Author: Fred Blahnik

…..the inherent stupidity of “fighting” cancer.  How do you fight your own body cells, even if they have decided to follow a traitorous path and have turned neoplastic?  The simple answer is:  You don’t!  Like it or not, those malignant cells are part of your body and much like mutineers aboard an ocean vessel, they can no sooner be dissociated from your body than it would be to amputate an arm or a leg or an unthinking skull.  You don’t “fight” cancer; you begrudgingly accept its presence and then take proactive measures to eradicate a malignancy knowing that the ultimate resolution to the matter does not rest in your hands and never will.  Fate will “decide” whether you live or die irrespective of your wishes, however fervent.  Treating a cancer diagnosis like it’s some sort of epic battle to be won or lost in the grandiloquent coliseum of human consciousness is just about the most juvenile, egotistical thing an afflicted person could ever do.  Understand, contracting cancer is not a battle, not a binary choice, not a hostile engagement.  Instead it is a premature death sentence that medical intervention may or may not be able to contravene, depending on the mood of the fickle omnipotent gods on any given day of the week we hominids choose to employ…..

…..and throughout this and that and everything else besides, time kept moving along slowly, ineluctably, inexorably…..and even though a mortal person could not empirically detect that movement with the five traditional senses, one could sense instinctually that life was moving along with an irresistible momentum all its own and that one was trapped aboard an incomprehensibly large ship from which there was no complicity and no escape.  We were all in it together—that I knew—yet incongruently we were all in it alone as well. We had no hand on the ghost ship’s rudder with which to influence the direction we were going; we just stood by and watched dumbly as things slipped by in the pitch blackness, amorphous things that we thought we might like to sample but were never afforded an opportunity to do so.  We just continued moving forward and onward, not unlike undiscerning hogs in a slaughterhouse, with no clear understanding of where we would eventually end up …..

…..just do what’s right!  That’s all. You’ll instinctively know what’s right when the situation confronts you.  What stands as blatantly unclear to you right now will distill very quickly when the moment of truth arrives and then the decision facing you will become amazingly easy.  Trust me on this.  Everyone possesses a conscience just as everyone possesses consciousness.  Just because it is not visible on the surface does not mean that it does not exist.  A conscience serves consciousness.  In fact, a working conscience is the greatest handmaiden that consciousness could ever hope for.  All this being said, some consciences are woefully underdeveloped and could stand for a lot more time in the weightroom…..

…..I don’t want anything tangible from you.  Nothing.  Squat.  You have given me the greatest gift of all—complete honesty—and everything else pales in comparison to that majestic offering.  You gave me crushing news with both barrels blazing and didn’t spare my feelings one iota, and now I have this ugly truth hand-delivered by you to confront and to grapple with in my mind as I struggle searching for a solution to my myriad character deficiencies, if they in truth even exist.  According to you they do, but who really knows for sure?  Honesty is the most slippery and elusive and subjective of all pseudo-emotions, and just because you say something is so doesn’t necessarily make it so.  You aren’t God, after all, even if you pretend to be on far too many occasions ……

Later on in the evening—this was after I had purchased a cheap hacksaw in that seedy Kmart discount store in downtown Great Falls, Montana—I walked out into its parking lot and crawled beneath our ailing van and began sawing off the crushed section of tailpipe.  The atmospheric temperature was exceptionally hot that duskingtide, still hanging out at probably ninety or ninety five degrees Fahrenheit. 

And yet the next thing I knew this kid wandered over to our maroon vehicle; he was evidently parked somewhere in the capacious discount store lot as well.  A barefoot kid—young man, rather—and, you know, that callow rascal offered to help me with the sawing, which naturally entailed lying on filthy, oily asphalt in a parking lot with grainy particles of rusty shit falling into one’s face with each stroke of the hacksaw, and don’t forget to factor into my misery index the reality I was doing this pleasant chore when the air temperature was hovering right around ninety degrees Fahrenheit and the relative humidity couldn’t have been lagging too far behind that metric either.  The barefoot kid said he hailed from somewhere in western Washington state—I forget the precise location right now—and I was extraordinarily impressed and appreciative that he would come over and offer to help purely out of the good of his heart while I was lying under the van sawing away like a champion lumberjack, all the time sweating profusely analogous to an eighty-year-old demi-fossil jacked up on Viagra struggling to come atop a nubile, voluptuous young sex kitten. 

(Excerpted from the forthcoming travel saga “North By Northwest“)

As a sidebar to this topic, my most vivid memory of the ear-popping descent down the backside of Going-To-The-Sun Highway occurred when Carla and I visited Glacier National Park back in the late 1980s.  I noticed with some element of mirth that there was the distinctive, acrid smell of burning brakes when the two of us finally reached the bottom of the steep mountain passageway and then, after peering around me on the roadway in an effort to spot the guileless, dumb-shit offender…..suddenly realized with horror that the malodor was coming from MY vehicle at the time.  I nearly shit my pants coincident with this unsavory discovery, but a long rest to allow the automobile’s brakes to cool down followed by a more sensible, gear-shifting strategy on the westbound trek won me redemption (I think!) in Carla’s disapproving eyes.

(Excerpted from the upcoming travel saga “North by Northwest”)

Goodbye is the ultimate oxymoron.  Think about it for a minute.  What exactly is good about expressing farewell to someone you obviously feel strongly about and sufficient kinship to that you wish to be present when that person takes leave of the situation they currently find themself in, all too often against their will and better judgment?  Nothing.  There is nothing—Zero!—good about emotional departures such as those, hence there is no valid reason to characterize the words spoken at a time such as that as anything other than sad, bad, mad, or saturnine.  Settle for the “bye” part and cast aside the inappropriate and dumbly used “good”.

…..I am, when all is said and done, a captive to the moment—a prisoner of time.  I am carried along the crest of time little different than a piece of flotsam being transported down a raging river during a spring flood.  Free will?  Maybe, but only to an extremely limited extent.  We cannot do anything about the raw passage of time—the Arrow of Time, if you will—thus somehow pretending that we can somehow alter the scaffolding of time itself is as ludicrous as it is pretentious; the moment is here and then its’s gone, and to think an individual exercises some degree of control over that evanescent particle of time, however minuscule, is crazy if not downright delusional…..

We may not have much else to speak of, but we have one another.  That’s right, Honey, we have one another and anything apart from that is grossly immaterial.  Wouldn’t you agree?  Our love does not put food on the table or pay the electric bill or power the vehicles sitting out in our attached garage, yet assume those three financial constants are taken care of for a minute and where does that leave you?  Happy?  Satisfied?  Sanguine?  I highly doubt it.  The human experience extends far beyond merely taking care of existential necessities and depends instead upon looking after and tending to one’s soul.  Yes, that’s right, nurturing the human soul every bit as much as you attend to your flesh-and-blood corporality is the passkey to happiness and the license to ultimately leading a happy, fulfilling life.  And why shouldn’t that be the case?  The psychic you is infinitely more interesting and intriguing than the physical you three hundred and sixty five days of the year—three hundred and sixty six days on Leap Years.  So honor this fact!  Exalt over it!  Venerate it!  Worship it!  Tend to your emotional needs just as much as you tend to your physical needs and I guarantee rapture of every magnitude will once more seep back into your life.  I Promise!!!  And if you don’t believe me, just ask Howard Hughes or, rather, the ghost of the colossally enigmatic Howard Hughes if you can somehow connect with that apparition during a seance.

One cannot say infinity exists if we have no means of defining it; the concept of infinity is impossible for the human brain to understand because the thought that something—-Anything!—can simply go on forever without end is an abstract theorem that is innately incomprehensible; we cannot comprehend infinity since life offers us no frame of reference with which to envision it.  Thus, one cannot use infinity as a mathematical answer and then in the next breath say that infinity is a concept and not an actual number.  The field of mathematics is predicated solely on the usage of arbitrary numbers and numbers alone; introducing vague concepts like infinity as the answer to mathematical riddles is not only illogical but, more importantly, dishonest.  And then esteemed mathematicians and logicians mix in the absurd thought that there are different levels of infinity i.e. that certain infinities are greater in stature than other “lesser” infinities, and this subject next crosses over the boundary separating logic from zany illogic, rationality from irrationality, possibilities from blatant impossibilities.  How could such a crazy thing even be possible?  How could one set of numbers go on forever, but then there is another set of numbers—numerous sets actually, if smug mathematicians are to be believed—that goes on even beyond that…..beyond forever?  Yes, you heard me right:  Beyond FOREVER!!!  I don’t think so.  C’mon, if infinity is impossible for human beings to comprehend, then some theoretical entity greater than a “standard” infinity is utterly preposterous and takes a giant leap into the realm of disjointed nonsense and gobbledygook.  Impossible to reconcile logically, and definitely impossible to reconcile with anything in everyday life.   At this surreal juncture the concept of infinity becomes little more than a semantic hot potato with no real meaning and no actual tethering to the real everyday world we mortal human beings inhabit.