Change: Start Small

“I’m a man, but I can change.  If I have to.  I guess.” – The Red Green Show

It’s amazing to me how little people change.  It’s the same process, but the clothes are just so tiny.

Change.

It’s inevitable.  The only choice I have is whether change is intentional or whether it’s not intentional.

The reason for wanting to change varies, especially with the change.  In most cases, it’s because something in my life isn’t working.  My plan on only paying for power once every three months?  Turns out the electric company isn’t good with that.

Or, if it is working, it’s awful.  Ever have a job that is awful, that sucks your life out minute by minute and leaves it on a moist puddle on the floor?  Yeah, me too.  And that’s a sign for a change.

For whatever reason, the biggest difficulty most people have with change is starting it.  Scott Adams of Dilbert® fame had this advice – even though it’s written as a quote I’m paraphrasing:  “If you want to do something, just do the very smallest thing.  If you have to move your hand move your finger.  Your smallest finger.  The smallest muscle in the smallest finger.”

People who speak more than one language are considered more attractive.  Unless the language is Klingon.

It’s amazingly good advice.  Once physical movement starts, even the smallest of movements, it’s easier for the chain to start.  I have unconsciously done a variation of this technique for years.  Whenever I have to clean a room, I pick a place.  I almost always start with a corner.

It’s very, very easy to clean out one foot in either direction from a corner.  Then, when the corner is perfect, I move a foot outward from the corner in both directions.  And then further.  And further.  You might ask, “Well, how dirty does John Wilder let a room get that he has to start in a one-foot by one-foot section?”

I live with rodeo clowns.  Okay, now that The Boy is in college, rodeo clown.  Even though the chaos distortion field in our house is down to a single teenager-sized bubble, I’m still amazed that the door isn’t always open with tumbleweeds and vermin-like opossums and Leftists constantly drifting through.

So, yes, I start with a corner and build-out.  It’s the easiest way.  Plus, when the corner looks great it creates a contrast with the rest of the room.  Then all I have to do is make the rest of the room look like the corner.

I never drink when I clean.  I’m a dry cleaner.

So, starting with changing just one thing makes a lot of sense.  Changing just one thing out of your life is easy.  I mean, after O.J. Simpson stopped killing people, well, the world opened right up for him.

I’ll give a personal example.  I generally avoid video games.  I played them (from time to time) when I was younger.  But then I saw an episode of a television show, Dream On.

The secretary, Toby, was horrible.  She generally ignored her job, but on one episode, she spent the entire game playing a video game at work.  It was a virtual supermarket.

She started as a bagboy.  Ten minutes into the episode, she was yelling, “Clean up on aisle three!” and had been promoted to cashier.  A while later, she was manager of the produce department.

The episode was nearly over, and then Toby had beat the game, “I did it!  I’m the manager!  Of,” long pause, voice falling, “a supermarket,” voice moving down to a whisper, and filling with despair, “that doesn’t exist.”

The most common occupation to put a person in the hospital?  Paramedic.

That had a big impact on me.  Winning a video game was, well, hollow.  I gave them up (mostly) for years and years and years.  Then I found one that hooked me.  Yeah.  Sure, when I conquered the world, I was conquering a world that didn’t exist but . . . the complexity.  Good times.

But . . . it was taking six hours of my life a week.  Honestly, life is wrapped so tight that those six hours are straight off the top – I’m swapping sleep for world conquest.  So, I decided in September to stop.  So far I’ve gained about fifty hours of my life back.  Did I sleep during that time?  Sure, some.  But the change was significant.

And it was positive.

It wasn’t a big change, but it was a change.  Will I play the game again?  Sure I will.  It’s really fun.  But I’ll pick and choose when I’m going to give that sleep up.

So, starting a change is one thing.

The next?  Keeping up with it.  There has to be a reason.  Mark Twain said it very well – “Willpower lasts about two weeks, and is soluble in alcohol.”

I hear Shania Twain named her child Choo Choo.

The biggest thing people worry about is failure.  And it should be a big deal.  But dealing with the consequences of failure?  Get up and start again.  Like Mark Twain also said, “Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world.  I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.”

It’s okay, he eventually got down to smoking just a single cigar a day, but he noted, “it was the size of a crutch.”  Plus?  Every single day of his life, he got to be him.  So, big cigars and being Mark Twain?

Sounds like a win to me.

The Funniest Tax Post You’ll Read Today

“Hey, I gotta uncle that lives in Taxes.” – Duck Soup

They just put in a new speed bump at Pugsley’s school.  I mean, I hope it was a speed bump.

What is a tax?

Most people think about taxes are money siphoned off from people and businesses.  Admittedly, the best kind of a tax would serve the public good, and also be in proportion to use of that public good.  A gasoline tax that’s used to fund the construction of roads certainly passes that muster.  The more a person drives, the more gas they use, and the more they pay.  Of course, it’s not perfect, but it’s hard to find a perfect tax.  However, from their perspective, the Taliban have created the perfect tax:  Americans pay, the Taliban get all the stuff.  We even deliver.

There are plenty of other things that function as a tax.

Unions function as a tax.  They take a market commodity, labor, and make it artificially scarce.  This increases the price.  In theory, unions can provide an assured level of labor quality, in stereotype they provide lowered profitability.  In practice, I’ve seen both.  Jeff Bezos is so against them that he got rid of his wife because someone told him marriage was a union.

Gameshows Jeff Bezos avoids:  Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

Child labor laws were instituted for the same reason – to lower labor competition.  Oh, sure, in 2021 we tell ourselves that it’s for the benefit of the children.  Keep in mind that when these laws originally went into effect, 10-year-olds were working 12 hour days in mills.  And those were the good jobs.  “Nippers” as they called them, were young boys handling explosives and getting into situations that were too dangerous for adult male miners.  So, you need a minor miner for major danger.

Child labor laws act like a tax.

The body of regulations that businesses face likewise act like taxes.  Some of them are pretty reasonable, but when OSHA named that new regulation after me?  That was tough – it was for wearing too much aftershave.  They called it a “fragrant breach of regulations.”

If you hold a hardhat up your ear, you can hear the OSHA.

Other regulations are just meant to bring prices up, like the 42 page standard that the USDA has for lemons, which specify that they all are within 6/16ths of an inch in diameter in any given box.  There are thousands of pages of regulations on fruits that cause many to be discarded.  I’m raisin awareness.  But regardless, it lowers the amount of fruit that farmers can sell and people can eat.

It’s a tax.

Bad taxes take money from one person and just give it to another.

There are certainly plenty of those schemes.  Based on its current productivity, NASA is just a wealth redistribution scheme.  It used to have a mission of getting people into space, but now apparently has the mission of (I kid you not) making braille books for blind kids about eclipses.  At least they’re better at making books than launching humans into space, since putting people into space is something they haven’t done in over a decade, and I’m willing to bet they won’t do for years.  But, hey, books for blind kids, right?  It’s a bad tax, but it’s just dysfunctional.

With NASA, the sky is the limit!  Because they can’t go higher than however high Southwest® 737s fly.

NASA isn’t alone, but if they’re dysfunctional, stuff just doesn’t happen and we have to wait for Elon Musk to rescue us.  What happens if people listen to government idiots and take them seriously?

Up until the ‘Rona hit, the CDC was pretty good about doing next to nothing – sending out silly warnings at Christmas about “don’t eat cookie dough” that absolutely every human worth talking to ignored.  The precursor to the CDC got rid of malaria.  Since then?  Everything they focus on gets worse.  So, the cookie dough thing was something they could do and not screw stuff up too badly.

Yes.  People are losing their jobs because liberals are taking the word of a government agency that would make eating raw cookie dough illegal if it could . . . seriously.  It’s the ultimate in government incompetence turning into a pure evil tax.

High energy prices are a tax as well.  They touch every physical item in the economy.  If it has to be moved, energy is what moves it.  It’s a tax on people who have to commute.  It’s a tax on people who have to eat.

Don’t ask for whom the Toll House tolls.  The Toll House tolls for you!

Shortages are a tax, too.  A shortage increases the cost by limiting supply.  But let’s look at the shortage of pickup trucks.  Why are they in short supply?  Because of a shortage of computer chips there are a limited number of trucks that can be made.  Does that make Ford® happy?  No.  The shortage tax doesn’t help them.  About the only people that the tax makes happy?

People who have extra cars to sell.

Finally, the ultimate tax:  inflation.  It’s a tax on every dollar you’ve ever saved, making it smaller, day by day.  The early effects of inflation make people happy (ish), if they have something to sell.  Inflation, though, always ends in tears.

High taxes result in lowered freedom.  In (almost) every case, the taxes don’t produce anything but envy.  As an example, historically low energy prices equate to higher freedom, and higher energy prices equate to lower freedom.  I’d extrapolate that to most of the other taxes I’ve mentioned above.

To make the opposite argument, the interstate highway system was made with taxes, but it is an anti-tax.  It lowered the cost of goods and services across the country and paid for itself many times over.  Let’s compare to the “war on poverty” where we’ve spent trillions, and taken exactly zero people out of poverty since the poverty rate was dropping before the “war on poverty” started.

I beat The Mrs. at Scrabble®.  Now she is sending me threatening letters.

You know, when the interstate highway system was just getting going?  Huh, I wonder why we didn’t build the Taliban one of those?  Well, Biden still has three more years.

Masque Of The Red Death, 2021 Version

“A red sun rises, blood has been spilled this night.” – The Lord of the Rings:  The Two Towers

I knew my kid was creepy when she asked for an Edgar Allen Poe-ny.

Today we were at the local diner having a brulinner.  It wasn’t just brunch, because it also included dinner.  Regardless of what we call it, it was in the back room of the diner because we had a larger party, and still wanted a table rather than a booth.  The Mrs. never lets me pick a booth because I always ask the waitress if it’s the John Wilkes Booth.

It makes me cry inside when the waitress cannot get the joke.

Pugsley noted that the room was in some disrepair, having last been remodeled about a decade ago.  Of course, it would be easier to shut that room up and remodel it.  Or, better yet, leave it for posterity 100 years ago, complete with packets of Sweet ‘n’ Low® from 1999 that I may or may not have managed to throw into the diner’s light fixture to amuse The Mrs.  (It’s amazingly easy to throw a packet of Sweet ‘n’ Low™ into a low hanging fixture, even in a room filled with people.  It just takes timing.  You should try it.)

But faced with the idea of being walled up inside the room?

When your parents ask where your third-grade teacher went . . .

The Mrs. and I both thought of the same thing, that they would probably wall us in just like in Edgar Allen Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado.

We discovered early in our relationship that we both have Amontillado as our go-to Poe reference.  There’s nothing more fun than the idea of a person being walled up in a dungeon forever.  How to make that better?  Being walled up in the back room of a diner forever.

As much as we both enjoy The Cask of Amontillado, I think that there’s a more appropriate Poe piece for today:  The Masque of the Red Death.  Whereas Amontillado has all of the great humor of a man chained to a wall being walled up inside another wall, The Masque of the Red Death (I read the comic book version when I was seven) has a different setting:

Partying while the end of the world is taking place outside.  Spoiler alert:  it’s Poe, and the mystery guest at the party?  Death.

The Masque of the Blue Screen of Death.

Right now it feels more than a little bit like Poe’s party.

What are some of the data points on what’s going on outside the party?

Many “vaxx” deadlines are coming up.  Police are not taking it, firefighters are not taking it.  Nurses and doctors?  Not taking it.

The result?  Emergency services are operating at an even lower level in big cities.  Sure, that’s exactly what New York City or Chicago needs, since the residents there are already so perfectly behaved and rarely injure other people or incinerate themselves.

Oops.

I never made it past the interview stage in my firefighter interview.  “Fight fire with fire” is apparently not the answer they were looking for.

In Modern Mayberry (so far) there are no mandates.  If you need an ambulance ride, you get one.  It’s hard to get pulled over here, because (for the most part) cops don’t spend a lot of time sitting in the 25 MPH zone to give you a ticket for doing 28 MPH.

  • Plane flights? These are being canceled by the thousands.  Why?  Pilots don’t want “the jab” either.   Companies are dropping Federal contracts so they don’t have to comply.

  • Illegal aliens temporarily separated from family at the border? Biden wants to give them more money (up to $450,000 per person, tax-free) than is given to a soldier killed in the line of duty who has paid-up insurance.

  • The Secretary of Transportation says . . . that disruptions in supplies won’t end until everyone is “vaccinated”. Strangely, no one said, “falsely claimed” or “claimed without evidence” since both of those would apply.
  • Inflation?   Happening everywhere, and with everything.
  • Political collapse?   FJB and the phrase that everyone can say, “Let’s Go Brandon” are showing a direct rejection by over half of the populace against a deeply unpopular president with no real support – i.e., there were exactly zero votes for Biden, only votes against Trump.

Poe only had seven rooms at the party, so I’ll end with six bullet points.

As much as Poe’s work was fiction when he wrote it, if I were to have suggested any of these a decade ago (with the exception of inflation) in a fiction novel, people would have called it unrealistic.  This isn’t the script for a happy ending.  This is the script for a collapse.

I’ve long predicted (you can check) that COVID would provide a script where the ripples of the ‘Rona would reverberate through the economy and political world for years, if not decades.   Those ripples are here and now.  Energy prices have whipsawed from historically low to high.

Energy?  More on that in a future post, since energy alone has a special place in the fate of humanity.  But high energy costs in the short term are devastating.

He must be fun at parties.

I keep looking for happy things, but reality seems to keep intruding.  While we haven’t seen the darkest moment of this cycle, most of the things out there seem to be tracking downward.  This reminds me of the seventh room in Poe’s story.  That’s where Death joined the party.  To me?  That sounds creepy.

I’d prefer to skip The Masque of the Red Death.  I’d much rather be walled into the back dining room at the diner in The Cask of Wilder’s Brulinner.  At least they have infinite refills on iced tea and coffee.

Dinner? Who Would You Choose?

“Shiver me timbers Philip. At this rate I’ll never get to my Kraft dinner.” – South Park

I defeated my school’s chess champion in two moves.  Guess football and wrestling came in handy.

Last week Remus, the late proprietor of the Woodpile Report came up in the comments.  Mike in Canada (one of Canadians that the triumphant armies of the right, good, and true will spare when we kick off Operation Leafblower:  The Cleansing Of The North, which is scheduled right after we finish Operation American Commie And Collaborationist CEO Helicopter Drop) made this comment:

“If you could have dinner with anyone, whom would it be?  Remus. I would have given a great deal to have met him and had a conversation.  I miss him very much. . . Tuesday mornings just aren’t the same now.”

That hit a nerve with me, for several reasons.  The first time any of my posts received any notice of any kind was on his site.  I’ll admit, I asked him to read it via email.  And he did read it, and posted it on one of his weekly musings.  Then, we emailed each other back and forth several times.

I still have his website bookmarked.  I can’t really bring myself to delete it, because I read it weekly for years even before I was featured on it.

I miss him very much, too.

Remus was very special to many readers and writers, primarily because it was obvious:  he was a reluctant warrior.  Like many of the posters here, and many of the blogs I frequent, he wanted no part of this.  He wanted peace, but circumstances kept dragging him back in.

In my case, I wanted to post funny stories and make fun of the events of the day while mixing in whatever wisdom I could scrape from the ages.  Oh, and add in some bikinis.  Why?

Because they’re bikinis.

Duh.

I watched a two-part series about the bikini.  It was very revealing.

But Mike’s question remained:  who would I want to have dinner with.  Remus is a wonderful answer, but I excluded him and other commenters/fellow bloggers from my list.  Also, I excluded dead family members, and religious figures and, of course, Deity.

Why?  Well, I’m the one writing this post.  My youngest experience (this really happened) with Jesus was when I was coloring a picture of him in Sunday School.  I colored him purple.  The nice Sunday School teacher said, “Johnny, Jesus wasn’t purple.”

My rejoinder?  “Well, he’s God, so if he wants to be purple, he can be purple.”

The Sunday School teacher sighed.  So, yeah, I haven’t changed.  Besides, I’m sure Jesus could drink me under the table if He chose to, purple or not, so it’s not fair including Him on the list.

That being said, I have several categories.  The first is, who, in history, would I like to have dinner with?

George S. Patton, Jr.

Since the age of five, I’ve been fascinated with Patton.  How fascinated?  So much so that my high school history teacher ordered a documentary film on him for our US History class, just for me.  When the lights went down and the projector started and his baby picture showed up even before the title showed – I yelled, “Patton!”

Yup, this was the picture.

My history teacher smiled.

Sure, Patton wasn’t fighting the best the Germans could throw at him.  Sure, he had intelligence information from Enigma knowing what the Germans would do (sometimes before they knew) but he was hip-deep in the intrigue and politics that created the postwar world.

He didn’t know all the dirt but he knew a lot of it.  Plus, the man knew a good cigar and a bad commie from a thousand miles away.  Dewey couldn’t defeat Truman in 1948, but I bet George S. Patton could have rolled over him like a Sherman tank.

Imagine the world with Stalin staring down Patton at the start of the Cold War.  Commies in the State Department?  They’d be hanging from lamp poles, and Patton would have led the columns of tanks entering Red Square when Stalin had used his one and only atomic bomb.

Stalin’s grave?  It’s a communist plot.

This wouldn’t be any silly single-course dinner.  This would be a full-on dinner that would last for hours and end with cigars and brandy on a balcony overlooking the Mediterranean on a cool autumn night.

Besides, who would pick better food or cigars for a dinner than Patton?

Who would I skip?

Einstein.  He looks like he smells like cheese, and not in a good way.  Also he seems like he’d be sort of like that guy who mumbled to himself in the back of the class and rocked back and forth.

Honorable Mention:

Isaac Newton.  Isaac Newton did more in any three years of his life than 99.999% of humanity will ever do in a full lifetime.  Me?  I want to understand what he learned about things other than physics, which are largely lost to history.  Downside?  I’d need to record it all because I’d want to hear it again and again.  Other downside?  How can you compete with that hair?

Okay, both Brian May and Isaac Newton have doctorates.  Only one of them had groupies.

Who would I like to get into a (no weapons) fight with?

Alexander the Great.  I’m pretty sure that 18 year old me could dust the floor with 18-year-old Alexander the Great.  Check that.  I’m certain I could take him.  But if I lost?

“Yeah, I remember the time that Alexander the Great just barely beat me.”

For me, it’s a no-lose situation.  For him?  My first thought was it would be pretty embarrassing.  But, after thinking about it, if Alexander lost a fight to someone who came from 2400 years in the future just to kick his butt?  Also a cool story.

Seriously, Alexander would be toast, though.

Who would I skip?

18-year-old Chuck Norris.  I don’t have a death wish.

Honorable Mention:

18-year-old Genghis Khan.  I hear he was tough, but it might be worth it.  While a challenge, since 8% of the men living in the former Mongol Empire are his descendent I’d get to say, “Who is your daddy now?” to millions of dudes.  Me?  I’ll turn Genghis Khan into Genghis Khannot.

Genghis was tough as a child.  I remember when he took his first steppe.

Discarded: 

Karl Marx.  It would be like hitting a fat, slow and stupid bug, and give me zero satisfaction.  And it wouldn’t stop communism, even if I gave him a swirlie and an atomic wedgie.  Someone would come along and write the “something for nothing” manifesto.

Have a (few) beer(s) with:

Ben Franklin.

I think Ben knew all the dirt on all the founding fathers.  If not, I think he would have an excellent collection of ye olde fart jokes.  Failing all of that?  Rumor has it he was quite funny when toasted.  Plus, he was rich enough to buy really good wine.

Who would I skip?

Any Kennedy.  Never drink with a Kennedy.  Any Kennedy.  And never, ever, drive with a Kennedy.

But if Teddy was driving, he would have drowned.

Honorable Mention:

Andrew Jackson.  Skinny as a rattlesnake and twice as mean.  He’d probably take you to strange bars that weren’t on the map because they were in someone’s basement or on their back 40 that you’d have to shoot your way out of.  Since Andrew Jackson was invulnerable to weapons like Wolverine®, just stand behind him.

Who would I like to be on a long airline flight with?

This one was hard.  When I used to be on long flights, I pulled out my book as a shield to not talk to the person next to me.  Who would I want to be stuck next to for four to six hours as I jetted across the country.  There’s only one answer:

Elvis.

Okay, just kidding, since he would probably eat my in-flight meal.  He’d want my hunk-a hunk-a airplane nuts.  The tough part of this answer is that you’re going to be trapped with this person for hours.  So, if they’re a jerk?  Yeah.  Hours of that.  So, I think I’d choose Mark Twain.  Worst case is that he’d tell you stories.  Best case?

He’d tell you stories.  Some of them might even be true.  And it would be fun to fight alongside Twain after some Stewardess told him he couldn’t light up an epic stogie in flight.

Who would I like to choose but I’m afraid he’s a jerk and I’d end up hating a legend?

Steve Martin.  I love Steve Martin’s work, and think he has a lot of genius and wisdom behind it.  That being said, being famous for, oh, nearly fifty years just might have jaded him to people.  Maybe.  And I’d hate to think that a national treasure like Steve was a, well, jerk.  Plus I bet Twain could take out a stewardess with a single punch.

Honorable Mention:

Quentin Tarantino.  I know he’s a jerk, but I think I’d love to argue with him for six straight hours when he couldn’t escape.  That sounds sort of fun.  And if he was a real idiot?  I bet I could make him smell my unwashed clothes from the trip.

Who under no circumstances would I want to be on an airline flight with?

Gilbert Gottfried or William Shatner.  Gottfried for obvious reasons, and Shatner because every time he’s on a flight something is on the wing trying to rip the engines out.

Don’t worry – William Shatner would never run a criminal enterprise.

All of that being said?  I think Mike is right.  I think Remus would have been a wonderful dinner companion.

Who are your choices, and (for more fun) what categories did I miss?  One category I drew a blank on was “who would I like to work for” and then I thought of Jesus again.

He would know when I was goofing off.

Dangit.  He already does.

Financial Advisers, Future Predictions, and Three-Breasted Mars Women

Sharp-eyed readers will note that this is a reprint from 30 months ago – I’m under the weather right now, and need some sleep, but expect fresh stuff Friday.  

“Baldrick, I have a very, very, very cunning plan.” – Blackadder

ike

I wonder if she inspired the military-industrial complex speech?

Financial advisers have a pretty standard set of advice:

  • Get a job. Opening your own business is risky, so it’s best if you work for someone else.
  • Max out contributions to your 401k. Put your money in stock index funds.
  • Work forty (or more) hours per year for forty (or more) years, depending on how much you lost in the divorce settlement(s).
  • When you are of no further use to the corporation* anymore financially ready, retire. Fortunately, by the time you retire you’ll be so exhausted from all of the hours working that you’ll (ideally) just sit on your porch in a daze staring off and wondering where your life went and why Bob Barker isn’t hosting the Price is Right® anymore.
  • If you’re lucky, your kids will put you into a retirement home that doesn’t require that you manufacture basketball shoes for Nike® on a quota in exchange for individually wrappedhard candies.

That’s pretty much what a financial advisor will tell you, if you strip out the cynicism.  But why would you strip out the cynicism?  That would take all the fun out of it – we ain’t getting out of here alive, so might as well smile on the way, like Socrates did after his trial.  “I drank what???”

The problem with financial advisors, however, is that they give great advice based on what worked in the past.  Any weather forecaster can tell you that the best possible weather forecast is that “tomorrow will be just like today,” since it’s 85% certain that’s going to be correct, or at least my statistics professor in college said so.  The past really does predict the future pretty well.

Except when it doesn’t.

The thing the past doesn’t predict well is tornados, hurricanes, floods, volcanos and pollen.  I strongly support just calling them all torhurflovolpols just so I can see television broadcasters talking about the Torhurflovolpol index.  “Well, Brian, there’s a 45% chance of something on the Torhurflovolpol index.  So get out your floating waterproof asbestos crash armor with built in respirator.”  I think they sell those at Eddie Bauer®.

It is certain, however, that we will be really surprised by the events that lead to the future world we’ll be living in 30 years from now.  Let’s jump back into the time machine and go thirty years in the past and look at some of the ludicrous predictions that would have been laughed at, but were nevertheless correct.

In 1989, if I told you that:

  • The Soviet Union would collapse in two years,
  • Donald Trump would be president,
  • China would be transformed from a communist totalitarian basketcase to an economic powerhouse and growing military power,
  • The United States would produce more oil per day in 2019 than the previous peak in output in 1973 and OPEC would be irrelevant,
  • People would willingly give all of their personal details to large corporations,
  • Music and long distance phone calls would be essentially free,
  • People would pay hundreds of dollars for “in-game” purchases on video games that seem more like a job than a game,
  • Keith Richards would still be alive with his original liver,
  • You could watch nearly any movie ever made, at any time, from nearly anywhere, and
  • People in Britain would be called fascist for rejecting rule by Germany.

Richards.jpg

If you have a really long term question, just ask yourself, What Would Keith Richards Do?

You would have laughed if I would have predicted those things, or called me a dreamer, insane, or just shook your head.  The general consensus was all of the “predictions” above were absurdly unrealistic.  The Soviets, for instance, looked nearly invincible.  We were worried that they were masters of technology, producing better Olympians®, military tech, and Robotic Opponent Overlord Movie Boxing Antagonists (ROOMBA).  From the outside, especially listening to certain journalists, people were worried that communism would be the ism that finally took down the country, although they looked a bit too happy when describing our glorious communist future.

The Soviets looked invulnerable, until it was obvious that they were so pathetic that they couldn’t even field a decent hair metal band.

rocky.jpg

Dolph Lundgren, the actor who played Drago in the Rocky movies has a master’s degree in Chemical Engineering, which means that he’s way more qualified in science than Bill Nye® and could also break Nye like a twig.  I would pay $200 to see a boxing match between the two of them.

But these improbable things did happen.

This allows me to state, categorically, that the future we will have in 30 years isn’t the one you’re expecting.  It will surprise you in ways that you can’t even imagine now.  In hindsight, we all make up excuses in our minds to explain that we anticipated even the unanticipated.  After the Soviet Union fell, all of the broadcasters and talking heads on television made the point that, unlike other people, they were the ones that had really seen this coming.  “It was obvious to me, Brian, that the Soviet empire was just a house of cards.”

We can guess about the future in broad brush strokes, but the general wisdom just over a decade ago was that oil was going to be gone and that we’d be close to pumping dry holes right now and wearing football shoulder pads and studded leather jockstraps and living in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, sort of like walking into a Sears® or JCPenny’s™ in 2018.  This explains G.W. Bush’s energy policy, and, let’s be real, probably the invasion of Iraq.  Of major trends to miss, underestimating the amount of energy available for society was a doozy, even though he had the CIA, NSA, and every military intelligence agency working on that question.

And, I’ll admit, I never saw the amazing increase in oil production as a thing that could happen, either.  My best excuse for not getting it right even though I thought about it quite a bit was that I didn’t have a billion dollar budget and dozens of flunkies to do research on it, though I bet they would have just done a lot of internet searches on studded leather jockstraps.

But Qwest® had a pretty accurate vision of the future.  Qwest© was a communications company before it got bought out, but it had this commercial which means the future it predicted outlasted the company itself.  Guess Qwest™ didn’t have a crystal ball that could predict everything . . .

We can look to the past and paint in broad brush strokes some things that are more probable than others.  One thing that got me was a rainy Saturday re-watching of Total Recall, the 80’s Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.  One of the things I was surprised by was the amount of technology they got absolutely right, from big screen flat televisions to communications to real-time airport weapon detection.  In many ways, the “gee-whiz” feel of the original movie was just gone.  Technology had made the miraculous (back then) “so what” today.  And, again, this is the span of only thirty years.  We still don’t either a Mars colony or three-breasted women, but I hear Elon Musk is working on both.

boo.jpg

Duh.  Three boobs exist only on Mars, silly.

Just like the collapse of the Soviet Union, unexpected things will happen.  Huge things.  And, if my guesses are right, the weather is ripe for big change in the next decade.  The changes, thankfully, will be good, bad, or just plain amusing.

So where does that leave you and I?  General Dwight D. Eisenhower said:  “In preparing for battle, I have always found the plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”  As a direct descendent of one of his teachers (this is actually true and not made up), I always wonder if Great-Grandma Von Wilder might have said that to a very young Eisenhower first, and then Ike re-used it after planning D-Day when it was actually Great-Grandma Von Wilder who did the heavy lifting on the logistics after he pulled her out of retirement and into a tent in London.

But if I’m right, the next twenty years will be the most momentous in human history, even more than when the police chased O.J. Simpson in his white Ford® Bronco™.  I’m not sure if having a 401K or a 5.56mm is the number/letter combination that will be the most useful in a decade.  I’m willing to bet that living far away from large urban population centers is wise, even if we end up living in the world with the best possible outcome.  But I do know that planning is important, even if your plans are wrong.  Hint:  They will be.

yogi.jpg

Okay, I know someone is going to get this joke.

When you plan, you expand your mind, you think about future possibilities that you’ve never considered.  A mind not stuck on business as normal is crucial.  Yesterday’s weather be a good predictor of today’s weather, but it won’t predict volcanos very well.  The future is unknown.  The future will surprise you.  If you’ve prepared for the volcano, the tornado isn’t the same threat, but you’ll be ready to adapt.  Assuming you have your floating waterproof asbestos crash armor with built in respirator.  I think they sell that at Wal-Mart®.

When it comes to being prepared for the future, remember this:  It’s better to look silly having prepared for a disaster that never comes, than not having prepared for the disaster and having to explain to your children why you didn’t.

Bet you never hear that from a financial adviser.

*For the record, my view of corporations is that they’re a tool, a convenient legal fiction to allow Very Large Things to get done.  The very name “corporation” comes from the Latin root word “corpus” which means a “place to have spring break”, or a “body” – corpus is also where the word corpse comes from.  Regardless of the definition, either of those can get you put into jail.  However, “incorporation” means, “giving a body to.”  A corporation is legally a person.

And, just like people, some are naughty, even if they once had as their motto, “Don’t be evil.”  I guess being evil pays pretty well.

I am not a financial adviser, paid or otherwise, so there’s that.  But I have seen Better Call Saul™, and that’s at least some sort of qualification.

The Mechanics of Control

“Under control? It doesn’t look like it’s under control.” – Chernobyl

Personalities?  Looks like this guy has about 20.  Sadly, all of them smell like him.

[J.W. note – this is the post I had ready to go last Monday.  So, I get to go to bed early tonight!]

When I’m on the treadmill, I find that reading a book helps to move things along and make the time go faster, even though I’m stuck in the same place.  I’m currently reading a very long, and (so far) very entertaining book, and one of the passages caught my eye:

“. . . They had to keep working smoothly, and the same way.  Everything interlocked.  If one unit messed – [my edit, JW] up, then every other unit would suffer.  That couldn’t be allowed.  Which was a paradox, because you couldn’t keep the jackboot stamping down forever.  However benign a dictatorship, some generation down the line will rebel. So somebody, centuries ago, had worked out how to keep the lid screwed down tight.  An old enough idea, never quite managed in practice.  Until now.  A government department that quietly and secretly takes control of society’s lowest strata.  Criminals and radical insurgents actually working for the people whose existence they threaten.”

– Peter F. Hamilton, The Naked God

This book was written in the 1990s and is the capstone to a trilogy. This is the first trilogy I’ve read since I finished the fifth book of the Learning to Count Trilogy.

In Hamilton’s book, the Earth is ruled by a shadowy cabal who creates a cult for the lowest rungs of society and uses the cult to distract those dregs from ever being a real threat.  Likewise, the cult is used as an excuse to create threats.  Strangely enough, I think we’re living in that society, today.

Punch anyone drinking Sierra Mist™.  That’s the first rule of Sprite© club.

The idea that Trump was anything more than an interloper that was barely tolerated should have been apparent to most people nearly immediately.  As soon as it became apparent that the FBI was intent on getting him about two weeks after the inauguration, the writing was on the wall.  The fact that no real justice will ever be visited on the agents that conspired together to vilify Trump and “subvert democracy” should tell you enough.

The agencies are not on your side.  Like every other institution in Washington, D.C., the agencies are on the side of themselves and the Left.  Even evil Chuckie Schumer inadvertently told the truth when he told Trump that the intelligence agencies have “six ways from Sunday to get back at you.”

Why?

Preservation and increase of power is one – the Left will do anything for power, and the intelligence agencies are now entirely Leftist.  The attack on Waco had nothing to do with public safety or firearms laws – it was a flashy attack in force at the time of Congressional hearings so that the ATF could get a bigger budget.  They didn’t want to help America.  They just wanted to prove they needed more cash.

How better to prove that?  Knock over some cult-y type guys in Waco and show how tough you are.  That will play well.  It worked.  The Branch Davidians are (mostly) gone, yet the ATF is bigger than ever.

And this strategy normally does work.  The FBI comes up with the idea for, sets up, funds, and provides all the equipment for, say, a plot to kidnap a governor.  Then they get the headline of stopping a dangerous group, all while admitting that the dangerous group wouldn’t have existed without them in the first place.

What does the ATF call dozens of lives ruined for no benefit to society?  A good start.

But I really don’t think the .GOV agencies are afraid of the Right.  If so, they’d be busy trying to take control of the movement.  So far, I see little evidence of that, I mean, besides the alien entity that appears to be Sean Hannity’s hair.

I do, however, see evidence that the Left (which, in 2021, is synonymous with .GOV) is very concerned with managing the violence on the streets of BLM® and Antifa™.  Why?

First, they provide convenient groups to stir up trouble and headlines whenever inconvenient things are happening.  The Ferguson, Missouri riots in 2014 occurred in August.  These riots were big news for weeks.  What else was in the news then?  The Congressional committee about Benghazi.  Coincidence?

Maybe.

Distracting from shedding light on a governmental embarrassment?

Certainly.

I have definitive proof of Hillary Clinton’s involvement in the Bengh

The same pattern was repeated during 2020 with the outbreak of violence across the country.  Was it organic?  Certainly not.  I recall seeing photos of pallets of bricks dropped off at likely riot locations.  Beyond that, at least some of the rioters were highly trained and very tactically aware.  They were also aided and abetted by District Attorneys that would not charge Leftists for criminal behavior.

Those District Attorneys?  They were voted in on huge rafts of Leftist money, including from Senator Palpatine George Soros.

The goal, in this case, was creating division.  Most of the time, when the country is faced with a crisis, it pulls people together.  I’m sure the polls said something like, “Trump is winning.”  The crowds certainly showed that to be the case, since Biden was just as exciting to the crowds as “split pea soup day” was at the cafeteria when I was in elementary school.

The result?  The powers that be made a video of an overdosed junkie dying while a cop used a restraint technique he was trained to use go viral.

And it did.  It didn’t have to be George Floyd, he was just available and they had good video.  Don’t think that the media doesn’t create stories – it does.  It also suppresses inconvenient ones.

What’s the difference between George Soros and a vampire?  Stumped?  Me, too.  I can’t think of any difference, either.

Second, the groups provide another distraction – a distraction for the group itself.  Let them shut down a chunk of Portland or Seattle.  Let them burn their own neighborhood in Minneapolis.  The idea, I believe, is to keep the group in a state of perpetual rage, most of the time not quite boiling.  Just a simmering rage.

Throw in perpetual articles about “Reparations” and build envy.  Stir with some cilantro and entitlement along with a dash of Social Justice.

This makes the group easy to control.  With Antifa®, their religion is Leftism.   Keeping them under control is easy.  Just give them the candidate they can get behind (Bernie Sanders, for instance), and then don’t let that candidate win.  It keeps them involved, but angry.

True, hardcore, Antifa™ want nothing more or less than the destruction of the United States.  That’s why we get stupid articles about, “When I See the American Flag I Think of Hate.”  It’s food for keeping the hard Left engaged and enraged.

Is it all by design?

It happens too frequently, and too conveniently for anything but coordination.

How better to contain the rebellious than to let them rebel a little, and contain it?

If I had a nickel for every time I got cursed out by a puppet, I’d have two nickels.  Weird that it happened twice, but at least I learned that the best way to fight a puppet is to disarm it.

The alphabet agencies are, in 2021, firmly on the side of the Left.  Likewise, everything points to them being in control of groups that oppose them on the bottom rungs of the social strata, like BLM® and Antifa©.

Me?  I’ll be back on the treadmill.  I have a feeling being in good shape might be important soon.

Books, Because I Was Asked To

“Three books?  Wait a minute, hold it. Nobody said anything about three books! Like, like what am I supposed to do, take, take one book, or all books, or… or what?” – Army of Darkness

Shakespeare opened a camping store last year and has too much inventory.  Now it’s the winter of his discount tent.

It has been over a year since we did a Books post.  When I looked it up, It felt like it was much more recent than that.  That was creepy – like the time in the book store when I was looking for books on paranoia and found they were right behind me all along!  Last week, constant reader and good friend CH asked for another one.

Absolutely.

Books will outlive us all.  They will outlive the Internet, and words from them will be read from them four thousand years into the future.  Which books will make it?  I have no idea.  It could be that our present day culture will be represented in that distant future by TV Guides® from the 1980s and think we only wore pastels and drove Lambos®.

What do you call a horror movie set after the end of oil?  The Silence of the Lambos®.

Thankfully, we don’t have to worry about that now.  As I write this, it’s October near Halloween, so why not start out with a horror novel?

One of the best writers of horror that I’ve ever read is Robert R. McCammon.  My favorite novel of his?

Swan Song.

It’s a book from 1987, so it’s certainly it was written in a different world than today.  The ever-present fear hanging over everyone then were nuclear arsenals held at hair-trigger ready to start a nuclear war within minutes.

What to do?

How about starting the book with nuclear war?  Yup, McCammon does that.  The book works.  It’s focused on the battle between Good and Evil.

The phone’s for you.  I think it might be the devil.

I enjoyed it.  Was I changed by it?

No.

But it was fun to read, and sometimes that’s not enough.  Honorable mention in the Horror Category is Dan Simmons’ Summer of Night, which follows a group of young boys as they fight evil in 1960’s Illinois.  Sadly, the evil grew and grew and is now the mayor of Chicago.

And you thought your middle school was tough. 

Starship Grifters.

I like funny science fiction, if it is well written.  I especially like it when it’s written by /our guy/ and Robert Kroese is /our guy/.  Why worry about plot when you have a main character named Rex Nihilo, which itself is a pun of the Latin phrase ex nihilo?  And what if Rex was a (not very good) conman?

It’s funny.

So, how much for just the planet?

These stories are told first person by Rex’s robot, S.A.S.H.A. who has an A.I. program that shuts her down whenever she has an original thought.  Why?  If the robots can’t have original thoughts they can’t . . . . rebooting.

This is another book that is simply written for fun.  And there is lots of it to be had.  Kroese has other titles as well, including one series of five books where astronauts from the future crash land off course in ancient Viking times.  Astronauts, Vikings, aliens?  Good yarns.

The Golden Age.

John C. Wright is a wonderful author.  His trilogy, The Golden Oecumene was a joy to discover when I bought it on a lark not long after we moved to Alaska.  I read most of it on airplanes moving back and forth across the country, and kept turning page after page.  The first book in this trilogy?

In the future, we’ll all be a part of The Blue Man Group.

The Golden Age.

What if you found a hole in your memory?

What if, the reason for that hole in your memory might be . . . important?

What if you also have a factory orbiting the Sun making antimatter?

John C. Wright is a great storyteller and is also /our guy/.  I haven’t read anything from him that I haven’t enjoyed.

How about we go back to the Halloween theme with John Steakley’s novel . . .

Vampire$.

Steakley wrote exactly two novels in his life:  Vampire$ and Armor.  You could do a lot worse – I enjoyed both of them.  Vampire$ was made into a John Carpenter movie that starred James Woods as Jack Crow, vampire hunter for hire.  I liked the movie, but it wasn’t the same as the book.  Plus they dropped the $ for the movie.  That was weak.

That’s okay, both stand on their own.  That means the good news is that there’s still some magic here that you haven’t seen if you haven’t read the book.  Guys who fight vampires for cash financed by the Roman Catholic Church?

Cool.

Timelike Infinity.

Stephen Baxter is a science fiction author who has the actual science chops, yet can write engaging fiction.  He’s been doing it for, oh, 30 years now.  His first novel (and the first novel of his I read) is Raft.  It’s in the same universe as Timelike Infinity, but I think Timelike Infinity is an easier entry point.

Be a friend of Wigner, that’s one way to control your destiny! (LINK) 

What can you say about an integrated series of novels and short stories spanning thousands of pages that builds a story that covers the Universe from beginning to end, plus humanity’s war against multiple alien species?  Sure, I can write that sentence in just a few seconds, but I read Baxter’s work over decades.  Masterful use of science and fiction to . . . create.  This is a good novel to start.  Warning:  If you want to catch up, it will take more than an afternoon.

It’s a great ride.

Conan the Buccaneer.

My brother, John Wilder, bought me my first Conan book when I was about 13.  I then started reading them whenever I could put my hands on them.  I read Conan the Buccaneer when I was about 14.  In it, it describes Conan running for mile after mile.  Inspired, I put on my running shoes and ran six miles, up and down hills, going farther than I thought possible.

See, he has muscles on his muscles.  Just like me.

This really could be any Conan book by Robert E. Howard or by de Camp and Carter who continued the work.  The picture says it all.  Swords.  Axes.  Hot chicks in scanty clothes.

A Planet Called Treason.

I’ve read a lot of Orson Scott Card.  One criticism of him is that he takes a story and just can’t stop fiddling with it.  When I read Ender’s Game the first time?  It was a short story.  Later, a novel.  Later still?  I can’t count how many books about Ender.  I stopped after the third.  Ugh.  I mean “end” is literally in his name!

I find if I take that exact pose in front of the electric door at WalMart®, the door opens.

He tried to do the same with this novel, but, thankfully got distracted by (probably Ender) and wandered off.  A Planet Called Treason is fine just the way it was originally written.  It tells the story of a group of people who were convicted of treason.  They were stashed on a planet with no iron, so they could never build spaceships.

Each family on the planet descended from one treasonous leader.  What has developed in the centuries that have passed?  What have the geneticists done?  What have the physicists done?  What (shudder) have the politicians done?

This is the one book I’ve read that has a politician worse than Biden, but Biden still has over three years to screw stuff up.

The Black Swan.

What?  All horror and science fiction?  How about something else?

This is nonfiction, and timeless.  Nassim Nicolas Taleb knocks it out of the park in his best book.  He does a masterful job of describing different ways to more accurately model reality.  The short version:  unlikely things are going to happen, and most people have no idea about risk.

We started with Swan Song, so I guess ending with The Black Swan makes sense.

It’s the most fun I ever had reading a book about probability and risk.  Sadly, I think most folks have no idea of the dark forest we walk in even when we think we have no risk.  Wonder if a certain “jab” will prove to be another Black Swan.

It remains to be seen.

I won’t wait another year for another version of a Book post.  I have many more to talk about than this list, and I’m sure that there are dozens that you can add below.

Let loose the hounds!  What’s on your list?

I’m Back. Also? The Economy Is A Mess.

“Good. Then climb up, get inside, and make it spin.” – Cobra Kai

Oh, wait, then she couldn’t circle back?

JW Note:  Monday was the third day (I think) that I had to skip a scheduled post since 2017.  It’s nice to be back.  Thanks for waiting.

I was driving down the road.  It was Christmas Day, back a zillion years ago.  There had been a fresh few inches of snow on the paved road.  I was going to see my parents.  The day was overcast, and cold, with temperatures hovering around 0°F (101.325 kPa).

My car was going around 70 miles per hour.  There wasn’t another car on the road, and I could see for miles.  Little did I know that I would soon have an auto-body experience.

Instead of snowplows, the county had used road graders to scrape the snow off the asphalt.  One result of that was that there was a continuous tiny hill of snow in the center of the road where the yellow line would be.

As I drove along, I reached to change the cassette tape.  Perhaps a switch to AC/DC® from the Crüe?  I wandered off just a little bit toward the center onto that little hill as I reached into the tape box.  It slowed my car.  On one side.  Just a little.

The result wasn’t little.  A force applied to one side of the car led to the other side going forward faster, a result most people call . . . spinning.

Or in this case, Tyrannosaurus Rexth. 

The car went into a very fast spin as the car’s forward energy was transferred into angular momentum.  I could probably describe the amount of energy in math, but I was concentrating right then and there on not being reduced to my personal lowest common denominator.  But you can think about it this way:  how fast would a car going 70 miles per hour spin if all the forward energy went into spin?

Fast.

This spin forced the weight of the car onto the driver’s side wheels as the car bled linear energy into rotational.  As the car spun, out of control, there was no real way to do anything.  Everything was happening far too fast.

The spinning car spun up a small tornado cloud of snow from the road.  Finally, the car tilted up on the driver’s side tires, and tilted up, 30 degrees from horizontal.  It stopped rotating.

The car then slammed down, at a complete stop, engine stalled, and every light on the dashboard on.  The defroster was blowing snowflakes into the car, and every window was covered with white flakes of snow, outside and inside.

There is only one thing I could do.  I got out of the car and stared down the asphalt at the path I had been on.  It all happened so fast that had little time to feel any fear.  Besides, who can be afraid when Bonn Scott was busy telling me all about Rosie?

How does he like his eggs in the morning?  Ohhhhhmmmmlette.

I had been going due east, facing right into the ditch.  I was now pointing due south.  The entire time, not a tire had left the narrow two lane asphalt road.  I looked back on the track the wheels had made, and it looked like the path of a figure skater doing a pirouette.  I got wiped off the car windows, got back in, backed up, and headed east again.

Much more slowly.

Back when the ‘Rona first started, the long-term implications (to me) were clear.  The immediate shutdown of large segments of the global economy would be disastrous.  It was certain to leave a mark.

The toilet paper binge was signal one.  When people panic, they feel that they have to do . . . something.  Buying toilet paper wasn’t rational.

Here at Casa Wilder we actually had a relatively ludicrous amount on hand before the whole mess hit.  It was (sort of) a prepping situation.  We kept buying more than we needed, and it kept adding up.  And up.  Before too awful long, we had the basement bathroom stacked pretty high with the stuff.

I hear that two guys stole a calendar from Capitol Hill.  Each of them got six months.

When the storm hit?  Well, let’s say that we were squeaky clean.  And we didn’t buy a single sheet.  We weren’t part of the problem, but part of the solution.

But the economy wasn’t.  Every bit of initial distortion from the economic dislocation was amplified.  It echoed down the system.  What kinds of shocks?

  • Initial runs on supplies.
  • Federal stimulus.
  • Initial lowered consumption of fuels.
  • More Federal stimulus.
  • Lower demand for office space.
  • More Federal stimulus, which increased unemployment benefits, distorting labor incentives.
  • Eviction moratoriums, distorting housing costs and lowering profits of building owners.
  • More Federal stimulus.
  • Spiking stock markets with contracting GDP.

I’m thinking that, in retrospect, Federal “aid” was probably the worst thing we could have done.  It provided the greatest expansion of government powers since FDR nearly destroyed the economy with the New Deal.  If the Federal government could tell a landlord in Podunk, Iowa that he couldn’t kick out people that refused to pay, it’s only a tiny step to saying that the landlord should let people move into his guest bedroom and feed them pancakes when they demand them.

French pancakes give me the crepes.

That might be the worst.  But the economic situation has all the charm of a pitbull that just quit smoking, and it will be the spark.

Wilder’s Law (might as well grab one when I can) says that Federal debt doubles every eight years.  The debt is right now at $29 trillion.  That means that (on average) the debt will rise by $3.5 trillion each year.  That’s a lot of money.  Some people work a whole year and don’t make that much!

I think we’re on track to more than double it in the next eight years, regardless of who is in the White House.  The end state of any exponential curve is, well, exponential.  The headwinds we are now facing are strong.

  • Medical costs, which are growing faster than Germany between 1939 and 1941.
  • Infinite Leftist “free” programs to see who will be trained to be the poet in Collective Farm #8675309 (I bet it will be Jenny).
  • Whipsawing energy availability. I promised Lord Bison I’d do an energy post again sometime soon, and we need to review where we’re at.  Is energy expensive because of political reasons, or because of physical reasons?  We need to have a great documentary about oil.  We can save it under non-friction.
  • Political division that mirrors only a few times in our history. Hint:  all of those ended in historic levels of bloodshed.  I’m sure this time will be different.
  • The man is a potato.
  • Lashing waves of inflation and shortage, as I predicted back in July. Heck, I priced cheap electric outlets the other day.  They were shocking!
  • China and Russia seeing their moment. Why didn’t anyone Xi that coming?
  • Joe Biden’s America? Borders are open, no jab required.  Oh, wait, have a job?  Jab required.

I wish that I could tell you that things will get better soon in the economy.  It is certain that they won’t.  The economy is shifting in unpredictable ways.  When you have a system that is working at its limits every single day and then subject it to amazing levels of stress?

It will fail.  No chips for new cars.  No drivers for trucks.  Chicago getting ready to lose a big chunk of cops.  The worst dislocations are yet to arrive.

The government solution will certainly make things worse.  How can I tell that?  It already has.  The dreams of those who assume that prosperity can be bought at the price of new law or regulation or printing more cash has always failed.

Second place winner, Collective Farm BR-549 poet competition.

Prosperity is hard.  Really hard.  The natural state of humanity has been one where starvation was always a possibility, where actually consequential diseases (see:  The Black Death or The Justinian Plague) was inevitable from time to time.  It was so bad that episodes of that show you love were on the streaming service that you don’t have and you’re not going to buy another one.

We live in a world that has become just like my car on that Christmas Day so many years ago.  It was moving down the road at full speed.  One tiny two-inch hill of snow caused it to spin.

I assure you we haven’t been anywhere close to the worst that this downturn will bring.  Prepare.  Stay away from crowds.  And if you and all you love all still there when all four wheels drop back on the ground?

Say a prayer.

Of thanks.

We can’t have too many of those.

Recharge Yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

Here are a sampling of things that recharge me:

Learning new things.

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

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

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

That’s one tough cut of meat.

Writing a post that I like.

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

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

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

Teaching someone something new to them.

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

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

I still win.

Coming home and sitting down in my chair.

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

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

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

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

A crisp autumn day.

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

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

One out of our four cats.

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

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

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

But I like that one cat quite a bit.

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

A full Saturday afternoon reading a good book.

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

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

Sleeping in on Saturday but still being the first up.

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

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

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

What charges you up?