Author: Fred Blahnik

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.

…..if she wasn’t the most beautiful, delicate thing he had ever seen in his lifetime, then…..then……well, upon further consideration, she definitely WAS the most beautiful, delicate creature he had ever seen in his lifetime. So he fantasized about her for a major part of every hour which make up those twenty four equal components comprising each new day on our Roman calendar, finally worked up the courage to ask her out on a date, and was rewarded for his otherworldly patience and uncommon bravado with a condescending sneer and a terse “Go fuck off, loser!!!”…..

……they argued perpetually over the relative merits of dogs and cats, yet he could never come close to understanding her point of view. Cats were loathsome creatures–sterile and implacable and sans emotions–yet she still defended them as though they were affectionate and deserving of loyalty.  Tell me this: Why would anyone love a cat?  You could just as easily say you loved your table-saw sitting out in the garage as saying that you loved a cat.  Sure, both of these objects serve a useful purpose–the table saw for trimming lumber to size, the cat for catching an occasional mouse–but there is nothing innately lovable about either.  In his mind, love and loyalty were interchangeable entities, and he had never in his lifetime claimed fealty to a table-saw, let alone a cat that refused to come rushing up wagging its tail and slobbering all over everything when he arrived home from work at the end of a particularly stressful day…..

Some days are just plainly and simply harder than others, and you have to accept this reality and adjust to it. Assuming all days are the same is naïve and foolish and ignores the barest of facts, which is this:  Change is the ONLY real constant in life, starting with our birth and ending with our death.  Life itself is purely and inarguably a bridge from one benchmark to the other, and every step of the way is somehow different and in some fashion more nuanced than the one preceding it.  Every stride we take is a little different from those previous–be it length, steadiness, angle of implantation, pressure downward, etc.–and consequently every impression we leave in the sand is a wee bit different as well.  Individuals who cannot readily adapt to change struggle with life; individuals who do never have to worry about a thing.

We’re all just here on Earth as renters; we don’t truly own anything we come in contact with. Human lives are frighteningly transient; the world we leave behind less so.  How can you claim ownership over something that will outlast you by millennia, if not longer?  Human beings are by nature parasites.  Do the fleas own the dog?  Do the barnacles own the ship?  Do the remoras own the shark?  Do the lice own your skull?  The thought of these paradoxes and others like them is silly.  The only thing we genuinely “own” are our flesh-and-blood bodies, yet even those are left behind to rot once we die and our souls take forever leave of their organic captors.