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…..

Stasis is our friend, okay?  If something ain’t broke, for God’s sake don’t don a dunce cap and stubbornly try fixing it!  Change in and of itself is not inherently evil, but those who advocate for change merely because they are bored to death and yearn to disrupt the status quo are anarchists at best, stupid meddlers at worst.  Stasis and change are like identical twins, in that neither is better than the other until one starts acting up and needlessly disrupting things, at which point you step in and take decisive action to rectify the situation…..but not one second earlier!  Change can readily make a situation better, but it can just as easily make a situation worse.  Knowing the difference and when change will truly be beneficial pretty much defines the word “intelligence”.

…..and the days grew progressively longer as he got older, while the dreams of his lost youth shriveled up—one by one by one—and gradually vanished into thin air until there were none left for him to treasure. Is this then, he resignedly thought to himself, the real curse of old age:  That I must now endure each week-long day—one piled slavishly atop the other like an endless row of felled dominoes—with nothing to look forward to other than my eventual cessation of breathing and ensuing chemical transformation from a dynamic flesh-and-blood organism into an elementary carbon derivative?  He stood up at this juncture, sighed, stretched his limbs in exaggerated fashion akin to a creaky old dog just awoken from a sun-bathed nap, and shambled off to his congested medicine cabinet to indulge in some life-enhancing—and life-lengthening—nourishment.  This certainly doesn’t feel very much like living, he thought, but then again it sure as hell beats the holy shit out of the alternative…..so far, at least…..

…..she thought fame would be the end-all, cure-all answer to her litany of ailments—both physical and emotional—but she soon learned otherwise.  She discovered that fame is a prison every bit as constraining as the poverty and anonymity she had serially grown to loath in her youth.  Return to that pitiful station in life?  No, she harbored no desire to turn around and trudge backward in time either, even if she had been able to but which of course she wasn’t.  And then a bolt of wisdom struck her—a bolt that had been hiding inside her body all these years, lying low and skulking about in some previously unexplored dark chasm—and she realized that people aren’t meant to live blissful, happy lives.  They just aren’t!  Genuine happiness is a sham, a ruse, an artifice; genuine happiness over an extended period of time is a heartless deception.  Happiness at its very core is a grandiose hallucination cruelly perpetuated from generation to generation by a small but vocal coalition of fantasts and naïfs.  Said is merely the winsome, unrealistic stuff centerpiecing political campaigns, bridal showers, bar mitzvahs, and fairy tales. Real life is an apex predator that is wholly amoral and constantly on the prowl for unwitting victims; it affords precious little time for nonsensical tropes like sanguinity and merrymaking. In the sobering big scheme of things, those much-sought-after entities face extinction and are every bit as endangered as the Siberian tiger and polar ice caps……