Author: Fred Blahnik

Self-confidence is an inherently fragile thing, with no more stability than quicksand and no more permanence than those cottony cumulus clouds that pass overhead in the summer sky.  A fussy thing indeed, one which constantly requires recharging lest its batteries go dead at the most inopportune time.  The army of forces aligned against self-confidence perpetually attempt to erode it around its edges, yet these are devious scalawags that go about their handiwork silently and insidiously, nipping incessantly at the margins and seldom attacking the main body itself.  When you finally get to the bottom of this algebra problem, to the place where a solution is demanded, suffice it to say the answer would read something like this:  Self-confidence is one of the most beleaguered, “picked-on” entities in our entire Universe, and as such it barely stands a chance against the legions of enemies that assail it each and every day of the year.  But you still must fight back gallantly against those Faustian forces in each and every instance, inasmuch as a non-effort equals an admission of defeat.  In almost every scenario imaginable, trying is tantamount to victory.

There is one—and only one—life that should hold any interest to you, and that is the one you are living at the moment.  Everyone else’s is a complete bore.  Celebrities?  There is no such thing as a celebrity.  A celebrity is nothing more than a person with an inflated opinion of himself/herself who aggressively seeks attention and adulation wherever they can find it.  There are plenty of glory hogs out there, true, and lots of people who treat their paltry “accomplishments” as something authentically special, but in the big scheme of things, on a celestial scale—which is the only one that truly matters—those so-called accomplishments don’t amount to a proverbial hill of beans.  A million years from now, which in reality constitutes but a trifling heartbeat in the lifespan of our parochial universe, no one will give a royal shit insofar as what you may think distinguished you from all other earthlings and therefore made you so disproportionately important in the year 2014.  This is assuming there are still humans alive that far out in the future, too, which is certainly not a foregone conclusion by any stretch of the imagination.  No, the only life that should hold any interest to you is the one you are currently living.  Forget about the multiplicity of others out there, all those insipid impostors and bores with their non-stop bragging and boasting and bloviating over things a mosquito might very well have been capable of “accomplishing”.  Their meaningless lives don’t matter one whit to you.  You harbor control over only one life—Your own!!— but as such you, and only you, can infuse it with as much or as little interest and pizzazz as you want.  Those other people will die sooner or later, mark my words on that…..and then how interesting will their lives seem to future bystanders, especially as time goes by and wave upon wave of new persons eventually replace them and busily go about looking for ways to maximize their pleasure during their eighty-odd year encounter with consciousness?

Sometimes—setting all logic aside—you just havta do what ya havta do……   It may not make a bit of sense at the time, but a persistent voice inside you will demand no less.  Call it conscience, call it intuition, call it instinct, call it a ghost in the machine, it really doesn’t matter one iota what you want to call it.….ya just havta follow your heart and see where it leads you!  It may not always lead you to the right place or to an overflowing pot of gold or to a blooming bed of roses or to a once-in-a-lifetime fuck, but that same inner voice will remind you that if you hadn’t followed its prompting…..you never would have been happy with an alternative decision.  Never in your lifetime!!!  Resultingly, an all-encompassing peace of mind will reside within your breast regardless of any adverse consequences you may have suffered during your futile pursuit.  Tried and failed invariably trumps never trying in the first place.

DO NOT stand back and wait idly by for someone else to do the right thing.  YOU should step forward immediately and do the right thing irrespective of others’ inaction.  There is no other honorable course of action.  Time does not wait for anybody or any thing, nor does a moment to be of service to someone badly in need.  If you do not instantly recognize a dire situation intertwined with the travails of someone desperately requiring assistance, the moment will swiftly pass, the dynamics of the situation WILL change—however slightly—and the next second may not present the same relative safety for that individual facing duress.  Timidity does not buy additional time; it merely escalates the potential risk for someone whose life may be in danger.  Use your built-in conscience as your true-north guide, not the consciences of others.  You have no idea whether their consciences are as evolved or finely tuned as yours, consequently they are not reliable and shouldn’t be trusted.  Move quickly whenever you see another person’s life or good health in peril.  To do otherwise—to hesitate or to hope that someone else will respond to the predicament first—is not acceptable behavior for an ethical human being; it far better equates with cowardice.

If ya want it to happen, ya gotta make it happen!  That is the only way you can look at any situation in life.  If you wait around hoping for someone else or some form of providence to come sailing along and rescue you from the procrastination doldrums, you’ll likely be long in the tooth and showing more gray than natural in your hair before that fairy tale outcome finally transpires, if it ever does.  More likely, you will wind up well short of your goal(s) at the end of the day and consequently blame “bad luck” for all of your character shortcomings.  Luck, my ass!!  Luck had nothing to do with it!  You were handed stewardship over the key to the convertible, but that catalyst never found its way into the ignition slot.  Fact is, the lamentable thing never even came out of your trousers pocket.  You cannot blame “bad luck” for that, you feckless jackfuck!!!

I came armed with logic, and she came “armed” with a plentitude of stubbornness.  It turned out to be no contest.  She won, and the competition was not something you would even call close.  Stubbornness trumps logic every time even though this answer is not at all intuitive.  It’s probably why bullheads and carp easily eclipse regal trout and gamefish whenever the different species share the same waters, if only for as long as it takes for the bottom-dwellers to kick some Pisces ass and drive the daintier sport fish elsewhere.  Abject mulishness makes no sense from an empirical perspective, yet it invariably prevails over more astute human qualities given enough time.

You are what you pretend to be.  Play a role for a long enough period of time and you ultimately become that person.  Remember, you are not an automaton that was factory-built and pre-programmed to behave in only one fashion.  Your brain is plastic, your personality is plastic, your usage of time is plastic……your future is plastic.  Yes, your future is whatever you want to make of it, because you can reinvent yourself in an instant and subsequently beeline off in a totally new direction any time you feel the urge.  Don’t blame anyone else for the failures in your life; there is one—And only one!!—captain of your ship, and that is the person you look at every morning in the bathroom mirror while you’re flossing your teeth.  Now…..whether you genuinely like that person staring back at you is a different issue altogether.

…..after her horrific experience from the day before, she felt God and Satan and all the primal forces of nature must be conspiring together to bully her into submission.  Life just could not get any worse than this.  Goddamnitall, why had she even been born in the first place?! Yes, why?!?!  She couldn’t possibly dip any lower on the universal happiness scale; she had plummeted past the erstwhile nadir at warp speed and was now in uncharted territory and still sinking rapidly.  But after a good night’s sleep to clear her head and a forthright dialogue with her inner psyche, she came to the mature realization that fortune waxes and wanes with complete randomness and she had merely found herself at the bottom of that cyclical trough for one miserable day in her finite journey through the Valley of Consciousness.  One miserable day, that was all it was.  The temporal rotten apple in the barrel of life. The dregs at the bottom of a keg of whiskey.  The armpit contaminating an otherwise pristine human body.  Today will be a better day, for sure.  Yes.  It really will be!  HONEST!!!  Truth is, it couldn’t possibly be any worse than that calendar monster racing around egregiously out of control little different than an elephant at a tea party and answering to the moniker of “yesterday”.…..

…..she thought fame would be the end-all, cure-all answer to her litany of ailments—both physical and emotional—but she soon learned otherwise.  She discovered fame is a prison every bit as constraining as the poverty and anonymity she had serially grown to loath in her youth.  Return to that pitiful station in life?  No, she harbored no desire to turn around and go backwards in time either, even if she had been able to which of course she wasn’t.  And then a bolt of wisdom struck her—a bolt that had been hiding inside her body all these years, lying low and skulking about in some previously unexplored dark chasm—and she realized that people aren’t meant to live blissful, happy lives.  They just aren’t!  Genuine happiness is a sham, a ruse, an artifice.  Happiness is at its very core a grand hallucination cruelly perpetuated from generation to generation by a small but vocal coalition of fantasts and naïfs.  Said is merely the winsome, unrealistic stuff centerpiecing political campaigns, bridal showers, bar mitzvahs, and fairy tales. Real life is an apex predator on the constant prowl for victims; it affords precious little time for nonsense like sanguinity and merrymaking ……

An individual’s latent intellect can be measured majorly more reliably by what they DON’T know than by what they DO know.  By the sum of knowledge that is wanting, rather than by the sum of knowledge already accrued.  By the holes in their resume as opposed to the hollow detritus scribbled across its pages.  By an honest shrug of the shoulders in lieu of pompous posturing.  An empty wagon rattles the loudest, and I trust we all experience on a regular daily basis more than our fair share of wagons that have been bereft of cargo for a zillion years running but which still create more of a din than is commonly heard during the advent of a Chinese New Year.  Annoying as all get-out, yes, but beyond that there isn’t a whole lot you can do to tamp down the irksome cacophony originating from vacuous brains other than to demand the offending individuals shut up and thereupon hope they comply with your sincere “request”.  So just learn to live with and reluctantly accept a fair amount of rankling background noise, and recognize that not all minds are created equal even if the same cannot be said of oversized mouths and oversized egos.