Author: Fred Blahnik

• 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.

• Dreams almost never come attired in Sunday-best clothes and adorned with cutting-edge bling. Rather, they are unerringly dirty—sometimes disgustedly filthy even—and require a good scrubbing-up before they can be presented to the public eye.  Pessimists are people who see all the filth and warts and carbuncles and decide this dream of theirs, which at times far more closely resembles a nightmare than an oasis in their consciousness that they can visit any time they desire, is not worth pursuing.  An optimist, conversely, sees the raft of filth and grime and squalor too…..but she also sees the beauty underlying this dream of hers and firmly resolves that it is a project worth undertaking in spite of the myriad trials and tribulations involved.  Dreams are, in the simplest of language, long-term projects, not short-term entitlements.

September 26th

By Frederick J. Blahnik

 

September 26^th…..

That transitional, melancholy time of year which instinctively seems to inspire more regrets than aspirations…..

A bridge between late summer sultriness and the crackling crispness of true autumn…..

The sound of a large flock of loquacious blackbirds, clustered lazily high in the maple treetops…..

Only this time headed south instead of north…..

Seeking refuge from the vile arctic monster soon to come…..

Goldenrods blooming luxuriously in the roadside ditches…..

Late to the party, but quietly spectacular nonetheless…..

Soon to be ambushed and murdered en masse by a stealthy, early morning frost…..

An occasional monarch butterfly still fluttering by on the chill autumn breeze…..

So few now, where once there were millions if not billions…..

Just as my cluster of dashed hopes were, too, for the temperate season just passed…..

The sun shining brightly overhead …..

But shoved way down from the zenith and really not warming anything appreciably as it did a mere few months ago…..

Now only a golden orb bereft of most of its power and no longer a generous supporter of life…..

Did everything—did the world–look and sound anything like this in 1969—today—the day my father’s heart stopped beating and his soul thereupon abandoned his rapidly stiffening body?

I cannot even remember the salient details which attended my patriarch’s demise anymore, so long ago did that earthshaking event take place…..

A beautiful day, today, yet one cloistered in an infamy not of its own making…..

September 26th.

• Where is this leading me??? What is this leading to???  Is there some kind of purpose to all this stuff I’ve been experiencing???  What does life mean to me?  Why am I here?  Where will I go next?  Why are there always far more questions than there are answers to satisfy them???  And then—in the blink of an eye and a paradoxical twist worthy of the apocryphal O. Henry—“Why?” no longer wears the cloak of a question but cryptically morphs into the correct answer to the majority of our transcendent queries.  There are no right or definitive responses.  I guess, in the end, life is just a gigantic riddle…..an intriguing mystery……a puzzle with no clear solution…..

• …..he was just about to escape the sticky situation with only moderate material damage incurred, this to go with a few niggling remnants of his oversized ego still thankfully intact, but just then his conscience decided to make its presence known and raised its (ugly?) head high in the air before rivulets of honesty began trickling steadily out of that accursed, shit-for-brains object. And there was nothing Fred could do to stop this new development, nothing at all; that thing—that fuckin’ hardworking conscience of his—had a mind all its own, and attempting to throw a bridle on it at such a compromised juncture would have been about as futile as stretching a thin Brobdingnagian blanket over the crater of a rumbling volcano in the hope that such action might stanch an imminent eruption.  So honesty prevailed in the end—Yes, pure, God-driven, sniveling honesty!!—and Fred was ashamed to admit that he had allowed himself to succumb wholesale to such an ordinarily docile foe…..

• …..she thought fame would be the end-all, cure-all answer to her litany of ailments–both physical and emotional–but she soon learned otherwise. She discovered fame is a prison every bit as constraining as the poverty and anonymity she had serially grown to loath in her youth.  Return to that pitiful station in life?  No, she harbored no desire to turn around and go backwards in time either, even if she had been able to which of course she wasn’t.  And then a bolt of wisdom struck her–a bolt that had been hiding inside her body all these years, lying low and skulking about in some previously unexplored dark chasm–and she realized that people aren’t meant to live blissful, happy lives.  They just aren’t!  Genuine happiness is a sham, a ruse, an artifice.  Happiness is at its very core a grand hallucination cruelly perpetuated from generation to generation by a small but vocal coalition of fantasts and naïfs.  Said is merely the winsome, unrealistic stuff centerpiecing political campaigns, bridal showers, bar mitzvahs, and fairy tales. Real life is an apex predator that affords precious little time for such nonsense……

Fran sat hunched over in the old red car with his eyes clenched shut, shivering just a little as he considered what his next move should be.  When he finally looked up again……there was that damned omnipresent time machine waiting for him!!! 

But this time when it cryptically manifested out of nowhere to seize him, Fran discovered with no small amount of relief that  the strange contrivance didn’t grab him quite so roughly and then proceed in reverse at hyper-drive speed as it had done before, but rather just gently nudged him back in time a mere few hours..…to when he awoke this morning and subsequently lay in bed thinking:

 

……..damn right, Fran considered himself to be something of an armchair expert on genetics!

That came from his uncommon exposure to pedigree matching when he worked in the dairy industry milking cows years before, first evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the dam (cow or heifer) to be bred, and then working closely with his herd’s artificial inseminator–in this case older brother Joe Blahnik–in trying to find a satisfactory bull they could breed the cow to that would help offset those obvious physical deficiencies.

In fact, Fran had worked at a small artificial insemination stud–Tri-State Breeders in Westby, Wisconsin–one erstwhile semester when he was attending technical college in Waseca back in the early 1970s.  Somewhere along the way he had even learned how to artificially inseminate cattle himself.

Once he started breeding cows on the Blahnik home farm, Fran got even more keenly involved in the selection of the A.B.S. (American Breeding Service) sires he would utilize to improve the quality of the family’s dairy herd.  His younger brother Fred—still in secondary school–was also rabidly intrigued by the process, and those two would often sit down and hold long, spirited discussions in the evenings on the strengths and weaknesses of each cow in their herd.  The dairy animals’ length, their overall size, their productivity over the course of a lactation, the strength of their hindquarters, their fore and aft udder attachments, their ease in calving, their disposition and relative docility–every aspect of a cow’s body and temperament was thoroughly evaluated and discussed by the pair of Blahnik herdsmen.

A.B.S., for their half of the equation, kept remarkably detailed records for each of their bulls, rating them on all those aforementioned specific categories plus countless more.  Therefore when it finally came time to purchase large batches of semen from brother Joe to store in their shiny liquid nitrogen tank adjacent to the milkhouse, Fran and Fred both had a clear understanding of each bull in the A.B.S. stable and what they might rightfully expect it would do to improve the quality of the offspring born to one of the cows in their dairy herd.

Anyway, from that valuable experience Fran Blahnik knew that virtually every imaginable trait which exists among living organisms is, at its very core, inherited and passed along from one generation to the next……and his thoughts then drifted tangentially to mental illness—a condition presumed but not proven to be distinct among the Homo sapiens species.  He knew there was some evidence of mental illness in his own family, especially on his Mom’s side, but thank God he had so far been spared the humiliation of contracting this dread, inscrutable affliction.

Or had he……???

Fran stared at his bedroom ceiling and pondered that transcendent question for minutes on end, while a simple algorithm kept tracking back and forth in his brain:  Every genetic trait was passed along in some physical fashion, however tiny; there was incontrovertible evidence–albeit not widespread–of mental instability in his own proud Blahnik/Snyder lineage; others in his immediate family kept gently yet vehemently insisting that he personally suffered from some variation of mental illness……yet he knew deep down in his heart that he had somehow been insulated from the possibility of ever inheriting this gene or–more likely–cabal of genes which contributed to the embarrassing mental and emotional anomalies that relentlessly plagued others. 

No—–NO, NO, and NOOOOOO!!!!!!..….…the gratingly persistent bastards who shared a last name with him kept pointing a polite but accusatory finger in his direction while at the same time trying to brand him a lunatic and a nut case—if not so much to his face, then surely by whispering nasty, innuendo-laced things about him behind his back whenever they gathered and invariably got around to gossiping amongst themselves akin to a gaggle of lonely, love-starved widows. 

But HE wasn’t mentally ill, for Christ’s sake; his mind was as fuckin’ stable and unchanging as the Rock of Gibraltar, just like it’d always been and forever would be in the future too……..HE WAS AS ABSOLUTELY POSITIVE OF THAT FACT AS A DAY IS LONG!!!!!

            Yet again……still…….as much as he hated to admit it—–he didn’t have logic serving as his ally on this particular subject…….

Fran shook his head and grunted softly through clenched teeth.

Son of a fuckin’ bitch!!!  Jesus Christ Almighty and the Blessed Virgin Mary too, for Godsakes!!!!!  GODDAMN IT ALL ALREADY!!!!!!!!  Why do things always have to be so fuckin’ complicated and difficult to wrap your arms around?!?!  Why can’t life just be simple and stuffed with happiness?!?!?!

Though Fran would have loved more than anything in the world to deny the hideous allegations he knew were floating around behind his back like a toxic cloud and at the same time prove conclusively that the rest of those condescending, smirking assholes were a misinformed pack of liars…….the pieces to this infuriating puzzle weren’t all adding up to his satisfaction……..

What if they had been right all along about his mental instability and he, by definition, then obviously must have been wrong all along and still was???

What iffffffffffffff…….??????????

Fran turned his head and stared out a window at the rising sun.  It was radiant and beautiful, as was the brilliant azure sky framing it, as were the magnificent one-hundred-year-old white oak trees dotting his farmstead as they poked majestically toward the heavens outside his bedroom window.  There was so much to live for out there, so much to breathe and see and touch and enjoy…….or was there?

And then the issue of mortality, the same issue Fran had been grappling with mightily for the past several weeks, crept into the back of his mind.

He had always enjoyed life…….but he didn’t now.  He had always looked forward to each new invigorating sunrise…….but he didn’t now.  He had always relished the taste of a refreshing cold beer on a hot summer’s day…….but he didn’t now.  He had always savored any opportunities to get together with members of his original family to converse and just share mutual affection……but he didn’t now.  He had always assumed he would play a prominent role in helping his three cherished namesake sons grow up some day to become reputable men and noble citizens……..but he had difficulty foreseeing that outcome now.  He had always planned on growing old with dignity and self-respect and élan, with allegiant wife Julie forever at his side…….but, try as he might, he couldn’t imagine that happening now.  He had always considered the blessing of life itself to be the ultimate expression of love from the Almighty God who had miraculously created him from nothing back in the late 1940s……..but………but………

Fran closed his eyes to block out the annoying bright sun shining through his window; couldn’t a wall of clouds at least form to shield him from that blasted thing’s radiance and fake cheeriness?!  He had a new day stretching before him now, an undisputed gift from God–putty in his hands–a small fragile temporal vessel in which to behold and celebrate this unique thing we call consciousness–twenty four brand-spanking-new hours in which to do exactly as he pleased.

Fran thought long and hard about how he would spend his next few precious finite hours on Earth’s surface.  He then slowly dragged his body out of bed before tediously beginning the task of getting dressed for the new day sprawled out before him not unlike the offertory gifts at church.

Yeah, just like the offertory gifts presented to God down at St. Ignatius Catholic Church in Spring Valley every Sunday morning.

Immediately prior to Holy Communion…..pay special homage to God by presenting Him with the ultimate offertory sacrifices—the symbolic body and blood of crucified Jesus Christ–on the supreme altar of the church…..every Sunday of every year, without exception…..over and over and over again, just like clockwork.

Tomorrow is Sunday, isn’t it?

            A day reserved for offering appreciation for the glorious things in life and for rejoicing and for praising and for sincerely thanking God who in his infinite wisdom and compassion chose to honor a select few human beings with the indescribably generous gift of consciousness.

Fran stopped what he was doing for a second to reflect.  What is so indescribably generous about consciousness anyway? He had no say in his creation; why should he then be so obnoxiously grateful to be alive? What exactly makes life so special and inviolate in the first place? Why are some people favored with only happiness while others, through no fault of their own, are condemned to a lifetime of misery? What is the underlying purpose of life if authentic happiness can never be found? What…..why…..what…..why…..WHAT…..WHY…..????

Fran shook his head in despair and tears welled up in the corners of his eyes.

            Just one more sunrise out of the multiples of thousands he had already experienced in his forty six year lifetime and Sunday, that traditional temporal shepherd overseeing solemn thanksgivings and offertory dowries and millennials-long worshipping of some pluperfect but unseen deity, will be here before you know it…..

            Or will it?

Can it?

            Does the sun actually rise if you are not personally present to witness this daily yet eternally transcendent event? Can age-old rituals truly be maintained if you have moved on to another plane of consciousness…..or absence thereof? Will the earthly world go on as before if you no longer own a seat at its banquet table? Is consciousness real or just a cruel hoax?  Is happiness a real entity?  If happiness truly exists, is it grossly overrated?  Does anyone really care about the future when it’s actually little more than a cruel mirage—a repository for dreams that seldom if ever come true?  Are you better off being alive or dead?  Do dead people still feel emotional torment once consciousness ceases to exist?  What constitutes a good life?  What constitutes a full life?

            The middle-aged man shook his head in frustration while staring blankly in the bedroom mirror at this gaunt, hollow-faced stranger who was in turn staring straight back at him. The guy looked extraordinarily despondent—tragic almost; he bore no resemblance to anyone Fran knew.

            Oh well, those are questions for another day and another person, Fran finally decided as he turned away from the mirror and dabbed at his eyes with the heel of his right hand and next began shuffling listlessly toward his kitchen.

For, you see, Francis Edward Blahnik already knew deep down in his heart what the fateful day facing him held in store —this otherwise unremarkable Saturday staking claim to its own two dozen hours well past the midpoint of September 1995 A.D. on the Roman calendar—because, barring a last minute change of heart, he had been meticulously rehearsing in his mind the actions he planned to perform during its afternoon bloc for some time now.

 

Fran let out a deep sigh and laid his sheet of paper on the empty passenger seat of the car he was sitting in.  He next climbed out of the vehicle and gently slammed its door shut behind him.  Fran walked to the front of the car, glanced mournfully through bloodshot eyes at the late afternoon sun ritualistically descending to his left, then slowly closed those haunted, sorrowful eyes a final time…..before inhaling one last giant, drawn-out breath as fully and as deeply into the furthest depths of his lungs as human physiology could possibly allow……..