Author: Fred Blahnik

…..I don’t want anything tangible from you.  Nothing.  Squat.  You have given me the greatest gift of all—complete honesty—and everything else pales in comparison to that majestic offering.  You gave me crushing news with both barrels blazing and didn’t spare my feelings one iota, and now I have this ugly truth hand-delivered by you to confront and to grapple with in my mind as I struggle searching for a solution to my myriad character deficiencies, if they in truth even exist.  According to you they do, but who really knows for sure?  Honesty is the most slippery and elusive and subjective of all pseudo-emotions, and just because you say something is so doesn’t necessarily make it so.  You aren’t God, after all, even if you pretend to be on far too many occasions ……

Later on in the evening—this was after I had purchased a cheap hacksaw in that seedy Kmart discount store in downtown Great Falls, Montana—I walked out into its parking lot and crawled beneath our ailing van and began sawing off the crushed section of tailpipe.  The atmospheric temperature was exceptionally hot that duskingtide, still hanging out at probably ninety or ninety five degrees Fahrenheit. 

And yet the next thing I knew this kid wandered over to our maroon vehicle; he was evidently parked somewhere in the capacious discount store lot as well.  A barefoot kid—young man, rather—and, you know, that callow rascal offered to help me with the sawing, which naturally entailed lying on filthy, oily asphalt in a parking lot with grainy particles of rusty shit falling into one’s face with each stroke of the hacksaw, and don’t forget to factor into my misery index the reality I was doing this pleasant chore when the air temperature was hovering right around ninety degrees Fahrenheit and the relative humidity couldn’t have been lagging too far behind that metric either.  The barefoot kid said he hailed from somewhere in western Washington state—I forget the precise location right now—and I was extraordinarily impressed and appreciative that he would come over and offer to help purely out of the good of his heart while I was lying under the van sawing away like a champion lumberjack, all the time sweating profusely analogous to an eighty-year-old demi-fossil jacked up on Viagra struggling to come atop a nubile, voluptuous young sex kitten. 

(Excerpted from the forthcoming travel saga “North By Northwest“)

As a sidebar to this topic, my most vivid memory of the ear-popping descent down the backside of Going-To-The-Sun Highway occurred when Carla and I visited Glacier National Park back in the late 1980s.  I noticed with some element of mirth that there was the distinctive, acrid smell of burning brakes when the two of us finally reached the bottom of the steep mountain passageway and then, after peering around me on the roadway in an effort to spot the guileless, dumb-shit offender…..suddenly realized with horror that the malodor was coming from MY vehicle at the time.  I nearly shit my pants coincident with this unsavory discovery, but a long rest to allow the automobile’s brakes to cool down followed by a more sensible, gear-shifting strategy on the westbound trek won me redemption (I think!) in Carla’s disapproving eyes.

(Excerpted from the upcoming travel saga “North by Northwest”)

Goodbye is the ultimate oxymoron.  Think about it for a minute.  What exactly is good about expressing farewell to someone you obviously feel strongly about and sufficient kinship to that you wish to be present when that person takes leave of the situation they currently find themself in, all too often against their will and better judgment?  Nothing.  There is nothing—Zero!—good about emotional departures such as those, hence there is no valid reason to characterize the words spoken at a time such as that as anything other than sad, bad, mad, or saturnine.  Settle for the “bye” part and cast aside the inappropriate and dumbly used “good”.

…..I am, when all is said and done, a captive to the moment—a prisoner of time.  I am carried along the crest of time little different than a piece of flotsam being transported down a raging river during a spring flood.  Free will?  Maybe, but only to an extremely limited extent.  We cannot do anything about the raw passage of time—the Arrow of Time, if you will—thus somehow pretending that we can somehow alter the scaffolding of time itself is as ludicrous as it is pretentious; the moment is here and then its’s gone, and to think an individual exercises some degree of control over that evanescent particle of time, however minuscule, is crazy if not downright delusional…..

We may not have much else to speak of, but we have one another.  That’s right, Honey, we have one another and anything apart from that is grossly immaterial.  Wouldn’t you agree?  Our love does not put food on the table or pay the electric bill or power the vehicles sitting out in our attached garage, yet assume those three financial constants are taken care of for a minute and where does that leave you?  Happy?  Satisfied?  Sanguine?  I highly doubt it.  The human experience extends far beyond merely taking care of existential necessities and depends instead upon looking after and tending to one’s soul.  Yes, that’s right, nurturing the human soul every bit as much as you attend to your flesh-and-blood corporality is the passkey to happiness and the license to ultimately leading a happy, fulfilling life.  And why shouldn’t that be the case?  The psychic you is infinitely more interesting and intriguing than the physical you three hundred and sixty five days of the year—three hundred and sixty six days on Leap Years.  So honor this fact!  Exalt over it!  Venerate it!  Worship it!  Tend to your emotional needs just as much as you tend to your physical needs and I guarantee rapture of every magnitude will once more seep back into your life.  I Promise!!!  And if you don’t believe me, just ask Howard Hughes or, rather, the ghost of the colossally enigmatic Howard Hughes if you can somehow connect with that apparition during a seance.

One cannot say infinity exists if we have no means of defining it; the concept of infinity is impossible for the human brain to understand because the thought that something—-Anything!—can simply go on forever without end is an abstract theorem that is innately incomprehensible; we cannot comprehend infinity since life offers us no frame of reference with which to envision it.  Thus, one cannot use infinity as a mathematical answer and then in the next breath say that infinity is a concept and not an actual number.  The field of mathematics is predicated solely on the usage of arbitrary numbers and numbers alone; introducing vague concepts like infinity as the answer to mathematical riddles is not only illogical but, more importantly, dishonest.  And then esteemed mathematicians and logicians mix in the absurd thought that there are different levels of infinity i.e. that certain infinities are greater in stature than other “lesser” infinities, and this subject next crosses over the boundary separating logic from zany illogic, rationality from irrationality, possibilities from blatant impossibilities.  How could such a crazy thing even be possible?  How could one set of numbers go on forever, but then there is another set of numbers—numerous sets actually, if smug mathematicians are to be believed—that goes on even beyond that…..beyond forever?  Yes, you heard me right:  Beyond FOREVER!!!  I don’t think so.  C’mon, if infinity is impossible for human beings to comprehend, then some theoretical entity greater than a “standard” infinity is utterly preposterous and takes a giant leap into the realm of disjointed nonsense and gobbledygook.  Impossible to reconcile logically, and definitely impossible to reconcile with anything in everyday life.   At this surreal juncture the concept of infinity becomes little more than a semantic hot potato with no real meaning and no actual tethering to the real everyday world we mortal human beings inhabit.

I thought I knew everything and I did…..other than humility.  And in the face of that sobering reality, I realized I knew nothing at all.  That’s right, nothing at all; not one fuckin’ viscerally important thing!  The life I found myself living was only a pretense for the life I should be living; it was a ruse; it was a caricature; it was all a big sham.  People who believe they have all the right answers cannot and should not be trusted and stand in want of the greatest gift of all:  Self-enlightenment in understanding that there are an infinite multitude of cosmic questions for which there ARE no definitive answers within reach of mere mortals, and never will be either.

…..and throughout this and that and everything else besides, time kept moving along slowly, ineluctably, inexorably…..and even though a mortal person could not empirically detect that movement with the five traditional senses, one could sense instinctually that life was moving along with an irresistible momentum all its own and that one was trapped aboard an incomprehensibly large ship from which there was no complicity and no escape.  We were all in it together, yet incongruently we were all in it alone as well. We had no hand on the rudder with which to influence the direction we were going; we just stood by and watched dumbly as things slipped by in the pitch blackness, amorphous things that we thought we might like to sample but were never afforded the opportunity…..

Everyone always thinks the adverse consequence won’t happen to them, that they are too smart to allow such a thing to happen, that genetics will keep them healthy, that their mental acuity is unsurpassed, that the rigorous physical conditioning they perform daily will shield them from injuries and bodily degeneration, that fate is everlastingly on their side, that their uniqueness and peculiar set of skills wed to incessant luck will protect them from ever experiencing the dark side of life like a disturbingly large percentage of earthlings must face.  But how realistic is this?  How grounded in logic is this approach to life?  How likely are these people to be the glaring exception to a cardinal rule that everyone else must genuflect to?  Not likely, let me assure you.  Almost nonexistent, actually.  These credulous fantasts are only deluding themselves.  Lying to themselves.  Rationalizing a dire situation to make it more attractive.  Rationalization.  Rationalizing is the skill these florid Panglossians employ most often to tranquilize their souls. Accordingly, this is the skill they are best at—bar none!  They excel at inventing fake reasons to boost their egos and prop up their ersatz arguments. Until destiny cruelly intervenes and they no longer can.