Author: Fred Blahnik

I know this is probably sickeningly cliché to hear once again and for approximately the millionth time in your life, but each day that passes by advances you twenty-four hours closer to your eventual and certain death.  You cannot relive that day.  You don’t get a second chance at it; no mulligans!  You won’t miraculously gain passage into a secret time machine and suddenly roar backwards in defiance of the Roman calendar while experiencing a Homeric rebirth. None of these things will ever happen, of course; that’s only wishful thinking carried to an extreme.  Conversely, time will continue flowing along just like Old Man River, and the upstream locales we witnessed or experienced as recently as yesterday are now gone forever.  They are memories…..useless artifacts…..irrelevant residua…..history; completely inaccessible to us anymore irrespective of any and all regrets that we may continue harboring in our hearts germane to them. As such, regrets are ghosts of the past—flowers blooming lustily on the altar of a wedding long since concluded after all the guests have departed.  Regrets are cruel that way, but that’s precisely why we want to leave them in the past where they were birthed and still rightfully belong.

Permanence doesn’t exist.  Does not.  Never has.  Never will.  The concept of permanence is impossible to understand. Nothing lasts forever; nothing stays the same; nothing is immutable.  Not we humans, not the Earth we live on, not our sun, not our galaxy, and not our universe either although no one residing on a tiny, blue, inconsequential planet niched somewhere off in a distant corner of the Milky Way star cluster will ever be privy to its cold, whimpering demise. Nothing lasts forever; nothing stays the same; nothing is immutable. Certainly not the batch of dreams we hatched and pursuantly incubated when we were only knee-high to a grasshopper and still fervently believed in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the benevolence of government at every level and the intrinsic equality of all human beings. In terms of theory, permanence and infinity belong squarely in the same conversation, in the sense neither can be understood or logically explained with the feeble entity that passes for human intellect. On metaphysically complex issues such as the ones I referenced, we of the Homo sapiens species can only speculate and make unsupported, unsubstantiated guesses, rendering us little different than the yak, the ostrich, and the ring-tailed lemur. No better than those cognitively maligned creatures insofar as comprehending existential conundrums, but assuredly no worse either if you want to be charitable and look at the bright side of things. Nothing lasts forever; nothing stays the same; nothing is immutable. Period.

……they argued perpetually over the relative merits of dogs versus cats, yet he could never come close to understanding her point of view. Cats are loathsome creatures—sterile and implacable and sans emotions—yet she still defended them as though they are affectionate and loving and therefore deserving of unfettered loyalty. She was grossly misinformed about the subject without even realizing it. So tell me this, Reader: Why would anyone with a functional brain love a cat?  You could just as easily say you love the Delta table-saw sitting inorganic and smothered in sawdust out in your garage as saying you love a cat. Sure, both objects serve a useful purpose—the table-saw for trimming lumber to size, the cat for catching an occasional mouse when it’s in the mood—but there’s nothing innately lovable about either. In his mind, love and loyalty were interchangeable entities, and he had never in his lifetime claimed fealty to a table-saw, let alone a cat that refused to come rushing up wagging its tail and slobbering all over everything when he arrived home from work at the end of a particularly stressful day. See, dogs are immanently and irresistibly lovable and automatically warm a person’s heart when they do neat stuff like that. And cats?  NOOOOO!!!!!…..

…..a novelty.  In the end it turned out to be nothing more than a fuckin’ novelty.  Plain and simple and as lower-cased as that.  Nothing complicated or nuanced or multi-layered or cryptically remarkable about it.  Just a fuckin’, plain and simple, human-nature-enticing novelty.  And thus he was left to malinger and mope around  back on Square One for a while longer, only this time majorly further advanced down his singular path of life from when he first started pursuing the promising endeavor eons and eons ago. Or at least that’s the way it seemed during this bewildering moment of introspection if one voluntarily accepts the fundamental premise of Einstein’s extensive writings regarding relativity, and why shouldn’t you considering the disheveled, long-dead guy just looks like a fulminating intellectual five times smarter than anyone a normal person typically associates with?  Yes, unfortunately, all of his distasteful soul searching and self-flagellation owed itself to a fuckin’ novelty that he gladly genuflected to and fell head-over-heels in love with and gladly flattered himself over as well, yet without embracing any cogent thought process addressing the inevitable consequences that he would climactically and disappointedly face as a direct result of his bullheadedness and take-no-prisoners approach to the matter. Oh yeah yeah yeah, he had been wrong—Dead wrong!—about the whole fuckin’ thing from the very outset, but only now were the pigeons coming home to roost and the horses returning to their rightful stalls in the stable. Only now was the obnoxious piper clamoring to be paid yet, most disturbing of all, he had no money left in his pockets to pay that cocksure, braying son-of-a-bitch…..

And so, My Dear Friends, until we meet again to break bread and sip wine and exchange lively stories, may you always tread in the shadow of good fortune, may the wind always be at your back, may the sun always be warm but not hot on your exposed skin, may your path always lead downhill but not at too steep of a grade, and may the ground beneath your feet always remain firm and non-treacherous. I leave you now in the safe, comforting hands of God, My Much-Beloved Brethren, with far more reasons to live than to die until the next time destiny opts for us to cross paths. Therefore live the good life and forever honor virtue and constantly fight the good fight until we meet again…..or NOT…..in which case I wish you a smooth, painless transition into the next realm of being, if one in fact truly exists.

Burning bridges is not necessarily a bad thing.  You’ll run across a lot of bridges in life that are rotten to the core and deserve nothing better than to be annihilated as quickly as possible.  Individuals who chronically scramble to preserve all their “Plan B’s” never achieve their “Plan A’s”; it’s way too easy to unloose your grip on the bowstring if anything less than a perfect kill shot presents itself.  That’s not to say you should burn every bridge once you cross over it—to do so would be reckless and woefully myopic—but certain bridges are not worth keeping and therefore should be immediately destroyed.  And for those well-intentioned but imbecilic recreants who insist you should leave every bridge you cross intact lest you may want to cross back over it again someday, I would say this to them: You’re looking in the wrong direction, Dear Fool; you’re gazing in the arrantly wrong direction!  The future rises brightly and boldly on THIS side of the bridge that you just traversed, not back on its distant side. Do you want to explore the awesome thing we call the future…..or do you honestly want to double back in time and relive the past? The future is a sublime gift and that’s why the Arrow of Time runs in only one direction—FORWARD AND TO THE RIGHT!

Just as bad times never last, in all honesty…..neither do good times.  Everything in life is perpetually in a state of random flux.  Change is the only real constant in this universe of ours. Hence if your life seems too good to be true during a particularly enchanting moment, it probably is and change of the negative variety is already in the offing back in the locker-room. This is inevitable, no different than the metronomic arc of a pendulum or the steady rhythm of the ocean tides. But always remember this: The opposite is likewise true, so don’t get too dejected and quickly give up hope when the pendulum swings once more to the left and sinister clouds move in and take up temporary residence directly over your head, something I guarantee will ineluctably happen to you in time—many times over! This compromised condition is temporary as well; the pendulum won’t remain stuck in a pejorative position permanently and it’ll work its way back toward you in time. Why? Because it will. No one knows why, or at least no person rightfully claiming prudence can offer a plausible explanation. Life is structured in a rhythmic, oscillating pattern for no apparent reason.

…..we don’t see eye-to-eye on most things. I believe in the future; he lives in the past.  I believe in investing in humanity; he believes in investing only in himself.  I see my descendants as being proud torchbearers of our family name; he sees them merely as creditors who owe him a lifetime debt of gratitude. I recognize mortality and am at peace with the relative brevity of a human life; he fights mortality like it’s a Mephistophelian villain and is of the strong conviction the world would be a fantastically better place perchance he lived forever.  I believe I owe humanity a dowry purely for the privilege of being alive; he believes humanity owes him a colossal debt because of his simple presence and incomparable amazingness. I respect life as the ultimate gift; he does not and continually chooses to abuse it.  Yes, all things considered, I guess you could rightfully say we–my longtime husband and I–are not too similar in our governing philosophies, but other than that we get along fine and dandy…..

…..theoretically, this could be accomplished—–but life is not a theory.  Hypothetically, this may happen—–but life is not a hypothesis.  Conjecturally, this is possible—–but life is not a conjecture. Life is not to be lived in a test tube with possibilities bubbling to the surface every other second, yet with one’s lone reaction to this smorgasbord of possibilities amounting to nothing more than mental games.  No, life itself is right HERE and right NOW—a dynamic, gyrating, flesh-and-blood-and-guts entity demanding immediate action.  Overanalyzing life totally misses the point; lives are meant to be spontaneous and lived on the run, not architected and examined on some bland whiteboard in a squeaky-clean office as the prelude to extensive rehearsals beforehand. You can’t live a life like that, but you sure as Hell can die as a result of overplanning and overanalyzing in the long run. Oh, and by the way, there is no long run in nature; death happens randomly, unexpectedly, instantaneously and it is the great ruiner of the most elaborate, well-conceived plans. The future, when all is said and done, is nothing more than a highly seductive mirage. Anyone who argues otherwise possesses an IQ that wouldn’t even register on the Richter Scale…..

…..the “Glory Days” didn’t seem so glorious back when they were happening, back when he was constantly being bullied by that fuckin’ musclebound prick Dan Dickhut, back when his face waged incessant war with itself in the guise of nonstop eruptions of unsightly acne, back when the prettiest cheerleaders in school stared right past him as though he didn’t exist and focused their gazes on the star athletes instead, back when high school cliques were more prevalent and demanded greater loyalty than notorious street gangs, back when you were either “cool” or “uncool” and there was no wiggle room for hybrids between the two classifications, yet everyone kept insisting they were inarguably the best years of his life, so all those purveyors of common knowledge must be right, of course; why, pray tell, would they NOT be telling the truth?  Forget the legions of onerous memories; his memory must’ve been betraying him all along; yes, the blame HAD TO lie with his own faulty memory! Those teenaged days of yore HAD to have been the best, most joyous years of his life and he’d just somehow lost sight of this obvious fact during the long ensuing interval. After all, why else would wunderkind troubadour Bruce Springsteen keep paying homage to them as the “Glory Days”?…..