Apparently I'm a Wolverine?!

Some people take personality quizzes. Some people get their star chart read at the farmers market.

I asked an AI.

Based on everything you know about me from all my rants and conversations. What is my spirit animal?

I’m not sure what I was expecting. Something dignified, probably. An eagle. A wolf. Maybe a yellow lab, because deep down I’m a loyal, lovable guy who just wants everybody to follow the rules and get along.

It said wolverine.

Then it explained itself, which was worse.

Your spirit animal is a wolverine, because apparently nature needed a creature that was aggressively independent, chronically irritated, impossible to intimidate, and physically incapable of leaving well enough alone. You don’t have hobbies; you have temporary obsessions that begin with “I wonder how this works” and end three weeks later with a new tool, a half-disassembled machine, seventeen browser tabs, and a 2,400-word rant about why everyone else has been doing it wrong for fifty years. Boat broken? Buy the bastard. Car problem? Diagnose it yourself. Weird medical symptom? Congratulations, you now know more about that organ than half the waiting room. Government policy annoys you? Somewhere, a PDF is about to get absolutely fucking interrogated. You roam mentally from Rails architecture to marine electrical systems to tax policy to woodworking to radioactive iodine with the serene focus of a raccoon loose inside Home Depot. Underneath all that, though, you’re weirdly protective and fairness-obsessed, which is unfortunate because it means every idiot, bureaucracy, scam, contradiction, and bad system you encounter becomes your personal emotional support grievance. So yes: wolverine — specifically one wearing reading glasses, holding a multimeter in one paw and the Constitution in the other, standing next to six unfinished projects and saying, “No, no, I’ve almost got this figured out.”

I would like to file a complaint.

Unfortunately, filing complaints appears to be my entire personality, so I’m not sure that helps my case.

WOLVERINES!

Let’s get the obvious part out of the way. When somebody says “wolverine,” most people picture Hugh Jackman with kitchen knives coming out of his knuckles.

I’m a child of the ’80s. I picture Patrick Swayze and a bunch of teenagers screaming “WOLVERINES!”

In Red Dawn, from 1984, a handful of high school kids in Calumet, Colorado, watch Soviet paratroopers land outside their school, grab some hunting rifles, run for the mountains and fight a guerrilla war named after their school mascot. At one point their dad yells “Avenge me!” through a prison-camp fence. So they do.

Honestly, that might be the most accurate part of this whole thing. That is exactly how I approach a bureaucracy: outnumbered, outgunned, armed with whatever was lying around in the truck, and completely convinced I’m the hero of the movie.

The VA sends me a denial letter, and somewhere in my head a teenage Charlie Sheen is screaming “WOLVERINES!” at a filing cabinet.

The prosecution presents its evidence

Here’s the thing. The AI’s roast was good. It was also too nice. It was working from memory.

I have receipts. This whole website is an evidence locker.

Exhibit A: the blog. I’ve been running this site since February 2000. It has more than 250 posts, and more than 140 of them are filed under a category I created, myself, on purpose, called “Rant.” The AI guessed my rants run about 2,400 words. That’s adorable. Building 7 ran well past 3,000.

Exhibit B: the titles. These are real post titles from this real website:

I have published a blog post titled “I hate people” twice. Three years apart. The second time, I dropped the “Goddamn” and added a dot. Personal growth.

Somewhere in the middle of all that hate there’s a five-star review, from 2007: Home Depot kicks ass! So when the AI compared me to “a raccoon loose inside Home Depot,” that wasn’t a joke. That was a citation.

Exhibit C: the airplane. I have written two separate posts about how much I hate airplanes. So naturally, years later, I started building one. From a kit. There is still a page on this site called RV-10 Build Log, and it now opens with the words “I have sold the build.”

The AI said “six unfinished projects.” It was only counting the ones that fit in the picture.

Exhibit D: the boat. “Boat broken? Buy the bastard.” In my defense, it wasn’t broken when I bought it. It was just a 36-year-old yacht that had been sitting for three years, which I described, in writing, on this very blog, as “several thousand pounds of floating deferred maintenance.”

I knew. I bought it anyway. That’s the wolverine part.

I also wrote a whole post, I Don’t Idle Well, about how I can’t sit still. I wrote it instead of sitting still.

Exhibit E: the waiting room. “Weird medical symptom? Congratulations, you now know more about that organ than half the waiting room.” I have an adrenal gland that makes too much aldosterone. A normal person listens to the doctor and goes home. I read a Cochrane review, a 133-trial meta-analysis and the PURE study, then wrote a very long post asking whether salt was ever really the villain.

Even my adrenal glands hoard things.

Exhibit F: the résumé. According to my own About page, I’ve been a soldier, a cop, a software engineer and a small-business owner. The Army trained me in signals intelligence and then, to quote myself, “Mostly I fixed trucks in the motor pool.”

That’s four different institutions I’ve been professionally annoyed by from the inside. Now I do it for free, in public, with footnotes.

Exhibit G: this website, right now. This blog has AI Notes that fact-check me in little yellow bubbles. And as of this week, the hard words get squiggly underlines and a definition card, because apparently yelling at you wasn’t educational enough. Most people who need supervision get a therapist. I built a feature.

Go ahead. Hover over “multimeter” up there. You know I had to.

I looked it up, obviously

Of course I did. You can’t tell a guy like me he’s a wolverine and expect him not to go read about wolverines.

It gets worse.

The wolverine’s scientific name is Gulo gulo. Gulo is Latin for “glutton.” My spirit animal is named Glutton Glutton. For punishment, apparently.

It’s the largest land-dwelling member of the weasel family, built like a small bear with the attitude of a much bigger one.

One of its nicknames is “skunk bear,” because when it’s provoked, it produces something unpleasant. So do I. Mine usually runs about 1,500 words.

A single male patrols a territory of more than 500 square kilometers, and a hungry one can cover 40 miles in a day. The AI said I “roam mentally from Rails architecture to marine electrical systems to tax policy.” Same energy. Fewer miles.

And there are numerous accounts of wolverines chasing much larger animals off a carcass, from black bears to entire wolf packs.

Weight class has never once factored into my decision-making. On this blog alone I’ve picked fights with Microsoft, Wix, the RIAA, Citibank, Hostgator, the Department of Veterans Affairs, every flat earther on the internet and, most recently, the federal income tax. Every single one of them is bigger than me. I’m not sure any of them noticed. I kept swinging anyway.

The picture

Then I made the mistake of asking it for an avatar.

My official portrait, courtesy of the same AI. Note the dog.

Look at this guy.

Reading glasses. Multimeter in one paw, the Constitution in the other. A cup of coffee. A workbench covered in wiring that is definitely going to work this time. A boat up on stands out back. A monitor with roughly four hundred tabs open, one of which is, naturally, another boat.

That’s not an avatar. That’s a surveillance photo.

Except for one thing. Lying on the floor behind him, fast asleep, is a big yellow dog. The AI drew a golden retriever, which is close, but as far as I’m concerned that’s Sadie, and Sadie was a yellow lab.

She’s gone now, and I never mentioned her to the AI. Not once. It put her in the shop anyway, sprawled out in the middle of everything, sound asleep, having heard the “I’ve almost got this figured out” speech a few thousand times and decided, very reasonably, to take a nap.

That’s exactly where she’d be. I’ll allow it.

Fine. I’m a wolverine.

The part that actually got me was near the end, where it said that underneath all of it I’m “weirdly protective and fairness-obsessed,” and that’s why every idiot, bureaucracy, scam and bad system turns into my “personal emotional support grievance.”

I’d argue with that. But I’d need about 2,400 words to do it, and that would kind of prove the point.

So fine. I’m a wolverine. Reading glasses, multimeter, Constitution, six unfinished projects.

And for the record: I’ve almost got this figured out.

WOLVERINES!