Author: Fred Blahnik

• …..immediately after she died he sought to hoard her material possessions–just as many as he could feverishly take hostage within his sticky clutches–as though such a rapacious course of action would somehow draw her closer to him and help cement her legacy for a longer sojourn in his grieving mind.  She had once possessed and handled those items and that fact alone made them sacred, or so he gullibly convinced himself.  But then over time–many years, actually–he gradually came to realize the keepsakes she left behind were nothing–That’s right.…NOTHING of import and certainly nothing to venerate–no more a part of her true essence than the soil she once tread upon or the air she shared with other earthly inhabitants while she transiently graced the surface of our blue planet.  Consciousness was key and its residual handmaidens, pluperfect memories and invaluable lessons learned at her behest, were the only things that genuinely mattered any longer secondary to her shining legacy.  The aforementioned keepsakes were just small pieces of cosmic matter that had been on loan to her while she lived, and now that she was dead they held no more personal connection to her or anyone else than the water in the oceans or a wayward comet wandering aimlessly through the Andromeda Galaxy myriad light years away…..

• Inertia is easily the most difficult force to overcome in nature. Sitting still and not doing anything to upset the status quo feels totally natural.  Moving…..acting dynamically…..changing the way things are currently done…..THAT feels distinctly unnatural.  It feels way more normal to just sit on one’s ass and let life flow by unobstructed than to confront it directly and try to affect real change. Yet you MUST do this if you ever hope to amount to anything apart from just another anonymous Social Security Number issued by the federal government, a humdrum shadowy existence spent clinging parasitically to the gut of society and, ultimately, a pedestrian obituary which showcases a grainy black-and-white photograph taken decades earlier drowning amongst legions of others on the unread second page of the daily newspaper.

Scary Creature

By Frederick J. Blahnik

 

Scared???

OF COURSE I WAS SCARED!!!!!

I tell ya, I was scared shitless!  I was so scared I couldn’t see straight!!  I was so scared I made “bone-spurred” draft dodger Donny Trump look like a Congressional Medal of Honor winner!!!

But what good did that do me???

Really…..what good did that do me?!?!

I had to act—Do something…..ANYTHING!!!—and not just stand there shitting my pants, looking dumber than hell, with my heart racing along at one hundred and fifty beats per minute and my blood pressure spiraling straight through the ceiling.

But my feet were frozen to the floor in terror.  Like I had inadvertently stepped into a gargantuan version of one of those sticky traps ordinarily reserved for pestilent rats and mice.  Like my Size 12s had been immersed in a thick slab of freshly poured cement.  I couldn’t have run away even if someone had stuck a twelve-volt cattle prod six inches up my ass and punched the “Activate” button.

 

This wasn’t the way it was supposed to turn out….

No, no, not by a long shot!

When she first explained it to me—first laid out the general details of our joint excursion—she never mentioned the possibility of this happening.  All she said was that it should be fun and we might get back late.  Nothing about any imminent danger.  Nothing about otherworldly surprises.  Nothing about coming face-to-face with an entity scarier and more bone-chilling than anything I could ever begin to imagine.  Something so utterly dastardly and vile and revolting my pulse still hasn’t settled back to normal and those highly sensitive hairs on the back of my neck have yet to lie down flat.

But she lied to me.

Oh, damned right she lied to me!  Lied through her fuckin’ pristine set of teeth!!  Lied like an uber-expensive Persian rug!!!  Lied to the extent she put my very life in grave peril!!!!

 

I’m sure you’re probably asking yourself right now exactly what I encountered the other evening that has me so fuckin’ worked up and in a tizzy.  I’m sure you doubtless think that I’m being melodramatic and carrying hyperbole to heretofore invious heights.  I’m sure you undoubtedly think I’m a bullshitting blowhard who never passes on an opportunity to exaggerate any and every situation to the max at the proverbial drop of a hat.

But I’m none of those things…..

No, I swear to God, Reader—I…am…none…of…those…things!!!

So…..exactly what den of lions did my devious girlfriend lead me into that has me so unhinged and yammering on now like a drunken teenager?

Betcha can’t guess, can you?!

Not in a million years!

Or even a billion probably!!

Enough with the overdone suspense, though; I’ll tell you now what that horrible place was, and you won’t believe this bit of news either and in all likelihood completely sympathize with my plight and instantly understand why I’m ranting on so uncontrollably.

My girlfriend—yes, my beatific girlfriend, the same person I must confess to having taken an unhealthy shine to over the past six months after first meeting her last spring—had the audacity and unmitigated gall to take me on a surprise visit to her parents’ house for dinner.

Where—and you no doubt have already guessed this by now—I was forced to meet face-to-face and nervously break bread with her gruff, unsmiling father!

To my loyal readers:  You are hereby welcome and encouraged to share in (reputed) Confucian insights on my new blog site entitled “Did Confucius Really Say That???”  Please share the blog site address with your family members, friends, and associates if you find that you enjoy and carry away bushels of previously unknown “wisdom” from this new literary enterprise of mine.  Thank you for your past patronage.  Fred Blahnik

• …..he struggled out of bed in the morning with exaggerated effort. He had barely slept two winks the night prior, his left shoulder was killing him, overall he felt like shit half-rewarmed only it’s impossible to conceive shit could ever have felt so depressed and despondent, and he was then left wondering what to do?  Yes, what course of action can and should one pursue when feeling so ungodly miserable at such an infantile hour?  And, after but a few seconds of intense contemplation, he realized there was only a single thing he could do in that dolorous situation:  He thusly went and sought out his favorite recliner and carefully contorted his body into a delicate position where—Can you believe this?!—his left shoulder and biceps didn’t actually ache like the Second Coming of Lucifer.  Thereafter, in not too great a length of time, he drifted off into a somewhat fitful sleep–wholly unlike the night previous–intent on waking up from this small slumbering respite marginally recharged from a physical standpoint, in better spirits (Realistically, they couldn’t have been any worse!), and ready–No, eager!–to face the still basically new day sitting before him like a luscious ripe plum…..

The present distorts the past, or at least past memories. It’s like being stuck in that house of mirrors down at the county fair carnival, where in every direction you turn you immediately notice that your body shape has been grotesquely and unflatteringly distorted by some arcane law of refractory physics.  Such is the case with memories as well; they too become ridiculously distorted while looking back through the devious prism of time.  And typically in a favorable manner; have you ever noticed that??  Very seldom unfavorably.  Very seldom unflattering.  Isn’t this fact interesting–the fact that overall favorability of a memory increases in a direct relationship to the number of years we travel backward in time?  And why should this be the case?  Why does the past shine with a luster that it never came close to possessing at the time something happened?  Well…..because we subliminally wish for this to happen.  We desperately rely on the highly malleable and compliant past to be our security blanket relative to the harsh present and–even more portentous–the perilous unknown future, and thus it automatically succumbs to this persistent desire of ours.  The past everlastingly looks more attractive simply because we wish that to be the case.

The battle for creativity boils down in the end to a race with one’s own brain. It is no secret anymore—or at the bare minimum it shouldn’t be a secret at least—that one’s brain becomes more and more sclerotic with age and less and less plastic. Roughly translated, this simply means that we lose the impetus and means for sublime creativity as we grow older.  No one escapes this cruel phenomenon either.  Not Albert Einstein, who did his most stellar work in his twenties, and then in the latter years of his life was little more than a doddering, eccentric shell of a scientist who spent the bulk of his time involuntarily resting on well-deserved laurels while doing nothing of importance professionally apart from regurgitating his ground-breaking theories from decades earlier.  Not Earnest Hemingway, who is said to have developed such a massive writer’s’ block in his sixties when his inspirational well dried up completely that he became so frustrated he tragically saw fit to take his own life.  Not James Watson, the illustrious American biologist who was the undisputed catalyst in unmasking the structure to the long-secret DNA molecule in 1953 at the ripe “old” age of twenty six years.  Following this ground-breaking discovery, Watson–who is still very much alive at ninety years of age and has spent the remainder of his career determinedly pursuing other biological Holy Grails–has never come remotely close to replicating that astounding Eureka moment from his mid-twenties. The (sad) lesson to be learned from all this?   Your best creative work comes before the age of forty, oftentimes even thirty.  So if you haven’t unlocked the clandestine virtuoso hiding inside you before those temporal benchmarks come around, it almost certainly ain’t gonna happen at all!

Distilled down to its barest essence, intelligence can best be described with this inordinately simple algorithm: Smart people think before they speak, while stupid people speak before they think.  That’s it!  That’s all there is to it!  That, Reader, is the true, unabridged definition of intelligence.  The highly conceptualized and theorized idea of intelligence contentiously debated by multi-degreed psychologists and neurologists is really no more complicated than this shockingly elementary truism.  Smart people seldom, if ever, get themselves into trouble with their mouths, while stupid people unfailingly do; they just can’t seem to help themselves!  Diarrhea of the vocal cords is the canary-in-the-coalmine predictor and single hallmark which unfailingly defines a dearth of basic intelligence.

Now

By Frederick J. Blahnik

 

Now is here

And tomorrow is a million dreams away

I’m not going to squander this moment by overplanning and worrying about those million dreams

They are only dreams, after all, only illusions……

While the moment—now—is as real as it gets

Perchance outstanding good luck and good fortune, I will indeed someday reach those million dreams, those million illusions, those million mirages in life’s expansive desert

But that is not my biggest concern right now as I sit here typing on my laptop

Because the moment at hand is all that really matters, now and at any undefined point in the future as well

We can talk all we want about the future

And what we hope to do in it, aim to do in it, intend to do in it, plan to do in it……

But those plans can all be wiped out with one internal combustion engine gone dreadfully awry, one random pull of a trigger, one clumsy misstep under hazardous circumstances, or one rogue, malicious embolus breaking free and thereupon deciding to circulate within the most critical arteries of our bodies

Don’t go there…..

Don’t take that risk…..

Now is here

And tomorrow is a million dreams away

Tomorrow will ALWAYS be a million dreams away

In deference to this reality, embrace the present

Embrace it like there is no tomorrow

Like there is no tomorrow

Like today is the final day of your life

Because it may well be

Because for all we know and are capable of knowing, there will BE no tomorrow

Tomorrow is no more certain and concrete than one beat of a cartoonishly fragile heart.

No more certain and concrete than one small breath into hyper-delicate, cartoonishly thin lungs.

No more certain and concrete than one shiv jammed unmercifully into a cartoonishly blood-engorged liver.

No more certain and concrete than one freakish blood pressure eruption within the most Lilliputian vascular vessels of a cartoonishly dainty brain.

No more certain than ghostly fog rolling in overnight.

No more certain than a benevolent Supreme Being.

But now is here

And here is all I truly need

Here and now is all anybody truly needs.

• ALL KNOWLEDGE IS GOOD KNOWLEDGE!!!!! Ignorance may be bliss, but–Truthfully!!!–would you rather be informed or blissful?  Knowledge, even knowledge of the distasteful variety, is a potent weapon in the hands of an intelligent person, and when squared up against a worthy opponent we surely need all the weapons that we can muster.  So don’t mimic an ostrich and shy away from receiving news, even if you expect it to be of the negative variety.  You may not be able to avoid the immediate pain in concert with any accompanying detritus, granted, but in the long run this new knowledge could very well prove to be invaluable and serve as an informed launching pad for ensuing action.