Author: Fred Blahnik

Suicide Watch

By Frederick J. Blahnik

 

They’ve had this guy on suicide watch for the past week……

Can you fuckin’ feature the surreal absurdity of that?!?!?!

Huh?!?!?!

I mean, can you truly TRULY fuckin’ feature that?????

Here he sits on Death Row—scheduled to be executed in a week’s time—and the dumb, son-of-a-bitchin’ bureaucrats running the prison have him on suicide watch, apparently afraid the condemned stiff will unfairly rob them of their civic duty and kill himself before they can indulge in the pleasure of legally murdering him themselves.

How’s that for random stupidity?!?!

Really, how does that rate as an Orwellian wasting of taxpayer dollars?!?!

The guy is gonna be dead in a week’s time anyway, yet the dumb son-of-a-bitches don’t want him to ruin the big publicity party they have gone to the effort of elaborately planning.  The media and those bombastic conservative shitheads on A.M. talk radio and the hypocritical Republican bastards who incessantly preach toughness against crime and other similar low-IQ miscreants would be disappointed—no no, “disappointed” is far too weak of a descriptive word…..totally aghast—if this great showcase of theirs is somehow stolen away from them by the featured performer himself at the proverbial last minute.  How selfish of that crazy, murdering bastard to just be thinking of himself at such a critical moment in time.  Why, the uncooperative, ungrateful piece of shit deserves to die a second and third and fourth time over even just for being so goddamned self-entitled and difficult to deal with!

Yeah, prison officials have had this guy on suicide watch for the past week now…..

One week and counting.

Why?!?!

Well, because they simply cannot afford NOT to…..!!!!!

That venal asshole, to think he might even be considering something so utterly harebrained just to be spiteful and purely to spoil an epic party prearranged months in advance with all of the big national news networks attending and bright lights shining and cameras rolling and tons of favorable publicity blowing back on an august detention center……

But……….d’ya think……………?????

 

I scarcely think we have to worry about something so grossly unlikely, don’t you…..???

 

Yet……………………………………where there’s a will there’s a way…..

 

(Long pause)

 

Quick…..double the guards and make one hundred percent certain that sneaky bastard doesn’t go and hang himself with a bedsheet or do something equally stupid and selfish, okay?!?!  We deserve our moment in the sun after all the bad publicity this institution has received lately, and this conniving asshole sure as hell ain’t gonna deprive us of what is rightfully ours.  An embarrassing unplanned death will never happen on MY watch, I can guarantee you that!!!

Didya hear me already, or are ya just plain dumb as a box of rocks?????

I SAID GO DOUBLE THE GUARDS OUTSIDE THE PRISONER’S CELL RIGHT NOW AND STRIP THE BUTTFUCKER’S BEDSHEETS THIS VERY INSTANT!!!!!  And make damned sure he doesn’t come in close proximity to any semi-sharp objects either!  That sorry assface can sleep on the cold cement floor and shit in his hands and half starve to death for all I care about his welfare until the midazolam flows!!!

After all, we can never be too careful with regard to societal safety nowadays.

• …..there wasn’t much she could do about the shitty situation at hand, so she just started crying. Crying like a big fuckin’ baby, yes, that’s precisely what she did.  Her hands were figuratively tied behind her back and the options she was facing amounted to absolutely nothing—NOTHING, I TELL YA!…..so what else is a sane person supposed to do in an impossible situation such as that?  Huh?!?!  Any suggestions?!?!  C’mon, no better ideas from any of you learned, esteemed readers?!?!  Well, okay then….don’t pass judgment on this beleaguered damsel in distress if your wits are no greater than hers.  So, yeah, that’s right, it’s agreed upon amongst all of us…..I guess you just feel sorry for yourself and bawl your lungs out like a fuckin’ baby howling for a Nuk.  Just feel horribly sorry for yourself and curse the gods above 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 drastic and stupid.  And thus she cried on wailingly, lugubriously—no closer to a workable solution and with no end in sight to her abject despair.…..

• …..”a simpler time”. One hears that expression so often—usually in an implicitly demeaning manner—yet it is majorly more a cliché than it is a truism.  Times weren’t simpler per se back “whenever”; they were merely different back then.  No era is simpler than another.  Only people are.  Branding an earlier time as “simpler” is, at its essence, a lazy attempt to artificially elevate the present and in the process magnify the problems one is facing today.    Can’t do that. That’s a complete cop-out.  A lame excuse.  There were hordes of problems people had to deal with in earlier times too, and the individuals who inhabited those years possessed the same intellectual resources to deal with said problems—no more, no less—as the people who are alive today.  Times are not immanently more complicated; they are just different, featuring a unique, era-sensitive set of problems that each succeeding generation has to grapple with.  But do not make the mistake—excuse rather—of suggesting ours is a more complex i.e. frustratingly difficult world than yesterday’s.  It isn’t, so that means you’ll just have to return to square one and cast about for another alibi to rationalize your disappointments, failures, and shattered dreams…..

• …..she was in the process of sharpening her wits as though they were sterling filet knives. After long years of cognitive laziness, circumstance now demanded that she be nimble with her thinking, to be capable of outfoxing another person without that individual ever realizing they had been outfoxed.  And that isn’t an easy thing to do, believe me; it defines the zenith of subtlety.  If you win a mental contest but the other person instantly recognizes their defeat, that really doesn’t constitute a victory at all.  It is a conditional, transient shifting of pieces —more of a Pyrrhic victory, at best.  No, a genuine win is when you figuratively steal the shirt off another person’s back, yet that person walks around afterwards all glorified and puffed up and oblivious without once realizing they are buck naked above the waistline…..

• Religiously follow the pathway (roadmap) leading to happiness! Do what needs to be done NOW, not sometime in the future.  The future, remember, is little different than a mirage in the wayward desert—something you dream about incessantly, but minus any evidence that it even exists or ever will.  If you are truly banking on the future and feel that you are immanently entitled to generous portions of same as a natural endowment, you are just plain stupid and own no more right to that beguiling province than a hungry bat stripped of its radar flying crazily about in a chandelier showroom.

• People communicate as much and as honestly by what they DON’T say as what they do. A failure to “gush” and to provide more than feeble, rudimentary information is a frank indictment of a specific situation or individual.  If someone is authentically impressed with a person, place, or dynamic, they will quite willingly let you know with a frothing torrent of words; such constitutes basic human nature.  In the stark absence of that type of candidness, however, the impression the individual fails to convey is almost always of the negative variety.  You don’t have to be an astute student of human nature in order to accurately “read between the lines” and rightfully interpret taciturnity as silent disapproval.  And if you fatuously decide to ignore this unspoken cue, proceed with caution because your back will be fully exposed.

• We’re all just here on Earth as renters; we don’t truly own anything we come in contact with. Human lives are frighteningly transient; the world we leave behind less so.  How can you claim ownership over something that will outlast you by millennia, if not longer?  The logic doesn’t add up.  Human beings are by nature parasites.  Do the fleas own the dog?  Do the barnacles own the ship?  Do the remoras own the shark?  Do the lice own your skull?  The thought of these paradoxes and others like them is silly and undeserving of intelligent comment.  The only thing we genuinely “own” are our flesh-and-blood bodies, yet even those are left behind to rot once we die and our souls take forever leave of their organic captors.  A feeble case could be made that we as human beings own the moment, but I believe destiny could present a much stronger argument.

• There are always consequences in life no matter where you go or what you do, and no truism is more critical to remember than this one.  Life comes with consequences; always has, still does, always will.  There are no free lunches and free fucks and free passes to Heaven.  Everything comes with a price tag, although that tag oftentimes is not emblazoned on a huge banner fluttering out in the wind for all to see.  Quite often the price tag is well concealed and one is required to do some delving in order  to determine what the human cost will be for performing an act or pursuing an endeavor.  But this investigative work must be done regardless.  Learn to accept this basic fact, and your life will “suddenly” become simpler and markedly easier to navigate.

• A gift only becomes a gift when it is used for the first time. Prior to that point in time, a so-called “gift” is nothing more than an official transfer of a commodity; usage is what confers value to an item.  So too with natural talent.  If or until a natural gift is utilized, it is nothing more than a latent ability lying dormant just waiting to be ignited by a catalyst—normally the beneficiary’s inner drive—although there is no guarantee such a thing will ever happen; too frequently it doesn’t. In truth, squandered natural abilities are more commonplace than grains of sand on a three-mile-long ocean beach.  The fact someone is born with immense talent does not mean that talent will ever be realized.  Potential does not equal fruition.  Fire requires a match to ignite it, and minus that match oxidation and the phenomenal power contained therein will never occur; it will forever remain just so much untapped potential energy.

• …..what are you waiting for exactly?!?! Is there a better time to do what obviously needs to be done?!?!  Huh?!?!  Well…..is there?!?!  I think not too!!!!!  So get your ass in gear right this minute and do what needs to be done!!!  Enough already with the goddamned all-day procrastinating!!  That important job is waiting for you and, trust me, time by nature is NOT a very patient entity! Time does not stop moving simply because you do.   Hence just go and do the work now and get it over with, lest someone else or—more likely—fate intervenes and ultimately denies you the opportunity.  Yes, distilled down to its barest essence, that is actually what this whole fucking thing inherently represents:  An opportunity, and if you don’t grab that elaborately disguised opportunity by the horns right now and wrestle it to the ground and pin its shoulders to the mat you will then have a lot of explaining to do to Someone far greater than myself or your exasperated friends and family members…..