I want to explore the importance of “internal locus of control”, particularly in the chaos of the Bidenverse. My wordsmithing hasn’t been focused.
So let’s start again shall we?
Waaaaay back when the son of a single term president was mismanaging his way to being a second generation single term president I bought a motorcycle…
Dammit! I just can’t come at it from straight on! If I say the obvious too cleanly some folks can’t see it. It’s shockingly Plato’s Cave-ish. Oh well, I’ll keep typing and see what happens.
Back when it wasn’t considered racist to compare the president to a monkey, Chimpy McHitler was the president and the American people were blessed with cheap gasoline. (This was much to the horror of Al Gore who likes nothing more than Powerpoint slides and expensive oil.)
Anyway Chimpy McHitler started out a pretty average and ignorable president. He was likely to have an average and ignorable one term presidency. But at least gas was cheap.
I didn’t know those were the last few years of partial sanity. Do you remember sanity? Pepperidge Farms does.
It’s hard to remember that short chunk of peace after Clinton and before the Light Bringer. It wasn’t yet official that everyone white was a racist asshole. People could take a dump without a political debate over which bathroom. Gas became so cheap that Al Gore grew a beard. Hippies bitched (as they always do when the president is an “R”) but that’s just what they do. They whined that the President was an idiot and I didn’t necessarily disagree; but it was still relatively calm.
I miss the good old days when not all crimes were caused by the FBI. “Maniacs setting shit on fire” was wisely called “arson” instead of “peaceful protest”. Back then the X-Files was fiction!
Americans enjoyed relative peace the way Americans should. They bought BIG CARS! Everyone and their dog financed 4×4 monstrosities. It was the era of the SUV. The greatest of them all was the H1 Hummer; a military truck which looks like it’s two lanes wide and gets incredibly shitty mileage. Hummers were used to signal how manly one was’ back when being “manly” was legal. Of course Hummers mostly sat leaking oil on paved shopping mall parking lots. (I was a 4×4 guy… you never saw an H1 on trails!)
Who wouldn’t want to bet on cheap fuel forever? Me!
I bucked the SUV trend with a motorcycle. My cruiser is just as ridiculous as any mall cruising Schwarzenegger-mobile. Yet it had practical aspects. It got 45 mpg (much better if I rode slow, which I didn’t) and it cost somewhere between a fifth and a tenth of a H1.
It seemed silly to conserve gas, given its low price, but I did. I chose to avoid depending on cheap gas. Good times don’t last forever.
I joked about my bad timing; a world where hulking military trucks were parked at Barnes and Noble is a weird time to have a daily driver with a 4 gallon tank. I had bad timing. Then again I was fine perfect timing; a year too soon is better than a day too late.
A clever fellow can make biodiesel but making gasoline is pretty much impossible. So I bought an ancient diesel Mercedes for non-motorcycle days. It gave me another option. If the world went Mad Max I could learn the dark art of biodiesel.
Then 9/11 happened and everyone lost their shit. Sound familiar? Panicked nitwits installed a police state . It’s the panopticon hell in which we now live. Bush flaked and there was war, then a second front, then increasingly centralized power, and then state sponsored torture. The icing on the cake was domestic spying on innocent civilians! (Sound familiar?) If you questioned any of it you were a terrorist.
Bush, who otherwise would have been toast, was re-elected. A surprise terrorist attack apparently makes a half assed president more electable and indeed every president since has hoped for another attack.
He muddled through until hurricane Katrina spiked gas prices. Cheap gas was over. My cynicism had come true.
Prices set records and everyone bitched about “big oil”. Except me. It makes no sense to blame my dealer for supplying the drug I requested. I rode my high MPG motorcycle until the Hummers disappeared. Soon the Malls faded too. I guess there was nowhere left to drive Hummers anyway.
I hadn’t gotten around to making biodiesel but the plans were in place. While everyone else shrieked about “big oil”, I read books and tried to remember high school chemistry. This is how you get an internal locus of control. I can’t change the world but I can change my relationship to outside forces.
Gas crept up. I paid higher prices just like everyone else but I didn’t feel like a helpless “victim”. I’d partially avoided dependency and thus had a measure of freedom.
Fuel prices ebbed a bit and then started a steady rise again under Obama. I can’t remember for certain but I feel like it was in his first term. Finally, I made biodiesel.
Biodiesel worked great! It was like magic!
People viewed my project through a short term lens. If I made biodiesel when pumps were charging $2.50 people thought I was an idiot. If I made biodiesel when pumps were drifting toward $3.50 I looked smart. See how that works? The same act is perceived differently based on things I don’t control. The solution to that is to ignore other people’s opinions.
I chugged around on homemade fuel and the grin never left my face. It was awesome! I felt so smug and superior you could see my ego from space! I’d earned it. I’d mastered various skills. I’d built equipment. I’d achieved something. Achievement feels good. It was a fun hobby. Even so, I knew it was temporary. Bad times don’t last forever.
Smart people in North Dakota started fracking. Pipeline protesters and regulatory brick walls couldn’t stop them. Private fuel off private land dropped the price of gas. The President tried to throttle things but he couldn’t keep the prices high. I stopped making biodiesel. Fuel stayed cheap-ish during a long long slow decline that the press carefully avoided calling a recession.
There was another election. Just like the one Al Gore lost, this one wasn’t well received either. Yet again the press woke-splained that it’s patriotic and legal to question an election but only if a Republican wins. Former president Clinton’s angry wife unleased throngs of harpies on DC. They wore pussy hats and set fire to cars on inauguration day. You know that meme where the spastic girl screams at the sky? That really happened. If you want to understand a person who has a completely external locus of control that would be it. Flaked out lunatics screaming in the middle of the street control literally nothing (not even themselves).
Fuel prices dropped during the horror of a thriving economy after the election. The press insisted we were doomed but Orange Menace created the best economy in 40 years! America became a net exporter of energy. Gas was so cheap that Al Gore wept every night!
By then my first motorcycle had outlasted virtually every H1 sold. Between high mpg vehicles (which were paid off), a garage full of biodiesel gear, and a head full of knowledge, I’d built a wall between myself and the price of fuel. This wasn’t necessary. After all, fuel was cheap. On the other hand, good times never last.
Then came covid. (We are required by law to believe nobody has ever tried a covid-type panic before. That’s why the predicted mass death over SARS, Swine flu, Ebola, Zika, Bird flu, Mad Cow Disease, and West Nile Virus are memory holed. This time Orange Man Bad needed to be defeated and therefore we’d all die!) Civilization deliberately punched itself in the balls.
Remember when civilizations didn’t lose their shit every few years? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
After nuking the economy and spending all summer of peacefully burning cities, we had another election. This one was such a mess that spreadsheet programs spontaneously combust when exposed to it. Orange Man Bad got more votes than any other candidate in history. Whoops! At 3:00 am, while nobody was counting anything, because the pipes were clogged, Captain Dementia broke Orange Man Bad’s brand new record. Biden, who barely left his house, set a super duper record! What are the odds?
I’m required by law to pretend that Biden got more votes than anyone (including Cheeto Jesus) since the beginning of time. No human has any reason to doubt it and to do so is (inexplicably) racist. As the woke-splainers instruct, if a Democrat “won” it’s illegal to complain. Them’s the rules!
As with any other third world election, political prisoners were rounded up and a swearing in ceremony happened behind concertina wire.
What happened to the cheap gas?
You know where this is going…
…the price of fuel doubled. BOOM! Good times never last.
Within a year, America went from a net exporter of energy to begging Venezuela for a tank of go-juice (which worked about as well as you’d expect). Before the second year the petroleum reserve had been drained. Gas isn’t cheap and it won’t be again for a while.
It’s funny how quickly economies respond to good management and bad. An eight year Obama-slog was exhausting and slow. Trump’s economy soared like a rocket. Biden drove it back into the ditch within months. You were there. Don’t let yourself be gaslit. Remember what you saw. Trust your observations above all else!
So gas was at eyebleed prices last summer and it’ll stay in that vicinity until someone new runs things. Raise your hand if you didn’t see that coming; if you raised your hand, use it to slap your face. You ought to know better.
It’s a good time to have internal locus of control. It gives me mental and spiritual distance from the lunatics in politics who deliberately ruin all the touch. This doesn’t mean it’s painless. I too suffer over these costs. But I’m not merely a punching bag for idiots. I have a few options and a bit of independence.
Also, I still have sufficient knowledge and tools to make biodiesel. Anytime I want I can start mixin’ up biodiesel. It’s hard work and so far I’m still lazy but the option is priceless.
That’s why I recommend an internal locus of control. I don’t feel helpless because I’m not. There’s only so far the pendulum can swing. An external locus of control is the opposite. You spend every day wondering what fresh hell will be inflicted this time. Eventually you wind up screaming in the streets and wearing a pussy hat. If someone you’ve never met controls your life from a political office, why not throw tantrums?
How does this relate to farm equipment? I’m getting there. It takes work to start in Plato’s Cave and wind up free. I’ll drag this series to conclusion in my next post.