Author: Fred Blahnik

Never lose sight of the fact principles endure forever; people do not.  I made this mistake during my early fatherhood years and regrettably worked hard at inculcating into my three daughters’ brains the precept that family interests should always come first in everything, even—Although I never told them this explicitly!—at the expense of sacred principles.  Yes, I actually taught the girls that: Family loyalty should supersede principled behavior if ever the two should compete head-to-head in the arena of life.  Well…..I will now freely admit that I was grievously wrong in espousing this ill-advised philosophy and I would like to sincerely apologize to my three daughters for chronically misleading them on a subject so relevant and critical in the Donald Trump and post-Donald Trump years. Principles should UNFAILINGLY take precedence over everything else, including family members’ sometimes mistaken beliefs and the attendant potential for family discord, and this maxim will never change nor should it change; I know that now. I’ll confess that I should have known better “back then” as well, but in my defense I guess I’ll hold up the adage “Better late than never!” as my best, albeit feeble, rejoinder.

You never get a second opportunity to make a first impression…..or a second impression…..or a third impression…..or a fourth impression…..or a fifth impression…..or an nth impression.  You sort of get the idea by now, I would think, or at least you should if you possess even a quarter of a brain.  One can NEVER allow yourself the luxury of letting your guard down insofar as making favorable impressions with people you meet or with whom you interact, regardless of however long you might know them.  You will ALWAYS be judged on your behavior and your demeanor by everyone you come in contact with every time you come in contact with them, and rightfully so. Consistency matters—A WHOLE SHITLOAD!—and inconsistency and dishonesty are intimate lovers who share the same bed, eat at the same table, and drink from the same water spigot.

…..this is who I am.  If you don’t like me, fine, but make no mistake about it: I am NOT molding myself to meet with your approval.  Truth be told, your opinion of me doesn’t stand for one stinky shit and doesn’t bear one iota of influence on how I behave or how I respond to other people or the situations I find myself confronting and thereupon attempting to navigate in life. If you approve of my actions—Fine!—but if you disapprove I’m not going to lose one minute of sleep over the matter and I definitely am not going to alter my behavior purely to appease you and win your approval.  You stay in your lane—Okay??—and I absolutely promise that I will stay in mine. There is no good reason why we must interact or exchange meaningless small talk or pretend to be friends for public consumption. Truth be told, I would strongly prefer not being hypocritical and feel a fake compunction to do any of those things. I’ve never invested heavily in the slimy, unctuous appeasement business. Having made that point clear, I damn sure feel no burning desire to begin doing so at this belated stage of my life…..

You cannot CONTROL the future; you can only DEAL WITH the quadrillion vagaries it unceasingly throws your way.  You are the undisputed servant and fate is your stern taskmaster.  Life on Earth has always been this way and forever will be.  We should hope for the best and fear the worst. Pray for rain even while installing a deluxe irrigation system.  Hope the bully backs away even as you ball your hands into fists and estimate the distance from your right foot to his crotch. Slip a condom into your pants pocket knowing full well it’ll likely still be there at the end of another luckless evening. Attempt that next-to-impossible bank shot in billiards even while reaching into your wallet to pay off your ballsy bet. Shit or get off the pot. This is not being pessimistic or necessarily fatalistic; it only articulates and reinforces our human status as an infinitesimally puny lifeform in an infinite Universe that we’ll never be able to fully comprehend.  And if we are arrantly unable to comprehend our role and our place in a cosmos that defies description, of what value is our limited simian intelligence really?  Precious little. That’s right: PRECIOUS. FUCKIN’. LITTLE! Human life matters, of course, but then again it doesn’t matter too much; its main import lies in the eye of the beholder and not anyone or anything more transcendent than that.

A desperate man, unlike an innately sane individual, is particularly dangerous given the fact he feels he has nothing to live for anymore and hence has nothing to lose.  Nothing to lose, understand.  NOTHING!!!  Since he really doesn’t, you see; preordained fate has become a given for him.  In a desperado’s warped mind, his race has already been run and his time has now come. He bears no powerful, mood-altering allegiance to any locale, cause, or—most importantly—living person.  Therefore beware of desperate people, because just as their lives lose value in direct proportion to their increasing level of desperation, so too does yours if you happen to interact or be in close proximity to one of these sociopaths as the situational temperature spikes ever higher and their life’s trajectory spirals ever downward—spinning faster and faster and careening frighteningly out of control.  If a person like this has no clue what they’re going to do next, how in God’s name then are you supposed to psychopathically extrapolate that essential information yourself? Two-word answer: You cannot. So just be careful when you’re around them…..

Understanding organic conception and its nemesis death is relatively easy, but neither affords any clues insofar as where consciousness arises from and what ultimately becomes of it following each of our earthly demises.  Consciousness may live on in another, altogether different realm, but then again it may not.  No one knows for sure; human sentience is and will everlastingly remain a giant riddle.  Anyone who claims to know definitively where a soul goes once life ceases to exist in a human body—if in fact it goes anywhere or does anything—is at best a crass speculator and at worst a sniggering, pathological liar. Consciousness is far and away the greatest mystery we humans experience in our lifetimes—a mystery modern science cannot come remotely close to understanding despite its emissaries’ boastful, outlandish claims to especial insights—and, for better or worse, it will forever remain so.  Consciousness arises from nothingness and ultimately disappears back into nothingness. From nothing…..bless (or infect, depending on how you look at it) a human organism for a handful of years or decades or scores of years…..TO nothing. For longterm peace of mind, a person is infinitely better off embracing this conundrum rather than seeking to “solve” it.  One solves New York Times crossword puzzles and mathematical theorems and clever Sherlock Holmes mysteries, not transcendent, supernatural miracles.

…..too bad, too bad, too bad, but the future is now sitting out on our front doorsteps, yes it is, yes it is, YES… IT… IS!  No more planning.  No more prophesying.  No more wishing and wondering and what-iffing.  No more procrastinating.  The future is right here now before us—big and bold and beautiful—and you must accept this plain fact and deal with it upfront. Whereas before the future was always an amorphous blob stationed somewhere way out yonder over that faraway horizon, today we have arrived at our destination and it is no longer imaginary or hypothetical or even remotely blurred.  Consequently…..if you’ve needlessly been putting off crucial decisions—make them NOW!  If you’ve been lollygagging with regard to important work that needs to be done—do it NOW!  If you’ve been inventing new and ever more outrageous reasons not to solidify and reinforce existing relationships in conjunction with building dynamic new ones—correct and rejigger that immature behavior NOW!  If you’ve got a longstanding “bone to pick” with a perceived enemy—do it NOW before you choke on the damned thing! Yes, the future—The big, bright, bombastic future featuring all its reckless peccadillos and imperial glory!—has pounced upon us out of the darkness in this instant with unrestrained fury, and the detailed ledger of dreams and theoreticals that you were meticulously compiling for soooooooooo long in the past has—as of this precise moment—officially expired and the pressing needs of the here and now have ruthlessly replaced it. I sincerely hope you are equal to the daunting task……

…..he would always love her, of that he was one hundred percent certain, yet he also knew that he could never implicitly trust the beguiling vixen.  She was a paradox extraordinaire, a binary contortionist.  Her charisma was exceeded only by her casual deviousness, a deviousness representing a fatal noose that strangled many an unwary male suitor before he came along.  Her magnetism was exceeded only by her lust for excitement, yet no principles or scruples were locked in place to effectively harness that lust and help keep it in check.  Her vivacious attractiveness was exceeded only by her desire to sample every new thing that sprang up in front of her, but no boundaries stood in place to squelch or temper this ungoverned desire of hers.  She was a real handful, all right, but a handful of WHAT is fair to pointedly ask.  Trouble.  Yes, lots and lots and LOTS of trouble for any man who found himself ensnared within her carefully woven web.  And so that’s the Faustian dilemma this pathetic male chump, not unlike countless men before him stretching all the way back to the savannahs of eastern Africa, faced: Blind love versus trust.  Her hypnotic charms held him captive and there was positively nothing he could do short of suicide to free himself from the mesmerizing dragnet she lay down.  But, amazingly, here’s the real mind-blowing kicker to this whole riddle I’ve laid out for you:  This otherwise uber-proud man who was being treated like a puppy dog on a short leash was utterly content with his current station in life and sincerely didn’t WANT to break free of the bedeviling woman’s Svengali charms; no, he really didn’t; he was that smitten with something euphemistically referred to as “love”. And all this despite the fact she meant everything to him and he meant absolutely nothing to her…..

True wisdom lies in knowing when you should stop beating your head against a concrete wall and consider how you should manage a problem rather than how you might frankly solve that problem.  Implicit in the previous statement, of course, is recognition that certain intractable, refractory problems cannot be “solved” in the classic sense and thus must be managed in the best way possible.  In other words, fight only battles that are technically winnable and leave the rest for dumb people to agonize over and determinedly wage.   “Dumb” and “stubborn” are virtually and for all practical purposes interchangeable words, thus toiling to convince people of this ilk anything is an exercise in utter futility; you may as well be Sisyphus pushing his monstrous boulder up a steep slope for all eternity.  However, there is no net cosmic loss in allowing stubborn fools to fight hopeless battles for indefinite interludes given the obvious fact they don’t respond to well-reasoned arguments and consequently their time isn’t nearly as valuable as your time, nor will it ever be. Let them do their thing and you do your thing and seldom, if ever, will the betwixt be between.

I will ask, but I will not beg.  I don’t beg………..    I will plead, I will implore, I will beseech, I will coax, I will cajole, I will wheedle, I will inveigle, I will entreat…..but I will never EVER beg!  Begging is unbecoming of a dignified human being, and anyone who expects said as a precondition for doing ANYTHING is woefully misguided and a classless, scurrilous miscreant scraped from the dark, murky bottom of a putrid whiskey barrel. Dogs beg, squirrels beg, chipmunks beg, sparrows beg, gerbils beg, questions beg, pardons beg…..but humans…..humans should NEVER be asked to beg for anything. Period.