Author: Fred Blahnik

• …..he realized that he was growing older and fatter and slower and more languid, but what really cemented this thought and resonated in every molecule of his body was a much-needed alteration in one of the favorite expressions he frequently chortled. Instead of saying, inveterately accompanied by a hint of disbelief, “That young lady is young enough to be my daughter!”, he now found he had to amend the expression to correctly state said young lady was young enough to be his GRANDDAUGHTER!  And this stark realization did little for his ego, and made him feel all the more old and worthless and irrelevant…..

• …..there was only a hint of dawn scraping the far edge of the eastern horizon; Old Sol had yet to put on his work boots and was still shambling about the celestial kitchen grouchily searching for his misplaced eyeglasses. The air outside the house was still, frozen, eerily silent…..yet undeniably teeming with promise.  Everything seemed to be waiting for something important to happen.  What?  I don’t know yet.  But not a living thing stirred, not even the ubiquitous flock of sparrows that ordinarily mounted a noxious cacophony from the unseen innards of the huge spruce tree standing sentinel over the far end of the driveway.  Nor did the two furry white dogs that typically bustled around the front yard as though their tails were on fire and their appetites could never be sated.  Nor did the pair of bluejays that under virtually any other circumstance could be heard raucously jeering from one of the myriad maple treetops encircling the property.  Something important was about to transpire, something monumental, something of biblical proportions……….a new day was about to commence!!!  And every organism in nature stopped to pay their respects to this regular, yet unerringly seminal, event.  For such is the texture of life, and such is the way of the cosmos, that today may very well be the final time each and every living creature is afforded the opportunity to experience this greatest of all miracles—the miracle of sentience and the miracle of life on Earth.  Death can happen cruelly and suddenly and unexpectedly to everybody and every living thing, and oftentimes does. The animals we share our pygmy-sized planet with know that instinctually, and we hominids damned sure better understand this plain fact as well lest we suffer the consequences without ever having truly appreciated our preternaturally glorious fortune…..

• …..after all those years of unspoken closeness—after an era cast in cement that should have been capable of withstanding even the most stalwart unmovable, irresistible forces—I could feel the two of us beginning to drift inexorably apart. We were gradually headed in opposite directions with no prominent headlines announcing this unexpected divorce.  It wasn’t a tangible thing either, something right in your face, something well-defined and readily identifiable that a person could easily understand and wrap their arms around and perhaps do something about if that was one’s desire.  Rather, I could just sense that a severance was happening, that our once-close relationship was slowly evaporating into thin air at the behest of fate, much as one senses it is going to imminently rain long before any ominous dark clouds begin rolling in on the western horizon…..

October Winds

By Frederick J. Blahnik

 

 

Curse the cold, rainy, October winds!!!

Slayer of summer!

How dare they rear their ugly heads and unmercifully chase away those long, intoxicating days of the fair season

And replace them instead with gray, choppy, diminishing equivalents

Featuring harsh mornings and raw afternoons and sub-freezing nights and gusty, frothing gales

Violently stripping away the huddling, scarlet leaves from those towering maple trees that border our yard and morphing them into diminutive Tilt-a-Whirls which fill the angry air with their non-stop whirring

As they morosely begin their penultimate plunge at the behest of gravity, spiritedly performing a final, last-ditch pirouette into the drab, hibernating grass

Only to unceremoniously rot into rich humus in time if they are not first raked away by overzealous yardmen.

 

Oh, the October moon is wondrous indeed!  No doubt, no doubt!!!

And he eclipses his less luminescent cousins from last summer with ridiculous ease

But over what sterile landscape does our lustrous friend govern??

Let us sit down and count the ways:

One bereft of noisy, merry children, who are long since dispiritedly slouched over tidy wooden desks, semi-listening to pontificating teachers as they find themselves cocooned yet again in boring, tan, brick schoolhouses.

One bereft of ice cream, which has long since been stashed back inside the secondary freezer out in the garage, and even now is involuntarily retreating deeper within that appliance’s bowels as snoopy henchmen peer and sort right past it, intent on heatable, more seasonal delicacies.

One bereft of sensual, tantalizing, copper-toned skin, which long ago disappeared beneath ugly sweaters and thin nylon jackets and ubiquitous blue jeans, acutely sensitive to the plunging mercury in an antiquated thermometer nailed to the red siding of a turn-of-the-twentieth-century, pastoral barn.

One bereft of Old Sol, who oversleeps later each and every morning, and when he does finally struggle up and gets moving languishes further and further away from the celestial zenith.

And, finally……one bereft of beautiful, melodious songbirds, which hastily packed their bags in September and quite sensibly scrambled off to warmer climes when the first ominous hints of Fairbanks, Alaska crept into our weekly weather forecast.

 

Yes, the October moon is proud and majestic all right, but over what type of sterile landscape does he govern?

A dying carcass is all–Road kill!–life slowly seeping out of everything one surveys as the fading days of October slowly crawl by.

And by Halloween…….by Halloween, the landscape around here will be fully and unequivocally dead, with rigor mortis intractably settled in and autumn’s obituary already composed and sitting right next to the printing presses, soon to be published for all eyes to see, screaming out loudly and obnoxiously from the second page of the local newspaper.

 

Curse the cold, rainy October winds!!!

Go ahead—Curse them loudly, I say!!!!!  

They totally deserve a severe unneighborly upbraiding.

Slayer of summer, you are!! 

Chickenshiiiiiiiiit!!!!!!!

Return whence you came and let summer live on forever!

Return whence you came………NOW–THIS VERY MINUTE–I SAY!!!

And let me live on forever instead.

 

For as the landscape around me dies with each successive October

 

So, too, does a small part of me……

• Don’t feel the need to be perfect. The need to be perfect in everything you do puts loads of pressure on your shoulders that you surely don’t need; you will ultimately wind up closely resembling Atlas collapsing under the weight of the world, and who really wants to be that sorrowful, overmatched guy?  Futilely pursing perfection makes you scared to attempt new projects because you know whatever result you achieve, however laudable, can never measure up to that impossibly lofty standard.  The fear of failure impairs you, restrains you, suffocates you, enslaves you….…prevents you from tackling life with total, reckless abandon. Yet that is what you undyingly want to do–eternally!  And while you obviously want to do your absolute best in any endeavor you commit to, shuck perfection aside as a primary goal and aim for excellence instead.  Not only will this new mindset offer you greater satisfaction for a job well done, it will also bestow upon you something majorly more important in the long run:  Peace of mind.

• “…..recent cosmological evidence indicates there is a massive attractive force tugging on our Universe, slowly pulling the entire thing toward it like a gigantic magnet.” Pregnant pause while the gathered throng of people took some time to digest this startling, little-known new fact.  A little girl sitting in the front row of the auditorium was especially entranced with the compelling revelation.  She immediately raised her hand and excitedly asked the famed, bearded astronomer standing behind a lectern at the front of the capacious room and an individual who was widely known to be an avowed atheist, “Do you think that great big magnet might be God?!”…..

• Not all days are created equal; some sprout wings and soar magnificently into the stratosphere, never to be forgotten, while others head in the opposite direction at a rate of speed not soon to be forgotten either. An individual has some control over the outcome of each day, but not a lot; destiny holds much tighter control over those celestial reins.  Basically, you just have to buckle up and go with the flow and make darned sure to bring along a positive attitude intertwined with a cheerful smile wherever the whims of fate deposit you on any given day.  The alternative?  Guaranteed inevitable disappointment.

• …..the “Glory Days” didn’t seem so glorious back when they were happening, back when he was constantly being bullied by that fuckin’ prick Dan Dickhut, back when his face waged incessant war with itself in the guise of non-stop eruptions of unsightly acne, back when the prettiest cheerleaders in school stared right past him and focused their gazes on the star athletes instead, back when high school cliques were more prevalent and demanded greater loyalty than notorious street gangs, back when you were either “cool” or “uncool” and there was no room for hybrids between the two classifications…….yet everyone kept insisting those were inarguably the best years of his life, so these purveyors of common knowledge must be right, of course; why, pray tell, would they NOT be telling the truth? Forget the onerous memories; his memory must have been betraying him all along.  Those teenaged days of yore had to have been the best, most joyous years of his life, and he had just somehow lost sight of this obvious fact during the long ensuing interval…..

• …..he was visited one night in his dreams by a stern math teacher from nearly a lifetime earlier. How eerie is that, might I ask?!  And why did this occur?!  He had never really liked the guy personally—he was too pompous and arrogant and full of himself— although Fred had to admit the teacher in question was an astute pedagogue and a worthy practitioner of his chosen profession.  But still…..the episode made no sense, no sense whatsoever!  That chapter in his life was over two score ago, and to have it dredged up and involuntarily thrust upon him now in asymmetrical, nonsensical fashion when his conscious defenses were temporarily relaxing and on furlough……   The whole thing just seemed utterly bizarre, and I imagine that is one of the foremost reasons why those rogue, extraneous thoughts from the night before last passed the Board Exams with flying colors to be officially certified as nighttime dreams…..

The Last Monarch

By Frederick J. Blahnik

 

 

The last monarch perched on a roadside milkweed plant and laid a fresh batch of eggs.  The last monarch was confident this final act of hers would help perpetuate her species for time immemorial.  How naïve of her!

How perfectly stupid indeed!!

Little did the last monarch know the milkweed she currently rested upon would be mowed down in less than a week’s time by an obsessive/compulsive county employee following instructions passed down from above, and that none of her eggs would ever hatch.  Not even one.

No, the last monarch was just relieved to have performed this instinctive duty in deference to the survival of her species, and had nary a clue that she was the last of her kind…..now and forever.

The last monarch launched herself from the milkweed plant and flew off in a southerly direction with no particular destination in mind.  She had done her part to honor nature’s relentless call and to perpetuate her kind; she could do whatever pleased her now.  There were no others of her type in the air as she aimlessly fluttered along, but she wasn’t especially troubled by this fact.  Truth is, she hadn’t seen any others of her ilk in the past few days, if not weeks and months.  But the last monarch had grown somewhat used to the solitude.  Didn’t like it, mind you, but she had begrudgingly grown accustomed to it.

The last monarch spied a rural farmstead in the distance and took aim for it.  She knew there always seemed to more excitement anywhere human beings hung out, and she was a big fan of excitement.  The last monarch settled on an exposed leaf of a lilac bush—one of many planted in a neat, perfidiously straight row–and spread her wings to luxuriate in the warmth of the late afternoon sun.  She had nary a care in the world; her eggs had been laid and the remainder of the time she had left to live was all hers.  The last monarch allowed herself time to doze for a few seconds, to relax and take a brief break away from her woefully short, predetermined butterfly life.  She switched off her vision and rested fitfully.

The next recollection the last monarch had was waking to the tumult of a young boy screaming in pleasure as she felt herself being rushed along.  The last monarch found herself painfully entrapped within a cloth mesh net, sans the ability to flap her wings.  The aforementioned boy was racing along at breakneck speed and squealing with unrestrained glee, boisterously celebrating his conquest over another species of animal.  They were moving inexorably toward the entrance to one of those big buildings unique to where human beings congregate.

Once inside, the last monarch found herself being transferred into an empty one-quart mayonnaise jar, and next its cover–which the boy took a few seconds to puncture several holes through with a hammer and rusty nail–was screwed tightly onto the glass receptacle.  Finally, the boy hurried upstairs and deposited the jar containing the last monarch on top of a wooden dresser, far away from the lone window in his bedroom as well as the preponderance of sunlight which filtered in lazily through that rectangular opening at a steep, forty-five-degree angle.

And that is where the last monarch spent the remaining days of her life—trapped forlornly within a glass jar in a dark corner of a long forgotten boy’s room, far away from the wind and sunlight and roadside patches of milkweed that she so dearly loved.

The last monarch died shortly thereafter as a misbegotten trophy, as stark testimony to mankind’s unique crusade to exercise absolute control over his surrounding environment.  The jar she had been imprisoned within was tossed into a glass recycling bin with the body of the last monarch still lying motionless inside it.  No one mourned her loss, and no one even seemed to care.