How Ron Paul Cured My Apathy

I swore off politics over a year ago. Actually let me clarify: I swore off politicians over a year ago. Believe me, I've got opinions on just about every issue (global warming, healthcare, Michael Moore, Abu Ghraib, voting in general) that I'm always willing to share with anyone who will listen. There are all sorts of aspects about this country that I would like to see changed. The thing is, I've stopped believing that any real change would ever come about because of a politician. I mean did segregation end because of the politicians who were in office at the time? No, as near as I can tell it ended because the attitude of the public was finally starting to shift in that direction. Did the Cold War end because a Republican president figured out a way to bankrupt the Russian economy? No, it ended because the Russian way of government was inherently flawed and it bankrupted itself. Did our economy boom in the nineties because a Democrat took over as president? No, it boomed because the personal computer simplified entrepreneurship while the internet encouraged faster buying and selling. And did the Iraq War end because congress finally had a Democratic majority? No. In fact most of the Democrats who campaigned under the anti-war banner ultimately voted to keep funding the operation! As near as I can see, politicians don't tend to change things that aren't about to change anyway on their own.

As voters I think we understand this, at least subconsciously, which is why we tend to vote for politicians based more on what they believe than on what they'll actually do. We vote for somebody because they believe abortion should be abolished… even though they won't really push to overturn Roe vs. Wade. We vote for somebody because they think there should be a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage… even though they won't attend more than a token assembly on the matter. We vote for somebody because they oppose the war… even though they won't actually do anything to stop it when the vote comes up.

I have barely lent a moment's worth of attention to the presidential primaries these last several months. I figured all the candidates would be saying pretty much the same things anyway. The Republicans would emphasize the war on terror while the Democrats rallied us toward universal healthcare. The Red states would be placated with speeches about the 2^nd Amendment and the sanctity of marriage, while the Blue states would be whipped into a frenzy over global warming and taxes on the rich. Come November, I felt pretty confident that we would be deciding between two candidates who had been deemed "most electable" by their respective parties, but whose ideas wouldn't vary all that much from the status quo… or even from their opponent's talking points.

Then I started reading about Ron Paul. I'd heard his name mentioned before, mostly by conservative talkshow hosts who considered him to be the token fruitcake of the Republican Party. Even though he operates under the Republican banner, Ron Paul's voting record shows a philosophy centered more in Libertarian than Conservative thought. What's more, he apparently has no problem telling his compadres in the Grand Old Party exactly when and how he thinks they're wrong. And his ideas, doled out in convenient-for-TV sound bites, did sound ridiculous. I mean he wants to eliminate the income tax and not replace it with an alternative source of funding! He wants to cut back or completely dissolve various government agencies including the IRS, the FBI and the Department of Education! He thinks the federal government has no right to determine the legality of moral issues like abortion, drug use or even prostitution! And, perhaps most insanely, he wants to pull back all of our troops, not just from Iraq, but from every single foreign base we have! This guy is a Republican?!? I was ready to write Ron Paul off as just some political nut who would never make it past the primaries.

Still, there was something intriguing about a presidential candidate who was so unapologetically different from any of his opponents. More than anything, Ron Paul struck me as the kind of person who, given the chance, would actually follow through on his ideas… even if those ideas made him inherently "unelectable." Even though I didn't agree with everything he had to say (or even most of it), I went to the internet to learn more about him. I read about the issues on his website. I listened to his interviews on YouTube. I scanned the blogs that painted him in a good light and compared them against the ones preaching his insanity. And the more I delved into the logic behind his "crazy" ideas the more I found myself saying, "Hey, you know what, that actually sounds crazy enough to work."

Where will our country get money if we eliminate the income tax?
Well, eliminating the tax has to go hand-in-hand with cutting trillions of dollars from our budget by eliminating useless drains like our military presence overseas.

Won't pulling our troops back make the terrorists come fight us on our own soil?
It may briefly encourage the leaders and the true zealots. But if they can no longer point to an American base in their neighborhood and tell people, "That is the enemy!" it's going to be rather hard inspiring people to fly thousands of miles to blow themselves up.

But is he really going to cut education from the federal budget?
Well why not let the local districts decide how best to impart knowledge to the children of their particular demographics… as opposed to teaching everyone towards some federally (and subjectively) standardized test.

And he could actually pave the way for legalizing marijuana?
Hey, if a guy suffering from chronic pain can get relief from a ten-dollar bag of weed purchased in the free market, maybe it'll encourage the drug companies to stop their price gouging.

But how can the free market solve the entire healthcare crisis without government oversight?
When you look at it, the cost of healthcare didn't start going through the roof until the government got involved with HMO's during the seventies. Politicians are obviously incompetent with this sort of thing so why not go back to a working system?

The more I read, the more I watched, the more I listened, the more it became apparent that Ron Paul wasn't merely a "one issue" candidate. Rather, he seems to view all the issues as inextricably linked to each other. We need to cut federal programs like military and healthcare to retain enough money in the budget so that we no longer need the income tax… which will leave more money in the pockets of citizens to afford healthcare. By getting the government out of the global warming arms race, you let the market – with its inventors and entrepreneurs – find us a more efficient fuel source. The moment some privately held corporation can turn a lucrative profit by producing energy that is cleaner, cheaper and safer than oil, you better believe we'll be spewing less carbon into the air… which would eliminate our dependence on foreign oil… which would eliminate our need to police the Middle East… which, in turn, would save us trillions of dollars and produce fewer terrorists.

No wonder it's been difficult for the pundits to sum up Ron Paul in thirty-second sound bites! He's not suggesting falsely simple band-aids for individual problems. Instead he's proposing an entirely holistic approach to success, trusting that each and every reform (aided by nothing more than the spirit of capitalism) will naturally lend itself to the next, ultimately producing a cure for everything that ails us… well maybe not "everything", but a lot of things.

I can't tell you how long I've been waiting for a politician like this. A politician who understands that no issue exists in a vacuum. A politician who realizes that a strictly liberal or strictly conservative stance is not an effective way to solve complex issues. A politician who doesn't mind sounding crazy in thirty-second sound bites, but remains confident that the whole overall message will eventually get through to people… and that the message will appeal to a lot of them. What's more, this is a politician who doesn't sound like a politician, which I think I appreciate most of all. When somebody asks Ron a question, he doesn't launch into a circuitous line of rhetoric, striving for a happy balance of "electable ambiguity." He'll actually say, "Yes" or "No" before defining where that "yes" or "no" fits into his "big picture."

Even though my knee-jerk reaction has been to cringe at a lot of Ron Paul's ideas, I have found myself (quite unexpectedly, and in stages) agreeing with them wholeheartedly. Even more unexpectedly, I have found myself believing that this is a guy who will actually follow through on those ideas. That's right. After swearing off politicians altogether, I have found myself trusting in one to be my president. Oh the horror. I initially tempered that grinding shift of gears with the realization that Ron Paul would likely never make it past the primaries anyway. In an age where people want increasingly quick and easy fixes to their problems, a guy like Ron Paul, with all of his complex and un-sound-bite-friendly ideas, remains, as ever, unelectable.

But you know how buying a new car suddenly makes you notice the same make and model on the road everywhere you go? After deciding that Ron Paul was the kind of candidate I would actually vote for, I immediately discovered that I was hardly alone in my thinking. I started seeing his signs everywhere. I started hearing friends and family dropping his name into conversations. Even the talkshow hosts seemed to be giving him ample airtime now. According to news reports, even though Rudy, Mitt and Huckabee were routinely topping the official polls, Ron Paul somehow managed to raise more campaign money than any of them. To believe the buzz in forums like MySpace, YouTube and the always-lively blogosphere, Ron will likely command the entire market of Republicans (about 25% of them) who oppose the war, and may actually be the go-to candidate for all those "undecided" folks. The more I look into it, the more plausible it seems that this guy could be a real and viable competitor in the primaries, and not just someone with a small but vocal cult following.

I realized I could no longer be cavalier in my support of Ron Paul. If there was a legitimate chance that he could effect an upset victory in the Republican primary, well then it was my duty to help make it happen. I've donated money to the campaign. I'm registering Republican for the first time in my life so that I can vote in my state's primary. And I'm focusing as much effort as possible encouraging people to at least look into Ron Paul and see what he's about. It will require a bit of time and effort to understand the whole truth behind his positions. It will mean reading a few paragraphs on his website and not depending on those one-sentence blurbs from AOL's front page. It will mean watching an entire ten-, twenty- or even sixty-minute interview on YouTube, and not just those short-but-meaningless sound bites on Fox News.

The cynics and the pundits say the general public has neither the patience nor the interest to invest that kind of time into researching a candidate. The very fact that Ron Paul's ideas can't be expressed as TV-friendly blurbs would seem to be a crippling hindrance. Frankly I tend to think just the opposite. As a nation I think we're eager for somebody who is a bit more complex; somebody whose ideas can't be categorized with simplistic terms like "Red State" or "Blue State." We don't want to get into another election cycle where our only two choices for commander in chief are an apparent imbecile and a guy who can't seem to decide how he voted on something. I find it hard to believe that I'm the only one who has been waiting for a candidate like Ron Paul. I think there are a lot more like us out there.

I think my generation in particular has the unique desire and the ability to push for real change in this election year. We're in our mid-20's to late-30's – old enough to start caring about the issues, educated enough to sort out our own decisions, yet still young and idealistic enough to take a chance on something new and different. In a recent blog, I called this Generation X/Y hybrid "The MySpace Generation", and I defended our poor voting record and general apathy toward the current "Us and Them" state of politics:

Perhaps what looks like apathy is just "our generation" unconsciously biding its time, watching and waiting until "they" vacate the premises. We know there's nothing we can really do as long as "they" are still in control, so why waste "our" time and "our" energy on useless rallies and campaigns that will only serve to get another one of "them" elected?

I went on to suggest, completely tongue-in-cheek mind you, that perhaps MySpace would become "the platform where the new revolution begins." If numbers are anything to go by, that little joke may have been more prophetic than intended. Ron Paul's page on MySpace currently boasts over 107,000 friends. Compare that to frontrunners Rudy, Mitt and Huckabee, who have only 64,000 friends combined. There is a political passion running through the younger generation, and Ron Paul has tapped into it in a way that no other Republican has. And now that I'm on that bandwagon I can sense the momentum building. It's palpable and I'm daring to believe that we have not only a politician who is "crazy enough" to get the job done, but a fed up public who is ready and eager to embrace a little craziness.

I encourage everyone – but especially my proverbial "peeps" from the MySpace Generation – to spend an hour looking into Ron Paul. Look beyond the labels. Look beyond the sound bites. Look beyond the polls. Look at the big picture. And when you find yourself agreeing with his ideas for America (perhaps in spite of everything you previously believed) . Get registered now – not just as a voter, but as a Republican. Get out to the primaries and make your vote count for once by electing someone who promises real change and not more empty talking points. And while you're at it, encourage others to do the same thing. I think we can actually make a difference with the right person this time around – though it's going to require more than simply "friending" that person on MySpace.

So in the words of my generation: "Just Do It." Ron Paul cured my apathy. He made me believe again in the power of a politician. Maybe he can do the same for you. The Ron Paul revolution is on. Get in on it while there's still time.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED LINKS:

RonPaul2008.com - The official campaign site. Start by clicking on the Issues link and familiarize yourself with Ron's ideas.

The Ron Paul Library - Delve a little deeper into the issues with this archive of Ron Paul speeches and letters

The Google Interview - An hour-long dialogue with Google exec Elliot Shrage. Ron Paul takes the necessary the time to speak freely and fully about his stances on the issues.

The Glenn Beck Interview - A series of clips (5-10 minutes long) shot on December 18 where Ron once again has the time and freedom to express his views in more than just a sound bite.

Clip 1 - Our National Sovreignty Under Threat / A Grass Roots Majority
Clip 2 - The Economy and Government Spending
Clip 3 - The Currency Crisis / Eliminate the Federal Income Tax
Clip 4 - Iraq and the War on Terror
Clip 5 - Prosperity and the Power of the Free Market
Clip 6 - Ron Paul's Supporters
Clip 7 - Libertarianism and the Responbilitiy of Freedom

An Inconvenient Following

I am seriously this close to being done with the whole Global Warming movement. I’m sure this will be an unpopular blog. Or who knows, maybe there is a quiet mob out there like me who will echo the sentiment. Who am I kidding though – most likely nobody but my MySpace contingent actually reads this crap anyway so why hold back? I should back up for a second and clarify that it’s not the Global Warming movement in and of itself that has inspired this latest of rants. Anyone who has read my essay “Is the Truth Really That Inconvenient?” knows that I haven’t closed off my ears to the debate entirely… or even a little. I simply have a lot of questions that nobody in the planet-hugger community seems willing or able to answer. Beyond that, I’m frankly suspicious that this whole movement, while it may have started out with good intentions, is being hijacked by disingenuous people more focused on money and power than actually fixing the problem. Where I really grind my axe these days is with two specific groups: A) Loudmouth global warming activists who are painfully (or willfully) ignorant of how global warming actually works; and B) Al Gore groupies. But it’s when you combine these two groups of earthy well wishers that I actually start to become afraid for the next few years.

Let’s start with Group A. All of us probably know at least one person in this group. I’ll set the scenario for you. See if you recognize it. You’re chatting amongst friends or shooting the breeze with somebody on IM when you make the mistake of making an offhand comment about the weather. The people of Group A don’t hesitate a beat before responding, “Well, that’s global warming for you.” It doesn’t matter what your comment is. It’s hot outside. Global warming. It’s cold outside. Global warming. It’s windy. It’s rainy. It’s dry. It’s muggy. Global warming… Okay, let me explain how global warming works. First of all, look at the first word: GLOBAL. You cannot gauge the plight of an entire planet by pointing to a weeklong heat wave in New England, nor is a freak cold snap in April indicative of glaciers melting and the impending ice age. In fact, if you have a week’s worth of unusually hot weather and then a week’s worth of unusually cold weather, as far as the GLOBAL temperature is concerned, nothing has changed. If January is five degrees warmer than usual and July is five degrees colder than usual, in the eyes of the overall climate, everything has balanced itself out. But the people in Group A either don’t understand that or are deliberately ignoring it so they can fuel their own activist fires. To listen to these people rant, you’d swear there was never any such thing as droughts, monsoons or hurricanes before the Industrial Revolution.

I’m going to say this just as clear as I can. Even if we take this “environmental crisis” at face value, the day-to-day effects of global warming are not dramatic enough to be noteworthy. Pointing to floods, tornadoes, heat waves or even glaciers collapsing in slow motion does nothing to prove your point. The things that lend credence to global warming aren’t sensational or visual at all. You know what they are? Numbers. Statistics. Data from all over the world painstakingly compiled into hugely boring tables and graphs that show the GLOBAL temperature rising by fractions of a degree. One quarter of a degree on a boring chart like that is far more damning than ten degrees on a bank thermometer. That is where the inconvenient truth really lies… even if it isn’t as compelling to look at. So please stop invoking global warming every time I decide to make small talk about the weather.

Okay, now for Group B. The Al Gore groupies. These people infuriate me more than Group A, who at least have the luxury of just being ignorant. The Gore groupies are different in that they really do seem to understand the causes behind global warming and are willing to condemn people, countries and corporations for all the damage they’re causing via their actions. Yet when it comes the actions of Al Gore, they turn a blind eye to that inconvenient bit of truth. In his movie, Gore urges everyone to make sacrifices to reduce energy consumption and lessen their carbon footprint on the planet. Yet when Gore’s own energy consumption habits were examined, it turned out that his house consumed nearly twenty times more electricity than the average American home. Twenty times! Add to that the fact that he flew around the country promoting his movie in a private jet and one has to wonder just how seriously Gore takes his own message. These aren’t groundbreaking revelations I’m making here. Pretty much every conservative radio show in the country has used this information against Gore over the last several months. But what continually strikes me as so odd is the way the Goreists consistently absolve their fearless leader of his conduct simply because he is the one getting the message out. “The private jet’s emissions are worth it if it means he can speak at more assemblies,” they urge. What other committed following would say that? If some Christian evangelist traveled the country preaching against, say, homosexuality and then it turned out he had been getting it on with male prostitutes after the show, would his followers say, “Well that’s okay because he’s out there spreading the right message”? Of course not! They would disavow themselves of him and his actions immediately.

The one argument I constantly hear being made in defense of Al Gore and his carbon footprint is that he “buys carbon credits” to offset his pollution. Essentially he pays a certain amount of money to companies with low carbon emissions, or to companies developing renewable energy technologies, or to organizations who do things like plant trees. Something to that effect. I’m exactly not sure how it all works, but the bottom line worth focusing on here is that Gore is validating his sins against the planet by paying money for them. Is it just me or does this all vaguely similar to the medieval Catholic doctrine of “Indulgences” where rich people could pay money to the church who would then give them (no joke) a “pre-emptive license to sin.” If a man knew he was going to have an affair, he would pay a certain amount of money to the diocese, and then his priest, rather than encouraging him to turn from his sinful ways, would simply absolve him of all future adulteries. The inherent hypocrisy wrapped up inside this doctrine was one of the primary triggers for Martin Luther’s grievances and the resulting Protestant Reformation. So why, just because Al Gore has more money than the rest of us, is he allowed to pollute at will? If he's supposed to be at the forefront of this movement, why doesn't he pay out that carbon credit money in addition to reducing his carbon footprint? (And just to be completely forthright here, it’s actually Paramount Pictures, the film’s distributor who pays those credits, not Gore himself.) And why oh why doesn’t Gore’s entourage at least acknowledge the inconsistencies between his doctrine and his daily life and demand that their leader hold himself to higher standard?

This blog has been a long time in coming. It’s been on the tip of my (fingertips?) for months now but without the time to actually sit down and hammer out my thoughts. Then I heard something, actually two things, that finally made me take the time to get this out there. The first thing I heard – which really was reason enough – was a speech made by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the Live Earth concert on July 7 where he flat out accused people who don’t believe the warnings about global warming to be guilty of “treason.” Treason! As in being a traitor to the country, perhaps the utmost crime somebody can be convicted of. Sadly, Kennedy’s comment was merely the most visible example of a scary trend I see developing in this country, where any opinions on global warming other than the ones espoused by Al Gore and those like him are opinions that are, at best, not valid. And at worst, if Kennedy can be taken at his word, those opinions can apparently make a person subject to anything from censure to death. We’re not there yet. For the time being there are voices who are countering the “Al Gore’s Way or the Highway” mentality. People like Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck who, love ‘em or hate ‘em, do make valid defensible points on the opposing side. The danger could exist however, if and when someone like Al Gore, somebody with his single-minded committedness to global warming, gets into a position of real power and opens up a new round of neo-McCarthyism.

I know that last remark sounds like I’m just being sensationalistic for effect, but I am dead serious. I wouldn’t have believed it myself except for the fact that I was also listening to the audio book version of Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid. The book is a memoir of sorts using Bryson’s childhood as a jumping off point for talking about America in the 1950’s. Bryson spends several minutes (pages?) in one chapter talking about America’s fear of Communism and how that fear was personified and ultimately manipulated by Senator Joseph McCarthy. McCarthy instigated a nationwide witch-hunt for anyone and everyone who might be perceived as collaborating with communists in any way. As Bryson explains, well respected scientists, businessmen, humanitarians and, of course, Hollywood artists were accused of being communists and couldn’t find work simply because they had once had a conversation with somebody who had once written a paper expressing what was narrowly interpreted as sympathy toward the communist party. Lives, careers and reputations were ruined for anyone who was even remotely suspected of advocating philosophies that strayed from the accepted American capitalist ideal.

As I listened to this recording I felt an eerie sense of foreboding over the similarities between then and now. As I said, we are not to that point yet, but the fact that somebody like Robert Kennedy can so openly and so easily accuse others of treason – not a light choice of words by any stretch of the imagination – simply for disagreeing with the most popular views on global warming… The signs are all there. McCarthy played on the country’s fears and people went right along with him, even as he made claim after increasingly ridiculous claim. The fears surrounding global warming are also building and are already being played upon. For the time being it seems to be mostly corporations who are reaping the benefits of those fears, with the sales of hybrid cars, fluorescent light bulbs and whatnot. But as the government changes hands over the next few years, who knows who might come into power and what ridiculous things might they get the country to agree to in the name of global warming? Al Gore claims we have ten years to change “or else.” If the threat is truly that dire, what will believers do to ensure that change? Surely shutting up dissenters à la Joseph McCarthy will be the first step. And then what? America’s fear of communism almost put us into all out nuclear war. What could our fear of global warming push us into?

As I’ve said all along (and I feel compelled to keep restating), I am not denying the claims of the global warming camp outright. But neither will I simply be pushed along by the rising current without asking what I feel are pertinent questions. Blindly agreeing with popular opinion doesn’t help any of us. In fact it could end up causing us to focus our efforts in exactly the wrong areas as projects and programs get green-lighted unchallenged, only to realize the mistake several years too late. At best we could end up wasting money. At worst we could end up taking measures that would alter whole eco-systems, something that, as humans, we’ve never had much success with. Better that we all take the time and ask these questions now. So show your dissent. Challenge others. Don’t let offhand, “Look what global warming is causing” comments go unchallenged. That’s how it starts, but eventually it could become, “Do you now or have you ever owned or operated an SUV?”

I, for my part, am showing my own personal dissent through typically passive-aggressive techniques. Blogs like this for one. And deliberately sarcastic mockery and oh-my-god-is-he-really-serious apathy for another. To that end, I need help designing a few bumper stickers. The prototype slogans are:

BURN MORE COAL!
...because penguins are EVIL!

GLOBAL WARMING:
…because it’s too damn cold out there anyway.

STOP GLOBAL WARMING:
Shut your big fat mouth.

And my personal favorite:

GLACIERS ARE MELTING! …so?

Anybody with graphic design abilities, feel free to collaborate.

John Kerry has NOTHING on these guys

When the fam and I went down to visit my sister in Florida last week, we opted not to fly like most normal people. In an effort to save money on tickets and rental cars – as well to save our sanity from trying to corral two kids and all their usual tote-along crap through an airport – we drove the thousand-plus miles. That however, as they say, is another story and shall be told another time. The trip was far from perfect, yet far from disaster, and all the aggravation was made worth it by one thing, perhaps my most favorite thing about driving through the southern states: Waffle House.

I first discovered Waffle House a few years ago in Louisville, Kentucky while I was working the Kentucky Derby. I had no idea at the time that it was a fifty-year-old franchise. Other than the giant yellow sign out front, it didn’t seem to have any of the usual trappings of a typical chain restaurant. Consisting of a few small booths and one long counter facing into the grill area where waitresses and short order cooks bustle about in full view, the whole place seemed built more around functionality than presentation, giving it the appearance of a small independently owned greasy spoon than anything designed by a corporation. But the food was great, and even better it was cheap! I got myself an “All Star Special” consisting of bacon, eggs, grits, toast, coffee and, of course, a waffle, all for less than ten dollars including tip.

Back at home, my job often had me driving from Philadelphia down to Washington, D.C. and I began to notice that familiar yellow sign on my trips south. It seemed as soon as I crossed the southern Pennsylvania border, otherwise known as the famous Mason/Dixon line, Waffle Houses started popping up at every other exit. I stopped in often and grew to love the place. The food, as I’ve said, is delicious and, for the price, absolutely cannot be beaten. Of course, as they rely heavily on butter and grease for their main components the cuisine is obviously no friend of the heart, but so what? If you want healthy, go get an egg-white omelet at the Wheatgerm Café.

More than their food though, the overall Waffle House atmosphere is what has made me keep coming back over the years. Walking through the front door you get the impression that you’ve crossed a threshold into some truck stop throwback to the 1950’s. But this isn’t just bogus nostalgia. Never for a moment do you get the impression that anything in this place has been designed by some suit in an office building three thousand miles away. There aren’t logos and merchandise plastered on every wall, the food specials don’t have overly cutesy or flamboyant names, and even the jukebox spinning the occasional oldies tune is a basic model (some might even say “cheap”) without glowing pink bubbles or backlit displays.

Most notable at every Waffle House though, is the staff. Seeing as how this is primarily a southern and midwest chain, it hardly seems a coincidence that the staff is generally comprised of people who could be described as “trailer trash.” I know I’m generalizing in the worst way here, but with pretty much zero exceptions across the entire chain, this is not the kind of place you’d go into to ogle the waitresses. Be that as it may, you will never, and I mean never, meet more genuinely nice people working in any restaurant. They’re not operating on the “Ten Key Points of Customer Service” handed down from the company manual or trying to hit certain timing and upselling benchmarks as dictated by their corporate managers. This is simply, purely down home courtesy of the highest caliber. There is never a roll of the eyes or a stressed out huff when you ask for more coffee. You never detect even trace amounts of annoyance when a customer places a complicated order. And when the waitress strikes up a conversation, you never get the impression that they are simply trying to schmooze you over in the hope of earning a bigger tip. I don’t know if Waffle House uses a different style of recruitment or if a certain type of person just naturally gravitates toward this particular establishment, but I have never met a Waffle House employee who wasn’t that perfect combination of friendly, helpful and prompt – everything, in short, that you’d want in a waitress.

Over the course of our long roundtrip to Florida we ate at Waffle House several times. I still order the same thing I did on my first visit, the All Star Special. And I still I love every greasy mouthful of bacon and egg, still savor every buttery sweet bite of waffle, still relish the indescribable texture of grits on toast, and still wash it all down with multiple cups of Waffle House coffee, which in and of itself tastes inexplicably better than the crap they pour at most any other restaurant. As ever, the staff was wonderfully friendly and cordial, even as our children proceeded to make a gigantic mess of our table and the floor around us. We left full, satisfied, nurtured even. But most importantly, we left not broke. We’re home again, officially north of the line and already I long for the day when I’ll be able make the trip south for another warm and friendly helping of quite possibly the most awesome restaurant chain in the world.

Social Experiment: The zany profile

I’d make a crappy scientist. I started my dating site “social experiment” just over two weeks ago and I’m already done with it. I haven’t even had time to sit down and write out what the whole experiment is even about and it’s over. Well to bring you up to speed let’s discuss the purpose of this experiment and then we’ll get into what little I’ve discovered.

The backstory. When my friend asked me to help out with their Match.com profile a few weeks back, I spent a little time browsing through profiles to see what love-hungry internet users were posting in an effort to find their next hookup or lifelong soul mate. And I’ve got to say, I was appalled. Seriously appalled. The dating sites I looked at gave you anywhere from 400 to maybe 1000 words for your intro and I swear nearly every user on every site must have copied and pasted the same 400 words into the space provided. With few exceptions, all the profiles I read said exactly the same thing. Apparently everybody in the world – if these profiles are anything to go by – everybody is “laid back” or “easy going.” Everybody “doesn’t take life too seriously.” Everyone has a “good sense of humor” and everyone “loves to laugh.” Everybody enjoys “partying in bars” but they also – every single one of them – enjoy “cuddling up with a movie.” And dear Lord if there wasn’t also a heavy percentage of people who used that old cliché line about “long walks on the beach.” The headlines these people came up with, the headings that are supposed to entice others to click on your profile, were equally lame and repetitious: “Nice girl seeking a friend” or “Single Guy in Philly” or simply, “Hi.” And that’s the people that actually took the time to write something. There were nearly as many people on these sites who only put in a token sentence or two which primarily consisted of the statement, “I can’t believe I’m actually doing this,” or “My friend told me about this so I figured I’d give it a shot,” or some other similar variation that doesn’t really tell us anything about the person.

Lauren and I spent time browsing through profiles, men’s and women’s, and we both agreed that it was overwhelming how generic the dating pool seems to be – again, if these profiles are anything to go by. How do serious users of sites like Friendfinder and Match.com actually pick and choose who to contact when every person you find sounds almost identical to person before? It must come down to the pictures they post. Since everyone sounds like they have essentially the same interests and personality, you might as well focus your efforts on only the hot ones. After maybe an hour of browsing through profiles, Lauren and I looked at each other and thanked God that we’d found each other. What would we do right now if we were still single in a world where online dating has become the most popular way of hooking up?

Now, I must step back for a moment and stress that I am not saying any of this to be holier-than-thou toward single people, or toward people who use dating sites. I am certainly not insinuating that marriage is the be all end of all human accomplishment, or that singledom is somehow a lamentable condition. I’m merely pointing out the fact that judging by the crop of people we browsed through on these dating sites, the modern dating world is apparently a bleak place with boring selections.

Mind you, the same was true back when I was frequenting the dating site circuit. In fact, it probably looked even bleaker back then because there was a higher percentage of people who simply didn’t put anything in their profiles. To be quite honest, any profile that had at least a full paragraph stood out from the crowd no matter what they wrote. And the thing is, what they wrote was essentially the same thing that everybody is writing these days. Namely, “I’m a laid back, easy going guy who doesn’t take life too seriously and I love to laugh.” So the climate really hasn’t worsened since I left the dating scene, it’s just that it’s more saturated with people saying the same thing. But here’s the thing, as I said in my previous post, back then all of the sites were free. It didn’t cost you a dime to post your dumb and generic profile. So I think what blows my mind more than anything is that not only are people boring and unimaginative to the point of making me physically nauseous, but they’re actually paying money to be boring and unimaginative. And paying a good amount of money too. So, like I’ve said, I have absolutely nothing against people using dating sites. I’m all for them. I used them myself back in the day and had a relative amount of luck with them. I think in this modern technological age, sites like these really are the best ways for a plugged-in and over-scheduled public to meet and hit things off. What I don’t get is why people would go through all the trouble and expense of having an online dating profile and not say something, anything to make themselves stand out from the crowd.

It was with that in mind that I decided to create my own profile. I figured I would post something so entirely off the wall, so completely out of line from the typical dating profile, and see what kind of response it got. So I ended up copying and pasting the text from an old humor column of mine. It tells a true story from my childhood about how my friends and I, in an effort to get back at the mean cooks in our school cafeteria, spent an entire lunch period smearing sloppy joes and blueberry cobbler all over our faces. For my headline, I used the title of the piece: “Hot Lunch Uprising.” I figured a line like that would be enough to pique people’s interest, make them say, “What the hell is this?” and click on my profile. Once they were in, my theory was that it would make them chuckle enough to at least write me a short email saying they liked what I wrote. After all, nearly every woman on this site claimed that they wanted a man who could make them laugh. Well rather than saying I could make them laugh, I just tried to make them laugh. Rather than posting a general description about the whole of my personality, I posted a story about one specific thing that hopefully gives someone an even better insight into it.

And you know what, it actually worked, though not as well as I had been hoping. Of course to be fair, it’s hard to really say how good or bad the response was since I couldn’t really respond to most of the emails I had received without paying for a membership – and in the case of Match.com, I couldn’t even read my mail without ponying up. In my first few days, I got a few emails from people on True.com, several of whom were actually quite attractive and all of whom actually had their own witty and intelligent things to say – the kind of women I likely would have tried to date had I done this as a single guy. I set up a free a three-day trial with True and emailed several of them back to let them know what I was really up to. I apparently got three emails from people on Match.com but, again, was unable to actually read them for lack of payment. I got one email from somebody on Yahoo personals who I was able to send a generic pre-written message back to with my free membership, and she was intelligent enough to write back with enough information that I could figure out how to contact her for real. Other than that though, without the ability to openly communicate, it was difficult to differentiate between emails I got from people who were legitimately interested in me, or emails from spammers and shills.

So for the amount of money and effort I actually put into this little experiment, I’m rather impressed with the results. The quantity of women contacting me may not have been as high as I’d have liked, but the quality of women was definitely noteworthy. I think if I were single and had actually gone all out, paid my money and gotten the ability to send and receive email freely, I would have done very well with this weird but apparently effective approach.

So, here’s advice from ye olde sage Brian to all those who are currently using a dating site, or are considering it. First of all, avoid True.com at all costs. I got more spam from that site than any of the others. You know the kind; pretty “ladies” who say things like, “I am liking for my one true love that you are sexy too.” So there’s that. My more important advice is this: don’t tell people about yourself in the intro to your profile. No matter how charming or witty you think you’re being, in the end all your interests, personality traits and suggestions for “the perfect date” are just going to sound like everybody else’s on the site. The better route as far as I’m concerned is to either tell a story or talk about one specific thing that interests you. Rather than saying you like hiking, tell the story of a hike you went on. Rather than saying you like to go out and party, talk about one particularly cool night when you were out. Rather than saying you have a sense of humor, actually tell a funny story. Make it random. Make it weird. Make it stand out. I think random stories tell a lot more about a person than even the best intentioned “introductions.”

So that’s my advice. If you take it and it works out for you, please let me know. I’m very curious to see how this tactic works for people who can actually benefit from it. As for me, I’m just glad I met my wife the way I did, at a wedding so she never had to read my boring and generic dating intro. Where would we be today if she had? And that’s really the end for this social experiment. I wish I had more fascinating data to share, but I frankly have neither the money nor the patience to pursue this line of thought any farther.

Keep on sneezing if you want... or try this

Cold season is upon us once again. We tend not to acknowledge the common cold as something even worth worrying about until we actually catch it and realize two things:

1) Man, I forgot how much having a cold SUCKS.

and

2) Since everybody who doesn’t have a cold still isn’t acknowledging the it as anything worth worrying about, you generally don’t get much sympathy from well people.

The goal, as with any sickness, becomes all about getting over it as fast as possible. So we seek out remedies from the drug store aisles, the natural food aisles, the hippie herbal tea store aisles, and in this modern day and age, from the internet… my “aisle” motif kind of dies in “this modern day and age.” So with that in mind, allow me to share with you what I’ve found to be a nearly foolproof cure to the common cold. I stumbled upon this remedy gradually over the last few years and have found it to be – let’s not mince words – one hundred percent effective. No joke. If I feel a cold coming on and I do exactly what I am about to describe, the cold is gone by the next morning. Gone. Occasionally there are minor remnants like a minor bit of residual phlegm, but certainly nothing debilitating that makes it laborious to go about your day. That’s more than I can say for any other remedy I’ve personally ever tried.

Now I will give a disclaimer. I don’t make any promises that this remedy will work for you. I know for a fact that it works consistently for me, but I’ve never actually seen anybody else ever try it and get back to me with their results. Even my own wife, Lauren, who has seen the effectiveness of this process, has yet to actually try it out for herself… though in her defense, she still has placenta pills leftover, which seem to work just as well as a remedy. So if this doesn’t work for you, I apologize, but honestly I’d be very surprised if it didn’t work for a good percentage of people who do it and follow the directions precisely. As always, you should consult with your doctor before trying any kind of remedy… though he’s just going to tell you not to do it, so screw him. Just use your head, be a grownup and don’t come whining to me with lawyers if something bad happens to you – because unless you’re very stupid, nothing should.

Okay here we go.

My foolproof cold remedy consists of three steps:

1. CLEAN OUT THOSE EARS
2. ZINC IT UP
3. EMBRACE YOUR FEVER

I’ve found that the process works best the sooner in the cold you do it. Personally I take action as soon as I start to feel the telltale symptoms of a cold – chills, fatigue, general achiness – coming on. As soon as I get home, I mount my three-pronged attack. If I wait until I’m a day or two into the cold, I find the remedy doesn’t work as well. Oh, it still works, but I tend to have those minor residual symptoms for several days longer than if I had just knocked it out at the start.

1. CLEAN OUT THOSE EARS

Even though this is the first step in my process, it was actually the last one I learned about. I read an article on Mercola.com a couple years back about a theory suggesting that cold and flu germs don’t enter the body through the nose and mouth like most people think, but through the ears. They get inside your ear canal where they germinate, breed, get bigger, and from there they start attacking the rest of your body. So the idea is to neutralize those germs at their source before they spread. To that end, clean out your ears with Hydrogen Peroxide. Lay on your side and put 6-10 drops into your ear – basically enough to fill your ear canal – and lay there for about ten minutes, letting the bubbling peroxide do its work. Drain into a paper towel and admire all the wax that you just cleaned out of there along with any germs, then repeat on the other side.

I don’t imagine it’s a good idea to do this multiple times in a short time period. Peroxide is some serious stuff and it seems like repeated use would have some negative effects on the tissue integrity of your ears, so irrespective of whether my cold goes away, I only perform this step once.


2. ZINC IT UP

Forget NyQuil or Sudafed or Echinacea. The only supplement I have ever needed to fight off a cold is zinc. Zinc lozenges. The kind you suck on, not the kind you swallow. I honestly don’t know the science behind how they work. I don’t know why they only work by sucking on them. I just know they work. In my anecdotal experience, I have found that my fever tends to accelerate within the hour after taking my first zinc lozenge, so my own personal theory is that they somehow stimulate your body to heat up which in turn allows it to fight off the cold – which we will address in the next step. You can find zinc lozenges in the medicine section of any supermarket. Make sure you get ones that have some kind of flavoring to them because the tablets tend to have a weird gritty taste that leave your mouth feeling dry and tacky. I usually take a tablet every hour or two depending on how I feel, and always on a full stomach. Make sure you’ve got something else in your belly or you’ll be adding nausea to your list of symptoms.


3. EMBRACE YOUR FEVER

This is by far the most important step of the entire process. As far as I’m concerned the previous two steps are merely aides to this step. The real work of fighting a cold is done right here because what you’re essentially doing is allowing the body to just do its work fighting the cold its own way, which is probably how nature always intended it.

We have such a fear of fevers in this society. Fevers are always the most notable symptom of something being wrong and worried sick people start pumping themselves full of Tylenol or Ibuprofen and covering themselves with cold wet cloths in an effort fight that dreaded fever. They think the fever is the culprit when really the fever is merely a response to the culprit. A fever is what the body is actually using to fight off the infection. By taking a fever reducer, you’re actually impeding the body’s ability to do its job. So whenever I feel a cold coming on, far from doing anything to hold my fever back, I go in the opposite direction and encourage it.

First thing I do, since I usually have the chills by this point, is bring my temperature up by taking a nice hot shower. Then after drying off, I pile on the layers: thermal underwear, sweatpants, t-shirt, hooded sweatshirt, a zip-up fleece, heavy wool socks. I cover myself with blankets, put on my hood and, if I really want to go hardcore, I’ll put on a winter hat. Basically, I do everything I can do to drive my temperature up. No matter how uncomfortable I get, I never kick off the covers or peel off any layers. And then I sleep like this all night. Of course, “sleep” is a rather generous word. To be honest, it always ends up being an all around miserable night and I usually end up going out to the couch so as not to disturb Lauren with my thrashing discomfort.

The first hour or two is usually a dry heat as my body uses the fever to fight off whatever is inside me. But after awhile, the intended result begins to happen: I start to sweat. I mean really sweat. Once this starts happening I make extra certain not to move, knowing that any movement will aerate the sweat and cool me down. In this way, I allow my body to evacuate… to purge… to cleanse itself. A lot of people don’t realize this but sweat glands are actually part of the excretory system. That’s why you often feel gritty after sweating a lot – impurities have been purged from your body via the sweat glands. So in much the same way that vomiting gets rid of impurities from your stomach during a flu, sweating gets rid of impurities from your body at large. Again, I’m not sure if there is an actual science to back this up, but it just makes logical sense to me. Why would we have evolved the ability to develop a fever if it wasn’t meant to drive our body temperature up for some specific purpose? And what happens when our temperature goes up? We sweat. In my mind, when it comes to battling infection, the two seem like they must be connected.

So all throughout the night, I just let my body sweat and, as much as I can, try not to do anything else to cool it down. Not that I don’t get any respite from the heat. Whenever I get up to pee or to get some more water (because you do end up needing to drink a lot during this whole process) the sweat that has been saturating my multiple layers ventilates and I get a little bit of relief. But then it’s back to the pseudo-sauna I go. Now, for those of you following this process, let’s not be stupid. If you legitimately feel yourself asphyxiating or are otherwise having some kind of respiratory problem, by all means cool yourself down. No sense dying battling a cold. But for the rest of us, fight the discomfort for as long as you can.

At some point in the middle of the night after several hours worth of heat and sweat, I will usually notice a tangible change in my general well being. It’s hard to explain, but all I know is that it indicates that whatever my body was fighting has been effectively conquered and I just feel “better.” This is how I know it’s okay to cool down. I take off the sweatshirts and the hoods and the hats and just leave my base layers on. I usually will take an Ibruprofen at this point as well just to relax muscles that have been kind of tense from fever all night and help me fall asleep. It took me a few times attempting this process before I was able to recognize this “critical turning point.” Before that I kept the layers on all night just to be certain. But now that I am able to pinpoint the threshold between “sick” and “well” I can save myself those extra hours of discomfort.

When I wake up the next morning, I’m cured. I mean completely cured. My cold’s ass is effectively kicked and despite the crappy night of sleep I just got I practically spring out of bed from the noticeable change I can feel from the night before. I’m dehydrated as hell from all the sweating, so I make sure to guzzle water for the rest of the day. I also make sure to wash all the clothes (and sometimes the blankets too) that I have been so heavily sweating my cold out into all night long. But for all the lingering vestiges of the cold, a few hours of discomfort and one crappy night’s sleep are worth it to avoid putting up with several days worth of alternating cold symptoms and medicine-head fogginess.

So I encourage you to try it out this winter. Forget all those miracle medicines that often have the reverse effect of actually prolonging your cold. Your body knows how to fight off sickness. It’s been doing it for the last hundred thousand years or so. So all you really need to do is give it the extra tools and extra help to do its job. And that, really, is what this three-step process is all about.

Happy winter everybody!

Huh, I'd like to pulse her tilla...

Homeopathy continues to amaze me. I just started learning about this whole practice last summer and as near as I have seen and experienced thus far, if used properly, homeopathy works just as well, if not better, than conventional drugs for treating just about anything that you would normally take a pill for. While the remedies are symptom specific, homeopathy doesn't treat symptoms (the way most drugs do). What it does is actually trigger your body to fight back against whatever happens to be plaguing it. It actually helps you heal faster, and heal naturally, with your body’s own defenses. A few of the remedies that we use in our house often are:

Arnica Montana – Great for bruises and sore muscles and has all but replaced Ibuprofen in our medicine cabinet.

Nux Vomica – Exactly like it sounds. It’s good for stomachaches, indigestion and all around ickiness due to overeating or overdrinking. If you let a few of these dissolve under your tongue after you’ve been out drinking all night it will usually save you not just the puking but also the hangover. I also took the Nux whenever my hernia started hurting or poking out and it was a good temporary fix until I got in for surgery.

Hepar Sulphuris Calcareum – This is an awesome remedy for dry congested coughs. It’ll cause the phlegm in your lungs to break up and allow you to get to sleep.

Chestal – This is the brand name of a homeopathic cough syrup made by Boiron and it’s good for wet, croupy coughs. What’s better, it tastes like honey. No I mean it REALLY tastes like honey. It’s not some false NyQuil promise, “Oh sure it tastes like grape,” but really still tastes like battery acid. We have no problems getting Allison to take this syrup. In fact she usually keeps asking for more.

Ambrosia Artemesia Folia – This was a godsend last September. Ragweed season always kills me, so last year, rather than suffer through another zombie-like month hopped up on Benadryl, I took Ambrosia which is literally ragweed. Taking in a little bit of ragweed several times a day made me right as rain all season with zero drowsiness. I’ve found that it also works when I’m having an allergic reaction to dust or other pollens as well.

Well the newest homeopathy to truly flip my lid and say, “Wow this stuff really does work doesn’t it,” is a remedy called Pulsatilla. I’ve heard Lauren mention this remedy before. At the birth center where she works they give it to women whose babies are presenting breech. Supposedly it helps the baby turn.

Okay, sure, it was always just one of those stories I heard about and said, “Oh that’s neat,” and didn’t think about further. Well then last Saturday Lauren got an email from her friend Lacey who was nine months pregnant. The mass email said that their baby was breech and the doctors didn’t want to do an ECV to try and turn it. They told her that unless the baby magically turned on its own, they would have to do a C-section on Tuesday.

Lauren immediately shot off an email to Lacey and told her to head to her closest natural food store and pick up some Pulsatilla. I honestly wasn’t expecting much. Even if Lacey got the message, she wouldn’t have had a whole lot of time to let the Pulsatilla do it’s work and would probably still be breech come Tuesday. My impression of most natural remedies is that they aren’t quick fixes. They generally need time to percolate in your system and do their work. I was again doubting homeopathy, which had shown me time and again to be the real deal.

Well apparently Lacey did get the message and went out on Sunday to pick up the remedy. And by Monday, the baby had turned! Her doctors were justifiably amazed and she went on to have a natural childbirth afterward. I’m not sure what the stats are on babies that turn after a certain point in the pregnancy and how those stats change for mothers who take Pulsatilla. Academically, I don’t know how well homeopathy stands up to conventional medicine. But it’s anecdotal cases like this that continue to make me a believer in this practice and make me want to learn more and more about it.