Author: Fred Blahnik

Too much time of our lives–—Far too much of it!—is dictated not by what we like to do but instead occupied by what we dislike or even hate to do.  It shouldn’t be this way.  No, not at all! Each and every person should make a conscious point of dedicating their lives to the pursuit of pleasure and satisfaction, not gritting one’s teeth and finding out the hard way just how much displeasure and outright pain one human body can endure over the course of a lifetime. Such does not constitute living. Rather, it constitutes bare tolerance, which is the polar opposite of why we Homo sapiens were created and placed on Earth’s surface in the first place.  Life should be a refreshing jog through a scenic park, not a grueling marathon through a junkyard.

Stasis is our trusted friend, okay?  If something ain’t broke, for God’s sake don’t don a dunce cap and stubbornly struggle to fix it!  Change in and of itself is not inherently evil, but those who advocate for change merely because they are bored to death and yearn to disrupt the status quo are anarchists at best, stupid meddlers at worst.  Stasis and change are like identical twins, in that neither is better than the other until one starts acting up and needlessly disrupting things, at which point you should step in and take decisive action to rectify the situation…..but not one second earlier!  Change can readily make a situation better, but it can just as easily make a situation worse than before.  Knowing the difference and when change will truly be beneficial pretty much defines the word “intelligence”.

You can never outrun mistakes of the past, no matter how hard you try and how much distance you manage to traverse and how mightily you struggle to rationalize those stubborn knaves; they become a permanent part of you, no different than your physical features and your God-given personality.  You must thus somehow come to terms with your mistakes in a manner that allows you to proceed forward with a clear conscience and an unburdened mind. Mistakes will affect and bedevil EVERYONE throughout the course of their lifetimes; that much is a given and as etched in stone as Moses’ apocryphal Ten Commandments.  Yet this fact we know for sure as well: How we react to mistakes that occur spontaneously and in no logical order is the true test of one’s character and the only meaningful variable secondary to that larger-than-life equation which governs our day-to-day existences.

…..there wasn’t much she could do about the shitty situation at hand, therefore she just started crying. Crying like a big fuckin’ baby; yeah, that’s precisely what she did.  Her hands were figuratively tied behind her back and the options she was facing amounted to absolutely nothing—ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING, I TELL YA!…..so what else is a sane person supposed to do in an impossible situation such as that?  Huh?! Any suggestions?! Pertinent insights?! C’mon now, no better ideas from any of my learned, esteemed readers?!  Well, okay then, don’t even consider passing judgment on this beleaguered damsel in distress if your wits are no more sophisticated than hers. So yeah, that’s right, it seems to be agreed upon amongst all of us…..I guess you just feel sorry for yourself and bawl your lungs out like a fuckin’ starving baby howling for a Nuk. Just feel horribly sorry for yourself and curse the gods above and the demons below and hope that somebody takes pity on you and maybe offers you an encouraging word and a helping hand to carry you through your time of suffering.  It’s either that or go searching for the nearest gun holding at least one bullet in its chamber, and she wasn’t anywhere near the point of desperation where she felt like doing anything THAT stupid and THAT drastic. Ergo she cried on wailingly, lugubriously, interminably—no closer to a workable solution than before and with no end in sight to her abject despair.…..

…..supposing the world was coming to an end soon, she resolved to buy an RV and see as much of the planet as possible before Armageddon ultimately arrived. It became her life’s mission; it became her guiding North Star; it became a raging obsession within her breast. Ten years later she was still out on the highway, still doggedly chugging along from one town to the next, from one national park to the next, from one alleged tourist attraction to the next, still executing the same game plan as before, still adamant in her belief that the end was near and she must therefore hurry about her business like there was no tomorrow. Time must not be wasted, y’hear?  We only have so much time in our finite lives to ride the champion racehorse!  She was vehement about seeing EVERYTHING on Earth’s surface before the dreaded apocalypse arrived. Yes—literally EVERYTHING!!!  Everything, that is, except the trivial mundane minutiae which serves as the glue holding one’s life together and seamlessly binds the past to the present and the present to the future and aimlessness to purposefulness without an individual ever being consciously aware of its presence. Life happens while we’re foolishly chasing after “absolute” goals that often turn out to be frivolous, misguided ones…..

The general acceptance of this truism notwithstanding, things are NEVER “meant to be”.  People—typically two people—must make a conscious decision in order to manifest destiny.  Accidents “happen”; life does not.  Decisions are made by discerning individuals; they don’t just fall haphazardly out of the sky or come crawling out of the woodwork like a scurrilous Asian beetle on a warm March morning.  The workings of fate?  Well, yes, of course fate exists as a huge, shape-shifting, monolithic entity, but the big bus of fate requires a driver just like any other, thus you may as well commandeer that temporal vehicle and take your rightful place behind its steering wheel purely so you can influence the direction it’s headed to the utmost of your ability. A million unsavory extraneous things could happen while you’re piloting said bus, true enough, but by taking rigid control of its steering wheel you’ll henceforth have succeeded in eliminating one potential pitfall, ergo I guess that number now stands at 999,999. Forget the daunting scale facing you for a second; behaving proactively represents an absolute improvement in your personal outlook—without exception!

…..the days dragged on and on like one of those excruciatingly elongated dental appointments where you wind up leaving feeling like a beaten Persian rug hanging from a clothesline, and she wondered to herself if something different and more exciting might lie ahead in the days, weeks, and months stretching out before her akin to a boundless Sahara. Because, quite frankly, she’d grown weary of life itself and the same monotonous, repetitious routine that she found herself mindlessly plodding through every day of the year. No known alternative to life and consciousness exists—She certainly understood and accepted this basic factor in the grandiose equation!—yet she nonetheless found herself wondering with increasing frequency if human life on the small planet Earth was all that it was cracked up to be, and why others celebrated it as though it was some kind of sublime gift even as she had grown frightfully bored with the whole deal and was therefore passively exploring viable alternatives…..and others not so viable…..

Hope springs eternal.  That’s the one and only thing that can never be taken from us.  Where there’s life, there’s hope, and you can perpetually take some small measure of consolation in knowing this.  Probabilities are few, while possibilities abound akin to mosquitoes in a Louisiana swamp in the heart of summertime, yet all it takes is but one of those nearly infinite possibilities to manifest in order for you to realize a personal dream.  Never let go of your dream.  Never!  That’s for others to do, for habitual quitters, because quitters instinctively waffle and then quit while dreamers forge ahead irrespective of any and all obstacles placed in their way.  If a dream insists on stubbornly taking up valuable space inside your cranium, it’s probably worth pursuing…..and pursuing with reckless abandon too! There’s no other way…..

…..he thought love, like the dodo bird and saber-toothed cats and the dinosaurs, was an extinct species until the day he met her. She opened his eyes and his heart to sensations and feelings that he had never felt before in his brief lifetime. She was the key that unlocked his heart, and to his surprise he realized that he had never understood before now that it had been secured steadfastly shut—a fortress protected on all sides by redoubtable moats and strategically placed concertina wire. She was all he ever thought about anymore, all he ever dreamt about, all he ever wanted…..all he ever needed going forward.  But then when she abruptly left in the dead of one otherwise nondescript night without saying a word or even leaving a note, the two-timing bitch took his empyreal love with her and he was left mucking about forlornly in a depressive stupor, wondering whether the previous three months had really transpired or, alternatively, whether the whole thing had just been some cruel figment cooked up by his overactive imagination…..

…..a large dark cloud blocked the light of the sun. It lingered for quite some time too, until one was left to wonder whether the sepulchral entity didn’t have a mind of its own and was behaving badly on purpose and purely out of spite for earthlings.  But in time it, too, like every cloud that had preceded it in the brilliantly azure sky, moved on, allowing tiny rays of sunshine to gradually peek out from behind its bulbous, fleeing rear end. The landscape down on Earth’s crust changed remarkably at that juncture and everyone’s spirits buoyed dramatically, including even the chronic naysayers who stridently insist overcast days never make them depressed. The monstrous cloud finally moved on entirely until it was out of sight and out of mind, permitting the sun to shine down in all its lustrous majesty. The world we live in seemed a better place right then and there and life seemed so much more worth embracing and cherishing than before, even if practically speaking nothing of substance had changed in the interim……