House of Eratosthenes

For my money — the same way George Washington was posthumously promoted to outrank any & all officers in any military branch, past present and future, Bessie is going to have to take her place at the top of the stack of big wins, now and forevermore. Nineteen years and 340 thousand miles, how can you even begin to compete with that?

The big epic fail is going to have to be marrying the creature that picked Bessie out. I’ve seen a special kind of pure evil, the kind of evil that doesn’t know it’s evil. So many of our little girls are being raised into women who spend their whole lives going around destroying people and things, not stopping long enough to realize that this is all life has to offer them anymore. And they think all they’re doing is chasing a dream. Kinda like some drivers have never been in an accident before, and God only knows how many they’ve caused. Don’t ask for details; I have very few to share. Between August of ’89 and November of ’91 I really can’t remember much. Nothing, really. Like aliens came in the middle of the night and killed off some brain cells — as an act of mercy. Oh well, I eventually paid it all off.

I don’t have too much sympathy for that “With Our Combined Salaries We Can Afford It” shit. In fact, I have a special name for it now: That “With Our Combined Salaries We Can Afford It” shit. I remember the nightmare started out with a sales pitch something like that…and me falling for it…and her deciding real life was a little too boring for her attention span, and suddenly combined salaries didn’t have much to do with anything. Not at all an unusual story. I’m ready to forget all about it entirely, except the next generation of gullible stupid males needs to be enlightened.

The Microsoft C compiler I bought in ’87 was a big win. I should think of it that way, I started a whole career off of it…and it’s still sputtering along.

The teevee set and the DVD/VCR combo that uploads pictures to it. The desktop computer. The “Daddy Fridge” outside, li’l tiny thing, which I taught my son since he was old enough to walk has all the beverages for him, and more important, for me. All these things have hung around for awhile by now and absorbed more than their share of abuse. Oh, yeah, and the boy himself who brings me my liquids from the Daddy Fridge. That one’s a win. He hasn’t been that expensive, really…except maybe in terms of aggravation. Oh, no wait. Counting everything, he’s been about as expensive as any other kid, which is plenty. What the hell, I think I’ll keep ‘im.

Not to name names or anything, but I’m ready to say any company that has ever automatically billed my bank account on a monthly basis, for any reason, without any exceptions at all, has been an epic fail.

My Bike Oh yeah, and that trailer. I hadn’t thought of it, it was between 8/89 and 11/91 — that fog got in the way. Not ready to talk about it yet. (Shudder.) That there’s a certifiable case of PTSD, I think. Decades of nightmares. Young people, don’t live in trailers, ever. Nobody treats you decently, nobody respects you. Can’t blame ’em; they’re looking at someone who doesn’t think he deserves to live in a decent home. Epic fail.

The bike. It’s a reasonably high-quality 24-speed mountain bike hybrid. When you’re over forty, it’s important to do something…something…anything…that isn’t sitting still. And I’ve got a good number of some pretty nice pictures out of these adventures. Pictures and suntans. Without it, I’d probably piss away all my years in the Golden State sitting in a chair swearing at a computer, eventually leaving the state all fat, flabby, pale, ugly, knowing no more about my surroundings at that date than I did on the day I moved here, which would be tragic in the extreme. Big win.

Oh, I have one silly, unexpected thing. One December I had to get a Christmas tree, and I took the time and trouble to find some spring hooks that were sized perfectly for the reinforced brackets under my sedan. I bought twenty feet of the best brand of rope I could get, and used it to connect them together — for fifteen years after that, every Christmas season the rope would come out, and once the Christmas tree was up, the rope would be put away. Never even had to untie anything. Win. It’s mostly the simple things, you see.

I can see how this would easily turn into a handy piece of advice for young adults just starting out.

So here’s a piece of frosting on the cake: The instant you have an address that is not your parents’, get yourselves a fucking paper shredder. Cross-cut. Pick one night of the week that is free, make a ritual out of doing all your laundry, cleaning your rotten food out of the fridge, and feeding all that useless bullshit in your mail to your paper shredder. Any & all credit card offers need to be part of the meal, because a credit card you really want to have won’t be offered to you that way.

Don’t think about it, don’t question it, just do it.

In short: Be cynical, and when someone tells you to stop being that way, stay that way. Put some high-quality thought into how people who have nothing of value to offer, in services or in goods, get money out of other people. Then channel some serious energy into not being those other people. That means gym memberships, multi-level marketing, MARRIAGE, selling shitty single-wide trailers, high interest credit cards. You can fill in all the blanks in the list after those. Figure out what those things are, and then stay away from the “business end.”

Then learn to enjoy the passage of time.

A happy, enviable life is yours.

Cross-posted at Right Wing News.

You know, I lost a few years in the mid 90s for the exact same reason. I think.
- vanderleun | 06/15/2009 @ 00:01
The big epic fail is going to have to be marrying the creature that picked Bessie out.

But… but… how much did you pay for that creature? I thought this was all about purchases.

If we’re gonna go down THAT road, then The Second Mrs. Pennington was both. The first 22 years was an epic win (and I DO mean that), the last year was sheer frickin’ Hell. She was living proof that one Aw Shit negates a multitude of Attaboys.

In terms of stuff bought… I have to say the Ol’ RD-400 gave me more smiles per mile… literally, in this case… than any other object before or since. And she still lives, albeit not with me (SN2 has custody). I can’t think of an epic fail. Seriously. Maybe that cheesy SAAB 9000, but it had its virtues.
- bpenni | 06/15/2009 @ 12:19
But… but… how much did you pay for that creature? I thought this was all about purchases.

Every nickel I could get my hands on, and every penny I could borrow.

This is not an exclusively female trait. Many of our neighbors — more and more of them every year — think of life as nothing more than a parade of pleasant surprises, to which they are entitled. Everything that has to do with materialistic order, is beneath their dignity. That means keeping the disbursements equal to or lesser than income; prioritizing; planning; following-through. They’re above all this. They want their needs met, they want their wants met, they don’t care to figure out which one of those is more important than the other, they want the rest of us to pay for it all, and when we do they hate us for it.

Know why that is? Because when you don’t have any need to worry about how to make things happen, the Maslov Pyramid is going to kick in and you’re going to start worry about silly, frivolous things, like lifestyles. As your mind becomes atrophied, anyone with a lifestyle different from yours is going to become evil — and then wham-bam, one day you find your “good” lifestyle is utterly dependent on the pottage that is forced away from those with a different, “evil” lifestyle. It’s self-loathing projected onto others. Biting the hand that feeds.

It’s punished by a sort of hell-on-earth because it is logically impossible for these people to ever be truly happy. It just can’t happen. But it’s not like the problem completely works itself out, because it seems there’s a rule in place that if you have 5 of these people in Year 1, you have 10 in Year 2 and 20 in Year 3. Perhaps, in time, these folks eventually grow up and become ready to join a real community in which everyone creates goods or services of value to others in order to earn a claim on what they need, and then on what they want. Perhaps they get to that point. But then a new generation of self-entitled kids comes in to replace them and create the pollution all over again.

This demonstrates the critical importance of raising kids right, I think. It comes back to the parenting. It isn’t being done right.
- mkfreeberg | 06/15/2009 @ 12:48

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Big Wins, Epic FailsSunday, June 14th, 2009

Big Wins, Epic Fails
Sunday, June 14th, 2009