Author: Fred Blahnik

…..and the new reality quickly became the old reality, and things that just days ago seemed fresh and exciting now seemed dull and unbearably tedious.  Why is this so?  Why do things become humdrum and pedestrian so quickly?  How can a life morph into a dreary existence after but a handful of spins on the carousel?  Once the shine wears off an apple, it no longer begs consumption.  Once you’ve been to Paris, your second and third and fourth views of the mythical city are not nearly as special.  Once you move past that nuclear first impression of her unparalleled beauty, her warts speedily become apparent and that lustrous sheen reflecting from her hair transforms into oiliness.  Same thing with life.  Once an experience has been sampled for the first time, it no longer holds the same allure that attracted you to it in the first place.  I guess you could say life is coldhearted and eminently lackluster because of this, yet that characterization does not do it sufficient justice and greatly oversimplifies its ethereal underlying meaning.  Life is pluperfect, but only if your expectations of it remain grounded in reality …..

We are all gatekeepers for the future.  Every…..single…..one…..of…..us.  Each of us has been handed a set of keys for the days ahead by the great, omnipotent overseer of the Universe(s), and it is then our responsibility to guard and maintain this temporal piece of property with the utmost respect and decorum, just as those who came before us struggled to do so for our sake.  But it seems in these current trying times not everyone is up to the task.  Some fall considerably short of the mark, and others don’t even realize there is a mark—that with the preternatural gift of life comes an attendant responsibility.  A responsibility to future generations, certainly.  A responsibility to the planet we call home.  A responsibility to the other co-inhabitants of this small celestial globe.  A responsibility to those in near proximity to us, as well as to those who reside on the other side of town, on the other side of the state, on the other side of the country, and on the other side of the world.  And mostly a paramount responsibility to oneself, yes, to that person staring back at you from the bathroom mirror each and every morning of the week.  Do what is right and moral—And your heart in the end will unfailingly tell you what is right and moral!—and then you will never have to fret about disappointment and shrinking away from that reflection in the mirror.

…..and she saved and saved and saved and saved and saved and saved and saved and saved and saved and saved and saved and saved and saved and saved and saved and saved most of the money she worked so hard to earn until one day years later when—secondary to the gradually deteriorating physical health which naturally accompanies the aging process for every human being who has ever walked the face of our blue planet— she was much less able to fully enjoy all that money she had accrued over the preceding years.  She next stopped for a moment to consider what exactly she had been saving her substantial stash of money for in the first place.  And what answer did she ultimately come up with?  Yes?????  An astoundingly savvy investment, maybe??  Well, no……..to be perfectly honest, she had forgotten the original reason by now, other than saving a lot of money seemed like a really good idea at the time and a slew of financial talking heads kept adamantly pushing this “sensible” plan on her until her natural resistance finally broke down and it became impossible for her to resist their logical suggestion.  Moreover, she wanted to be absolutely certain that she had sufficient money set aside in case of a major financial emergency.  Yes yes yes, that was the chief reason for saving her veritable Kilimanjaro of cash, she remembered now:  She wanted to have a giant nest egg set aside in case something went tragically wrong with her life, but thank God nothing like that had ever happened!  So now—decades later—she had this hard-earned bonanza to spend in any fashion she so desired, notwithstanding the fact she currently possessed considerably less mobility, considerably less mental acuity, and considerably less zest for life than had she elected to spend some of her earnings thirty years earlier when she was still vital, still energetic, still  nubile, and majorly more physically attractive…..

…..there were a bunch of foul-mouthed, teen-aged boys running around proudly sporting red MAGA caps and I instantly thought to myself:  What type of “greatness” are you referring to in all of the seventeen years or so that you have lived on the surface of this planet?  Just what constitutes your extensive frame of reference for making such a grandiose claim, Pimple-faced Kids, considering that you have served less than a score of years as a member of our unique American culture and thus your benchmark for measuring greatness is punier than Bobby Sands’ frame was in his final, suffering-filled days.  What makes YOU—someone who was sucking on your Mama’s titties and shitting into a diaper and being assigned timeouts for social misbehavior not so very long ago—a bona fide expert now, during these historically turbulent times, on the direction American society should be headed?  All valid questions, undoubtedly, yet every one of them begs unrequited for a satisfactory answer.  But before I become too angry and judgmental with those presumptuous, impudent young assholes and the brazen license they were showcasing by wearing MAGA caps that opprobrious afternoon, I must remember that they are merely the products of their upbringings.  Shitty, misguided upbringings, no question, but upbringings nonetheless.  My scorn should be directed at the young cretins’ parents for instilling odious values and beliefs in their progeny.  One should never expect a verdant vegetable to germinate and subsequently bloom where a cocklebur seed has been planted in the soil.  Nor does an apple ever fall too far away from the tree that spawned it, and one does not rightfully expect ornery hornets to produce barrels and barrels of succulent honey like their industrious, pollinating honeybee cousins are renowned for doing.  So I guess I should give those obnoxious teenagers a free pass for this day at least, if for no other reason than they are nothing more than ignorant kids who were brought up in morally warped households.  Additionally and as a footnote to this brief treatise, that aforementioned frame of reference I referred to does include one George W. Bush for the first eight years of this new millennium—scarcely a generation ago and therefore undeniably falling within a teenager’s memory span—and he was undisputedly an unenlightened, intelligence-challenged degenerate who easily ranked as the worst United States president of all time before one mendacious, fuckish guy by the name of Donald J. Trump came waltzing along to wrest the reprehensible title away from King Georgie Boy the Groundhog Impersonator (9-11-2001) with astonishing ease.  Thus I imagine from this skewed perspective there WAS a lot of “greatness” to recover after “W” did his utmost to wreck our venerated country over the course of eight tortuous years, but I seriously doubt that was the issue those shameless boys were referring to with the ill-suited caps they were wearing.  And furthermore, to expect greatness from an individual with as many glaring character defects as Donald J. Trump would be akin to begging for compassion from a deranged serial killer; such behavior simply defies every basic tenet of common sense……

A cartoon sketching of  a fool can be found in the dictionary right next to the definition of stubbornness; the two inextricably go hand-in-hand.  The quintessence of intelligent people, other than a requisite turbo-charged memory, greased-up neural circuits, and acute senses, is flexibility.  Yes, flexibility!  An individual who does not consider all available possibilities—who hurriedly makes up his/her mind based on limited data and then intransigently sets this opinion in concrete—can never be labeled as intelligent.  Intelligence demands a certain level of flexibility, of malleability, of plasticity…..and stubborn people obviously do not meet this fundamental prerequisite.  You must consider all possible options—not necessarily form a consensus from them, but consider all of them nonetheless—before arriving at a fact-based conclusion.  Stubborn people are unable or unwilling to do this, and that’s the reason you’ll never find a connaturally bullheaded person on the list of our planet’s most intelligent individuals.

In most instances, perception matches reality.  Do not be shocked or even surprised when this happens; there is no good reason to be.  You can always dress a skunk up in a tuxedo, bowtie, and stylish fedora and pretend that you have succeeded in fabricating a handsome, plausible fellow out of a miscreant and that all is well, yet indifferent bystanders nonetheless aren’t rigorously challenged to recognize a stinky varmint hiding out beneath your full array of fancy regalia.  And, for better or worse, this fact holds true of most other things in life as well.  What you see is what you usually get.  The sum equals the parts.  Honesty is more transparent than mendacity. Why delude yourself?  Why should you expect otherwise?

Today’s regrets are tomorrow’s opportunities.  That’s right, today’s failures—if appropriate lessons are taken to heart—lay the foundation for tomorrow’s accomplishments.  Thomas Edison once said—and please understand I am very much paraphrasing here—that there are no such things as failures, because a so-called “failure” should be rightfully regarded as the unmasking of one potential solution that was not workable.  I think, notwithstanding Edison’s well-documented vulgar, petty personality, that his shot hit close to the target regarding this particular observation.  A failure is not some impenetrable wall that can never be breached.  Rather, it should alternatively be regarded as a portal opening into tomorrow’s success story, and if not tomorrow’s then next week’s or next month’s or next year’s.  Success will come your way if only you learn from past mistakes and don’t quit on the process.

…..she is scared of the future.  Scared shitless of it.  Terrified of it.  And for that reason and that reason alone, she clings tenaciously to the past like it is some sort of all-encompassing security blanket embroidered with warm fuzzies.  Forget for a minute the past is gone forever and can never be reclaimed or relived or recycled.  Forget too that the past was rife with problems and injustices and inequities unique to its epoch, all now conveniently glossed over and buffed up for these pitiful patrons of antiquity by dint of their viewing it through a distorted, rose-colored lens.  Yet turning to the past for comfort and as a fount of solutions for the full array of today’s complex problems will never bring it back.  Ever. Not in anyone’s lifetime, including hers and mine and Donald Trump’s and the Man on the Moon’s.  The past is gone for good.  The past is as non-existent and impossible to access as toiling to faithfully re-assemble that breath of air molecules that you just expelled into the surrounding atmosphere; recovering the past as an intact entity is equally futile i.e. impossible.  Good thing too, because the past is a natural chameleon and devious as hell; it’s little different than a patch of well-camouflaged quicksand if one suffers the gross misfortune of falling into the heinous clutches of same.  The nefarious stuff never forgives, it never relents, nor does it ever release any of its unfortunate prisoners once it has seized control over them.  The past is an unapologetic impostor. The past is nothing more than a giant ruse structured to frustrate and torture imperfect mortals.  That being said, though, I can gladly point to one bright spot:  The past is every bit as extinct as the dinosaurs and the dodo bird and systemic female subjugation. One never has to worry about it because by definition time to our arrears can never return to haunt us other than in our nightly dreams, and those are of course no more real than a Donald Trump promise or the Minnesota Vikings one day winning the Super Bowl.   Still…..still…..still, amazingly, this fact didn’t matter to her one scintilla because—And this point you need to clearly understand since it speaks to the crux of the issue!—in her mind all those years and decades which have preceded the day we are presently experiencing maintain a familiarity—a sheen, a luster, an irresistible glossiness—that she so desperately craves during these  turbulent modern times.  Uncertainty—masquerading unashamedly in the mien of what lies lurking unbeknownst and adventitiously in the days to come—are what she absolutely loathes and, yes, fears more than any person or thing in the world.  And hence she invariably turns to the past whenever she feels her pulse quickening and her blood pressure skyrocketing and her spirits drooping, because that is simply her natural reaction; the past is the only timeframe she feels genuinely comfortable inhabiting.  Tragically, the passage of time,  employing cold hard logic, and utilizing gentle, comforting words targeted in her direction will never change this unmalleable facet of her persona.  She is a helpless creature hopelessly beholden to another era.  What more can I say?  To borrow an inane, nonsensical, way-overused bromide for lack of a better explanation:  It is what it is…..

Nothing gets better with age other than cheese, champagne, and fresh cowpies left out under the hot summer sun to ripen into suitable, albeit not ideally aerodynamic, Frisbees.  Everything else just grows older and more brittle and more decrepit.  More disheveled and more shambolic and more…..just worse overall!  Including and especially human bodies and the human spirit, so don’t even THINK about wasting your youth on trivial shit that can be accomplished just as easily much further down the road when your capabilities and faculties become diminished with age.  Youth must be served when it is blossoming, otherwise it is irrevocably forfeited.   Fried eggs cannot be unfried, sour milk cannot be refreshened, and youth can NEVER be relived despite raucous protestations to the contrary from balding, beer-bellied lechers driving uber-pricey foreign sports cars while caught in the grips of a florid middle-age crisis.

The Travelers’ Prayer courtesy of Fred Blahnik:  As I now embark on this lovely journey of a lifetime, I realize there is a strong possibility that I might never return home again.  And yet I choose to go anyway.  Why, you no doubt ask?  Simple.  Because the potential rewards of this trip far outweigh the risks.  I could play it safe and remain at home—remain safely ensconced in my cozy cocoon over the next few weeks or even lay low for the rest of my life, if I so decided—but what purpose would that serve?  Yes, what transcendent purpose??  The element of danger is what makes life exciting and ultimately worth living, and hence it isn’t something a person should consciously eschew in the name of increased longevity.  Leading a safe, sheltered life may lead to more years on the surface of this planet, but those additional years scarcely qualify as living in a Homeric sense.  A single-cell amoeba could rightfully claim the same amount of pleasure, yet leave behind no less a permanent legacy than human serial safe-seekers when both anticlimactically die and are thereafter flushed into a time-bereft oblivion they so richly deserve.