Author: Fred Blahnik

…..he was not a big thinker, thus she did all of his thinking for him. She was his intellectual avatar, in other words.  And he didn’t mind it one bit; in fact he liked this set-up–appreciated it greatly.  It took the pressure off him.  It didn’t force him into pretending that he was something he clearly was not.  Hence their relationship was exceedingly solid that way; their marriage was one of convenience, and I don’t say that in a pejorative sense either.  He provided the brawn and she provided the brains.  He was the muscle and she was the smarts.  He was the lever and she was the fulcrum.  It was a nice, cozy dynamic they had going on in their old-style household–a classically synergistic relationship, if you will–and this was probably the primary reason which had enabled the pair to be blissfully wed for untold years and counting…..

A lifetime may seem like a long time to you, a mortal being, but to the sun, the moon, and the planets it is but a trifle, a comma lost somewhere in the middle of Tolstoy’s rambling War and Peace. To them, time is as irrelevant and useless as the concepts of finitude and infinity, antiquity and perpetuity, before and after.  Always remember your true place in the overarching scheme of things:  We are merely transient visitors in the celestial bodies’ everlasting Universe, not overly hubristic hosts of some cosmic party.

Nothing of lasting value can be taken from the past.  Nostalgia and wistfulness are slimy, blasphemous miscreants that entrap our feet in quicksand and then inexorably suck us down into a cesspool of treacly sentimentality.  The past is an amorphous vacuum which, and this is true only if you happen to be one of a chosen few, you somehow manage to escape its clutches to live on and fight another day with your spirit intact and your body facing forward.  The rest of humanity?   Sad.  The past takes everyone else prisoner while condemning them to an eternal existence of facing backward with their lives perpetually in rewind, listening to Bruce Springsteen bemoan the “Glory Days” over and over again while they ponder the endless what-ifs and what-might-have-beens indigenous to any organic existence, be it an amoeba’s or a lemur’s or a preposterously intelligent hominid’s.  Pitiful when you stop and think about it, isn’t it??

Let us never forget a most important truth: Whoever we support to represent us in government is who we are.  Not who they are, but who WE are.  The government officials who we support are a direct reflection of our own values, and you CANNOT separate the personality from the policies; they both originate from the same DNA and the same brain and the same body.  Same with us.  If you choose to cast your lot with a government official, you are backing one hundred percent of that individual–the policies, the proclamations, the personality, the persona.  Can’t be any other way.  A so-called leader’s policies, however abhorrent, reflect back directly on those citizens who fight to keep him/her in office.   This may seem like an obvious statement, but a leader cannot survive and remain in office without at least a modicum of support from some segment of the populace.   Suggesting otherwise–to suggest you revile a leader yet wholeheartedly support his policies–is pure and simple hypocrisy.  In conclusion, then, you are not only properly judged by the company you keep, you are likewise judged–appropriately–by the politicians and so-called “leaders” who you embrace.

Luck is a life-raft for the unprepared. Luck is the last resort of the ill-prepared.  Luck is throwing dice with your fate because you were negligent in preparing in advance.  Luck is nothing more than a chickenshit temporary “solution” for those individuals who should know better, but were too lazy and detached to invest themselves in a righteous cause even after multiple opportunities presented.

Get it right straight out of the chute, or problems are likely to surface immediately and then ramify exponentially if you screw something up at the outset. Do your best not to be caught off guard when facing a new situation, because even a slight lapse of judgment can–and likely will–come back to haunt you tenfold.  This is not to say the middlegame and the endgame are not equally important in the grand scheme of things, but mathematics teaches us that incorrect variables introduced early in an equation reverberate disproportionately throughout the remaining equation, whereas incorrect variables introduced at a later juncture do not impact the final product to such an exaggerated degree.

…..the end came abruptly, and it definitely wasn’t pretty or what he had ever imagined. He felt the bullet slice into the left side of his chest, and he knew instantly that it had found his heart.  And now the precious blood that was supposed to be pumping rhythmically out of his left ventricle to perfuse every organ in his body was gushing out of that new jagged hole in the left side of his chest, and he could already feel his strength beginning to ebb as he fought maniacally to retain consciousness.  Various objects before him began to lose their shape and texture; they began to grow shadowy.  The last thing he remembered before toppling over on the floor was precisely that–the blurring of sharp-lined objects into geometrically rounded shapes oscillating back and forth in bizarre fashion, bobbing up and down like ships on the ocean during a maleficent gale.  That, and the fact too that every color in the rainbow had frantically fled the crime scene like scared schoolchildren as blood continued pouring from the gaping hole in his thorax, leaving behind only disparate but boring shades of gray…..

…..from a moment to a memory…..that’s all it was…..one second it was out in front of me and highly tangible…..and in the next second it was filed away in the back of my brain, as inanimate and unchangeable as the color of my skin. The bridge between a moment and a memory is teensy indeed–almost infinitesimal–indeed no longer than the attention span of an average human being, but depending upon its import what transpires in that span can easily last a lifetime and possess all the power of the splitting of an atom…..

When you are young and footloose, a year of time doesn’t look so long and priceless as it does a few decades later. The peerless Einstein was not referring to human life when he postulated his Theory of Relativity, but he may as well have been.  The reason?  Time moves at a faster and faster rate the older we get, and nothing can be done to slow its acceleration.  What seemed like weeks in our teens is condensed down to hours in our eighties, despite the fact the timepieces we use in both instances remain exactly the same.  And as part of this increased acceleration, time itself becomes correspondingly more valuable; we simply appreciate it more and take it for granted less.  Young people will of course scoff at this revelation and question its veracity, but I hereby guarantee you that in fifty years every one of them will perform a sharp about-face and experience an absolute change of heart on the subject.

Note:  My father-in-law, Don Warm, passed away (So, yes, let’s wander off on a tangent for a moment here and address an annoying, albeit trivial, subject:  People do not merely “pass”; they pass away.  After all, how many people who die have been seen or heard from since?  The expression “pass away” is one hundred percent correct and appropriate.  If you insist on using only the word “pass”, you could just as easily be referring to bowel gas) a year ago, on October 19th, 2017.  He was undeniably a great man.  As his erstwhile son-in-law, I can truthfully offer Don the greatest compliment that could ever be passed along to a father-in-law:  He treated me exactly as he would a son.  The following poem is a personal tribute to him and is borrowed from an anthology of poetry entitled “The Changing Seasons of Life”, which was organized and published in 2017 by me.

 

Giants

By Frederick J. Blahnik

 

 

Giants aren’t all eight feet tall while boasting biceps larger than ripe watermelons

And giants don’t necessarily tower over everyone around them in physical stature

Giants don’t sing their praises incessantly and beg everlastingly for attention and adulation

No, giants can be reserved, unassuming, and of normal size and organic composition

Don Warm was a true giant.

 

Giants don’t have to be larger than life and impose their will on everyone they come in contact with

And giants don’t always have to set out to create legends and to carve their names indelibly in the annals of history

Giants don’t have to stand out from the crowd with loud, obnoxious, garrulous behavior

No, giants can oftentimes compensate for their physical averageness with intellectual or creative genius

Don Warm was a true giant among men.

 

Giants don’t feel an obsessive need to prove their gigantism every second of every day

And giants aren’t invariably the obvious solution to every problem that arises

Giants aren’t fashioned from blocks of granite and thereafter immune from the slings and arrows of mere mortals

No, giants can bedazzle with their industry, their resourcefulness, and their astonishing problem-solving skills

Don Warm was a true giant among his myriad contemporaries. 

 

Giants aren’t always found as the featured protagonists in ancient myths and storybook fairy tales

And giants don’t have to unfailingly rescue drowning children or damsels in distress in order to validate their invincibility

Giants aren’t molded from cosmic super dust and ethereally pre-destined for greatness

No, giants can be normal people, lead normal lives, perform non-heroic deeds….but nonetheless leave an extraordinarily favorable imprint upon those fortunate people who happen to cross their paths

Don Warm—a smallish, bespectacled, uber-humble father of two unobtrusively hidden away in the far-off reaches of northeastern Minnesota for the overwhelming majority of his adult life–was a true giant standing tall and proud amongst a thriving, albeit perpetually quarreling and squawking, colony of big-talking pygmies.

 

Yes, with nary a doubt or even a reservation, Don Warm was every bit a giant and cut from the same transcendent cloth as any biblical or mythological figure who was ever conceived or imagined.