Author: Fred Blahnik

Do they add an extra dimension, however tiny, to a conversation or circumstance?  Do they add clarity?  Do they contribute information or gravitas that wouldn’t otherwise have been available without their presence?  Do they feel like a critical missing piece to the situational puzzle?  Do they intrigue?  Or, conversely…..is their absence not even noted?  Does the fact their presence is missing go arrantly unnoticed, let alone set off bells of concern and true alarm?  Is the strength of their personality—and more foundationally, their character—so weak that no one even cares whether they are missing from any situation, regardless of importance?  Do they bore beyond belief?  These are the seminal questions which need to be asked insofar as a person’s criticality as a cog in the ginormous, ever dynamic machine which is everyday humanity.  If you checked all the wrong boxes on the aforementioned questions, then sadly there is really no good reason why you were ever born.  You need to roll up your sleeves and get to work immediately on becoming a real, legitimate, unique individual, not just some DNA-enhanced zombie squandering precious oxygen and soil space on Earth’s finite surface.

The world changed dramatically since the sun last rose in the east, but not for the better.  No, definitely not for the better.  A large chunk of good has been forcibly excised out of the world we live in, and what remains behind for this grieving survivor is only a feeble equivalent of times past.  Yet what is one to do in such a desperate situation?  Is there any reason for hope?  Any redemption?  Any silver lining to this funereal occasion?  Grieving and crying a river of tears isn’t going to bring my dear old friend back, surely, so there is no reason or value in going overboard on those two innately nugatory activities.  But then what?  What is left for me to do, I beseech of you?  He was here and living and breathing and frolicking and lighting up my life like a blast of napalm and now he isn’t, and no emotion housed in the human arsenal can come even remotely close to addressing the unimaginable pain I am currently experiencing.  It is the cross I now must bear into the foreseeable future, and to be completely frank I am not sure I am up to the task.

She doesn’t miss me.  Apparently not at all.  A big fuckin’ nullity.  So let me ask you this pointed question right now:  How much stronger of a character indictment could there be than that?  Seriously.  A tired old axiom holds that absence makes the heart grows fonder, but what if the heart doesn’t discern any feeling at all?  What if the heart doesn’t give two and a half shits that it hasn’t seen you or heard from you since last week?  What if said heart is even ambivalent about the whole matter?  It obviously hasn’t been growing fonder during this time spent away, and one could convincingly argue that the original strong relationship-—if one ever truly existed—is now substantially weaker than before.  One could even tiptoe a step further down the path of logic and suggest that this now feeble relationship is on life support and nearing extinction.  So much for happy, fairy-tale endings…..

We make our own beds and then we lie in them.  Distilled down to life’s bare essence, this is as elementary as it gets.  You act and then God…..life…..destiny…..fate…..kismet…..an unknown, unnamed deity…..the Universe incarnate…..whatever you want to call the all-powerful entity that governs every circumstance associated with the passage of time—or perpetual ungoverned chaos, if such is the case as it may well be—will react to what you have done.  You are powerless then.  At that juncture the ball is in another’s court and completely out of your hands.  Never forget that every person alive exercises some degree of free will over the direction their life will follow, but that “free will” only extends so far and weighs so much.  The rest belongs exclusively to Somebody or Something Else far mightier than thee.

Gramps was loudly holding court down at the small town coffee shop, regaling anyone within earshot with tattered, worn-out stories from the previous century when he was still a boy growing up on the farm.  Everyone inside the Lilliputian café was forced to sit and listen to Gramps’ rambling reminisces regardless of whether they wanted to or not.  Gramps finally reached that familiar point where he started in on his favorite story, referencing the period of time back during primordial days when he attended a miniscule, one-room country schoolhouse.  “Y’know, People, when I attended elementary school back in the early Fifties, we weren’t such panty-waists like kids are nowadays.  Why, seldom a winter morning went by when the temperature outside wasn’t at least twenty five degrees below zero Fahrenheit; then I had to struggle at least two and half miles through at least four-foot-high snowdrifts with the wind howling at least forty miles per hour out of the northwest just to get to school, and the primitive path I followed to school and then back home just so happened to be uphill both ways……”  A little girl who was sitting nearby with her parents exclaimed loudly at this last comment, and a look of profound wonderment crisscrossed her cherubic face.  “Uphill both ways…..?!?!”  The amazed lass looked both dumbfounded and skeptical at the same time, before deciding to confront the aged windbag.  “Uphill both ways…….?!?!   Uphill in both directions…..?!?!  Are you kidding me???  Old man……is that the reason why you walk so stooped over now like the Hunchback of Notre Dame?!?!”

A razor-thin line exists between genuine curiosity and unwanted snoopiness.  Don’t cross that line…..EVER!!! So what is the crucial difference separating these two, you ask?  Curiosity is asking questions to learn and further educate oneself.  Snoopiness is asking questions that do not enhance one’s being, but instead just furnishes one with prurient information about somebody else that has no bearing on one’s own life whatsoever.  Curious people ask honest questions, while snoopy people ask mendacious questions with the goal of gaining some degree of leverage over another person.  Curious people are exemplars.  Snoopy people, on the other hand, are the putrid dross found at the extreme bottom of a recently emptied stink barrel.

…..the goal, as always, is to make incremental progress.  Not a specific target, not an arbitrary benchmark, not some unreasonable expectation—those stated objectives are all unnecessary and too daunting in nature.  No, just make satisfactory progress today and if you do that you can consider the day to be an unqualified success.  Same for tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that.  Setting and then predictably falling short of unrealistic goals is the perfect recipe for disappointment and, more insidiously, eventually quitting a worthy crusade altogether as the result of perceived failure and the dark depression which invariably accompanies same…..

…..so I went this morning to set up an on-line account for a soil testing kit I recently purchased through Amazon, and you would not believe the security measures those feckless sons-of-bitches subjected me to.  For a benign soil testing kit, no less!  Why, you would have thought the paranoid bastards at MySoil thought they were protecting the front gates to Fort Knox or the uber-secret recipe to Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried  Chicken or Elon Musk’s personal cell phone number, so stringent were the safeguards and password-creating protocols the MySoil folks forced me to follow just to register a pedestrian soil sample from my backyard garden into their data banks.  I can see the blaring front-page headline in the Chicago Tribune right now:  SOPHISTICATED COMPUTER HACKERS STEAL VITAL INFORMATION BELONGING TO A MULTITUDE OF BACKYARD GARDENERS!!!  And the secondary headline:  The Nefarious Thieves now have Access to the pH Levels of the Soil in Many Thousands of North American Food Plots!  A bona fide national security emergency, for sure…..

…..the head shrinker asked me if I was happy, but what frame of reference exists to reliably answer a question like that?  Seriously.  None that I know of.  The issue of happiness is so visceral, so subjective, so contextual…..that one can go through an entire life without ever knowing whether you were truly happy or truly miserable or, more likely, residing at some point falling between those two extremes until many years—decades—have passed and you can then look back with a degree of objectivity.  You always have a rough idea of how you are feeling inside at any given moment in time but that idea is impossible to quantify with any semblance of accuracy.  You may as well be throwing darts in the dark at a target situated fifty yards away.  We’re talking nothing but guesstimates here.  But this train of thought gets worse, however implausible the thought of that may be:  You have NO inkling how someone else might be feeling—irrespective of how close or even intimate you may feel your relationship with that individual is—and, what’s more, you will never be privy to vital information such as that which might appreciably advance your own happiness and emotional well-being.  If you are an even-keeled person and grossly unsure of your own level of rapture, how then would someone else similarly normal be able to measure theirs any more reliably?…..

(Excerpted from the book “The Hardest Life I Could Ever Love”, a memoir chronicling the life of Mary Blahnik)

Grandpa Snyder became critically ill in the summer of 1922, and I can recall Papa was seldom, if ever, at our own house at night after that.  Following a hard, physically exhausting day during grain harvest, Papa would sit up all night with Grandpa tending to his physical needs.  Grandpa died on August 1^st, 1922, and I can vividly recollect the strange activities that took place at our farm following his demise.  I was kept very close to our house throughout all those proceedings. 

Back during that antediluvian era, an undertaker brought a casket along and performed whatever preparations were necessary for burial right at the deceased person’s home.  The wake–or reviewal, as it was referred to back then–was held in the deceased person’s home, and friends and relatives maintained a constant vigil with the lifeless body throughout the night.  People—strange faces, people I did not recognize or come close to knowing—streamed into my grandparents’ home for hours on end, and I remember Grandma Snyder walking around her yard sobbing uncontrollably early on the morning of the funeral. 

At that time I did not comprehend yet what had truly happened, and it was not until after Grandma was alone—and then gradually as days, weeks, and eventually months elapsed while Grandpa never made another appearance within their diminutive house–that I finally came to realize my Grandpa was “dead”……and that he would never, ever return to be with us again.  Comprehending the grim, desolate finality of death left a tiny girl feeling terribly fearful and shaken…… 

            Following Grandpa’s death, Grandma would sometimes visit Uncle Matt, who was a bachelor and lived near Braham, a small town located between the Twin Cities and Duluth in upstate Minnesota.  Papa would transport her to Austin with the horse and buggy, and Grandma would then ride the train north from there.  I remember one time it was bone-chilling cold outdoors when she returned to her home following one of those visits; the incident I am about to describe must have occurred right in the heart of wintertime. 

Anyway, Grandma wandered over to our house shortly thereafter and announced in no uncertain terms that she smelled a skunk odor.  Papa checked the cellar under her house–old houses always had the entrance door to the cellar on the outside back in those days—and, sure enough, spotted “Mr. Skunk” loitering down there in the relatively warm environment.  Papa left the cellar door wide open, and soon the skunk–being ravenously hungry in the frigid weather–found his way outside.  Papa scrambled to retrieve his gun from inside our house, and then in his unthinking haste shot the stinky scoundrel right in the middle of our immediate yard. 

Big mistake, Papa!!!!! Inexcusably stupid for one so intelligent!!!

Not surprisingly, Grandma’s house, our house, and the whole yard surrounding both abodes reeked with that terrible, unmistakable skunky odor for days, if not weeks, afterward!