Author: Fred Blahnik

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.

Always pay alcohol the respect it deserves.  Alcohol wields immense power, and to underestimate that power—even in rare, isolated instances—is sheer foolishness and a recipe for unmitigated disaster.  You may think you exercise unconditional control over alcohol, but that is pure whimsy.  Alcohol may lie low in the weeds—timid as all get-out and as polite and subservient as a house servant being paid a six figure salary—for nine hundred and ninety nine times that you “socially drink”, but then on that thousandth time it will hideously arise like The Creature from the Black Lagoon and move swiftly to ruin your evening, if not a small part of your life, when one considers how utterly important special relationships are to the human species.  DO NOT ALLOW THIS TO HAPPEN!!!!!  Always remember, alcohol is not inherently evil.  Akin to a loaded gun that you hold in your hand, you alone wield the power to make it so.

Understand this point, and understand it well:  Dead men have nothing to lose.  Marcus Brutus had nothing to lose.  George Custer had nothing to lose.  Jack Ruby had nothing to lose.  Charles Manson had nothing to lose.  Ted Bundy had nothing to lose.  Jesus Christ had nothing to lose.  King Leonidas had nothing to lose.  Yet we are all dead in the sense that each of us is a mortal being—we have a strictly limited shelf life which is breathtakingly fleeting from a cosmological perspective.  No one lives much past one hundred years, and most earthlings succumb decades, if not scores of years, before reaching that three digit benchmark.  The point I alluded to at the outset then?  Death does not have to be jarringly imminent—witness the earlier stated examples—for you to treat it as such and thereupon begin to live recklessly and uninhibited as though you have but a few days left on Earth’s verdurous surface.  Well, that is essentially true, because against the backdrop of the interstellar clock your remaining time as a sentient organism on planet Earth can and should be measured in surprisingly teensy multiples of hours, days, months, and years.  You are here and—Poof!!!—in the next instant you are gone akin to the Phantom of the Opera.  When compared to the universal constant, your stint as a flesh-and-blood constituent of the cosmos cast among the throngs of surrounding inorganic stars and galactic debris lasts no longer than the proverbial blink of an eye.  Than the snap of one’s fingers.  Than the ectopic skip of one’s heart.  Than a violent sneeze.  Than the time it takes you to tumble off a cliff.  Humbling, I know, but uncompromisingly true.  So you may as well get over it now and relish this ephemeral condition we humans call life. It’ll be over before you know it, and even sooner for those people born with a brain but with no electricity coursing through their metaphysical organ.  Live life, don’t think about it!!!!!

Is he happy with the life he is currently living?  I don’t know.  Maybe.  That subject really isn’t for me to judge or decide, is it?  But I will go ahead and give you my take on it anyway:  He definitely possesses all of the material accouterments necessary to live an easy, stress-free lifestyle; one perusal of the panoply of expensive “man toys” he keeps stored in his pristinely kept garage immediately divulges this nugget of information.  Yet with regard to the biggest variable of all—that being personal relationships, of course—he seems to be falling woefully short of the mark.  His key relationships are very much limited in scope and the ones that do exist are rotten and perilously eroded at the foundation.  And isn’t that—strong personal relationships—what happiness distills down to in the long run?  People and not things.  Personalities and not items.  Flesh, blood, and vital organs and not inanimate objects.  Life and not inorganic cosmic matter.  If I am wrong here, you will have to explain to me where my error in logic is located.  Yet I make this statement wearing a smug look on my face because I know that I am not wrong on the matter.  Personal relationships trump everything else in life; nothing else even comes close, least of all material possessions.  They rank somewhere near the bottom of the list, perhaps just ahead of politics and government subsidies.

…..so you sold that desirable item and made a very tidy profit in doing so.  You’re feeling really good and savvy and all puffed up right now, but how long do you expect that glorious feeling to last?  More to the point…..what now?  Yes, what now?!  You’re currently sitting on a pile of money that you didn’t have just twenty four short hours ago, but how sexy and self-affirming is it to stand in possession of bland, staid, pedestrian money?  If you didn’t read between the lines here, that was a rhetorical question:  The answer is “owning” a shitload of money isn’t very sexy at all and only stirs one’s hormones and emotions to a minimal degree. Quite the opposite from owning a rare original painting, a nearly-impossible-to-secure autograph of an important historical figure, an uber-muscular sports car, a luxe “cabin” on a pristine northern lake three hours from home, a turbocharged speedboat, a champion thoroughbred, etc., etc., etc.  Making money is only intoxicating if it is reinvested in something more sexy.  Because although a polyglot of digits in your multiple banking accounts comes as a monumental relief for conservative folks, so too does dry cereal for breakfast, boxer shorts, and two-hour naps in the afternoon if those are the people you are struggling to emulate……