Author: Fred Blahnik

The general acceptance of this truism notwithstanding, things are NEVER “meant to be”.  People—typically two people—must make a conscious decision in order to manifest destiny.   Accidents “happen”; life does not.  Decisions are made by discerning individuals; they don’t just fall haphazardly out of the sky or crawl out of the woodwork like a scurrilous Asian beetle on a warm March morning.  The workings of fate?  Well, yes, of course fate exists as a huge, shape-shifting, monolithic entity, but the big bus of fate requires a driver just like any other, thus you may as well commandeer that temporal vehicle and take your rightful place behind its steering wheel purely so you can influence the direction it is headed to the utmost of your ability. A million unsavory extraneous things could happen while you’re piloting said bus, true enough, but by taking firm control of its steering wheel you will henceforth have succeeded in eliminating one potential pitfall so I guess the number now stands at 999,999.  Forget the daunting scale for a second; that represents an absolute improvement—inarguably!

…..he was searching for a wholesome girl…..an industrious girl…..a resourceful girl…..a GENUINE girl…..yet, let’s face the plain, unforgiving facts here, so few of those exist anymore.  They are an endangered species, scarcely different from the Siberian tiger or the Florida manatee or an old-time, Roy Rogersesque western cowboy.  So when he finally lucked out and found an old-school girl for himself, he felt remarkable kinship to a gemstone miner in South Africa who has just unearthed the next Hope Diamond.  He vowed that he would treat this incomparably exquisite creature with respect, with gratitude, with no small degree of adulation, with saintliness even…..and that if their bond was ever to be broken, it would be as a direct result of her actions and not his own. Said was a promise he was destined to break, of course, but—Spoiler Alert!—the surprise here lies in the astonishingly short duration before his transgression occurred and not in its virtually guaranteed immediate disavowal, this coming from someone whose not always splendid behavior was almost as predictable as the phases of the moon…..

The absolute saddest thing in life is standing helplessly on the sidelines watching pure potential go unrealized.  So many people are arrantly talentless, and therefore to watch someone who isn’t waste their God-given gifts defies logic and is serious cause for dolor.  If only drive and ambition were as commonplace as raw ability, but they undisputably aren’t and the competition between the two isn’t particularly close. Dedication is the great equalizer in life, and I would automatically take one conscientious hard worker over ten precocious but lazy prodigies any day of the week if I badly needed to get a job done in a timely manner. Pity the underachieving louts! Life doesn’t owe them anything. Contrarily, they owe life EVERYTHING, more specifically compensation for pillaging finite resources on a tiny blue planet that, for all we know, is the only one in an infinitely huge Universe that nurtures life and accepts all comers, irrespective of their level of gratitude.

Confidence breeds success.  And success breeds increased confidence…..this is a wonderful, self-perpetuating cycle, isn’t it?  But what is the key ingredient I haven’t spoken about yet?  Trying.  Effort.  Attempting.  Engaging.  In order to enjoy any measure of success, you must first have the guts to try.  You cannot succeed without first trying.  Such may sound like a moronically obvious statement, but you would be astounded to learn how many individuals sit on the sidelines—endlessly watching—and then have the audacity to complain about their lack of success and the fact they’ve never received any “breaks” in life.  What a crock of shit that is!  No one succeeds every time they attempt something, but those who have experienced failure are also the same people who will ultimately taste success. Those successes will henceforth multiply over time as the individual’s confidence initially blossoms and then continues to mushroom, oftentimes exponentially.  But first you must try.  Trying is the critical ingredient. Trying is paramount.  I hereby promise you this: Short of an incipient effort, nothing of merit will ever come your way.

…..after her horrific experience from the day before, she felt God and Satan and all the primal forces of nature must be conspiring together to bully her into submission.  Life just could not get any worse than this.  Goddamnitall, why had she even been born in the first place? Yes, why?!  It was a fair question; it was not an overreaction.. She couldn’t possibly dip any lower on the universal Scale of Happiness; she had already plummeted past the erstwhile nadir at warp speed and was now in uncharted territory and still sinking faster than a shot put dropped into a vat full of Jello.  But after a good night’s sleep to clear her head and a forthright dialogue with her inner psyche, she came to the mature realization that fortune waxes and wanes with complete randomness and that she had merely found herself at the bottom of that cyclical trough for one miserable day in her finite journey through the Valley of Consciousness. One miserable day, yes, that’s all it had been.  The temporal rotten apple in the barrel of life. The dregs at the bottom of a barrel of bourbon whiskey.  The armpit contaminating an otherwise pristine human body. Today will be a better day, for sure, she told herself.  Yes yes, it really will be!  HONEST!!!  Truth is, it couldn’t possibly be any worse than the calendar monster that had been racing around egregiously out of control, little different than an elephant at a tea party, which stunk to high heaven and answered exclusively to the moniker of “yesterday”.…..

The sagest advice EVER to anyone under forty years of age:  When ya could’ve……..YA SHOULD’VE!  Truly!!!  The physical capabilities and robustness and stamina of youth only last for a relatively short period of time, therefore do not take those priceless commodities for granted when you stand in proud possession of them.  Use ‘em often when you’re a “kid”—Use ‘em just as often as you possibly can!—and use ‘em a lot too! More than common sense and discretion and our old friend healthy moderation would ever dictate; overuse is not a factor that should even be considered.  Cuz when they’re gone, trust me……they’re gone for good!  SAYANORA, BOYS AND GIRLS!  OUT THE WINDOW!!! Fading youth is a trapdoor we all fall through from which escape is not possible. But if you’re one of those obstinate individuals who happens to have a bellicose streak running through you a mile wide and consequently don’t wanna trust my advice on this subject, I would strongly encourage you to conduct a speedy survey down at your nearest nursing home.  I‘ll bet one hundred dollars hard cash—One thousand dollars?—that you’ll discover the superannuated fossils hanging out at those long-range hospices will stand in near unanimous agreement with my frank assessment.

Are ignorance and stubbornness the same guy…..only with his hair parted just a little bit differently than before, maybe a few pounds lighter, sporting a three-day growth of beard now, and currently dressed in disparate, more-hip apparel?  Are ignorance and stubbornness actually the same person…..only answering to different aliases?  Do ignorance and stubbornness reflect the exact same genome…..only to be manifested as strikingly unique phenomes at a later date?  Are ignorance and blind stubbornness really the same entities masquerading under misleadingly different names?  I think so.  Yes yes, I definitely believe they are one and the same!  Ignorance and abject stubbornness are in fact identical entities, and the only means of differentiating them is by stealthily surveilling a situation and then watching to see whether Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde steps out from behind the curtain at any discrete moment in time.

…..he didn’t quite know what to expect as he walked into the crackling fire.  How could anyone possibly know?  Obviously it isn’t an experience that you live to talk about afterwards while sitting around a campfire bullshitting and roasting marshmallows with close friends, sharing embellished stories as you pleasurably tip one Bud Light after another. Therefore he was filled with trepidation, surely, but also an overwhelming sense of relief.  Relief that he no longer had to contemplate doing this rash, self-destructive act.  Relief that his torment would finally be over once and for all. Relief that he was being proactive, albeit certainly allowing for how insane and suicidal this provocative act genuinely was as opposed to just shambling around feeling utterly miserable while allowing others to chart his life’s course for him like he had inveterately done in the past. He was feeling all these emotions plus more as the bluish-yellow flames lapped at him fiendishly from every direction.  He continued forward with mulish absolutism anyway. And as the heat started becoming unbearable and as his eyelids began welding shut and as the bottoms of his feet screamed in agony while their bottoms chemically decomposed and as he could feel his skin begin the first stages of melting grotesquely inward onto his viscera and skeletal frame and as the raw pain he felt throughout his body exceeded by a googolplex cubed any he had felt before in his lifetime, he permitted himself a cryptic, ever-so-brief smile. Because this was what he had always lived for; this was what he authentically wanted to do; this was what he would die for today.  He was merely walking through a portal separating two distinct realms of being; it all seemed so entirely natural to him.  But I’m certain readers are probably asking themselves this question right now: How did the protagonist know with such vainglorious certainty there was another realm of existence awaiting him on the other side of consciousness? How could he possibly? Well, in truth, the suicidal fellow didn’t know for sure, but he was one hundred percent certain consciousness was a gargantuan hoax foisted on the aggregate Homo sapiens population by grandiloquent entities unknown ever since our distant ancestor Lucy found herself foraging for nuts and other edibles on the vast African savannah untold millennia ago. Hence anything he might encounter after voluntarily forfeiting mindfulness today couldn’t possibly be any more of a ruse than what he had been theoretically “living” for the past forty-five years. Could…..could…..could it?????…..

Merely passing along wisdom that was passed to you by elders is lazy and ordinarily not sufficient.  Rather, you should strive to expand upon that knowledge base so that when the time comes for you to pass that same tranche of wisdom on to younger generations, it has grown in stature and become enhanced in some way, shape, or form.  Such is the only way a society and humanity as a whole will grow and flourish.  Moreover, this is not just an individual’s prerogative; it is every individual’s cultural OBLIGATION.  Accordingly, expanding upon yesterday’s database is an ironclad responsibility that is incumbent upon every member of a society and certainly not merely a frivolous option to be considered if the circumstances surrounding you happen to be amenable at a convenient point in time.

She took his name on the occasion of their marriage, like so many women still do.  So now I ask this of you: What greater honor is there than that?  She definitely didn’t have to, after all; she could just as easily have kept her own cognomen and in today’s world all would have been nice and peachy and no one would have taken undue notice or basically given a damn. But regardless she voluntarily chucked aside the surname of her father and adopted the last name of her new life partner, and let me assure you there was nothing in the world that could have made her new husband any prouder than that.  Proud, absolutely, but he felt an undeniable sense of responsibility as well to continue honoring their now-shared last name to the nth degree so as not to give her any pause in the future for having made such a huge symbolic sacrifice to him.  If she thought it was a name worth adopting and implicitly trusted him to uphold its nobility ad infinitum, he sure as hell didn’t want to be an ungrateful asshole and disappoint her through immorality or malfeasance.