Alpha Move: Be Prepared

I’m kind of shocked at the number of people on Staten Island who are shocked that they aren’t getting any help, three days after Sandy hit them.

Maybe it’s because I grew up on the Gulf Coast, but I thought everyone knew certain basic facts about hurricanes and other natural disasters. One of those facts is that after every disaster, some people are surprised at how long it takes for help to arrive. This, in spite of the fact that it happens after EVERY disaster. You’d think people would figure it out.

As an Alpha male, or an Alpha in Training, YOU are the Captain of your family’s ship. That means the buck stops with you. Your family is looking to you to make sure they are safe, and you’d better do it because FEMA sure isn’t going to.

First, and I mean no disrespect to the people of Staten Island when I say this, if you live on an island, WHY ARE YOU STILL THERE during and after a hurricane? If your house is 10 feet above sea level, and the National Hurricane Center is predicting an 11 foot storm surge, the math isn’t that hard. The best way to survive a natural disaster is to not be there when it happens. West Coast residents have to deal with earthquakes, which give no warning before they hit. But everyone knew a hurricane was coming. They were warned that it was going to be bad. They had plenty of time to find somewhere else to be. And again, I’m not saying this to pick on these victims, just to point out that you shouldn’t make the same mistake.

I’m also amazed at the people who are running out of gasoline three days after the storm. That means they are either driving a lot, or they didn’t have the foresight to fill their tank the day before the storm. Look, storms knock out power. Sometimes it takes a while to get the power back on. You can’t pump gas with no electricity, so fill up ahead of the storm.

The other thing you should do is be prepared for whatever natural disasters affect your area. If you don’t live near the coast you may not have to worry about hurricanes. But winter storms can cause similar problems with widespread power outages, and inability to travel. Basic preparation is the same, whether you expect hurricanes, winter storms, or the Zombie Apocalypse.

There are certain basics that you just have to make sure you have on hand, all the time. They fall into a few basic categories:

WATER: My house has a well, so if the power is out, the water is out. Even in a city, if the power is out long enough the water will stop flowing. Water is bulky and heavy, so it’s not easy to store. But at a minimum you want a three-day supply of drinking water on hand. Figure a minimum of a gallon of water per person per day. Get a couple of those blue five-gallon water containers at Wal Mart and fill them up. Put a teaspoon of unscented chlorine bleach in each jug to kill any germs. Change it out every three months anyway.

That’s just for drinking. You’ll need water for flushing your toilet, too. One way to keep a good supply of non-potable water handy is to fill the bathtub before the power goes out.

FOOD: At a bare minimum, keep a two-week supply of non-perishable food in your house all the time. If your family eats canned and dried foods, this can be as simple as keeping stocked up on the stuff you normally eat. If you don’t eat processed foods, you might need to keep a survival kit of canned goods. Anything you buy at the supermarket needs to be rotated on a regular basis. Canned food doesn’t keep forever.

Make sure you have a way to cook this stuff after the power goes out. I come from a long line of campers, but if don’t already have a camp stove, get one.

This seems really obvious, but you’d be surprised: make sure you have a way to OPEN CANS without electricity!

For longer term storage there are better options. Do a web search on food storage, or ask a Mormon neighbor to help you out.

FUEL: Before a storm hits, fill the car with gas. I make it a general rule to never get below half a tank, but then, I’m paranoid. Make sure you have fuel for your camp stove. (Propane is the most convenient and probably the safest.) Have flashlights and extra batteries. If your house (like mine) is all-electric, figure out how you are going to keep warm in the winter. A fireplace or wood-burning stove can keep a room or two warm. There are propane camping heaters but they are meant for small tents. Kerosene heaters put out a lot of warmth but liquid fuel can be dangerous indoors. Whatever you use, keep adequate fuel available.

MISC: Paper towels, toilet paper, sanitary products, any medications you take on a regular basis.

DEFENSE: There always seems to be looting after a storm. Most of the time the looters are rummaging through empty homes and stores, but not always.  If you follow the minimal advice I’ve given above, you’ll be in better shape than 90% of your neighbors. What are you going to do if they decide to partake of some freelance socialism and redistribute your wealth? As Captain, you need to be prepared to repel boarders.

There are lots of opinions on this, and mine is far from authoritative. But this is my blog, so I’m going to tell you my opinion. And in my opinion, if you are only going to have one weapon for home defense, it should be a pump-action 12-guage shotgun. Better: in addition to the shotgun, have a rifle in the thirty-caliber neighborhood, and a handgun in a minimum of .38 caliber or 9mm. Both the rifle and shotgun should have short barrels. Tell the sporting goods store you are going to use them for hunting deer in heavily wooded areas, and you’ll get something appropriate.

Stay away from scary-looking black military-style weapons. You want something that could be used for sports like hunting or target shooting. The reason: if you should ever have to defend your family with one of these weapons, you will eventually be sitting in a courtroom while an assistant district attorney shows them to a jury. You want the jury to see you as someone who was driven by circumstances to pick up his hunting gun and defend himself, not as a vigilante survivalist who was chomping at the bit to kill someone.

That list should get you started, or at least get you thinking along the proper lines. Remember that after any significant natural disaster, it’s likely to be a minimum of three days before any kind of help arrives at all, and up to two weeks before the situation stabilizes and serious reconstruction starts.  

Homework assignment: For the next three days, take note of everything that you eat, drink, consume, or use. Ask yourself if you would miss it in the aftermath of a storm. If you would, make sure you have it on hand in your “hurricane kit.”

Body Language

A lot has been written in the manosphere about the importance of body language. An alpha male carries himself confidently. He takes up space without apology. He stands tall and looks people in the eye.

And the opposite: looking down is a sign of submission. A lot of words have been written about this, but here's just one example: Eye Contact Game

In that link, Danger and Play tell us "If a girl looks down, she views herself as lower status than you." And "If you look down, it means you’re submissive. If you look down after making eye contact with a woman, you have subconsciously told her that you’re a worm."

Pop quiz: Below is a split-screen image from the Monday night presidential debate. Which man looks like an Alpha male, and which one looks like a submissive pussy?

Even with the sound off, it was clear who won this debate. But this isn't a political blog, and I'm not making this point to influence how you vote. My point is, you want to look like Romney, not like Obama.

The overwhelming consensus that Romney won the debate has as much to do with his and Obama's body language as it does with anything that either of them said. This stuff is important. If looking at the ground can affect the outcome of a presidential election, just imagine how it can affect your chances of getting laid.

The night of the debate was the Obama's 20th anniversary, so the leader of the free world probably got duty sex in a Denver hotel room after the debate. But I bet Mrs. Romney's panties were dripping during the limo ride back to the hotel and Mr. Romney got righteously laid Monday night.

DHV: Have some credit

When my first marriage broke up, my credit was awful. I had a pre-paid cell phone because even the phone company wouldn’t give me credit. In my defense, I must point out that I was married to a drug addict, but I must also accept responsibility for my own bad decisions – including the decision to remain married to a drug addict for as long as I did.

As soon as we separated, I formulated a plan. I eliminated all excess spending. After alimony, nearly half my take-home pay went to paying down some very old debts. I also worked on cleaning up my credit reports. I won’t go into details here, but I found a lot of useful information at the FICO Forum.  

Three years after the separation, my credit had improved enough that I was able to buy a house. Three years after that, I was able to qualify for an American Express card. That green Amex card is a huge symbol to me, because Amex was the first credit card I ever owned, and the first one to be cancelled for missed payments. Having that card in my wallet reminds me that I am now a responsible adult.

You’ll hear a lot from guys like Dave Ramsey on why it’s important to be debt-free. And I agree with most of it. But being debt-free is not the same thing as not having credit, or not using credit. And sometimes, it’s really important to be able to pull out the credit card and handle a situation.

I was recently in just such a situation. My wife and I attended a family reunion on the other side of the country. It was an area we had never visited, and to maximize our time there we booked the last flight out of the airport the night we were scheduled to return home.

That’s where Murphy’s Law raised its ugly head. Due to mechanical problems, our flight was cancelled. Two hundred people de-planed and headed to the service counter to try to re-book their flights. When it was finally our turn, the very pleasant young man informed us that he could get us two seats on a non-stop flight home at 1:00 PM. It was currently a little after midnight.

“Don’t you have anything leaving earlier?” I really didn’t want to spend the next 13 hours in that airport.

He clicked on his keyboard for a minute. “I have a flight leaving at 9:00 AM. But you have to change planes in Chicago, with a two-hour layover. It arrives at [hometown] 20 minutes later than the non-stop.”

So we take the nonstop. “Can you provide us with a hotel room?” He explained that the airline does keep a block of rooms, but they didn’t have any more available. He gave me a pink slip of paper with an 800 number, and told me that if I called that number they could find me a discounted rate.

My wife, by this point, was getting a little bit nuts. We could see some folks from our flight bedding down in the corner at the next gate. CNN was blaring loudly on an overhead TV screen. I knew it was time to Alpha-up and be the Captain.

“Sit here with the bags,” I told her. “I’m going to go over there where it’s a little quieter, and make a phone call. Don’t panic, I’ve got this.”

I called the number on the card. They told me that they had a few rooms left near this particular airport, at a Marriott. $115 seemed like a good rate, under the circumstances. There was a free shuttle. I wrote down the confirmation number.

I went back to my wife. “Grab your bags, we’re going to the Marriott.” The relief in her eyes was visible.

Instead of a miserable night trying to sleep in an airport, wearing clothes we had been sweating in all day, we got to take hot showers and crawl between clean sheets in a comfortable bed. In the morning we enjoyed a leisurely breakfast overlooking the bay, while watching the airplanes take off from the runway that jutted out into the water. Then we took the free shuttle back to the airport, and the flight home went off without a hitch.

The “old me” wouldn’t have been able to make this happen. After carefully budgeting the trip down to the penny, I wouldn’t have had the resources to deal with the extra Benjamin for the hotel room, not to mention the extra $50 for breakfast. That little green Amex card in my wallet bought me much more than a comfortable night’s sleep and a pleasant breakfast – it let me be a hero to my wife.

And that is a great thing to be.

Alpha move: dress better

Over on Hooking Up Smart, a commenter named Cooper had some questions about why he was attracting the wrong kinds of women. It seems that he has no problem attracting women, but he’s looking for a potential Mrs. Cooper.

I’m not going to suggest that Cooper’s wardrobe is entirely responsible for his problem. There’s a lot going on here, and his clothing choice is only a small part of it. But it’s probably the easiest part to fix.

Cooper says he’s partial to “Obey shirts.” Being of a certain age, I had no idea what an Obey shirt is, so I had to check out their web site. My immediate advice to Cooper was to stop wearing them. He’s in his mid-twenties, so he may be able to get away with wearing graphic tees for a few more years. But even as young as he is, such clothing is not optimal.

I think part of Cooper’s problem is that the graphic tees send a message about him, and that message says that he’s either an adolescent or a thug. That’s directly relevant to his situation, because Red Pill dudes know that adolescents and thugs have no problem attracting women. If he wanted to be like Heartiste or RooshV and tally up a string of one-night-stands, he’d be doing fine. But Cooper is looking for a long-term relationship. Women who are attracted to adolescents and thugs are not LTR material.

A good rule of thumb is to dress one notch above those around you. If you’re a college student and your classmates are all wearing tee shirts, try wearing a polo shirt instead. If casual Friday at your office means all of the men are in polo shirts and khakis, then wear some nice wool slacks and a button down shirt. Don’t be afraid to put on a sport coat when going out to a club. If all the other men are in sport coats, wear a suit. If everyone is wearing a suit, be the guy in the bow tie or the guy with the brightly colored pocket square. 

If you’re over 30 years old, save the graphic tees for doing yard work or changing the oil in your car.

If you need some help with your wardrobe, check out Tanner over at Masculine Style.  Some of his suggestions are a bit too fashion-forward for a guy my age, but he has some good insights on how a man should dress.

 

Clothes may not make the man, but they do say something about him. What are your clothes saying about you?

Alpha Advice: Buy a Motorcycle

I spent last Saturday driving my roadster much too fast on twisty mountain roads, with my wife in the passenger seat. Well, mostly in the passenger seat. I let her drive some, too.

My wife is an adrenalin junkie, so when we got back to our hotel room that night I was handsomely rewarded for scaring the crap out of her. It didn’t even matter that we were both dog tired, sunburned, and the walls were so thin we could hear the fat lesbians giggling in the next room. It was awesome.

But this post is not about getting your wife hot by riding her around in a sports car. It’s about motorcycles, and the women who love the bad boys who ride them.

One of the roads that we drove on that day is a particularly infamous stretch of US Highway 129, known as the Tail of the Dragon. At one end of this stretch of road, there’s a motel that caters to motorcyclists. And next to the motel there’s a pub and grill which serves the best burgers in the area. We ate lunch there, and since it was a Saturday in the summer time, the place was packed. We enjoyed some great people-watching along with our burgers.

There was a wide variety of people to watch. There were young dudes in leather jumpsuits driving crotch-rocket bikes, and grizzled old-timers on chopped Harleys. There were retired couples on Gold Wings, and of course, there were the sports-car guys in Polo shirts and Bermuda shorts.

The first thing that I noticed was the biker women. They ranged from the young and hot to the elderly and morbidly obese, but they all had one thing in common: No matter where they might fall on the hotness scale, every one of them was far hotter than the man she was with

Once I noticed this, I started searching in vain for the exception: surely that fat gray-haired lady… nope, her husband is wrinkled and missing half his teeth. This one looks kind of butch. Oh, that’s because her “boyfriend” is a girl. The 30-something with the bad haircut and lazy eye? Not a biker, she’s married to one of the sports car guys. In every case, if a biker dude had a woman with him, she was two to three points above him on the hotness scale. 

The conclusion is inescapable: buy a motorcycle to increase your sex rank.

N.B. – I will not be taking my own advice. I owned a motorcycle years ago, for about six weeks. In that short span I had two accidents. The first was entirely my own fault, and resulted merely in a bruised ego and some scratched paint. The second could easily have killed me, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could have done to prevent it. I’ll stick to hot two-seat convertibles, thank you very much.

A Find! (And a book review)

I was out with my wife a couple of weeks ago and we stopped in a little consignment shop. While she was trying on clothes, I was browsing through the selection of used books on the back wall.That's where I made this remarkable find: The Game, by Neil Strauss. I'd have bought it if it was a ratty paperback, but was especially delighted to find it bound in leatherette, and decorated with gold leaf. The silk ribbon bookmark is an especially nice touch.

In spite of the binding, this is not a pickup-artist Bible. It's actually the story of how author Neil Strauss transformed himself into a pickup artist called Style, and moved into a Los Angeles mansion with Mystery. It's a memoir rather than a method, but reading it will give you some insight into the methods of the pickup artists. 

The book reads like a novel, and it's a real page-turner. After Style develops the skills to pick up any woman he wants, he begins to question what it is he really wants. He notices that the group of PUAs living in Mystery's house are more concerned with impressing each other than actually meeting women. He discovers that pickup skills are great for one-night stands, but struggles with forming lasting relationships -- too bad he didn't have the benefit of Athol Kay's writings, or The Red Pill Room, to help him with that.

Eventually the infighting and rivalries cause the residents of the house to go their separate ways. Strauss' big insight comes at the end of the book, when his girlfriend Lisa tells him she wants him to be Neil, "balding, nerdy, glasses, and all." 

He realizes that while Lisa liked "the real me," she would never have had the chance to meet him without the Game. 

I needed Mystery, Ross Jeffries, David DeAngelo, David X, Juggler, Steve P., Rasputin, and all those other pseudonyms. I needed them to discover what was me to begin with. And now that I had found that person, brought him out of his shell, and learned to accept him, perhaps I had outgrown them.

Perhaps he had. And all of us in long-term relationships can learn from his experience. The PUAs have some information we can use, but we don't want to be them. 

T-shirt Truth in Advertising?

I'm not sure why this woman chose to advertise her sex rank on her shirt, or why she's offering to show others how to achieve the same score, or why anyone would aspire to be a "3 or 4." But when I saw her in the grocery store I laughed. I just had to share this.

Like most women, she seems to over-estimate her own SR.