Author: Fred Blahnik

Nothing gets better with age other than cheese, champagne, and fresh cowpies left out in the hot summer sun to ripen. Everything else just grows more old and more brittle and more decrepit.  Including and especially human bodies and the human spirit, so don’t even THINK about wasting your youth on trivial shit that can be accomplished just as easily much further down the road.  Fried eggs cannot be unfried, sour milk cannot be refreshened, and youth can NEVER be relived.

Resolution is good; indecision is not good. It is better, in both the short run and the long run, to know rather than NOT to know.  Knowledge is immanently empowering; it allows us to go forward armed with at least some of the information we need to make intelligent decisions.  Wanton ignorance, on the other hand, doesn’t confer anything of lasting value.  Some people actually prefer living in the dark, unburdened by a wealth of knowledge which they regard as cumbersome and loathsome, but then again so do bats, and who among us would want to trade places with those hideous little half-blind mammals for a year?  Knowledge sheds light on a subject; deliberate ignorance snuffs out that critical light.

Satan lives…..but he is not a caricature and he is not red in color and he does not wield a five-tined fork and he does not boast ridiculous spiked horns atop his fiendish head. No, the real Satan exists as unfounded fear…..and boundless anxiety…..and morbid depression…..and uncontrolled paranoia…….and inexplicable schizophrenia…..all of those repulsive things that can take an otherwise normal life and turn it upside down and make it into something scarcely worth living.  Satan exists in a great number of lives as gross emotional anomalies that make each new day a non-stop living Hell.  So don’t snicker sarcastically when the name of Satan is invoked and pursuantly conjure up medieval images of Dante’s supposedly unenlightened time.  No, Ol’ Satan is as alive today as he was back then, only the disguises he now employs are much more subtle and discreet and hence he succeeds in luring the average person into a false sense of security without them ever being aware of his insidious, pervasive presence.

Scared???

OF COURSE I WAS SCARED!!!!!

I was scared shitless!

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 with my heart racing along at one hundred and fifty beats per minute and my blood pressure spiraling through the ceiling.

 

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

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 even begin to imagine.

 

(This short story will be continued at an undetermined later date.)

The “Smell Test”!!!!! Owing to its utter simplicity, the “Smell Test” is without doubt the best test of all.  If a situation doesn’t feel quite right…..if it doesn’t look quite right…..if it doesn’t radiate quite right…..if it doesn’t “smell” quite right…..then there is probably something wrong with it.  Nothing too complicated or subtle about the dynamic in question.  Instinct and common sense are the key components fueling this equation, of course, along with a rudimentary understanding of your surroundings.  If all your ducks aren’t lined up in a tidy row then something is probably wrong, and that is the time when you have to admit this fact to yourself, roll up your sleeves, and start tenaciously digging beneath the surface to uncover an underlying reason for the anomaly.

Gramps was loudly holding court down at the small town coffee shop, regaling anyone within earshot with tattered, worn-out stories from the previous century when he was still a boy on the farm. Everyone inside the Lilliputian café was forced to sit and listen to Gramps’ rambling reminisces regardless of whether they wanted to or not.  Gramps finally reached the point where he started in on his favorite story, referencing the period of time back during primordial days when he attended a miniscule, one-room country schoolhouse.  “Y’know, People, when I attended elementary school back in the early Fifties, we weren’t such panty-waists like kids are nowadays.  Why, seldom a winter morning went by when the temperature outside wasn’t at least twenty degrees below zero Fahrenheit; then I had to struggle at least two and half miles through at least four-foot-high snowdrifts with the wind howling at least forty miles per hour out of the northwest just to get to school, and the primitive path I followed to and from home just so happened to be uphill in both directions……”  A little girl who was sitting nearby with her parents exclaimed loudly at this last comment, and a look of profound wonderment crisscrossed her cherubic face.  “Uphill both directions…..?!?!”  The amazed lass looked both dumbfounded and skeptical at the same time, before deciding to confront the aged windbag.  “Uphill both directions…….?!?!   Both directions…..?!?!  Are you kidding me???  Old man……is that the reason why you walk so stooped-over now like the Hunchback of Notre Dame?!?!”

What is the meaning of life? Correct answer:  There is no underlying meaning to life.  We are born and then we die.  In between these two seminal dates (for us, and only for us), we are granted a finite number of days in which to experience this unique dimension called consciousness.  How we choose to spend these precious days is entirely up to us.  Time is the only common denominator linking us to both our ancestors and our descendants.  Once you are gone from this planet someone new will step in immediately to take your place, and five hundred years from now–unless your name happens to be Jesus Christ, Napoleon Bonaparte, George Washington, or some other overarching historical figure–no one will ever have heard of you.  Furthermore, no one will give a shit that you ever existed either.  This is not being cruel; it is being ruthlessly honest.  There is no transcendent meaning to life, only a finite, wholly mathematical, undetermined number of days each individual is granted in which to experience consciousness, and you would be well advised to start relishing that relatively small allotment before the meter on your mortality tank drops down to less than a quarter tank and you “suddenly” face the risk of those incomparable days as a sentient being running out.  And they will eventually come to an end too, let me assure you of that.  There are no mulligans on life.  When you pass away some day and your body eventually transforms back into the bare stardust from whence each of us came, no one will mourn for very long nor attach any significant “meaning” to the life you happened to live as a transient, puny resident on Earth’s timeless surface.  You were here…..and then quickly and unceremoniously you were gone, and life as we know it and the Universe encasing us will continue on without skipping a beat. We are only important and indispensable in our own minds…..

NOTE:  The following poem is borrowed from an anthology of poetry entitled “The Changing Seasons of Life”, which was authored by Fred Blahnik and published in 2016.

 

Another Day Passed

By Frederick J. Blahnik

 

The sun slips silently over the western horizon

I watch it closely as it disappears from sight

Darkness slowly settles in while a battalion of crickets intensify their raucous chirping

Another day passed

Never to return………

 

I go for a walk down a desolate gravel road

Corn growing tall, stretching eagerly toward the heavens

The furry, more-gray-than-white dog at my feet panting heavily in the oppressive summer heat

Another day passed

Never to return………

 

Daughters home from college for the summer

Working odd jobs, lazying around the house the remainder of the time

I can remember back–Way back in time!!!–when I too got to indulge in that same Bohemian lifestyle

Another day passed

Never to return………

 

Dogs barking outside the kitchen window

Just a pick-up truck going by on our township road, driving slowly yet not menacingly

But that’s the reason you always wanna keep a good watchdog around your place in the country, right?!

Another day passed

Never to return…….

 

Sitting out back now savoring a strong whiskey and Squirt

Sealing the lid on yet another wondrous, eventful day

What about living and life ain’t there to like?

Another day passed

Never to return………

 

Then multiply these dreamy, never-alike seamless days by a hundred and then by another three hundred

Years pass

Never to return….…

 

And a life quickly passes as well

Never to return………

…..she felt the knife sliding between two ribs on the left side of his chest, and then she heard a gentle hissing sound as blood came gushing out of this newly created body orifice while the total stranger stumbled about awkwardly before silently toppling over backward onto an immaculately groomed carpet. JESUS CHRIST!!!!!  The horror of it all!!!  Diane gasped involuntarily while sweat rushed from every pore in her body, drenching her lavender pajama top as though she had just taken a lengthy shower in the garment; she found herself frantic to escape this hideous nightmare she found herself trapped within…..this horrible charade…..this ghoulish scene-playing–and the sooner the better!  But then she went to brush some rogue strands of hair back from her forehead…..and Diane quickly discovered the sticky blood on her hands was every bit as real as the transcendent fear she was feeling now in her heart…..

…..she was so certain she was infallible that she looked upon advice as charity, some useless commodity to be distributed at random exclusively to the stupid and the feckless and the dregs of society, but definitely unbecoming to someone of her magisterial dignity. Then one day–by sheer happenstance and through no fault of her own–she became one of those aforementioned miscreants, and her perspective abruptly pivoted and did an about-face. She was now of the proper mindset to accept hand-outs, including and especially salient words of wisdom…..