Author: Fred Blahnik

…..he didn’t quite know what to expect as he walked into the crackling fire.  How could anyone possibly know?  Obviously it isn’t an experience that you live to talk about afterwards while sitting around a campfire bullshitting and roasting marshmallows with close friends, sharing embellished stories as you pleasurably tip one Bud Light after another. Therefore he was filled with trepidation, surely, but also an overwhelming sense of relief.  Relief that he no longer had to contemplate doing this rash, self-destructive act.  Relief that his torment would finally be over once and for all. Relief that he was being proactive, albeit certainly allowing for how insane and suicidal this provocative act genuinely was as opposed to just shambling around feeling utterly miserable while allowing others to chart his life’s course for him like he had inveterately done in the past. He was feeling all these emotions plus more as the bluish-yellow flames lapped at him fiendishly from every direction.  He continued forward with mulish absolutism anyway. And as the heat started becoming unbearable and as his eyelids began welding shut and as the bottoms of his feet screamed in agony while their bottoms chemically decomposed and as he could feel his skin begin the first stages of melting grotesquely inward onto his viscera and skeletal frame and as the raw pain he felt throughout his body exceeded by a googolplex cubed any he had felt before in his lifetime, he permitted himself a cryptic, ever-so-brief smile. Because this was what he had always lived for; this was what he authentically wanted to do; this was what he would die for today.  He was merely walking through a portal separating two distinct realms of being; it all seemed so entirely natural to him.  But I’m certain readers are probably asking themselves this question right now: How did the protagonist know with such vainglorious certainty there was another realm of existence awaiting him on the other side of consciousness? How could he possibly? Well, in truth, the suicidal fellow didn’t know for sure, but he was one hundred percent certain consciousness was a gargantuan hoax foisted on the aggregate Homo sapiens population by grandiloquent entities unknown ever since our distant ancestor Lucy found herself foraging for nuts and other edibles on the vast African savannah untold millennia ago. Hence anything he might encounter after voluntarily forfeiting mindfulness today couldn’t possibly be any more of a ruse than what he had been theoretically “living” for the past forty-five years. Could…..could…..could it?????…..

Merely passing along wisdom that was passed to you by elders is lazy and ordinarily not sufficient.  Rather, you should strive to expand upon that knowledge base so that when the time comes for you to pass that same tranche of wisdom on to younger generations, it has grown in stature and become enhanced in some way, shape, or form.  Such is the only way a society and humanity as a whole will grow and flourish.  Moreover, this is not just an individual’s prerogative; it is every individual’s cultural OBLIGATION.  Accordingly, expanding upon yesterday’s database is an ironclad responsibility that is incumbent upon every member of a society and certainly not merely a frivolous option to be considered if the circumstances surrounding you happen to be amenable at a convenient point in time.

She took his name on the occasion of their marriage, like so many women still do.  So now I ask this of you: What greater honor is there than that?  She definitely didn’t have to, after all; she could just as easily have kept her own cognomen and in today’s world all would have been nice and peachy and no one would have taken undue notice or basically given a damn. But regardless she voluntarily chucked aside the surname of her father and adopted the last name of her new life partner, and let me assure you there was nothing in the world that could have made her new husband any prouder than that.  Proud, absolutely, but he felt an undeniable sense of responsibility as well to continue honoring their now-shared last name to the nth degree so as not to give her any pause in the future for having made such a huge symbolic sacrifice to him.  If she thought it was a name worth adopting and implicitly trusted him to uphold its nobility ad infinitum, he sure as hell didn’t want to be an ungrateful asshole and disappoint her through immorality or malfeasance.

…..so you sold that highly desirable item and made a very tidy profit in doing so.  As a result, you’re feeling awfully good and savvy and all puffed up right now. But how long do you expect this 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, really, how sexy and self-affirming is it to stand in possession of bland, staid, pedestrian money?  If you haven’t read between the lines here, that was a rhetorical question: The answer is “owning” a shitload of money isn’t sexy in the least 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 left behind by an apocryphal 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 stallion, etc., etc., etc.  Making money is only intoxicating if it is reinvested in something far sexier and esoteric.  Because although a polyglot of digits in multiple banking accounts comes as a monumental relief for conservative, risk-averse folks, so too does Quaker oatmeal for breakfast, boxer shorts, Velcro sneakers, and two-hour naps in the afternoon if those are truly the people you are struggling to emulate in life……

Considerable time has passed.  Single years, decades, and now scores of years have long since passed under that inscrutable bridge paralleling human mortality.  I have changed much.  She has changed much.   The world around us has changed much.  Our relationship has changed much.   Everything has changed much. And now that once Gibraltar-like closeness we felt when we were unfalteringly together as nestlings no longer exists. That’s right, it no longer exists and no amount of pretension will alter that fact one scintilla.  Our interactions now more closely resemble the coolness and aloofness—properly tempered with the requisite politeness and diplomacy which modern society expects, of course—that one feels when in the presence of a benign stranger.  Tom Wolfe was spot-on when he said you can’t go home again, and no amount of sentimentalizing and treacly re-enacting will ever alter this stark truth with regard to places, times, and, most critically…..the people who pass through our lives as the years pass by and eventually dwindle away.

…..and throughout this and that and this and that and everything in between, time kept moving along slowly, ineluctably, inexorably…..and even though a mortal being could not empirically detect that movement with their five traditional senses, one could tell instinctually that life was moving along with an irresistible momentum all its own and that we were trapped aboard an incomprehensibly large ship from which there was no complicity and no escape.  We were all in it together—that I knew for a fact—yet incongruently we were all in it alone too; we were all strangers haphazardly clumped together through no volition of our own. We had no hand on the ghost ship’s rudder with which to influence the direction we were moving; we just stood by and watched dumbly as things slipped by in the pitch blackness, random amorphous things that we thought we might like to sample yet were seldom afforded an opportunity to do so.  We continued moving forward and onward…..forward and onward…..forward and onward…..not unlike undiscerning hogs being guided into a slaughterhouse, with no clear understanding of where we were going and obviously no inkling of where we would ultimately end up……

……like most obnoxious know-it-alls, he actually knew very little but for some inscrutable reason believed otherwise; in his warped mind he was a canny savant, with his knowledge base extending to nearly every subject imaginable and then others beyond that as well.  And so, akin to most confirmed know-it-alls, the fat, intrinsically detestable poseur was utterly unbearable to be around and one would take egregious, exorbitant steps to merely avoid his presence for any appreciable length of time.  Sometimes that simple strategy worked out fine, but other times it failed miserably and you were then left stranded alone in his orbit, alternately feigning polite listening to his ridiculous sermons and rants but more often ruing the gods of fate for having put Lil Ol’ U in such an odious, repulsive situation even as you desperately sought some halfway plausible excuse to extricate yourself from his shitty presence…..

I cursed at the foul weather raging outside my living room window this morning, but it didn’t seem to do any good or instantly quiet the hideous maelstrom.  If anything, the wind seemed to pick up even more and the rain beating against my windowpanes reverberated even louder and with greater ferocity than before and phalanxes of small hailstones now gleefully rushed in to join the atmospheric party.  And then I thought to myself: You goddamned, GODDAMNED vile natural elements and fuck—Yes, FUCK!!!—the satanic, iniquitous forces that are masterminding your assault on this tiny patchwork of Earth’s surface this capricious morning.  The weather outside could be nice, the air could be still, the sun could be shining brightly, the birds in the treetops could be singing in perfect harmony, the temperature could be comfortable if not frankly balmy, and yet not a single one of those preconditions is true or even remotely close to reflecting reality. NOT ONE!!! So next a question materializes out of nowhere and looms large: Is this shitty, shitty, SHITTY weather directed solely at me for some undetermined reason, or is it rather just an adventitious quirk of nature in this undeniably adventitious universe in which we all reside? I don’t know and never will either.

…..sadly—and the best sign yet of my utter desperation—was the fact the only “real” option left to me now was prayer.  Yes, that’s right, praying the bejesus out of my scared-to-death soul as I target the faint, dying-while-I-type-this hope of scoring a much-desired goal which I otherwise exercise zero control over achieving.  Frightening thought, huh?  And profoundly discouraging too. Now, I don’t purposefully wish to disparage praying and I personally hold no grudge or antipathy against doing so or against those who ceremoniously “rely” on it in their day-to-day lives, but in total honesty, if you have exhausted all of your proactive steps toward reaching a coveted objective and prayer is consequently your last resort for securing a favorable outcome, I would delicately point out that there ain’t a whole lot of reason for optimism at such a belated stage of the game. You may as well be throwing darts in pitch blackness or rushing out to buy a shitload of Powerball lottery tickets when the payout is sitting in excess of one billion dollars. And if by some miracle your prayer is answered…..who’s to say that wouldn’t have been the natural outcome anyway? Credit where due, but that’s impossible to acknowledge when you have no idea who the creditor is.…..

…..who IS that young, buff, dynamic guy in the old, dated photographs I retrieved from a shoebox in the back of my bedroom closet anyway?  Do you recognize him?  Is he someone you remember from the past?  Any clues to his identity? Distinctive features? Should you know the undeniably striking fellow?  Upon further scrutiny, I guess he kind of bears a passing resemblance to the you of today, but that is all it is; the resemblance is scant at best.  And then some heartless apparition materializes from out of the firmament and reminds me that the youthful person in the picture is indeed Yours Truly, and I can’t help but be flabbergasted. Everyone knows passing time is a nefarious thief who steals away the profuse majority of human perquisites and peccadilloes as we grow older, but to witness firsthand that bodily deterioration in a photograph from decades ago is a brutal slap in the face regardless.  We all grow old and pay a punitive price for this drawn-out natural process—True!—but does that cruel, gross degradation have to be preserved so starkly in photographs that last forever?  Couldn’t the stark bastards lie or, at the bare minimum, conceal the harsh truth just a trifle? I somewhat sadly realize the answer to this rhetorical question is an unequivocal “No!” in light of the fact I am holding irrefutable evidence to the contrary in my hands right now, and that evidence is not subtle or feeling-sparing in the least…..