily, like you only received one billionth of your mother’s love, since the rest of it was reserved for chardonnay and “Daytime Daddy.”

Why isn’t the Earth a closed system?

The Sun allows us to have surplus energy, and thus order on Earth.  With the exception of nuclear reactors, all energy on Earth is solar.  Wind is caused by differential heating of the atmosphere.  Rain is caused by solar evaporation of water.  Even oil is millions of years of trapped sunlight, helpfully stored by God in gas stations.  Nuclear fuel used in our current reactors (and the core of the Earth) was forged in the heart of a star.  Not Nicholas Cage®.  Maybe Johnny Depp™.

This energy is responsible for other things, too.  Salt deposits.  Sand dunes.  And life.

So disorder is increasing across the Universe every day.  And not only in the galaxy, but in your house.  In your carpet.  In your body.  In that Yeti© cooler.

But we know these things for certain.  Without energy:

  • Your house will someday be a wreck.
  • Your carpet should have been replaced Reagan left office. Brown shag is . . . 1980.
  • Your body will die.

Until you die, you have to have standards.  You have to hold the line.

You have to fight for the glorious tomorrow over the whispering of losing your will and relaxing today.

Life is hard.  Life is a struggle.  If you are lucky, you can struggle for mighty things, good things, virtuous things.  Hopefully with a healthy body and maybe a hardwood floor.

But I’ll let you in on a little secret:

We all lose in the end.  Entropy will win.  Entropy always wins.

The struggle is the goal.

Regardless of where you are, this is your golden age, your moment – it’s the only one you have.  When you were six you knew this.  What you read, what you watched – what was thrilling, who were your heroes?  People who went to work at a bank?  No.

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In ancient Sparta, apparently they did Cross-Fit® but didn’t talk about it.  They were advanced!

Your heroes were people who struggled, who fought.  Winning was preferable, but the struggle was enough.  A defiant loss like the Spartans at Thermopylae or the Texans at the Alamo is, perhaps, an even stronger example of virtue.

There are plenty of things in life that are worth fighting for, worth struggling for.  What are you going to do with your life?

braveheart

Grandpa McWilder didn’t wear a kilt.  He was an overalls kinda guy.

You have two choices.

You can waste your life.  Or you can struggle.  Do you have the discipline to embrace the struggle?

All the cool kids are doing it.

pulp

At least struggle with a rifle cartridge if you’re gonna fight aliens.

Four Questions That Describe The Meaning of Life

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

pizza

I heard that someone told the Dalai Lama this joke and he didn’t get it.  Which is makes it even funnier.

I was busy trying to adjust my phone to listen to a podcast while driving and pouring coffee the other day, and it hit me like a ticket for inattentive driving:  There are only four questions that are worth asking.  I found that to be amazing, since I have hundreds of note cards with ideas for posts on them in boxes waiting for the right day for me to write them up.  So how do I condense most of those ideas as answers to four questions?

I was worried that this was too simple.  I bounced back and forth between three questions and four questions, but finally settled on four questions.  They were simple questions, and the first one that occurred to me is the first one on this list.

  1. What brought us here?
  2. Who are we?
  3. What is this place?
  4. Where are we going?

Originally I had a fifth question, but then I found my keys.  Under my hat.  Again.  Also, when I use the word “us” in this post, it’s certainly meant to include everyone.  Everyone except Johnny Depp.  He knows why.

But these are big questions.  As I thought a bit about it, these are the questions that drive me to write this blog, with the exception of the odd post here and there.

What brought us here?

This was the first question, and it hit me as I was working out the ideas for a future post in my head.  It hit me like an angry wet salmon wearing a bear suit.  At its core, this questions the all of the conditions that led to our present state.  All of them.  It questions the way that we are – as individuals, as groups, as a species.

War

I would have sworn that Washington had a blue lightsaber.

This is only a four word question, but it’s a really big four word question.  Thankfully, it’s simple to answer.  All you need to understand it is the answers to any questions you can think of in these subjects:

  • All of human history.
  • All of physics.
  • How PEZ® was invented.
  • All of the history of the universe.

So, the question is very short, and the answer is very long.

We still don’t know many answers to questions that are fundamental about each of these subjects.  One time I was talking to The Mrs. back around 2000.  My exact quote to her was, “The Mrs., I’m willing to bet that one day they find that we have Neanderthal ancestors.  I think that the reason why I came to that conclusion was based on me.  I’m pale.  I can sunburn under the glare from an LED computer monitor.

That sort of pale didn’t happen overnight.  Along with other physical observations I’d made, it just seemed the most logical conclusion that Neanderthal wasn’t extinct.  Neanderthal was us.

So when the DNA evidence came back and, eventually, showed that most European-descended people had Neanderthal DNA I wasn’t surprised.  And I’m not surprised now when I hear that our most basic assumptions about the way that things like physics work are subject to change – massive change.

An example:

At CERN (where they smash atoms together like a tipsy celebutant celebrating that her parents purchased her way into USC™ smashes daddy’s Mercedes© into a mom’s parked Ferrari®) they recently celebrated, with campaign(!), that they had discovered a particle symmetry violation between anti-matter and regular matter.

physics

If Vinnie drops a car on Frank’s car, neglecting air resistance and assuming g=9.81m/s . . .

That’s a lot of words for a very basic thing – let me break it down a bit.  The Universe that we see is comprised almost entirely of normal matter, not anti-matter.  But the Big Bang® should have produced equal quantities of both, so where did the anti-matter go?  This is a pretty significant question, since anti-matter explodes with the force of a billion bipolar ex-wives (GigaX) when it comes into contact with normal matter.  It’s really good for us that we don’t have this anti-matter going around and wanting alimony payments, but there’s no real reason that the Big Bang™ didn’t produce equal quantities of both.

This discovery from CERN might explain why my ex-wife anti-matter is thankfully rare in our environment.  It appears that anti-matter doesn’t follow the same physical laws that matter does.  This is the first time we’ve figured that out, but we don’t know how it’s different.  But think just for a second – what if you could have a substance that wanted to fall up instead of down?  That was anti-magnetic?  That could coat, soothe, and protect a sore throat?

Yes.  This discovery could provide technologies that we haven’t even dreamed about, but most people have never heard about it.  Thankfully we’re all up to date on Kardashians, though.

Thankfully there’s tons of things left to discover, both about ourselves and about the Universe that we can safely ignore while we are Keepin’ up with the Kardashians.

Who are we?

I got this question down to three words.  See what a ruthless self-editor I am?  This question opens up a lot of today’s biggest mysteries:

  • How the human body works.
  • How the brain works.
  • What consciousness is.
  • If people have souls.
  • Why 80% of the world is silly and watches soccer.
  • What health is.
  • Immortality – anything besides a great three-letter-score in Scrabble®?
  • What motivates us.
  • Why we do the things we do.

I’ll admit, some of these questions do have overlap – the question of “What brought us here?” overlaps some with “Who are we?”  Ancestors are crucial to both, for instance.  Protip:  since you inherit somewhere between 60% and 80% of our intelligence, the first thing you should strive to do is to convince your mom to pick a smart dad for you.

But even given thousands of researchers spending billions of dollars annually, the primary positive impacts to health in the last 150 years have been clean water, better nutrition, antiseptic surgical conditions, and antibiotics.  Newspaper stories keep showing up about the immortality around the corner, but I haven’t even seen one fifty year old mouse, and we can cure any kind of mice-cancer at this point.

vision

No, thanks, eyes are fine.  And I’ll skip the colonoscopy, thank you.

Thankfully, medical science can all of the questions about why humans are like they are.

Except for the interesting ones.

What is this place?

Our surroundings are curious.  There is the world and cosmos we live in, but there are also the civilizations we’ve made.  How does all of it work?

  • What virtue is.
  • Where virtue comes from.
  • What societies work well for humanity.

This is the question I could (sort of) cram back into the other three, but I felt it was important enough because of the great deal of discord in society today, and the uncertainty about the future of what we’ve made.  Understanding the ability for humans to govern themselves and live together is crucial, and we still haven’t gotten the knack yet.

Where are we going?

This is the final question, the future.  The mysteries of the future are different.  The past and present are set, the future is undecided, wrapped in probability.  What are the big questions, the big unknowns of the future?  This question is easy to answer if we just know:

  • The fate of ourselves.
  • The fate of our civilizations.
  • The fate of humanity.
  • The fate of life itself.
  • Physics (all of it), again.

I’ve mentioned religion twice.  Though it’s not a constant part of posting, it’s a very important component in understanding these questions, especially the ones where I’ve listed it.  And religion is important as a philosophical construct – it has been the largest single influence on humanity in all of recorded history, and probably before that.  Beyond religion as pure philosophy, there is that possibility that deity as contemplated by religion exists, and maybe even close to what is on the label.  Science certainly hasn’t ruled that possibility out.

bear

Does a bear answer trivia questions in the woods?

But in 2000, they had ruled out the possibility that we were part Neanderthal, or at least that was the general consensus.

So you never know what we’ll learn in the future.  And it looks like I’ve got plenty to write about, and with the amount of Neanderthal blood I have, probably some mammoth to catch and some caves to paint.

Books, Stoics, Immortality (Now Available on Stick)

“I am Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod.  I was born in 1518 in the village of Glenfinnan on the shores of Loch Shiel.  And I am immortal.” – Highlander

coffee

Or maybe it was the scotch that made him immortal?  When I drink scotch I’m bulletproof.

I once had a Grandboss (my boss’s boss) that once said, “Reading is the only way that you can know great minds across centuries.”  He was deeply philosophical and attempted to use that philosophy to improve business results, and also to use history as analogy for business conditions.  Prior to the movie 300 coming out, he was discussing the battle of Thermopylae and the courage of the Spartans to fight to the last man as a business analogy.  Needless to say, when you’re using a battle where every single solder dies as an analogy, business isn’t going all that well.

Grandboss also assigned On War (a treatise on war and strategy during the Napoleonic era) by Von Clausewitz for us to read.  I’m probably the only guy who actually did read it, and still have my copy.  Needless to say, I loved my Grandboss, and still send him cards on Grandboss day.  When I quit that job to take a new one, I told him first, and as a goodbye present?  I gave him a book.

My Grandboss was right, though – reading allows us to know great minds across centuries.  The nice thing is we can read the thoughts of dead Greeks like Epictetus.  Epictetus spent his entire life studying and living stoic philosophy, which was a pretty hard thing to do when you were a slave with a gimpy leg.  Epictetus eventually became free – we don’t know how, but I imagine he won the annual caddy’s golf tournament and got a scholarship from Judge Smails.

nothing

I bet Epictetus just wishes he wrote, “You’ll get nothing and like it.”

One thing we do know is that Epictetus did was spend a lot of time thinking about virtue and vice.  We’ll spend more time on virtue on Monday’s post, but Epictetus came to the conclusion that the following things were neither vice nor virtue:

  • Wealth
  • Health
  • Life
  • Death
  • Pleasure
  • Pain

As wealth and health are at least two nominal themes of this blog (this is Friday, so I’m stretching it and saying this is a health post) it might seem a bit hypocritical that I spend time talking about health and wealth and then quote a dead lame Greek that says that neither of those are virtuous.  But I would argue that my message on wealth is that true wealth is in having few needs (Seneca, Stoics, Money and You), and although I prefer pleasure to pain, I recognize that a pleasure repeated too often is a punishment (Pleasure, Stoicism, Blade Runner, VALIS and Philip K. Dick).  And we also know that health is more controllable by our choices today than Epictetus did.

qwho

Immortal and omnipotent.  And good on the mariachi trumpet.

Heck, I even got challenged by an Orthodox priest friend on whether or not learning for learning’s sake was, in a religious context, a vice.  If so, there goes most of my Monday posts.  The priest and I (as I recall, over a BBQ lunch) came to the conclusion that learning for learning’s sake was maybe a vice.  Since he was also a fan of learning for learning’s sake, if it was a vice we were both guilty.

Going back to Epictetus’ list, Life and Death are on it as being neither virtues nor vices.  I’m not sure about you, but I really prefer Wealth to Poverty, Health to Illness, and Life to Death.  Epictetus felt the same way – it was okay to have preferences with the understanding that neither condition is, in itself, virtuous.  I finally came to understand that while not virtuous, death is required for life.  Oddly, I thank Bill Clinton for this realization.

It was during the Clinton presidency that I first looked around at the national leaders for both parties and thought, “Jeez, what a bunch of bozos.”  Both sides were stupid or corrupt.  Some were stupid and corrupt at the same time (looking at you, ghost of Ted Kennedy, I’ve imagined you’ve been plenty warm this winter).  Back then I was a capital-L libertarian, and could see that both sides had as primary goals the restriction of freedom on their agenda in addition to being incompetent.

Beyond that, they were . . . awful.  Spineless.  They were tools of groups with different names but the same objectives – objectives that mostly didn’t favor you or me.  Throw into this mix that one day at lunch I was thinking about immortality and the implications of living forever, which was spurred on by eating a tuna fish sandwich which might have been as old as Epictetus, who died in 135 A.D.

bubbaho

Elvis will never die.  Mobility?  That might be an issue.

If people were generally immortal?  Our birthrate would plummet – 200 year old women have very few kids.  As for me, I’d have plenty of time so rather than putting things off until next week, I’d put stuff off until next century.  But the worst consequence?

Bill Clinton would forever be an elder statesman, always trying to increase his (and Hillary’s) power for all of eternity.  Our current batch of elected officials would be about the best we’d get, or maybe the only ones we’d get.  Senators and congresscritters already stay in office until the only way to keep them alive is though that experimental technique that turns them into zombie-like creatures that feast on living human flesh like Nancy Pelosi, or immortal robots like the Ruth Bader-Ginsbot™ 3000.

Thankfully, we live in a world where things die and the world moves on – just like a cell in a human body ceases to exist so new cells can take over.  We have a name for immortal cells – cancer.  Just like cells pass away, so do we to leave this world to the youth.  I didn’t say death is “good” – just that it serves a purpose.

laz

Okay, this is one boy who loved his mother.

Part of that purpose is focusing us on the here and now:  in this way we don’t lose sight that life is precious and fleeting, like sedation dentistry.  Perhaps the most precious thing we have is the shared time with those who have meaning to us (like your friendly blogger).  But for those who have left us, honor them with the virtue that they helped you obtain.  Be glad you had a part of their life, and had a chance to witness their virtue and learn from their vices.  Look at how they have changed you, made you better so that they live on through their influence on you.

Lastly, for heaven’s sake, write something down.  It’s the only way that someone can know your mind when you’re gone, unless they check your browser history.

How I Got Into Debt, Trench Warfare, and an End of the World Cult You Can Believe In

“Well, if you don’t like that, try some Archduke Chocula.” – Futurama

franzmeme

After World War One, the phrase, “Happy as a Hapsburg in Serbia” fell out of favor, as did the “Hair Smile” style of mustache.

I’ve already told the story about digging out of debt.  In retrospect, it seems to me that all of those stories end up sounding the same:  “I weighed six hundred pounds, my kitchen floor was covered in dirty dishes and cat food, and I had $3.7 million in debt until I found Wildernetics© and the First Church of PEZology™.  Look at me now!”

flammen

Proof that I am a reincarnated World War One soldier (Part One).  These are from a soldier’s joke newspaper, The Wiper’s (a mangling of Ypres) Times, produced for soldiers by soldiers that found an abandoned printing press.

I know my methods can solve everything, but today I had a crazy idea.  How about spending some time talking about how I got into debt in the first place?  I know that might cut into the revenue of the Wildernetics© End of the World Cult and Take-Out BarBeQue Restaurant®, but I figure you might come back for the brisket.  It’s very tender.

I’ll quit teasing.  How did I get into debt?  First a little.  Then all at once.

Let me rewind a whole marriage.  As regular readers will know, The Mrs. was not the first, but she is the final spouse.  My first marriage was an example of a series of escalating poor mutual decisions where each side seemed to lack a brief moment of sanity to back out before anyone got hurt, sort of like the run up to World War I.  Even before Archduke Franz Ferdinand proved that .380 ACP was a useful round against Hapsburgs and their notably gelatinous bones, World War I was inevitable.  Before I said “I do” everything was in place for the trench warfare of future divorce.

ditch

Okay, I apologize for this joke.  I think it violated the Geneva Convention.

But, rewinding.  After graduating college I got married and got a starter job, which is to say I had a job that just barely paid the bills.  Nearly exactly.  In fact, after working at the job for a few months, we were exactly (most months) at zero.  We weren’t saving any money yet, but we also weren’t in the red.  Success.  My credit card limit was 10,000 . . . Siberian Lira.   This was equivalent to a whole bright and shiny quarter.  This helped me stay debt free.

Then came the table.

optimism

Proof that I am a reincarnated World War One soldier (Part Two), this one is for James.

We had a dining room table.  It wasn’t great, and the chairs that came with it were a bit ratty – the vinyl arms had been slammed into the table often enough that it looked like a pack of rabid Chihuahuas had spent their lives sitting on the chair seats and gnawing on the arms.  I imagine them growling and chewing in unison as they sat around the table, like Viking Chihuahua rowers.  Most all of our furniture was second hand or gifted, but the table really was the biggest eyesore.

unread

Okay, this one isn’t mine, but I couldn’t resist.

At some point discipline broke.  I know how silly it sounds to say that now, but back then, month after month of not buying anything but actual necessities takes more discipline than Elizabeth Warren around a tribal gathering.  Eventually I gave in.  We bought the table.  Using debt.  Back then, individual stores would give you amazing credit limits just to buy their crap.  They gave us more than enough credit to buy that table, and with the money I saved from shipping the Chihuahuas back to Denmark, I figured we’d be money ahead.

fireworks

Proof that I am a reincarnated World War One soldier (Part Three).

The table was only $500, but the difference between having no debt (outside of a mortgage) and having debt, even a small one, was a huge psychological hurdle for me.  It’s like having a doughnut when you’re doing low carb.  “I got weak had one doughnut, so I might as well have, say, 36.  And do you have any whipped cream I could just guzzle straight from the can?  I broke my diet, and don’t want to waste it.”  Pretty soon other nice to have things showed up, very few of which I still own today.  But I had crossed that mental barrier from peace (debt free) to war (spend away!).  Suddenly, the credit card companies realized I had debt, and immediately wanted to lend me more money.  My credit limits tripled.

I hope that this doesn’t sound like I’m blaming The Ex.  Like Adam in the Garden of Eden, I was fully complicit.  Ultimately the debt grew faster than my wages.  This led to the idea of grad school:  I could get free tuition plus be a paid graduate assistant.  Would it work?

Sure.  There were also student loans.  Free money!  Oops.

bellgas

Okay, let’s all admit that Nachos Bellgrande® is NOT a war crime.

gas

Proof that I am a reincarnated World War One soldier (Part Four).

There were some places along the way that I could have gotten off the merry-go-round.  When I sold that first house to move for a new, post-grad school job, we’d made a stunning 40% profit in three years.  It would have more than paid off a good chunk of my student loans.  Nope, that would have made too much sense.  We did pay down a little debt and bought a new house, putting down the minimum down payment.

But most of the money was just spent.  About this time I also had one of the worst ideas I’d ever had in my life.  The Ex and I were always arguing about money, and about the thermostat – I knew that 50°F in winter and 90°F in summer were reasonable temperatures, but The Ex disagreed.  Well, if she had to pay the bills, she would certainly understand how tight money was.  Right?

No.

We had a different view of not only household temperature, but the idea that one should pay monthly bills, well, monthly.  I didn’t figure this out for three years, by which time I owed enough money to qualify as a third world country, but one of the nice, mainly atrocity-free ones.  Mainly.

mgmeme

Taco Bell® inspired outfits?

Debt is like George Washington’s description of fire, it’s an amazing tool, but a fearful master.  My advice is to pay all of your bills in full, monthly.  I know that the people who own your debt disagree.  Why?  They want you to have debt, as much as you can pay.

I had a friend (since passed away in an accident) who I called Batman© on this blog (“I’m Batman,” – Batman, in Batman).  He had one particular investment that was worth about $12 million – a series of apartments.  He had paid the apartments off before they were even built by selling future property tax credits to other businesses.  Yeah, that kind of friend.

But he viewed his tenants as slaves (his term), who went to work daily so they could send him money every week.  I heard him use exactly that phrase to describe them.  He liked his tenants, and was a good landlord.  However, he knew the score:  when they went to work each day, they went to work so they could pay him.

And Batman was a good guy and he taught kids that debt was a form of slavery of ordinary people to wealthy guys just like him, not that they always listened.

My marriage to The Ex?  That particular marriage is proof of the old Henny Youngman joke:

“Why are divorces expensive?”

“They’re worth it.”

peaceinourmeme

Yeah, divorce just STARTS the argument.

The day she moved out was one of the happiest days for both of us.

I was still digging myself out of debt when I met The Mrs.  As our relationship blossomed, I thought it was only fair to tell her of the debt that I had.

“The Soon To Be The Mrs., I have something to tell you.  You might want to sit down.”

The Soon To Be The Mrs. looked shaken.  She sat.  I told her about my debt.  She laughed.

“Is that all?  I thought you were going to tell me you’d been in prison.”

No, not prison.  But I still owe reparations payments to France.

Mortality, Bill Murray, Art Lessons, and Avatar

“Two years he walks the earth.  No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes.” – Into the Wild

haystack

I’ve left a map.

“That’s so you, Dad.”

It’s an unusual thing for The Boy to say when discussing death.  In this case, my death.

First, some context.

I’ve made peace with the idea that I’m going to die.  I have no desire to die anytime soon, mind you, but I realize that it’s something that, statistically, happens to 100% of us.  Not 99%.  Not 99.999%.  Not even 99.9999999999%.

100%.

I think the human mind has developed safeguards to distract itself from facing this inevitability, primarily so we don’t spend our days in a corner sobbing uncontrollably when we’re young, muttering, “What is it all about?  Why do we even try?  What if I never meet Bill Murray?”  However, there comes a time in life when you begin to understand that death will come.  If I am statistically average, this fate is decades away and again, I’m not particularly interested in hurrying it along.

I’m not sure the exact moment I made peace with the idea of death.  It might have been when I was stuck watching a DVD of Avatar®.  That will make anyone long for death, so that was probably it.

avatard

I kept waiting for Papa Smurf® to show up during Avatar©.  Or the movie to be good. Neither of those things happened.

As luck would have it, Pop Wilder lived to be quite old, and was in generally very good physical health throughout his life.  At the end he was taking in more calories in pill coatings than food, but he was in good enough shape to walk for miles.

His physical health was fine.  What happened to Pop Wilder was that he started forgetting.  Perhaps the biggest blow was that, at the end, he had forgotten me entirely.  I’m fairly certain that the last few times that I saw him he had no recollection of me.  His eyes were blank – worse than blank.  When he looked at me he had the wariness one reserves for a stranger or a congressman.

I had been prepared for this – it was obvious that his memory loss was increasing exponentially each time I saw him.  I think that the last time he really knew that I was his son was several years before he passed on.  And that was okay.  I won’t say that it wasn’t difficult, but I will say that I had said everything that I needed to say to Pop before he lost his memory.  I was at peace.  Again, not easy, not happy, but at peace.  I understood that there was nothing that man nor medical science could do for him, so there was no reason for anger.

I hadn’t, however, realized the impact it had on The Boy.  The Boy saw the same things that I did, and knew that Pop Wilder was no longer the grandfather he knew.  The Boy could sense that Pop Wilder wasn’t present anymore.  Perhaps this is the most basic element of horror – watching a human transform from the person you know very well into a person you don’t know at all.  It’s implicit in every horror transformation story from vampire to werewolf to zombie.  Seeing it when you are young hits you even harder.  That transformation is made more terrifying because you didn’t even know it was possible.

Fast forward to Saturday, six days ago.  We were driving home from an event, and I mentioned that there were some things I wanted to see from him in the next twenty or thirty years.

“Don’t dawdle.  I don’t want to have to wait to die when I’m ready to die.”

It was really meant as a joke.  The look on The Boy’s face as he drove, though told me he was thinking about it.  Deeply.

“I saw what Grandpa Wilder went through.  That was tough.”  Pop Wilder had passed on years ago.  “I like your idea better.”

“My idea?”

“Yeah.  The one where you’re going to go off into the woods with just your .30-06 and enough supplies to live.  Or die.  That’s so you, Dad.”

It’s true.  I had shared with The Boy my thoughts that, should I be judged to be terminal, or if it was pretty clear I wasn’t going to make it, that rather than lingering, undergoing chemotherapy, or having to sit through another Avatar© movie, I’d sling my rifle and enough physical supplies that if I worked at it and was skilled, I could live.  Until, of course, I couldn’t.  It would be an adventure.  Maybe I’d keep a diary.  That would be some great blogging from beyond the grave.  I could even sketch memes in pencil.

deer

See, drawing is easy!

“I hope that you’d drop me where there are bears.”

“Why?”

“Well, one might attack me and I could fight back with a knife.  It would at least allow me to go out of this life like I came into it – screaming and covered in blood that wasn’t mine.”  Okay, I stole that joke.  At least The Boy thought it was original.

He laughed.

But the point was a clear one.  I know that I certainly couldn’t have dropped Pop Wilder into the forest – that certainly wasn’t anything he had ever asked for.  Watching him decline, however, was tough.  In my mind he will always be 45, at the height of his business acumen, personal physical power, and filled with the vitality that kept him always going.  When I think of him, that’s the man I see.

I can’t square the conception of my future as one that ends in a nursing home, surrounded by the never ending too warm room and hollow echo of footsteps on beige vinyl tile and antiseptic smell of hospital grade cleansers.  No.  The frozen morning’s icy touch on my cheeks, the sound of the wind rushing up the snow covered valley, and the harsh smoke of a campfire.  That has a better feel.  A truer feel.

An adventure to cap off an adventure, my next day of life dependent upon my wits and the cold steel of my knife and rifle.

owl

If there or no bears to fight, I’m sure I can pick on an owl to fight to the death.  Plus?  Owls are easy to draw – only two steps.

I’m not sure that walking away into the woods will happen – there are certainly plenty of things that would prevent this from being my destiny:  obligations and events beyond number, that chance to hang around and become drinking buddies with Bill Murray.

But right now?  This adventure continues.  It’s time to make the most of the next few decades . . . there’s only so much time.

Get busy.

A Wilder Story, or, The BB Gun, The Black Bear, The Soviets, and Me

“You’ll put your eye out.” – A Christmas Story

bear bbgun

Nobody was too concerned with my eyes.  But do NOT make us have to pay for a neighbor’s window.

I’m a believer in Christmas – it’s a time of redemption and rebirth that proves that miracles can happen.  People can escape their past, and become something more than they were before – they can become reborn.  We can become better.  The birth of Christ is an example that we can all be reborn and change our lives in a miraculous and meaningful way.

But, I’m not sure I can recall any particular Christmas miracles.

Oh, wait, here’s one.  It’s mostly true, as well as I can recall, and field tested to read aloud to your family:

On Christmas Day when I was in second grade, the one thing I wanted more than anything else was . . . a BB-Gun.  No, this is not a remake of A Christmas Story, this is A Wilder Story.  And I was there for this one.  As I recall, this was the last Christmas when we opened Christmas presents on Christmas morning.  In all following years, my older brother John Wilder and I wheedled our parents into a Christmas Eve opening of everything but “Santa” gifts.  We were insufferable.  My brother (really) is also named John Wilder – my parents didn’t want to waste those extra birth announcements when they could just change the day and year, but that’s another story.

But that particular Christmas morning when I was in second grade I looked down on a real-life lever-action Daisy® BB-gun.  It looked like a real rifle even though the wood parts were plastic.  I’d never shot a real rifle before, but I knew that all I wanted for Christmas was that BB-gun.  And there it was, all mine, pristine in its oiled metal and plastic perfection.

daisy

It looked very real.  Mine was the one on the bottom.  It was actually mistaken for a real gun several times.  Mainly by me, because everyone who was an adult could see it was just a BB gun.

“Take care of that, and it’ll last you a long time, Son,” Pop said as he handed me my first gun.  This was the first time he’d said that to me, and I nodded gravely, feeling the responsibility and pride deep inside me.  Pop would later repeat that phrase about boots I got in high school, a Buck© pocket knife I got in fifth grade, and my first car.  I still have the BB gun and the boots.  I lost the knife, probably at school.  It was expected then that you had a knife with you if you were in fifth grade, because what if you had to clean a fish during English class?

But I was in second grade, and I had a BB gun.  My BB gun.

And I was ready to use it.  I was given a quick tutorial on how to load it, a list of all the things (mainly windows), people (mainly windows), places (our windows), and forbidden objects (neighbor’s windows) that I shouldn’t even think of aiming my BB gun at, let alone shoot.  I was trusted to take my new BB gun on an expedition, because it was made clear to me in no uncertain terms that the worst punishment in the world would fall upon me if I shot something I shouldn’t.  I would lose (probably until I was 40) my BB gun, be grounded from TV until I had my own children and probably be branded as a BB abuser for the rest of my life in my Permanent Record.  (For kids:  Permanent Record is now called Snapchat©.)

With the earnestness only a second grader can muster, I put on my deep blue Sears™ parka (the ad said it was designed for pilots stationed in . . . the ARCTIC, you know, where we fought the Soviets to save Santa from becoming, I guess, more Red) with polyester fur trim, and a pocket for pens and pencils on the arm, because where else would you keep pens and pencils except your left arm?  I pulled on my black felt-lined snow boots and stiff green plastic gloves, and went outside.  It was cold, certainly below freezing, and probably hovering around zero in non-communist degrees.

sears

Like a pocket knife, every boy had a parka like this.  Every boy. But does anyone know why pilots need parkas if they’re in heated jet airplanes??  Oh, yeah.  Soviets.  Image from E-Bay.

It had already snowed enough that the snow pile in our front yard was 10 feet (43 meters) deep, but we had a packed trail where our snowmobiles had gone onto the snow-packed country road and up into miles of forest roads that dated back to the old prospectors looking for gold way back before Carter was president.

My feet crunched in the snow as I walked due north onto the road, my breath puffing out as if from a small blue fake-fur-trimmed steam engine headed uphill.  I kept going.  What was I looking for?  I’m not sure – I don’t remember, exactly.  I guess, looking at stuff with a BB gun in my hand and shooting anything that wouldn’t get me in trouble with Ma Wilder at the rate of 6 BBs per step.  But I felt like a man, and what would a man with a rifle do?  Hunt.  Win World War II again.  Look for communists.  It’s hazy, but I know I had a purpose.

Snakes weren’t a possibility, since I knew snakes wintered in Florida with baseball players, Santa and the Cubans.  Regardless, I wanted to shoot my BB gun, even if the opportunities to send Soviets back to Russia with a backside full of BBs was limited, at best.  I still don’t recall ever seeing a Soviet in the forest until I saw Red Dawn, and then my BB gun was at home.

reddawn

I guess Europe decided to sit this one out.

I trundled up the road.  I think that’s probably the only time I’ve used the word “trundled” precisely since it implies I moved along slowly, noisily, and in a less than graceful manner.  All of those applied.  But I was ten feet tall with my BB gun, shooting aimed fire into snow banks and sage brush alike.  About a half a mile from my house, more than three quarters of the way to the Old Cemetery, I saw it.

The Bear.

Sitting motionless, huddled against the barbed wire fence, not 20’ away, was the bear.  It was a black bear.  I knew that grizzly bears had been killed nearby, but this was a definitely a black bear, being black and all.  Ma Wilder had told me about them before going hiking and told me to never, ever get between a black bear cub and its mother – she said that was more dangerous than being between Beto O’Rourke and a microphone.  I didn’t know if this bear was cub-sized or mother-sized, but I already knew that this was something way out of my experience level – I mean I still wasn’t even coloring within the lines very well.  Communists?  Sure, I could take down a dozen of them since they were weak because they were Godless and fatherless and mainly starving when they weren’t swilling massive quantities of cheap Afghan vodka.

But bears?  Better call the reinforcements (spelled D-A-D) in.

wilderbear

Calling out an APB on a tiny blonde boy.  He looked tasty.

I backed away from the bear, keeping my eyes on it the whole time.  My BB gun was loaded, a precious brass sphere ready to explode outward on a column of pressurized air at the bear should it charge me.  I knew I was too slow to out-trundle the bear.  Even my candy-cane addled brain knew that the BB was scant protection against a bear, but if I was going to go down, I was going to go down fighting like a man, and not running away like a Soviet child would.  Even though it was nearly zero, I built up a sweat in my green turtle neck under my Air Force Pilot Parka®.

That green turtle-neck was really tight and made me look a lot like an actual turtle, so I only wore it three times.  Why?  A chubby kid covered in the smell of fear sweat and Nacho Cheese Doritos™ isn’t really a winner with the ladies despite whatever Bill Clinton might say.

An aside:  In the safe realm of 2018, I know that it seems insane to allow a second grader to hike up into the forested wilderness alone at temperatures near zero on Christmas morning armed with a weapon that’s patently illegal to arm a second grader with in New York City, and twenty other states that are, no doubt, now deeply under the influence of the Soviets.  Or, does it?   When I last had a second grader (Pugsley) he had a BB gun and trundled off into the backyard with a zillion BBs.  I can attest our backyard is now safely Soviet-free.  But back in the day?  We weren’t building weak Soviet children.  No!  We had backbones of steel and cheap Taiwanese Rambo® knives with compasses built into the handle.

So, yeah, not unusual.  I guess it was a crazy thing called freedom.  Anyway . . .

I got back to the house and threw open the door.  I stamped my snow-covered feet inside.  Yeah, I know.  But I was in a hurry, I had real news and information for the family.

My parents were lounging on the couch, enjoying a quiet coffee.

“A BEAR!”  I yelled.

“I swear, I saw it, a bear!  It was just right up the road, right where the hill starts.  A bear!  A black one!”

Ma looked at Pop, concerned.

Pop Wilder shook his head.  “Bears are hibernating.  None are up this time of year, not when it’s this cold.”

“No, it was there, right by the fence.”

Ma Wilder nudged him, seeing the absolute certainty on my face.  “We should take a look.”

There is a look a man gives a woman when he knows that he has lost the argument even before it started.  I know that look because I saw it then.  Pop sighed, got up, and got dressed.  Half an hour later, he and Ma and my brother were all dressed, and ready to go up the road.  I had my BB gun.  I hoped that the bear would still be there.

We walked.  I pointed, when the Bear came into sight, not 300 yards away.

“See, I told you.”

Ma Wilder looked concerned when she saw visual proof of my story.  I think she had put my bear story into the category of “addled ravings of an overly imaginative eight year old that may or may not process reality like a normal human after he told me that he was worried that Grandma would turn into a zombie (Sleep Deprivation, Health, Zombies, and B-Movies).”  As for me, I was concerned that Pop hadn’t brought bazookas, howitzers, grenades, or maybe a battleship.  Nah, Pop Wilder could probably wrestle a dozen or so bears, if they came up to him one at a time, like in the Kung Fu movies.  We finally got up to the road where we were perpendicular to the black bear, still huddled up against the fence, not 30 feet (432 meters) away.  It hadn’t moved since I’d first seen it.  I felt vindicated, even though I’d never heard the word.

“Hand me the BB gun,” said Pop Wilder.

I did.

Pop shot one BB into the bear, smoothly worked the lever like a cowboy in the Old West, and then shot another BB into the bear.

The bear was motionless.  It must be dead!  Pop Wilder killed it!  Pop handed the BB gun back to me.

He then walked back into the deep snow directly to the bear, reached out, and pulled up the black, plastic sheeting that had blown into a ball up against the fence.

He handed me back the BB gun and handed my brother the black plastic sheet.  We walked home in silence.

So, there was that:  the Miracle of the Transubstantiation of the Bear – where a Christmas miracle transmuted a black bear into a sheet of black plastic.  Not sure of any other explanation.

But the real Christmas miracle, it’s below?  Merry Christmas to all.

Christmas