…..she gave them virtually everything they wanted and everything they asked for, but she didn’t offer them inarguably the most valuable commodity of all: Her time.  And next to that glaring omission, all the expensive, glossy largesse she showered on them really didn’t amount to much of anything.  Nil.  Nothing of lasting value; nothing to write home about; nothing to cherish indefinitely. They desperately wanted her time; she favored them with money and shiny trinkets in lieu of it and no one wound up being satisfied in the end.  There were no winners in this regrettable scenario. They believed her to be a self-indulgent swine who only cared about herself, and she in turn thought them to be bratty ingrates who could never be satisfied or happy with anything she threw in their direction. A classic stalemate then. A hopeless deadlock. An unwinnable impasse. They both had everything in the world from a materialistic perspective, yet from the more important firmamental perspective they had nothing to speak of—nothing that made them truly happy, nothing that made their earthly existences more pleasurable and redeeming…..

…..and he sold a piece of property that he dearly loved for an exceptionally handsome profit and was feeling really good about himself and absolutely full of himself for a short while afterward until he started thinking about what he was going to do with the windfall he had received in exchange for that property.  Yes, what on Earth was he going to do with this new, handsome cache of money?  Money in and of itself is worthless—ugly in nature and intrinsically no more valuable than the greasy paper it’s printed upon—and its true value thereby only comes when it’s exchanged for either material goods or pleasant, memorable experiences.  Well, he had just gotten rid of one of the all-time favorite material goods he had ever “possessed”, therefore what was the point in rushing out to buy another object in a frantic attempt to replace it?  And that’s assuming he could find something that he genuinely liked better, which quite frankly wasn’t likely to happen in the short term.  Pleasurable experiences?  Yes, that idea sounded enticing, truly—parlaying a material object for time spent rapturously is almost always a winner in the “big picture” school of thought—but he had already gone on a host of enviable vacations in the past year and wasn’t particularly inebriated with the proper spirit to go on yet another one so soon afterwards. Ergo, what exactly should this guy do with his newfound bonanza?  Any ideas?  Yeeeeeeesss……….NOOOOOOOO?????  About “ownership” then.  No one genuinely owns anything secondary to our ephemeral stay on Earth.  At most, lucky individuals live until they are approximately one hundred years old, and cartoonishly lucky hominid dinosaurs might live until they’re one hundred and ten. The Earth itself—that’s right, our endearing home planet allegiantly revolving around the Sun—including its surface array of chemical components that cruise through more recent terrestrial times in the vainglorious guise of “material possessions” for individuals of the Homo sapiens species, has been around for roughly four and half BILLION years. Yes, BILLION!!! I asked Alexa, and she dutifully informed me that 100 divided by 4,500,000,000 is 2.2 to the minus 8^th power; in other words, a nearly infinitesimally microscopic figure. And then to think earthlings actually have the nerve and audacity to selfishly claim ownership over portions of the cosmic spaceship on which they transiently reside as passengers, if only for a celestial attosecond?  Yes, a certifiably asinine, mindboggling thought, I know!  In any case, the paladin at the beginning of this dissertation sold his valued property for a fistful of money, felt smugger than a thrice-fucked virgin for a smattering of days owing to his cleverness and entrepreneurial acumen…..but then what?  Yes, what’s the next logical step for him to take?  If you don’t ultimately convert the money you hold in your pockets into shiny toys and brag-worthy possessions and extravagant vacations, what good is it anyway; what good is it anyway; WHAT GOOD IS IT ANYWAY???  That’s right—NO GOOD…..GOOD FOR NOTHING!!!  Let’s be completely honest here, Reader:  Money merely gathering interest in a bank account or a C.D. is about as sexy and glamorous as a nagging case of hemorrhoids, but unlike those hemorrhoids you won’t be taking any of the money or financial instruments you own now or in the future to your gravesite, crematorium chamber, or whatever option you choose for initiating your body’s conversion back to the stardust whence it came.  So SPEND SPEND SPEND and horde as many memories as you possibly can now because the money and financial annuities you currently own will be irrecoverable and thus WORTHLESS WORTHLESS WORTHLESS the instant you die.…..

A huge abyss exists between “I had a chance to…..” and “I did it because the opportunity was there…..”.  That’s right, a HUGE abyss that reveals everything you need to know about another person’s core character. About their resolve.  About the substance and strength of their spine. About their belief in themselves.  About their overriding sense of adventure. About the size of their cajónes. And at the end of the day, isn’t that what life unmistakably is: A behemoth adventure rife with opportunities?  The answer is a resounding “Yes!”, and the gulf separating wishful thinking from concrete action is even wider than the one separating New Orleans, Louisiana from the country of Venezuela.  Make sure you don’t just “Talk the talk!”.  No, “Walk the walk!” while you’re at it.  Who knows?   In time, you might actually grow to like it.

…..and the days grew progressively longer as he got older while the dreams of his lost youth shriveled up—one by one by one—and gradually vanished into thin air until there were none left for him to treasure. Is this then, he resignedly thought to himself, the real curse of old age: That I must now endure each week-long day—one piled slavishly atop the other like an endless row of felled dominoes—with nothing to look forward to other than my eventual cessation of breathing and ensuing chemical transformation from a dynamic flesh-and-blood organism into an elementary mishmash of carbon derivatives?  He slowly stood up at this point in time, sighed, stretched his limbs in exaggerated fashion akin to a creaky old dog just awoken from a sun-bathed nap, and shambled off to his congested medicine cabinet to indulge in some life-enhancing and—just as critically—life-lengthening nourishment. This certainly doesn’t feel very much like joyful, divinely blessed living, he thought, but then again it sure as hell beats the holy shit out of the alternative…..for the time being, at least…..

…..she thought she was authentically special and unique and sublime—irreplaceable to the human species, if the clandestine truth of the matter must be revealed in this literary passage. As such, she demanded that she be able to commandeer a small piece of finite and, by extension, invaluable ground and deface it with an engraved chunk of granite so that other earthlings could commemorate her and worship her demigodesque memory for all eternity after she died and moved on or didn’t move on (The jury is out and will forever be out on this supernatural subject) to another plane of existence. Predictably, said never happened and now that Lilliputian piece of real estate that she so greedily appropriated stands unnoticed and unattended three hundred and sixty-five days out of the year and, as such—arrantly wasted in lieu of some useful purpose like food generation or recreational park space…..

…..the alarm clock rang shrilly somewhere off to his left and he instinctively realized that he was currently in the process of switching gears from a deeper level of consciousness to this shallower one that seemed to altogether characterize his banal days spent on Earth’s rocky crust. And he grunted softly in dissatisfaction then because he knew that he was leaving unfinished business behind, probably never to be completed at any point in the future. The dream from just seconds before lingered in his brain since it was so vivid, so lifelike……so crucial to his very existence!  And yet he knew as soon as he hopped out of bed and started getting dressed for the virgin day now fully arrived, that weird but somehow essential storyline from the night before would hurriedly disappear from his memory banks not unlike the dementia that skulks around to relentlessly plague and sabotage countless old farts’ recall capabilities—doubtless never to reappear in the exact same fashion. Ergo he mourned the inevitable loss of an integral part of his entity as he pulled on his trousers, scrambled to find a clean dirty shirt, and stared in the dresser mirror, because the narrative in which he was the featured player just minutes earlier was now destined for consciousness’s trash bin and—zooming ahead in time some twenty-four hours—there too he would almost certainly find himself decrying the permanent loss of another different but no less vital plotline ginned up by subconscious gremlins while the rest of his body slept and reenergized for the next day…..

Get it right straight out of the chute, or problems are likely to surface immediately and then ramify exponentially if you screw something up at the outset!  Do your utmost not to be caught off guard when facing a new situation because even a slight lapse of judgment can and likely WILL come back to haunt you ten- or even twenty-fold. This isn’t to say the middlegame and the endgame are not equally important in the grand scheme of things, but mathematics teaches us that incorrect variables introduced early in an equation reverberate disproportionately throughout the remaining equation, whereas incorrect variables introduced at a later juncture don’t impact the final product to such an exaggerated degree. In other words, all errors are NOT created equal; early mistakes are more insidious and infect the patient to a far greater extent than opportunistic pathogens that gleefully pile on in the latter stages of a pandemic. For the sake of convenience, just remember this counterintuitive little aphorism: First is worst!

…..what are you waiting for exactly?  Is there a better time to do what obviously needs to be done?  Huh?!  Well…..IS THERE?!  I think not too!  So get your fat, lazy ass in gear this very instant and do what needs to be done!  Enough already with the goddamned all-day procrastinating!  An important job is waiting for you and, trust me, time by nature is NOT a connaturally patient entity! Time doesn’t stop moving simply because you do, nor will it ever.  Hence go do the work now and get it over with, lest someone else or—more likely—fate intervenes and ultimately denies you the opportunity. Yes, distilled down to its barest essence, that’s actually what this whole fucking dynamic inherently represents:  A sublime opportunity, and if you don’t grab the elaborately disguised opportunity by the horns right now and wrestle it to the ground and pin its shoulders to the mat you’ll then have a lot of explaining to do to Someone far greater than myself and your exasperated friends and family members waiting back home…..

…..when she unexpectedly left him standing all alone on the altar not unlike a flagpole in the center of a sprawling suburban mall, she at least was sufficiently generous to leave behind a token present in his honor as well:  A gaping hole in his soul that no amount of mortar or putty or spackling could ever hope to repair or gloss over.  He became an emotional cripple following her surprise disappearance, albeit through no fault of his own.  To wit: How can you ever hope to function as a normal human being once your soul has been publicly ripped to shreds and subsequently left lying exposed for all the vultures of the world to peck on and fight over?  Yes indeed, he was undeniably a pitiful pitiful creature in the aftermath of being jilted on the altar, and his pursuant life—or what purportedly posed for a life, that is—was pitiful and sickeningly brittle too.  About the only thing he could think of doing after she abruptly abandoned him at the front of a church packed full of eager celebrants was to begin counting down the months, weeks, and days until his forgettable sojourn on the surface of this small planet would prayerfully come to an end. Just hurry up and wait. Time can’t disappear fast enough anymore. Let’s get this whole fuckin’ charade over with as quickly and painlessly as possible!  Accelerate the timetable, maybe, something that was easily within his physical capabilities?  Nah.  Nah……nah…..nah, only crazy, unhinged lunatics did anything that outrageously extreme. He surely wasn’t to such a desperate juncture yet, although he did make certain to file a mental note to himself that he shouldn’t absolutely rule out this nuclear option in the future if his life continued its inexorable downward spiral…..

Many, if not most, investments will NOT turn out to be big winners.  That’s just commonsense wed to simple arithmetic; if investing was simple, everyone on your block would own a palatial mansion with two Maseratis and a luxury speedboat parked conspicuously in their driveways.  But they don’t, of course.  You must accept this stark reality straight up front if you decide to run the risk of investing some or all your money in entities or instruments that run some degree of risk.  Yet never forget the flip side of the coin either, which is this: All it takes is one or two or three big “hits” to offset all the losses you may be forced to absorb on other investments in your financial portfolio.  Said is purely the price you must pay for being in the game—the “cover charge” to gain entrance into the cutthroat financial world, in other words.  Because if you don’t want to run any risk whatsoever—If you wanna play everything perfectly safe and be absolutely guaranteed that you’ll never lose one penny of value—go and “invest” all your earnings in a commercial bank savings account, but then don’t let me hear you complaining one peep as you go about collecting a whopping one percent interest bonus on your “investment” at the end of the calendar year. Better yet, why don’t you follow Gramps’ savvy investment lead and stash all your earnings in a coffee can as a prelude to sneaking outside after dark to bury that “savings account” in your backyard for long-term safekeeping.  Your money will doubtless be secure and risk-free hidden beneath the soil as it shares space with nightcrawlers, grubworms, nematodes, and others of their ilk, but a peculiar hunch of mine keeps insisting the cash you hide away probably won’t grow too much in value over time.  Truthfully—even assuming a low rate of inflation, which naturally is never an ironclad certainty—any money you have hidden away in your coffee can will depreciate in value with astonishing rapidity not unlike the once-new car sitting in your driveway or the still sparkling year-old appliances anchoring your kitchen.