…..after all those years of unspoken closeness—after a splendid era cast in cement that should have been easily capable of withstanding even the most stalwart forces of nature and all its omnipotent overseers—I could feel the two of us beginning to drift inexorably apart.  We were gradually headed in opposite directions with no prominent headlines announcing this unexpected divorce.  It wasn’t a tangible thing either, something right in your face, something well-defined and readily identifiable that a person could easily understand and wrap your arms around and perhaps do something about if such was your overriding desire.  Rather, I could just sense that a severance was happening, that our once-close relationship was slowly evaporating into thin air at the behest of fate, much as one senses it is going to imminently rain long before ominous dark clouds begin rolling in on the western horizon or one can sense that a day is gonna be shitty as all tarnation even before you roll out of bed in the morning.  And—sadly and I suppose most telling of all—I really didn’t mind or seem to care that this fateful separation was taking place. No, I didn’t care and, what’s more, I didn’t care either that I didn’t want to take any cathartic, decisive actions that might help restore past glories…..

…..she instinctively felt a compelling need to protect him from himself.  He obviously was in desperate need of a person to run interference for him in life, and she intuitively volunteered for the position.  He was, after all, incapable…..inutile…..hopeless almost.  Don’t ask me why she felt better qualified to run the life of a person—Any person!—other than herself, but she just KNEW deep in her heart that her instincts were uniquely superior to his and that she should therefore unfailingly be the point-person on every decision that impacted his life to any significant degree. She was doing him a big fuckin’ favor is all it truly boiled down to; can’t you see that, Reader?  Can’t you understand that?  Well…..CAN’T YA?!  It’s clearer than a glacial stream to me. Frankly, the guy should be arrantly grateful to her and the stupid nincompoop definitely shouldn’t feel one bit resentful nor be overly annoyed with this blatant intrusion into his life…..

Latent intelligence is not a viable substitute for accrued experience.  Never has been and never will be.  Intelligence is a worthwhile weapon only when it’s allowed to gain temper and weather sufficiently over time.  A virgin piece of premium grade iron ore is impressive in its own right and contains all the potential in the world, but until it has passed through the thousands-of-degrees Fahrenheit temperatures indigenous to a blast furnace, this raw piece of iron possesses no inherent value as a weapon.  Only when confronted with immense temperatures, pressures, and stressors does the original chunk of primal hematite eventually transform into a pluperfect specimen of tungsten steel.  The same holds true regarding intelligence.  Until someone has faced a varied range of life experiences and has had their latent intelligence tested in the searing flames of difficult, real-life circumstances, that supreme intellect—assuming a person truly possesses same, which of course is a variable and never a constant—is virtually worthless in addressing practical, everyday problems.

As one grows older—older in this case being middle-aged and beyond—the concept of a personal future disappears from one’s radar screen.  Past, present, and future are gradually replaced by past, present, and……your children’s future.  Your own future no longer matters one scintilla, but your offspring’s future expands exponentially to become the most important thing in the world to you. And this is unmistakably the direction life should evolve.  Your kids are connaturally worth it; they’ll carry your torch forward into the days ahead regardless of how dim or unworthy that torch’s illumination may be, and yet this really doesn’t matter.  Not at all. They’re still going to be doing it irrespective of whether their last name is Lincoln or Trump.  Conversely, there is nothing more detestable and pathetic in our terrestrial world than seeing a disgustingly large subset of vainglorious, self-entitled old buttfuckers recklessly wasting precious resources, especially medical services and available donor organs, in ruthless pursuit of their own version of immortality.  These flesh-and-blood abominations act as though their continued presence on Earth’s surface supersedes everyone else’s yearning for happiness and understandable desire to receive a fair, if not large, share of the health care pie. Well, just to set the record straight once and for all: You’re emphatically wrong in your mercenary thinking, Old Bastards, and the departure of people holding your selfish beliefs represents a net gain to society, not a net loss!

Each day is different in some respect. That difference may be elephantine or it may be atomic—doesn’t matter in the least—but this variance, more than anything else, is what makes life so especial and endearing in the first place. Stability may be comforting and every bit as soothing as a steaming Finnish sauna, yet it’s also intrinsically yawn-provoking. Thus change of any kind is a good thing and a prerequisite for personal growth.  Embrace any and all changes while affectionately wrapping your arms around them, since life is not suddenly going to shift into reverse and zoom backwards purely because change frightens you and you’re feeling nostalgic and you yearn for everything around you to remain exactly the same as it was in the past.  And do remember this point in passing too, in light of the fact it’s the most important kernel to be pried away from today’s corncob of advice: Whatever new change comes your way—positive, negative, or nonaligned—will only be transitory in nature, inasmuch as there will most assuredly be something newer and different following closely on its heels…..ad infinitum, ad infinitum, ad infinitum…..  In a world rife with a panoply of variables—Far too many to count only with integers, actually—change is ironically the one and only constant in each of our daily lives.

…..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…..