Author: Fred Blahnik

…..the earth wobbled on its axis and the mammoth black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy instinctively shied away from the Lilliputian terrestrial domain spinning determinedly way out at its furthest outpost, yet his volcanic temper still raged on—completely and irrationally out of control.  He took another wild swing at the petite woman—his allegiant wife of thirteen years—but this time, unlike the others, he connected solidly and she flew against their bedroom wall, her head slamming against its unmalleable sheetrock with such force she left  a circular impression the size of a small pie in the gypsum board.  Next, and with an exaggerated slowness that suggested Einstein’s elegant theories regarding the relativity of time must be completely askew, she toppled over on the carpeted floor—face first—and afterwards there was no movement from any part of her body as a pool of blood rapidly collected under her attractive, but badly bludgeoned, face.  He glanced down at the floor briefly then, but only long enough to ensure he wouldn’t trip over the motionless body as he silently made his way out of the room…..

Good times cannot last forever, and they don’t and won’t.  There is always a dark cloud hovering over your head, typically invisible to the naked eye but following you around wherever you go nonetheless, and on multiple occasions in your lifetime that cloud will burst open and shower you with icy rain coupled with other unwanted detritus.  Guaranteed to happen, and on select instances you just have to persevere and trudge forward into a severe headwind with your head bowed down—being brutally pelted with miniscule, razor-sharp, icy projectiles all the while—your forward progress undeterred and your commitment unwavering.  I know it is cliché and vogueish in today’s world to say you don’t want to include merely “settling” on the roster of choices available to you, but realistically that is what you’ll have to do during certain trying periods of your life, and hopefully their duration will be short-lived and relatively glitch-free:  “Settle” between an assortment of lesser choices, since the ideal one doesn’t exist—never has and never will.  The sooner you come to grips with this stark reality—the reality of non-perfect yet non-lethal choices—the sooner you’ll find happiness begin creeping back into your everyday life.

…..he found himself wandering aimlessly through this thing called life, lost without a roadmap, unsure what his purpose was for being alive, conjecturing about possibilities yet woefully nescient when it came to probabilities, stumbling clumsily through every happenstance he encountered not unlike a drunk in an opera house…..and he didn’t have one fuckin’ clue what the next day might hold in store for him and, what’s more, he really didn’t give a roaring shit either.  Because, after all, without a plan for life—without goals and dreams to objectify and then target as part of a much greater mission…….what is the value of owning a life anyway?  What is the transcendent purpose of it?  None that I can think of…..

Eliminate as much worry and angst from others’ lives as you possibly can, especially as it may relate to those individuals you most love.  Worry is the most worthless, cannibalistic emotion known to mankind, so why burden the people you love the greatest with this miserable scourge if you can keep the reasons which are driving it secret from them?  In other words, allow those you love to remain unburdened worrying about YOUR personal problems (typically health related), in order that they can focus on more fruitful emotions like happiness, love, and altruism and not waste any of their invaluable time on you.  There is a good reason why these are called “personal” problems and not family or communal problems, thus resolve to keep them personal!  Be a strong enough person to shoulder one hundred percent of the worry and pain yourself and spare those around you; doing so is indisputably the right thing to do and clearly the logical, mature course of action as well.

If we as humankind cannot grasp the numerical relevance of infinity, then how can we grasp the concept of infinity per se?  How can we smugly assign a descriptor to something we do not come close to comprehending?  How indeed??  It is one thing to say that something goes on forever, but “forever” is an undefinable concept that we as men and women can never come close to comprehending.  What exactly is “forever” anyway?  How can we possibly conceive of something that abstract?  How can we know there is not a termination point at some undetermined juncture on the number line or at some point in the future?  Humans are adept at describing entities with distinct boundaries, but less so—wholly incapable, in fact—at describing entities that do not fit within bounded sets and subsets.  Infinity obviously falls within this grouping.

Case in point:  We do not even possess names to designate numbers beyond a certain threshold on the number line.  If one cannot fathom or ascribe a definitive word to represent a certain quantity, how can we then say such a quantity even exists?!  Numbers hold relevance only if they can be suitably pigeonholed and described.  You cannot say an impossibly large number exists if you have no way of accurately identifying same.  At that point we are little different than toddlers or Tourette sufferers, i.e. people who routinely invent silly words on the fly with no thought to meaning.  Short of this absurd juncture, and we are left staring into some amorphous abyss where everything is indescribable and nothing therein has any shape, mass, or texture.

And this thing works equally well in reverse too.  Going backwards in time now, is there such a thing as a “beginning”?  Every physicist—every learned person in the world, for that matter—believes in the concept of the meticulously researched Big Bang that created our universe…..but what antedated the Big Bang?  If there was in fact nothing at that point in time (“time” used in this context strictly as a literary vehicle), then how did the original constituents of our universe magically spring from that nothingness?  And what is nothingness anyway?  If a place, person, or object can be generally described with a word, then logic dictates something must be there physically—A vacuum bereft of matter even?!–taking up space.   Accordingly, there was obviously SOMETHING present at the time foreshadowing the creation of our universe, or you wouldn’t be here right now reading this excerpt.  Said is a subject so ironclad that it isn’t even open to discussion.  But where did that something come from??  And who—or what—was responsible for its creation??

Of course, no one will ever know the true answers to these metaphysical questions—And trust me, they ARE metaphysical questions; despite its most hubristic protestations, investigative science is not equipped to answer them and never will be!–but that fact shouldn’t stop us from speculating.  And to continue debunking those religious “experts” who keep insisting they possess unique knowledge and have all the germane answers.

I stopped to take a time-out from life, but life didn’t oblige my desire; it didn’t stop for me.  Drat the damned thing!!!  GODDAMN IT ALL ALREADY!!!!!  What was it thinking?!  I just wanted a brief respite to catch my wind and to gather my wits about me, yet life was not compliant with this simple request; it demanded that I continue forging forward despite an acute need for rest.  Thus I had to acquiesce and grudgingly do that; I was left with no choice in the matter.  Life offers a person no opportunities for rest, no wayside stations to let your guard down for a few minutes and to primp up, no prolonged bathroom breaks just to escape work for a piddling five minutes of self-indulgence.  Life never stops, hence we can’t either.  Oh, surely one day our bodies will cease functioning—they all do that just as sure as the days are long and the nights are short—but until that day comes the clock will never stop its relentless ticking even on those occasions when we feverishly pray that it can and should.

Finding real solutions to complicated problems is the most rewarding and exhilarating thing there is to do in life.  Taking the easy, well-traveled route does not inspire, does not loose a torrent of adrenaline within your arteries and veins, does not leave behind lasting memories.  Only difficult circumstances will do that.  Do not shy away from particularly challenging problems, because those thorny situations bring out the best in an individual. Half-baked “solutions” are worthless and an utter waste of time; you may as well turn and walk away from a problem altogether than work to partially “solve” it.  A full solution inveterately requires a full commitment, and anything less than that will not suffice.

Relative to most chores or projects, there is ordinarily a hard way and then an easy (ier) way to accomplish your objective.  Obviously, in every instance strive to recognize the easy (ier) methodology before you begin the task.  This will save you both time and frustration in the end.  One of the telltale hallmarks of natural intelligence is the ability to quickly ascertain the maximus way to reduce any given task down to its barest essence.  Witlessness, on the other hand, manifests in the opposite direction:  Performing a task over and over and over secondary to rote memory, precisely in the manner it was performed the first time and every time thereafter, never seeking or even thinking of novel techniques that might somehow streamline the process and thereby free up additional time that could henceforth be spent on pleasurable pursuits.  In the end, isn’t that the chief goal all of us are striving for in life—Maximizing the time we have available for purely hedonistic pursuits—but with wildly mixed success owing to disparate methodologies?

Understand:  There is never a “perfect” time to do anything, nor will there ever be.  Perfection doesn’t exist in nature, thus why should one expect it to exist in circumstances?  The best anyone can ever hope for is a “right” time to attempt something, when most if not all of the conditions attending a situation are aligned in one’s favor. That is when you should act; that is when you should pull the proverbial trigger.  But if you are an obstinate fool and  insist on waiting around until every one of those aforementioned conditions is in perfect alignment, I can hereby guarantee that you will die first.

Why?

By Frederick J. Blahnik

The baby housefly was uncharacteristically blunt.

“Papa, why do we pester the humans so much, especially when it’s highly dangerous?  Why, just two days ago Uncle Ish got crushed to death on the humans’ kitchen table when he allowed his natural caution to lapse for a mere few seconds!!  Wouldn’t we flies be a lot better off if we just left the humans alone and focused instead on landing only on objects that are edible and taste good?!”

The elder housefly bristled at this suggestion.

“Absolutely not, Young One!!!  Pestering humans is something that we houseflies have been doing for millions of years and it’s built into our very DNA!  It’s an activity that you should take great satisfaction in doing and then proudly pass it along to your own offspring some day too!  Harassing humans endlessly and unmercifully is something that is integral to our core being, Young One; it helps define what we houseflies intrinsically are and why we were placed here on Earth in the first place!!!”

The baby housefly cowered under this verbal onslaught.

“Gee, I didn’t know you felt so strongly about the subject, Papa.  I’m sorry that I even brought it up.”

The elder housefly remained on edge and didn’t feel like being appeased by a wet-behind-the-ears fledgling.

“Of course I feel strongly about the subject, Young One!  Why shouldn’t I?!  And do you know why too?  Have you ever stopped to think why I feel so strongly about maintaining non-stop vigil on the humans—pestering them constantly, harassing them ruthlessly, making certain no area of their exposed skin goes more than five minutes without one of our ilk alighting on it and hopefully biting that patch of flesh if at all possible…..annoying those gigantic monsters over and over and OVER until they’re thoroughly enraged and ready to literally pull the hair out of their scalps by the roots…..do you know why this job of ours is so unfathomably important, Young One?!?!”

The baby housefly glanced downward and shook his head side-to-side.

“No…..no, I really have no idea why this job you are obviously deathly passionate about is so incredibly important, Papa.  Tell me then:  Why is it so??”

The elder housefly stood up straight and erect on his four spindly legs and cleared his throat to lend greater emphasis to what he was about to say.

“You see, Young One, humans are our natural enemies.  They persecute us, they swat us, they gas us, they pull our wings off, they kill us, they seek to exterminate us, they hate our guts for no good reason at all…..why, their unstated goal is to eradicate EVERY LAST ONE OF US from the face of the Earth!!!  That’s right—EVERY LAST ONE OF US houseflies, I tell you!!!”

The elder housefly stopped to catch his breath because his heart was all but pounding out of his chest, and his naturally bulging eyes were now seemingly jumping out of his skull.

“So then I ask of you, Young One:  What are we supposed to do when faced with that kind of flagitious onslaught???  Just fly away back into the furthest reaches of the wilderness and pretend that humans like us?!  That they’re our lovey-dovey friends and our new bosom buddies?? That they would now desire more than anything to forgot past hatreds and kiss and make up with us??  So we should just turn our tails and fly away and act as though everything is hunky-dory?!  That we’re living in some sort of dreamy fairy-tale world??  Huh???  HUH?!?!   No, no damned way, I tell ya!!!  Any fly worth their exoskeleton wants to stay right here and fight back against those despicable human beings, and the best way we can do that is by pestering them mercilessly every opportunity we get.  Every opportunity we get, I say!!!”

The elder fly stopped ranting at this juncture, took a deep breath, and stared down at his young, cowering protégé.

“Do you understand now why we houseflies harass the humans as much as flyly possible, Young One, despite the immense risks we run as well as the awful dangers we constantly face living in close proximity to those unbelievably cruel bastards???  We do it strictly because the humans are fully deserving of this level of contempt!!!”

The baby housefly was taken aback by his patriarch’s spontaneous display of raw emotion.  He had never seen the Old Insect so worked up and passionate about anything in his lifetime.

“Gee…..I never realized you felt so adamant about the subject and hated the humans that much, Papa.  I just never knew……”

And his voice trailed off then like the contrail dissipating in the wake of a jet airplane passing high overhead as he paused to contemplate his next thought.

“But I worry about you, Papa, I really do!!!  Every time you fly off on one of your harassment missions against the humans I keep thinking that you’ll never come back.  Just like Uncle Ish last week.  He said the same things that you did right now—The exact same things, mind you!!–and look what happened to him!  He thought he was invincible too, and then…..and then he got squashed into a pile of mush and guts on the humans’ big kitchen table.  I just don’t want to see the same thing happen to you, Papa!  I don’t, I tell you!!!  I don’t think I could handle such a thing!!!!!”

Tears formed at the edges of the Baby Fly’s eyes.

The elder fly was touched by this seldom seen display of emotion, but not to the point of vacillating on the ironclad commitment to his species.

“You don’t have to worry about a thing, Son!  Not a thing, I tell you!!  Trust me, I’ m exceptionally careful every time I fly off on a patrol mission.  Understand, I’m not as reckless as dear Uncle Ish was; that guy, as much as I loved my older brother, was too overconfident and full of bravado; he really, truly was and obviously it ended up costing the poor schmuck in the end!  No, I have the humans all figured out by now.  I’ve been studying their habits for years and I can read them like a children’s book.  They can’t hurt me; they’ll never be able to lay a hand on me, Young One.  I promise you that!”

The Baby Fly remained unconvinced.

“But that’s precisely the same thing Uncle Ish used to say too!  He would constantly parrot those same words over and over as well:  ‘The humans can never touch me!  The humans can never touch me!!  The humans can never touch me, Junior!  I’m much smarter than all of them put together!!!’  But look where that got him, Papa!  Look where that got poor Uncle Ish!!!  Crushed to death!!!  I think we’d be a lot better off just leaving the humans alone, Papa!  Just leave them be and not pester them anymore!  It’s simply gotten too dangerous!!   Please, Papa!!!  Will you promise me today that you won’t go flying off on any more guerilla missions against the humans??  Will you promise me that one little thing??  It’s just too dangerous, Papa; it’s way too dangerous!!!  It isn’t worth it in the end, I tell you!!!”

The elder fly looked down softly upon his weeping progeny.

“I’m sorry, Junior.  I really, truly am sorry you feel that way.  But, no, there is nothing you can say or do that’ll stop me from heading out on my search-and-destroy missions against the diabolical humans.  Ultimately, they have it coming.  Oh, yes, do those sons-of-bitches ever have it coming; they are fully deserving of whatever torment I can visit upon them plus some!!  And if I don’t step forward amongst us flies and do my fair part in combating those huge genocidal monsters, then how can I expect any of my brethren to do theirs??  It’s all about honor, Junior:  The honor of defending our species against the cruel, domineering humans.  You see, it’s always been that way and it always will be.  The humans want to control everything around them—And I mean EVERYTHING, okay?!?!–and we houseflies cannot just roll over and timidly allow them to do so.  Such is the way of the world, Young One, and there’s nothing either one of us can do that will ever alter that sad fact.”

The elder fly stopped talking at this juncture and gently stretched both of his wings in preparation for flight.

“I’ve gotta go now, Young One.  Tell Mom that I’m off on another mission against the humans and that I’ll be home in time for supper.  Luv ya, Little Fella!”

And with that the elder fly launched his body into the air and flew off in the general direction of the humans’ kitchen.  He left behind in his wake a sobbing, inconsolable young disciple.

Unbeknownst to the elder housefly, the beleaguered owner of the residence had just hung a sticky new fly-trap above his kitchen sink–an area he knew from experience was a favorite hang-out for any flies that happened to find their way into his house.  He was curious about its efficacy and was naturally somewhat dissatisfied with the old-fashioned method of manually swatting any flies that became too much of a nuisance around his household.

And back in the darkened recess in the family room wherest the elder housefly seemingly had materialized from nowhere, a hulking, hideous-looking wolf spider with absurdly bulging eyes had been carefully watching the heartfelt conversation between the two houseflies from his secret lair not too distant.  When he saw the older of the pair levitate and fly away–leaving the youthful housefly by himself and wholly unguarded–he sensed a rare opportunity and hurried to take advantage by slowly inching his black furry body toward the disconsolate, unsuspecting young insect, silently grinding his dagger-sharp teeth the entire time as he stealthily closed the gap with increasing speed.