Author: Fred Blahnik

When I was young I thought I knew everything; I was absolutely convinced of it; there was no surer thing in the world! I now know I was sadly mistaken and knew basically nothing.  This new awareness that settled over me over the course of many decades has invested me with great wisdom and valuable insights, but those individuals who know everything nowadays—the youth of society, of course—treat me as an irrelevant relic terminally infected with advancing, incurable senility. They don’t want or appreciate advice from a doddering old man, just as I never wanted any “words of wisdom” from irrelevant ancients when I was their age either. The concept that as you grow older you grow wiser seems like a logical premise certainly, but to callow individuals it reeks of a bald rationalization.

All news is good news even when it clearly isn’t; there is no such thing as “bad” news. The receipt of any outside information that’ll help inform future decision-making is beneficial, even when that information is the polar opposite of what you were hoping to hear. There is no “bad” news; every tidbit of knowledge you come across helps sculpt future decisions and that is intrinsically and inarguably a good thing.

I cursed at the foul weather raging outside my living room window this morning, but it didn’t seem to do any good or instantly quiet the hideous maelstrom.  If anything, the wind seemed to pick up even more and the rain beating against my windowpanes reverberated even louder and with greater ferocity than before.  And then I thought to myself: You goddamned, GODDAMNED vile natural elements and fuck—Yes, FUCK!!!—the satanic, iniquitous forces that are masterminding your assault on this tiny patchwork of Earth’s surface this capricious morning.  The weather outside could be nice, the air could be still, the sun could be shining brightly, the birds in the treetops could be singing in perfect harmony, the temperature could be comfortable if not balmy, and yet not a single one of those preconditions is true or even remotely close to reflecting reality.  So next the question automatically looms: Is this shitty, shitty, SHITTY weather directed solely at me for some undetermined reason, or is it rather just an adventitious quirk of nature in this undeniably adventitious universe in which we all reside?

He didn’t like my response, I could tell, yet he did his utmost to conceal his scorn.  As he stood up to leave, the guy cleared his throat and said to me in a tone I’m quite sure he didn’t feel was condescending but I sure as hell did: “I’ll pray for you.”  And I’m thinking to myself, “Please don’t, you unctuous asshole!  I don’t appreciate prayers of any sort coming from people of your ilk, nor do I care to be viewed as a spiritually feeble, sympathetic figure either. Instead, why don’t you just take those prayers you have in mind for me and shove ‘em all the way up your ass until they tickle your stomach lining.  Yeah yeah, THAT is what you can do with your unwanted, unsolicited prayers, Religious Freak; I sure as Hell don’t want ‘em, okay?  Need ‘em?  Well…..that’s’ a whole ‘nother story altogether, yes it is it is it is, but it sure as hell ain’t one that you—standing high up on your hubristic pedestal made of shifting sand—are in any qualified position to judge.

She said “I’m sorry” with seeming sincerity, but who really gives a shit about those two little words anyway?  How does that make a malignant situation better?  How does that change anything that happened in the past?  How does that rectify previous mistakes? Why in God’s name should two simple words absolve her of everything bad that she did to me and henceforth put our relationship back on equal, neutral footing? None of the aforesaid is true. If I didn’t make this point crystal clear in my earlier jeremiad, she can take her meaningless apology and stick it straight up her ass for all I care owing to its useless significance. Apologies are—at the end of the day—a trite, worthless, godawful “Get Out of Jail!” card for serial perpetrators, transgressors, malefactors, and sundry other social misfits. I didn’t accept her apology for anything more than what it genuinely constituted: A feeble attempt to make things right between us with no real effort to correct past misdeeds through substantive, demonstrable action.  That’s what I’m really looking for—Okay?—and that’s precisely what I do NOT believe I will be receiving anytime soon in the form of commensurate reciprocity.

If you’re lucky you don’t or won’t have to pay for mistakes committed in life—even early in your adult life—but obviously legions of people aren’t that lucky and hence have to pay a stiff penance later in life for earlier malfeasance if they even make it that far down the temporal pathway; many do not.  This may not sound especially fair, but we should all know by now that fate and its handmaiden luck are the least fair arbiters we’ll ever encounter.  Luck merely happens; it is never planned or prearranged. Ditto fate.  And if you happen to draw the short straw on any particular day or night or in any particular life, there unfortunately isn’t one fuckin’ thing you can do about it.  Fate is not hypothetically a temperamental bitch; fate IS a temperamental bitch.

Although the gently falling October leaves possessed a funereal nature and were majorly more reminiscent of death than of life, I nonetheless recognized them for what they genuinely represented:  A rebirth!  Because even though they heralded a heinous, seemingly endless winter still to come over the next five months, following that those leaves—or, more precisely, immediate descendants of the suicidal leaves parachuting onto my west lawn as I write this—will return in all their glory, fresher and sprightlier and more determined than ever—ready to grandiosely usher in a brand new season inextricably wed to a brand new batch of vernal dreams.  Yes, a whole new batch of vernal dreams that will stretch well into summer before they too wither and dry up much like the cucumber vines and stalks of tangy rhubarb out in the back garden. Such is the undying rhythm of the four seasons, and such is the undying rhythm of life as well for all mortal creatures.

…..he could think of only one good reason why she wasn’t returning his myriad phone calls, but thirty lesser ones.  Naturally, as in all matters involving the heart and the lovelorn, those other thirty reasons held disproportionate sway and Prince I.M. Utterly Naive optimistically picked up his cell phone and tried once more….and then again after that and again after that and again after that.  Love is blinding to the senses—All right?—but it is also blinding to one’s rational thinking and our ability to process obvious cues. Tragically, this exasperated buffoon hasn’t learned these invaluable life lessons quite yet but trust me, after weeks and weeks of unanswered communiques and having his nose rubbed humiliatingly in ripe feces he will discover what so many men have painfully been forced to acknowledge before him:  Women are unfathomably complex, unpredictable creatures who specialize in eviscerating male egos, albeit sometimes probably unknowingly ….

Every day that you continue functioning on the north side of the soil rather than its dark, seamy underbelly is all the more reason you should feel supremely lucky and grateful to be alive here on our bewitching little blue planet innocuously named Earth.  No other considerations.  No other caveats.  Nothing else matters.  Now…..what you choose to make of those additional days is entirely up to you, but your ongoing presence here lies in the hands of Someone far greater and knowing than any of us puny earthlings.  Be grateful for sentience and sentience alone.  Do not commit the cardinal mistake of asking for or gratuitously expecting anything more than that.  If saccharine largesse serendipitously comes your way—Great and more power to you!—but if it finds its way to other, sometimes undeserving individuals, do not begrudge them for their ethereal fortune and for damned sure don’t curse the Supreme Being for being “unfair”.  The firmament and Whoever oversees it doesn’t operate in an immanently logical manner, and neither do human lives and the crazily random destinies said lives follow.

…..their kinship was real and could easily have been confirmed by paternity testing if for some reason that ever became necessary, but other than DNA there was no element of closeness connecting them.  Blood was not thicker than water in their case, and love—the main acknowledged staple of family relationships throughout the ages—did not pass freely between the two brothers.  Rather, an odd vacuum existed where there should have been love—a vacuum packed chockfull of indifference and wariness and even ambivalence—and, surprisingly, the obstinate pair readily accepted this peculiar dynamic and did not find such an accommodation the least bit unusual.  They didn’t get along, they didn’t respect each other, they hardly ever fraternized except when traditional family alliances mandated they must…..and yet neither brother found this bizarre situation even remotely disturbing. It was just the way the world existed, no different than the stars in the sky or the molten stew roiling at the Earth’s core…..