Author: Fred Blahnik

Try your hardest at all times.  If that isn’t good enough to merit a brief mention in your local newspaper or a ringing of the bells atop the steeple on the cathedral down on Alder and Sixth—well, that’s okay too!!  At least you’ll be left with the giant consolation of knowing you did your absolute best and had no more left to offer and, believe me, that’s worth a lot too.  One should never fill a car up with gasoline before taking it to be scrapped at the local junkyard, and you likewise should never hold back in effort while vainly hoping for a second or third or even fourth chance to succeed at whatever endeavor you may be pursuing at the time.  Oftentimes one opportunity is all you get, and—truth be told—one is all you should ever rightfully expect.  To assume more than that is simply being avaricious.

“Could’ve”s, “would’ve”s, and “should’ve”s don’t amount to a wheelbarrow full of cowshit after the fact.  You’ve gotta pull the trigger when the gun is in your hands—when you have unquestioned possession of it.  Because once a weapon leaves your hands, commiserating and second-guessing yourself on alternate courses of action is as meaningless and useless as a Donald Trump promise or a fart into a forty mile per hour gale.  You consistently have to leverage power when you possess the means to do so; such won’t always be the case; such is oftentimes definitely NOT the case!  If you choose to not leverage power for whatever reason when you have command over it, trust me on this:  That power will automatically transfer to someone else, and if that individual is astute he/she will make dazzling use of the potency that you were too ignorant and meek to wield yourself.

After careful consideration, he decided to forgive with however much sincerity he could conjure and even go a step further and apologize despite the fact he hadn’t really done anything wrong and was not the principal instigator and party to blame insofar as a grossly overblown misunderstanding. This was quite simply the easiest course of action for him to take even though it may not have been the technically correct one, and it did inarguably make him feel better and did resonate better within the hallways of his conscience. That does matter in the big, mile-high picture; that should count for something—some small thing, perhaps—shouldn’t it? Peace of mind cannot be easily corralled or quantified, but it does exist just as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow morning in the east or Donald J. Trump will tell yet another lie.  Carrying around massive guilt akin to a three hundred pound yoke weighting down one’s shoulders for twenty four hours of each day can be exhausting as hell, both physically but especially emotionally.  The avenue of action he was considering was therefore preferable in his mind; this way was undoubtedly better and would serve as salve on his restive soul.  Simply apologize and relieve himself of the tranche of guilt he was feeling, despite the fact said guilt was ninety nine percent artificial and he had done nothing egregiously wrong to incur such disproportionately harsh punishment from the falsely aggrieved individual.

…..they kept her alive because they had been granted stewardship over her medical care and had the capability of keeping her alive; this small subset of individuals possessed the means and the knowledge and the wherewithal. That’s it.  Nothing more.  There was no better reason than that.  No valid reason and certainly no defensible reason.  Capability equaled a mandate in their over-educated, faux compassionate minds, thus they exercised this godly “right” of theirs and insisted on keeping her alive in a semi-vegetative state for an indefinite period of time, all while there remained no realistic hope for a return to a quality lifestyle for the gravely ill patient and even as the hospital cash registers continued to ring “Ching-ching-ching!!” non-stop throughout the day—day after day after tedious day…..night after night after tedious night.  Immoral?  Inappropriate?  Grossly irresponsible?  One could make a stalwart case to support such semi-obvious assertions, but who other than God can truly answer that sort of question?  Certainly not this scribe, although I am sure you can readily deduce by this point where my heart stands on the matter.  Living and existing are not the same, especially if that existence is totally dependent on external equipment and nearly fulltime nannying.  There is a right time for everything—being born, being parented, maturing, copulating, marrying perhaps, pursuing a career, parenting, getting drunk as a skunk, kicking the kids out the house, growing old (If you’re lucky!), and, finally…..dying.  It is no shame or abject embarrassment or evidence of a character defect to accede to Death’s pernicious clutches when that cryptic entity comes banging ferociously on your front door.  Contrarily, fighting like a crazed maniac at prohibitive expense just to (re)claim a few more days or weeks or months of compromised “living” is far more indicative of significant character deformation, namely selfishness and blind narcissism.  The planet Earth can get by just fine without your saintly presence; it did in the past and it will in the future too. No single person is indispensable, and that’s the way the world should operate. Therefore when death comes to embrace you and lead you home and the arguments it makes are unerringly strong and persuasive, just submit to the obvious and agree to accompany the Grim Reaper to wherever it chooses to lead you.  Granted, no one wants to die, but no one wants to go to the dentist for root canal work or pay exorbitant taxes to a pitifully underperforming government or host your impertinent mother-in-law for a long weekend either, yet those are odious things we must do regardless when the moment calls for it.  Same thing with imminent death.  Accept it when said becomes the obvious outlook, both for yourself but especially for someone who may be immoderately close to you and whose health you have taken ultimate responsibility for or been similarly invested with this improbable power.  Don’t fight death irrationally just to claim a moral victory and to earn an additional pittance of time spent on compromised “living”, if one should even dignify artificial, kept-alive-only-by-the-miracles-of-modern-medicine purgatory by referring to it as that.  You were not responsible for your creation, and you are not the architect who will orchestrate your eventual demise either.  To think otherwise is risible.  You don’t own your life; someone far mightier than puny, fatuous human beings rightfully lay claim to that distinction.  Yes, you admittedly can delay the onset of death just a little bit, but at what cost?  Yes, indeed, at what cost(s), both financial and otherwise???  Just so your loved ones have to worry ceaselessly and wind up being responsible for footing the mindboggling expenses and labor investments attendant to caring for an invalid or semi-invalid for a few more weeks or a few more months or—at the absolute best—a few more years?  And that’s just you personally.  I neglected to mention the gargantuan financial stake society is forced to shoulder in the form of Medicare subsidies (Yes, Medicare is for all practical purposes a federal government welfare program for all but the healthiest geriatrics) just to appease your blind intransigence and honor your foolish desire to mimic Ponce de Leon and start chasing after the Fountain of Youth at a point in time when, ironically, all hope appears (and realistically is) lost.  So go ahead and believe that you are a hero for fighting like a grievously wounded tiger to live for every last day and second that you can coax out of your exhausted, irreparably broken body, but just don’t expect—Nor should you expect!—plaudits and thank-yous from those people and deities whose opinions matter the most…..

…..while it is a well-known fact everyone’s eyes are mysterious and the true windows into one’s consciousness, hers very easily exceeded that basic standard.  Peering into their depths was exactly as one would imagine it would be like staring into the Stygian abyss of a crevasse bisecting an Arctic ice-field, knowing that there has to be an end to it somewhere…..but not having any clue whatsoever where that end might lie.  Such was the nature of her bedazzling, inscrutable eyes, and they immediately took me hostage and drove me absolutely crazy with desire.  Those dark brown windows which served as portals into her inner consciousness were the most enigmatic, unrevealing things I have witnessed in forty-plus years of living, and I can easily surmise they are what made her the most intriguing person I have ever known as well—by a country mile!  Doubtless they were the chief reason I fell hopelessly in love with the beguiling tramp, a love that went forever ignored and unrequited despite my humiliatingly persistent entreaties. Do understand though, Reader, that for as mind-bogglingly deep those enchanting eyes of hers were, the wench’s personality and intellect were commensurately shallow…..

And now I sit trapped—a prisoner of both distance and time—a thousand miles and three and a half days away from my best friend of nearly fifteen years, who lies slowly dying on a grassy patch of land back in Minnesota as the outside temperature prepares to plummet to winter-like levels and the days shorten by leaps and bounds, ostensibly still on “vacation” even as I was assailed by horrific news and the proverbial walls came crashing down around me the evening last.  And what viable options remain open to me now?  Really, what options of helpful consequence?  None that matter, I tell you.  None that would make any sense to a person who is thinking rationally, which I currently am not.  All I can think of now is getting back to Minnesota as expeditiously as possible to nurse and attend to my dying friend, but expense and logistics render that option grotesquely impractical and therefore not worth pursuing.  And so I sit here in a seedy motel room in downtown New Orleans, Louisiana, rhythmically clenching my hands into balled fists and gnashing my teeth for want of anything better to do, wishing like a lovelorn sailor that I could immediately be back home in Minnesota but grudgingly resigned to the fact no amount of such wishing will alter this dreadful fuckin’ predicament that currently holds me hostage, at least until my wife’s and my regular airline tickets become valid in three plus days. And at that point in time…………..….well, by that point in time my quest to see and console my old comrade one last time will undoubtedly be too late…..

…..no one makes an indelible mark on humanity.  We only think we do.  Humanity is bigger than any single person.  Our lives—even those of mankind’s greatest recognized icons—are like sand castles on the beach, standing proudly for a little while before the next incoming tide washes them away.  But remember, the sand comprising a sand castle is not destroyed, it is simply redistributed elsewhere, and thankfully so are we.  No one ever truly disappears; their essence is merely reconfigured in a different form.  Trust me, we’ll always be around somewhere in the Universe.  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust…..no truer words were ever spoken.  Greatness is overstated, overrated, overly deified.  People are not connaturally great; it is the world around us that is.  People come and people go, but the world around us forever remains the same.  No one makes a permanent mark on the world, because humanity and permanence are diametrically opposite concepts.  The best anyone can hope to do is to try to positively influence the direction humanity is headed during that ludicrously brief sojourn of time one is granted an audition on Earth’s surface.  Any pretensions bigger than that—greatness, lasting marks, legacies, etc.—are nothing more than that…..hubristic pretensions.  The root word for pretensions is of course pretend, and those who ascribe anything more to mankind than temporariness and cosmic insignificance are just horribly naive pretenders lost in a world of make-believe…..

…..a shard of information adventitiously came my way last evening, and although it definitely wasn’t information I welcomed or could readily embrace, I nonetheless had to acknowledge its veracity and take steps to appropriately address it.  The receipt of information oftentimes works in this fashion, that is, it is frequently malodorous and undesirable in nature, but our sentiments regarding said information does not alter the underlying scaffolding and superstructure on which reality is constructed one iota, and we henceforth have to accept any “new” data at face value and do our utmost to be flexible and hastily rearrange our lives to accommodate constantly changing circumstances.  Absolute rigidity in the guise of “principle” is unacceptable; it amounts to a death sentence in the arena of sound judgment…..

…..I looked backwards as I stood at the threshold of the daycare lady’s front door and my three-month-old daughter Sam was staring back at me with large, sorrowful eyes, equally alarmed and incredulous that I would be leaving her alone in a strange place with a friendly, yet altogether unfamiliar, lady.  And right then she began crying—just bawling her lungs out hysterically at an unearthly volume.  I felt awful…..traumatized…..distraught…..abusive.  Truth is, I couldn’t have felt worse than I did at that exact moment and still been drawing breaths and classifying myself as a feeling homo sapiens.  My heart was being ruthlessly ripped out of my chest and stomped on savagely by the purveyors of fate, and they were evidently having loads of fun doing so. This was Carla’s first day back at work following a three-month maternity leave, and thus it was Sam’s first morning experiencing out-of-home daycare and I was the party responsible for getting her there safely. I blinked reflexively.  Shiiiiitttt……..this horrible nightmare can’t honestly be happening to me, can it?!?!  Is this for real?!?!  I SWEAR THAT I AM INNOCENT OF ANY WRONGDOING, AND YET THAT FACT DOESN’T SEEM TO MATTER ONE STINKIN’ BIT!!!!!  The day obviously wasn’t getting off to a good start, and I was feeling even more dispirited than before if that was in fact possible.  At a nerve-wracking time such as this you just recite all the predictable appropriate platitudes to yourself in an attempt to feel better:  That you have to go out to earn sufficient money in order to properly support your dependents, including Sam; that she has to be exposed to the Big Bad World by herself some day—so why not now??; that the person you are leaving her with for the upcoming day is compassionate and congenial and Sam therefore was in wonderful hands; that learning to properly socialize is critical to a child’s emotional development and at this place Sam will be surrounded by a phalanx of other young people roughly her age; that eventually she’ll be going off to official pre-school classes followed by kindergarten so she might as well get used to spending days by herself outside our cozy abode now; that…..that…..that…..that……  And yet none of those eminently logical reasons made a shred of difference as I stood there in that infernal doorway seeing my tiny, beloved daughter staring back at me uncomprehendingly like a caged animal while hearing her shrieking away hysterically at the top of her lungs.  The only thing I could think of—and which weighed on my mind right then with the mass of a blacksmith’s anvil—was that I was both the meanest son-of-a-bitch in the world as well as far and away the worst father—Take your pick, Reader!—and it was the last thought that crossed my mind as I tearfully peered backwards one last time at my woefully distraught daughter before heading off to my job at the Mayo Clinic.  Not surprisingly, the day that ensued measured thirty six hours in length and turned out to be the longest and most introspective day of my life…..

…..and another day came, and another day went…..and another day came, and another day went……and another day came, and another day went…..and another day came and another day went…..and after a while they all started to resemble one another, irrespective of the weather outside and the varied menagerie of individuals who populated these days and whatever random worldly events transpired within them, and in the grandiose scheme of things time flowed along in a slow, methodical pattern which defied the very idea that entropy could be the basic transcendent stricture governing all things on Earth.  If chaos was the final definitive answer, then why did homogeneity seem to rule with an iron hand over the present?…..