Author: Fred Blahnik

…..he couldn’t wait to brag about all the money he left behind on Earth’s surface when he got to the Afterlife but, strangely, no one wanted to hear about it there; they all seemed to have more important things on their minds.  How can this be, he thought to himself?  I amassed a glittery fortune when I was alive and sentient and financially killing it back on Good Old Earth, and now all these ignorant yahoos up here in Nirvana prioritize matters entirely differently and aren’t interested in offering me the credit I so richly deserve for having been a financial assassin down on Earth’s ultra-competitive crust.  And the guy’s frustration only grew and swiftly metastasized after that.  He was an unrivaled master at gathering and amassing and consolidating and amalgamating and hoarding assets, yet a premium clearly wasn’t placed on those distinct skills at his new place of residence.  Rather, generosity and altruism and beneficence seemed to be held in much higher regard, and those were qualities that admittedly had not been his forte as a mortal being.  To be blunter than a kid’s plastic knife, he had eternally scoffed at and interpreted the aforesaid qualities as weaknesses and signs of fragility and vulnerability i.e. windows of opportunity while a denizen of Earth, but now?  Yes—NOW???  Hmmmmmmm……….  Who knows…..maybe he would have to temporarily strategize a little differently in order to gain the upper hand on his unsuspecting dipshit brethren…..

…..she was one hundred percent wrong and I was one hundred percent right, but a person could never get her to understand this rudimentary fact.  See, she was stubborn beyond belief, stubborn as all hell, and getting her to recognize and admit one of her many shortcomings would be about as easy as beating a cheetah in a footrace with a heavy-duty Whirlpool refrigerator strapped to your back.  That ain’t gonna happen today, tomorrow, next week, or in the furthest reaches of infinity either.  Never, in other words.  She equated admitting a mistake with prohibitive character deformation, hence is there really any reason to believe she would just voluntarily step forward and empty her humility canteen for all to see and appreciate?  The answer is a resounding “No!!!!!”, at least not in my lifetime…..

…..like most obnoxious know-it-alls, he actually knew very little but for some inscrutable reason believed otherwise; in his warped mind he was a canny savant and his knowledge base extended to nearly every subject imaginable.  And so, akin to most know-it-alls, the fat, intrinsically detestable poseur was utterly unbearable to be around and one would take egregious, exorbitant steps to merely avoid his presence for any appreciable length of time.  Sometimes that simple strategy worked, but other times it failed miserably and then one was left alone in his orbit, alternately feigning polite listening but more often ruing the gods of fate for having put Lil Ol’ U in such an odious, repulsive situation…..

…..she asked me how I was doing, and I nonchalantly glanced up and replied okay.  That wasn’t being dishonest and was at least partially true, I guess; I didn’t frankly lie to her.  At the bare minimum, I am still moving about—albeit in slow, zombie-like motion with a concentration level that probably most closely matches a pygmy shrew’s—and doing various activities above the soil without thankfully comprising a minuscule part of it.  Yet.  That’s right—YET.  “Yet” is the operative word here and the only word that truly matters out of the millions or so that make up the English lexicon.  I know there’s much much more to life than this paltry benchmark but, hey, it’s a start at least…..

When the Morning Dew Turned into Frost

By Frederick J. Blahnik

October happened along, and the weather suddenly changed

That raw nip in the air indigenous to September has now become something more permanent and nefarious and malignant

That benign breeze out of the south has now gained a palpable ferocity and switched over ominously to the northwest

The sun arises later and slouches ever closer to the southern horizon with each passing day

And in the midst of everything else, the regular morning dew from months past has inscrutably turned into thick white frost.

October happened along and the weather paused before making an abrupt right turn

That gentle air caressing my fully exposed skin almost every day last month is no longer gentle when it reaches out to contact my covered body

The rain falling from the sky now feels colder and harsher than it did just two weeks ago

The rays of light issued by the sun, although they look exactly the same as before, no longer warm with the same diligence and dedication like they did back in mid-September

And in the midst of everything else, the regular morning dew from months past has inscrutably turned into thick white frost.

October happened along and the weather suffered through an identity crisis before deciding to don an entirely different costume

The relatively balmy air that graced Labor Day weekend now feels as much arctic as it does tropical

Those days of going shirtless in the afternoons that extended into the first half of September conspicuously went AWOL once the month of October flipped down on the wall calendar

The sun is being pulled inexorably downward with each succeeding day now, if not by gravity than by some other cryptic cosmic force

And in the midst of everything else, the regular morning dew from months past has inscrutably turned into thick white frost. 

Yes, that riant morning dew mutated into thick white frost somewhere along the temporal causeway, and in the mornings I feel my sinews and cartilage and tendons go SNAP-CRACKLE-POP even as I sense my aging bones becoming more and more brittle with each passing sunrise.

The seasons of the year are rapidly advancing like an invading Prussian army, and so too in lockstep are the seasons of my life.

No one gives a fuck about your sentimentality.  No one gives a fuck about her sentimentality.  No one gives a fuck about his sentimentality.  No one gives a fuck about MY sentimentality either.  This firmamental truth extends all the way across the chess board.  All those things I treasure so dearly and tenaciously as vestiges from the past and as tangible tethers to irreplaceable memories—MY irreplaceable memories, remember, not John Q. Public’s or Jane R. Schmuck’s…..material items that sometimes even now bring tears to my eyes if I happen to stare at them for more than a handful of seconds while subconsciously connecting them to priceless engrams that reside permanently within my skull—do not elicit a similar response from people who did not experience those events firsthand, including my three ethereal daughters along with my trove of distinctly lesser blood relatives.  Did I just say “a similar response”?  HAH!!!!!  Manifold times they elicit NO response, zero response, not even a ghost of a response.  Sentimentality’s orbit extends only as far as one’s uniquely personal experiences; those who do not partake in a happening firsthand obviously do not harbor any strong personal feelings toward that occurrence.  And, I might ask, why in God’s name should they?  They have their own totally peculiar moments to cherish and cling to.

We are all dying on some level, to some degree, on some plane, in some realm, in some manner, in some fashion, in some domain.  The immediacy of an individual’s death may seem more obvious in certain instances, but that is only an illusion—cruel chicanery—an optical illusion that strongly suggests a person suffering from pancreatic cancer is destined to die far more quickly than the person in the prime of their life who may be predestined to obliviously step out in front of a fast-moving bus tomorrow morning, never to experience consciousness again in this “tragic” incident’s aftermath.  Shit most definitely happens, but not always for some inscrutable reason as the worn-out platitude wearyingly goes.

I totally lost track of time, but by that I don’t mean I lost track of the immediate hour, minute, or cluster of seconds which cling tenaciously to the face of the wristwatch cinched to my left arm.  Instead, I couldn’t decipher whether I was living in the past, present, or future—Honest to God I couldn’t; it was crazy; it really was!—and this conundrum left me feeling plussed and profoundly bewildered.  I was a temporal pilgrim with no direction to turn that didn’t feel strange and foreign; I was lost with no idea where I was, let alone where my true home might lie.  But why should this seem odd to a discerning reader?  After all, it is a well-established fact that we inhabitants of the Universe live on the cutting edge of a spacetime continuum, and if one can readily get lost in the space plane of that continuum—And who amongst us hasn’t at some random point in their lifetime?—then why should it seem weird and illogical that one might just as easily get lost in the time milieu as well?

…..and he looked around and slowly came to realize the canvas he was painting on was positively puny; Lilliputian; minute; embarrassingly so.  The others were painting on gigantean canvases that were manifold more expansive than the one he was utilizing, and this epiphany caused him to involuntarily blush and to wonder why his attempts to create something large and lasting were so feeble and wanting compared to seemingly all the mortals who surrounded him.  But after much thought he was unable to come up with a satisfactory answer, thus he sighed the sigh of the mortally defeated and continued going about his trivial business with an air of resigned despondency…..

I saw a little sparrow on the gravel road that Carla and I live on during my early morning walk down to the intersectional “T”, and it obviously couldn’t fly; something catastrophic had happened to one of its wings.  My best guess is that it had first been careless and subsequently grazed by one of the infrequently passing cars on our desolate township road.  In any event, the forlorn little creature couldn’t fly and instead hopped around desperately when I approached and quickly passed by it on the narrow roadway.  I made no attempt to assist the little sparrow because, let’s face it, there wasn’t a goddamned thing I could do to enhance its future or change the impending outcome.  This creature of God’s was a “dead bird walking” (No pun intended), and the only question relating to its future now was the method by which it would eventually perish.  Would it be run over by a passing vehicle if it insisted on sticking to the gravel thoroughfare?  Would the hapless critter be serendipitously discovered by a roving fox or coyote and then gulped down instantaneously—feathers and all?  Or might it just unceremoniously die from severe dehydration there in the tall roadside grass as a late July sun climbed ever higher in the azure sky?  None of these possibilities sounded very enticing to me but, again, there wasn’t a fuckin’ thing I could personally do to save the frantic little bird; its relatively quick death was now as assured as the aforementioned sun tumbling over the western horizon come duskingtide. In truth, the feathered creature was now as dead as it was alive, even if the tiny, admirably resolute avian still held out hope like all living things do until their very last minute and breath arrives.