Author: Fred Blahnik

She honestly believes there is a higher purpose to life than chasing simple pleasures and benignly pursuing happiness.  A greater, nobler purpose for humanity.  A metaphysical calling.  So be it then, but I obviously do not agree with her pretentious assessment.  A higher purpose to life may indeed exist, but so too may UFOs, Dark Matter, and parallel universes to our own.  Which is to say I don’t know for sure and neither does she.  It is all conjecturing, positing, postulating, theorizing, or any other word you can come up with that signifies sophisticated thinking sans any proof to support a point of view.  The whole idea is subjective in nature, thus let’s leave it at that.  But a problem arises when individuals of her ilk vaingloriously attempt to inject objectivity into an innately subjective equation.  The two are obviously not compatible and never have been.  That is wrong and should never be tolerated, yet expecting her to graciously accept this logical explanation would be as futile as trying to fend off an enraged, charging bull elephant with a pea shooter.

…..given the immense, smoldering anger I was feeling deep inside me, I knew I had to move expeditiously to distance myself from the hideous moment with as much speed as I could muster or otherwise I was liable to do or say something rash that I would almost certainly regret later.  What happened has happened and it now resides squarely in the past where it belongs, and the only element of the travesty I can currently control is my reaction to it.  That’s right, I exercise a picayune bit of control over the present and maybe I can wobble the future on its axis a barely discernible speck too, but I definitely command no leverage over the past.  The past is a million ton monolith; it is immovable, implacable, and unalterable.  So just move slowly away from this abominable moment at hand and put a little distance between you and it, Fred, and in time that smoldering anger burning uncontrolled within your breast will start abating before beginning to flicker, thereby signaling its death throes not unlike a campfire left untended overnight.  Only then are you safe, although surely not advised, to look backwards to assess the damage that was inflicted on your person.  Looking backwards is never a good idea, understand, yet this advice comes with a massive caveat:  Gazing into the past is almost instinctual behavior and beyond one’s ability to control……

If you decide to take a “day off” from life, know that you stand in imminent peril of losing that time forever; days are classically precious and irredeemable.  Sand that flows downward through a hourglass doesn’t then magically and in discordance with all the known laws of physics flow back upward through that tiny orifice separating the two glass chambers—the isthmus in this case representing the highly dynamic present, the bottom chamber the past, and the top chamber the pluperfect future which manifests as our remaining time on Earth.  Remember, there are no rainchecks on life.  Once we allow a day to pass, however productive or unproductive the rascal may have been, there is zero chance of returning to that day again in the future.  And of course such is the way things should be.  Appreciate what you have now; don’t struggle maniacally to thwart the advance of time or pompously seek to deposit units of time in a temporal piggybank for future usage.  The Laws of Physics don’t work in this fashion and neither does life.  Celebrate and rejoice in the present for all it’s worth, but understand that once it’s gone it’s gone.  You can’t unscramble an egg, you can’t undo an avalanche after it’s begun, you can’t scrunch a genie back into its host bottle, you cannot reverse the result of oxidation and wish away a roaring fire once a match has been lit, you cannot undo the Big Bang, and you likewise cannot relive events from the past irrespective of desire.  This is not to say you have to make every day that you’re alive a colossal, monumental extravaganza, but I’m merely suggesting that taking any day off completely without attempting a key initiative or a laudable physical action amounts to a giant sham and a shameful waste of time.  There were probably a thousand different ways you could have utilized said time that would have provided you with more overt pleasure than just lying around contemplating what you’re gonna have for supper as you listen to a clock ticking on the wall, but you nonetheless “chose” otherwise.  Granted, the preternatural gift of free will affords everyone such a lifestyle “choice”, but the simple existence of free will surely doesn’t constitute evidence that sloth is a prudent, defensible manner of living.  Water flowing into an ocean can never be undiluted and returned exactly as before to the river wherest it originated, and by the same token days that have sailed by arbitrary benchmarks on the Arrow of Time can never be returned intact to those same benchmarks. The past is immutable; the past is inviolable; the past is fixed in concrete; you cannot go back there unchanged from before.  The present and hopeful future?  Those are different creatures altogether; change is possible and even a suggested course of action for certain people in glaring need of same.

The day is good.  She is not.  Therefore, I will pass on her and opt for the day ahead.  Nothing too profound about this decision, is there?  Fact is, it is one of the easiest I have ever been asked to make.  Feminine wiles are treacherous things and oftentimes hard to resist, but not in this instance.  She is bad news and that will never change.  She was born bad to the bone and her skeleton has remained intact since that tragic day.  But the day ahead is looking good and my outlook on life excepting her is positive, so I will be okay.  Yes, I will be okay and promise to be a responsible steward over the life I have been gifted with so long as she remains apart from my orbit.  Oh, and on a permanent basis too.

…..the deathbed felt cold and sterile to the octogenarian’s hunched back, but she wasn’t living in this particular charmed decade anymore anyway.  Her mind had left her body far behind and she had traveled back some sixty years in time, back to when she was a fetching young ingenue once more and all the talk of the town.  Awe-struck boys within a ten-mile radius beat a path to her doorstep every night of the week and would nearly come to blows as they begged embarrassingly for her indulgences, and not a day went by when she didn’t feel wholly invincible and like the queen of the whole universe.  This sublime happiness the old lady was experiencing while entrapped within a cruel time warp wasn’t some trifling, relative thing either.  Rather, the ravishing debutante from yore knew it to be a permanent fixture written in the stars.  She would always be young and nubile and an irresistible boy magnet in her sclerotic mind, even if her frail body and failing heart and the calendar hanging on one wall of her nursing home room emphatically suggested otherwise…..

In life, everyone is assigned a cross to bear.  The only question then is how big that cross will be and how and when it will manifest.  Some crosses are puny and constructed of toothpicks, others are intermediate in size and fashioned from 2X4 lumber, and the largest crosses are carved crudely from towering, rough-hewn oak trees.  What is the greatest factor that will determine which of the aforementioned crosses will be assigned to you personally?  Typically fate.  That’s right, fate is ordinarily the greatest determinant of the size and nature of the cross you will arbitrarily be assigned to carry upon your back throughout your life on Earth.  Unfair as facial acne, I know, but I’m simply speaking the truth here.  One would like to think that inherent altruism, good will toward others, and philanthropy would play a much larger role in this seminal equation, but sadly and unfortunately they don’t.  The forces of fate preponderantly decide the level of difficulty for the life you are asked to live, and at that point it is entirely up to you as an individual to “man up”, accept this kismet in whatever mood you decide upon, and subsequently soldier forward with the remainder of your life.  Bitching a lot and crying a river will not change your life’s trajectory one iota, but a mindset of total acceptance followed by a grim, steadfast determination to fashion the very best life out of what you have been offered by the forces of destiny WILL undeniably lead to a happier—if not frankly happy—outcome for you.

…..one instant she was alive—laughing, smiling, joking, talking, loving.…living, yes, living life to the fullest!!!…..and then in the next instant she was not.  Just like that.  No advance warning whatsoever.  No premonitions or spirit warnings or anything stereotypical like you always read about in the literature.  No NOTHING, I tell you!  She was here one second and then in the next instant she was gone.  And life, yes, life—that mysterious thing (???) that somehow differentiates us from rocks and houses and fences and swing-sets—disappeared at that moment as well, never to return.  Just went away with no warning and no fanfare.  Like…..Presto Vanish-o!!!  Yes, that slippery little entity we know and worship as life was thereafter gone in a literal heartbeat and the blink of an eye.  So now I ask of you:  How on Earth can one realistically deal with the gut-wrenching suddenness of something happening like that?  Yes, tell me, how can you possibly be expected to rationally cope with a separation that earthshaking and that abrupt?  How can you realistically digest it?  How can you intelligently explain it?  I sure as fuck don’t have any answers for you and I’ll freely admit as much.  Because if I did know how—If I accidentally stumbled upon even a whiff of an explanation for the Mephistophelian turmoil I am presently experiencing—I sure as hell wouldn’t be falling apart at the seams as I sit and write this now……agonizingly wondering why I was put here on Earth in the first place just to stand by powerless and slack-jawed—being forced to witness firsthand an event so viscerally heart-rending and dream-shattering and…..and…..and………utterly nonsensical…..

OH FUCK!!!!!  That didn’t go so well, dd it?!?!  Quite awful, actually!! Couldn’t have gone much worse!!  Well, move on the next moment then!!  No point living in the past; there’s nothing of value hanging out there.  The next moment is the only one that really matters after the one at hand has come and gone.  That moment from a second ago no longer has any relevance so there is no point fretting over it, even for a nanosecond.  Start over fresh with the next moment, okay?!?!  The moment to come is the only timeframe that matters after this moment at hand passes, and then the one after that and the one after that and so on and so on and so on.  That moment from a second ago is meaningless now—Utterly meaningless!!—as meaningless as wings on a helicopter or tits on a boar pig or ten carat diamonds lurking twenty miles beneath the surface of the Earth.  The past is a temporal graveyard rife with skeletal regrets and cartilaginous misgivings and broken promises; the present, a joyous arcade; the future…..a repository for boundless dreams.

For the nine hundredth and ninety ninth time, put your goddamned money where your mouth is or otherwise shut the fuck up!!!  Talking a big story may make you feel powerful and feed your starving ego, but in reality actions and money talk exponentially louder than words and all the words in the world are a puny defense when aligned against these two cosmic bulwarks. Words are nothing more than constrained corpuscles of air that celebrate recklessly after finally being liberated into the atmosphere immediately adjacent to the mouths of long-winded louts.  They henceforth  break ranks, dissipate, and rapidly disappear into the firmament—never to be seen or heard from again in the same construct they left some blowhard’s lungs.  Assigning too much credence to words is the epitome of naivete, if not outright stupidity.  Words lie, oftentimes prodigiously; actions and cold hard cash never do.

…..time will cure your heartbreak.  Truth of the matter is, time is the ONLY thing that will cure it.  Nothing else works:  Not talking and joking around with good friends, not sympathetic family members, not immersing yourself one hundred percent in work, not hoping for and then receiving unexpected distractions, not traveling to exotic locales, not overeating at the dinner table like a starved pig, not even going on a good, old-fashioned one-week bender with a case of Jim Beam whiskey and a bongful of powerful Minnesota Green.  The passage of time is the only antidote for true heartbreak, and unfortunately there is nothing one can do to speed along or hopscotch over this lengthy process.  I admit that is difficult to hear this early in the game when the memory of her is still so unbearably fresh in your mind that you can see her and hear her and smell her and touch her and taste her all at the same time, but it is better that you hear the unvarnished version of the truth right now and not some bastardized version from a well-meaning but nescient dunce meant to temporarily uplift your spirits and raise false expectations.  The only thing that will not change with the passage of time will be your memory of this hideous moment, although that memory will become somewhat blurred around the edges down the road and hence morph into something marginally more palatable.  The excruciating heartbreak will leave you in time, but your memory of it will not.  As dreadful as you are feeling right now—And I can sense that your unhappiness is off the charts—the memory of this exact moment will still be distinctly awful one year from now, five years from now, twenty years from now…..even when you are lying on your deathbed and emotionally preparing to depart the mortal realm you will still be thinking back to that mortifying time in your youth when you were unfairly and unceremoniously jilted by an unappreciative lover. That knife cuts unbelievably deep and leaves behind an ugly, permanent scar.  Unrequited love is the cruelest, severest, most heartless entity known to mankind.  It is a numbingly ruthless, coldblooded, equal opportunity assassin.  This has always been the case since hominids first lifted their knuckles from the ground in eastern Africa and started walking on two extremities rather than four too many millennia ago to count, and this will forever be the case in the future too so long as two separate sexes exist and a full range of emotions, including end especially sensual, romantic love, remain an integral component of human consciousness.  The intense heartbreak you are feeling right now will go away in time—Trust me on that!—but there is no shortcut that can be taken which will shorten this process and no medicines which can be ingested that will lessen the pain and grotesque sadness you are feeling in this moment.  The first sentence of this brief essay bears repeating at this juncture, my disconsolate friend, because it really says everything that needs to be said in the fewest words possible:  The slow passage of time will cure your heartbreak, but nothing else can or will even come close to accomplishing this grievously longed-for objective……