Author: Fred Blahnik

…..an opportunity was there for the taking, but like all stupid ignoramuses I mistook it for a problem instead and instinctively fled the scene in a panic without acting or even thinking clearly.  And akin to virtually every opportunity that manifests, this chance was present for only an instant before it disappeared with all the grandiosity of a ghost, and I was then left to live with eternal regrets of what might have been had I only possessed the courage and intuition to recognize the lopsided rewards I could reasonably expect to harvest in a nonpunitive period of time and thereupon marshalled the courage needed to confront this highly fluid situation forcefully and head-on.  But that didn’t happen.  No, nothing remotely close to that happened.  Rather, I failed to act decisively during that pivotal moment so I’m now left holding an empty bag as I trudge away from the scene of the “crime” pushing a wheelbarrow loaded chockfull of regrets, remorse, and ruefulness, even as some other lucky fool (Luck?!  Hell no, luck had nothing to do with the outcome!) runs off grinning fiendishly with his jumbo-sized sack overflowing with lucre…..

…..when the moment of truth arrived unannounced and of a sudden, he didn’t know whether he could trust his employer after all his years of professional servitude.  Honestly, he really didn’t know for sure!  And that left him with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach and a horrible, horrible aftertaste…..easily the most horrible aftertaste he had ever experienced in his lifetime.  Because when “the shit hits the fan” and “the rubber hits the road” and “the egg hits the skillet”, you must know instantly who you can trust and who you cannot trust; there simply isn’t sufficient time to conduct sophisticated, comprehensive surveys at such a critical juncture. Time is never your ally, of course, but especially at crucial moments such as these.  And if you don’t instinctively know the answer—if you have to waste unsalvageable time weighing possibilities against probabilities and then factor in potential consequences to boot—that is equivalent to a negative response, and the uncertainty that engulfs your ostensibly loyal employer at such a transcendent moment tells you everything you really need to know regarding your happiness and long-term prospects with the company in question. Implicit trust should never have to be earned more than once; it is always on them and not on you…..

…..I called her name and she didn’t answer. I called again…..still no reply.  Called her a third time…..same (non)response. And of course that’s when I started getting nervous, started getting antsier than a dropped potato chip at a summer picnic.  This wasn’t like her, wasn’t characteristic of her normal behavior.  Something must be wrong…..something drastic maybe?  So I went to investigate the mystery, and what I found stopped me dead in my tracks.  She was there alright, there right where she was supposed to be…..but not as a living, breathing organism anymore. Rigor mortis had obviously already set in, and her eyes—although still hauntingly open—were glazed over and drying up rapidly not unlike fresh grapes into raisins.  What the…..?! The bizarre spectacle didn’t afford any time to answer my hypothetical question, however, because I suddenly turned pale and got sick then and narrowly missed hitting her stiff body with a blistering stream of vomitus.  Shiiiiitttt!!!  Goddamnitall!!!  HOLY FUCK ALREADY!!!  “Great!” I thought to myself.  Now you have more than a dead body lying in your bedroom under suspicious circumstances to contend with; you also have this smelly, unseemly mess to clean off your carpet before the gross stuff settles into the fabric and subsequently reeks for half an eternity whenever indoor humidity winds up spiking over the summer months. Why, of all life’s niggling problems, and solely because of HER!!!.…..

Fate plays all sorts of games with us, but who are we to second guess the sundry, peculiar twists and turns our lives regularly encounter?  It is best not trying to understand life—It is intrinsically impossible to “understand” anyway—but rather just accept the random oddities and perceived bad luck that you may experience on a daily basis and react to those barbs and thorns the best way you know how.  Live your life without any expectations and be happy for it.  Adapt to the vagaries of life that come your way—many times unexpectedly—because rest guaranteed those scoundrels are innately contumacious and will not adapt to you.  Far too much time is wasted struggling to understand the “meaning” of life when in reality there is no deep-seated meaning.  Life is to live, not understand.  Life is a question, not an answer.  Life is an unfinished manuscript, not a polished memoir. Life is a riddle, not a bon mat.  Attaching more significance to life than this is not only supercilious, but highly counterproductive.  The common currency of life is irrefutably time, and a human being shouldn’t squander splendid finite minutes contemplating that which has no more transcendent meaning than eating, breathing, thinking, sleeping, copulating, loving…..just being!

……I was sure he was gonna die last night, but I prayerfully had another whole day with him today.  A whole day of companionship.  A whole day of sharing the sublimity of consciousness.  A whole day of co-existing with a creature I love unreservedly versus the backdrop of an endless Universe with no true beginning and no true end.  That’s worth something, isn’t it?  Just a little bit, maybe?  A trifle? That was a rhetorical question, by the way, if you haven’t deduced same by now. Actually, it’s worth a lot.  A helluva lot!  A WHOLE HELLUVA LOT!!!   It means the world and all to me, just as each successive day that he continues to be alive will mean the world to me as well.  Life is lived in bits and pieces—in tantalizingly small fragments akin to slowly savoring your way through a package of M&Ms knowing full well that’s there only a finite number of chocolate nuggets hiding in that tiny package—and every additional fragment of time that I can get with him now and over the next handful of days—however small and however short-lived those turn out to be—will warm my soul and feel like an earthshaking moral victory.  He will soon be leaving me, I know, but soon is not the same thing as right now; I can take some Lilliputian respite in knowing that…..

…..for as beautiful as she was on the outside, she was that much uglier on the inside.  You’re probably familiar with the expression “her/his shit don’t stink”, and that vulgar aphorism was especially true in her case. She treated other women like fresh dog feces and men even worse than that. Females at least were not subject to her withering rejections of affectionate advances, whereas men would just be emotionally guillotined if they made the grave mistake of thinking she was on the open market and thus might possibly harbor some degree, however minuscule, of carnal desire. She was primarily in love with herself, understand, but then one was left to wonder if even that held true: She seldom if ever smiled, reflecting an inner dissatisfaction that almost certainly must have extended to her feelings of self-worth. Yet at the end of the day, her saving grace was always that radiant, transcendent natural beauty; her looks were so ravishing that any woman who happened to wind up in her presence was automatically rendered to looking nothing more alluring than a disheveled swine worthy only of being her handmaiden.  And she knew it too. Oh, yes, did she ever know it!  She was the eternal belle of the ball, and all other females were her unwitting subjects; that’s just the way life played out in this instance. Lesson for today: Women should NEVER be born with her criminal level of beauty because it only serves to retard their emotional growth. Furthermore, freaky good looks permanently condemn ethereal divas to an existence of unasked-for deification and inescapable narcissism,,,,,

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’s our “Eureka!” moment for today.  This, Reader, is the true, unabridged definition of intelligence.  The highly conceptualized and theorized idea of intelligence debated contentiously by mile-long panels of multi-degreed psychologists and neurologists is really no more complicated than the aforementioned shockingly elementary truism.  Smart people seldom, if ever, get themselves into trouble with their mouths, whereas 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 stand-alone hallmark which unfailingly defines a dearth of basic intelligence.  Smartness profiling is no more complex than recognizing this reality.

…..I walked into the display room and instinctively knew that every eye in the crowded place was trained upon me, yeah, that’s right, purely on lil’ ol’ me!  All those people were thinking that I was the biggest imbecile in our whole fuckin’ Universe, and I must confess that I didn’t blame them one scintilla for their derogatory attitudes either; I would’ve been thinking the exact same thing had I been inhabiting someone else’s skin during that transcendent moment. Yet I had to remain brazenly confident or, rather, struggle to project an unmistakable air of brazen confidence that I definitely wasn’t feeling at my core. Not the easiest thing to do, mind you, but the circumstances I faced that opprobrious day left me no other option, no face-saving alternative, no viable avenue of proxy behavior. I knew that I would just have to bide my time and settle for play-acting until a more gainful option came along…..IF a more gainful option eventually did come along. Truth is, I could only pray like Hell such a thing would happen…..and happen soon.  Oh yes, oh my God, so fuckin’ fuckin’ SOON, I tell ya!!!  Otherwise…..otherwise…..do any of my readers know if there have been any documented cases of an otherwise healthy individual dying from sheer embarrassment?…..

Is it truly beneficial to know the future, even something as trivial as the weather which in our positions as feckless human beings we can do absolutely nothing to alter?  I don’t think so.  Where would the excitement be…..the anticipation…..the piquancy…..the implicit romance…..if we knew in advance events that were about to occur? The vibrancy would be weirdly absent from life and substituted in its stead would be rote routines and vapidity and insipidness.  Say what you will about the unexpected, but no one can rightfully dispute that it keeps us on the edge of our seats and adds a razor edge to future moments as they unerringly develop and unfold.  Predictability is boring, as are predictable circumstances and predictable people and predictable outcomes. Bottom line, predictability is anathema. Why then would anyone in their right mind pine for it?

He was a slave to the past.  He found it virtually impossible to let go of the past. The past held him as its permanent hostage.  The past was his de facto master. And yet this dismal situation he found himself ensnared within was entirely volitional, entirely self-fulfilling, entirely of his own making.  He could quite easily have extricated himself from the dreary dynamic he was stuck in if he so desired. He could have broken free from the unwieldy chains and readily escaped if he truly chose, but he just didn’t want to. He was opposed to doing it. Strictly speaking the truth now, this everyday guy—this “Mr. Average” guy—was immanently satisfied with his current existence and therefore rebuffed any and all changes that came his way, obliviously ignoring the fact his present life was admittedly a sorry, sordid one that held scant hope for redemption while his future offered nothing more uplifting than a daunting megadose of the same wearisome bullshit.  But here’s the critical point to remember: He was CONTENT with the life he was leading even if he wasn’t outwardly happy with it, simply because said life fit him as tidily as that trusty old pair of Red Wing work boots sitting over in the corner. Change?  No no…..Hell no!!!…..he wanted no part of THAT at this delayed stage of his life.  Why upset the applecart and busy himself with fixing something that wasn’t even broken?  Huh? HUH?!  That wouldn’t make one bit of sense now, would it?!  He would much rather keep his antennae pulled down safely right next to his side, fly well beneath the radar, and stick to the monotonous life he knew so well, notwithstanding the fact the so-called “life” in question didn’t bring him true happiness, pleasure…..or even a minute degree of satisfaction.