Set aggressive yet realistic work goals.  Nothing is more depressing than to work your ass off all day long without really wasting any time, only to peruse your checklist at the end of the session and discover that you’ve come up well short of meeting your stated “goals” for the day.  Hard work deserves a better outcome; don’t allow this dynamic to happen—this clumsily engineered, utterly predictable disappointment—inasmuch as you are quartermaster over the usage of every minute of your time and should therefore know better.  Treat yourself fairly and with some built-in slack, no differently than you would others!

The definition of an insult is not to be merely criticized; it is to be WRONGFULLY criticized.  Believe me, there is a leviathan gulf separating the two.  Criticism that is securely founded in fact and honesty does not qualify as an insult, even if it stings and greatly hurts your feelings. Use it as fuel to propel more productive efforts in the future.  Conversely, an insult must be a comment of an untrue nature and it likewise must be directed at you in pejorative fashion. Insults are unfailingly malignant in nature. Delivering the truth may oftentimes be rude, but it is never insulting.  And if you still cannot differentiate between the two, I hereby pronounce you thin-skinned and undeserving of sympathy. If all you ever seek are broad, insincere compliments and unctuous flattery, go back home and let Momma fawn all over you while she gets you spoiled, insular, and fat.

You’ve just gotta bear down and resist those hunger wolves when then start gathering and prowling around the perimeter of your regular meals or they’ll rush right in and seize control over your campsite and turn you into a fat, disgusting, slavering person before you even realize such a thing is happening. Obesity is not a gallant frontal attacker, not a rigid adherent to the Marquis of Queensbury rules governing civilized pugilism, not a paladin perched atop a glistening white steed.  Rather, fatness sneaks up on you from behind and seeks to overpower you with passive measures and clever artifice as opposed to raw brute force.  But don’t be seduced by this fact and, most importantly, never let your guard down for too long.  No, not even for an instant!  Don’t become complacent merely because your opponent isn’t frightfully aggressive and physically menacing.  Know this, and in fact commit it to memory: Corpulence absolutely DOES NOT need to be those things in order to accomplish its sinister objective!

A sense of desperation reeks badly; it has a distinct smell all its own and, rest assured, that smell isn’t a pleasant one!  One can identify its sickening odor from five miles away, little different than a dead deer that has been lying in a roadside ditch for three straight days in blistering heat and now affords a luxe dinner for competing flocks of squawking crows and leering turkey vultures.  So don’t ever allow yourself to reach this precarious juncture; don’t ever allow any plight you might be experiencing to become so transparent that others can readily notice it.  Because if you do—If you broadcast through your words, demeanor, and body language that you’re experiencing especially tough times—expect every degree of abuse, retribution, and exploitation to cascade down upon you from outside parties, both known enemies along with seemingly perfect strangers.  Why?  Well, because quite simply natural selection never stops working—not at the lowest levels of protozoans, not at intermediate levels of predatory mammals, and not at the highest, most sophisticated levels of hominid interaction either. Unfortunate that this is the case, I guess, but pay absolute homage to the following truism in light of the fact it remains relevant for all time: Vulnerability begets dominion—once, now, and forever.

Well, the day finally arrived……   The day that I can’t say I was truly dreading, yet it definitely wasn’t a day I was joyously looking forward to either.  One of those shitty, repulsive, despicable days we all experience at infrequent intervals in our lifetimes, but not quite rising (sinking) to the level of toxic and radioactive. It came and I was as ready for it as I guess I probably ever could have hoped to be, given the unique circumstances surrounding this temporal bastard. And do you know what? It didn’t turn out to be so bad after all!  That’s right, after all that worrying and teeth-gnashing and nervous pants-pissing, nothing earthshakingly bad or nefarious happened that even came close to matching the sum total of useless worrying and negative imaginings that I’d invested in the affair in advance. Not even close, I tell ya! And that taught me a “lifelong” lesson that’ll doubtless last only until the next anguish-ridden imbroglio rears its vile head before me and then bares its bloody fangs. Namely, fretting is a classically inutile emotion, and circumstances rarely turn out as bad as we envision they’ll be during our all-night, pre-event angst sessions.

Does he come blessed with peculiar insights that afford him an elevated perspective on this particular issue?  Is he divinely inspired?  Is he some sort of precocious savant?  Is he preternaturally gifted?  Or does he just think that is the case?  More to the point, is he one of those typical “know-it-alls” who claims mental supremacy on every subject in the Universe when there is no empirical evidence—None whatsoever!—to suggest he is cerebrally equipped in such a manner?  That’s the critical question begging to be addressed before we can move forward and solve the pressing issue lying before us, that is, if a workable solution does in fact exist.  We can’t just gullibly rely upon his words and exaggerated claims for validation.  Uh uh.  No. Null set.  That would prove to be an egregious, unforgivable mistake if his words and attendant edicts turn out to be no more grounded in bedrock than a house built upon spindly stilts. Is he the real deal or a fumbling, feckless, fuckish fraud? THAT, My Breathlessly Waiting Brothers and Sisters, is the million-dollar question for today, and the whole success of our cooperative project hinges on answering this crucial query correctly.

A simple, but failsafe, method for determining the latent intelligence of any person is whether they’re willing to accept rational alternatives for blind faith in a supernatural being.  Or to rephrase this issue another way: Is a person open to the possibility that other options exist independent from an unwavering, but inherently unprovable, belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent God?  Can human life exist on planet Earth without a supernatural being overseeing it?  Is randomness—chaos, if you will—somehow an unnatural and illogical state of being?  Because if a person is not open to this inherently logical line of free thinking, then you can immediately draw the rightful conclusion that you’re dealing with a connaturally stubborn, dogmatic, obtuse—And yes, willfully ignorant!—individual and proceed with said relationship accordingly. All information registered in our brains is technically good information, even when it comes couched as unwanted and oftentimes unexpected nescience manifested. Deity believers may be right and atheists likewise may be right in their core convictions, but neither camp can produce a single shred of empirical evidence to support their diametrically opposite claims. Some things are meant to be known and others are not; the creation and governance of our peculiar Universe certainly falls within these amorphous boundaries.

You can’t turn back the clock. You can’t make old young again. You can’t make worn-out new again. You can’t squeeze a genie back into the bottle wherest it came. You can’t dream impossibility into reality. You can’t reset the natural pacemaker on a heart that has fallen irreparably into chaos. And you can’t turn back time. No, you can never turn back time irrespective of our most shrill, demanding proclamations. Time goes on relentlessly…..unerringly……metronomically…..forever…..but biological bodies do not and never have. Life dies eventually whereas time doesn’t. The lesson to be taken from this miniature sermon? DON’T WASTE TIME….EVER!!!  Death pays no dividends, only “death benefits” (How’s that for a classic oxymoron cooked up by idiotic life insurance linguists?!) to family members we leave behind.  And who in their right mind would consider that a fair tradeoff?

…..”Why do you waste an hour every week going to church?” he continually asked her, and all she could really say in response was that she just felt a lot better and more content when that anointed hour was over. Irrespective of her belief in Christianity—and her feelings were admittedly tepid when it came to such a seminal subject, that much was true—she just felt a lot more gratified and unselfish when she donated an hour of her time each week to some unknown cause apart from her usual personal agenda and edification. Thus she continued going to church, continued to sit and listen to some hubristic pastor ramble on superciliously for too long and far too confidently and way too passionately even though she had a million pressing things to do back at her residence, yet she continued to experience zero regrets when she’d arrive home late every Sunday forenoon, lightyears behind on her to-do list and anxious as Hell to begin catching up with all the demanding things on it.  And she also continued to tell him exactly the same thing whenever he aggressively queried her about that egregiously “wasted time”: “I go to church each week because I like the way I feel afterwards. No amount of work or pleasure could ever replace that transcendent feeling……”…..

We hominids make plans for the future and try bossing it around as though it’s a dumb, compliant head of livestock, yet it’s anything but.  Contrarily, the future is our unquestioned master—a tyrant masking a mercurial temper who brandishes a whip over our heads at all times—and we’re subject to her every whim and vicissitude regardless of how arbitrary and unfair those impulses may appear to be on the surface. Accordingly, let’s not mince words here and I’ll be brutally clear about one thing and one thing only: The future is NOT our personal playground to assiduously make plans for and lord over like it’s a piece of malleable chattel…..like it’s some type of subservient domain put here for human hedonistic pleasure. Rather, we’re invited guests only and we should therefore accord it—“it” in this case being that uncharted wilderness of time stretching out in front of us for as far as the eye can see and for as far as the mind can conjure—the same degree of respect at all times and definitely NOT take it for granted!