…..this battle can never be won outright; it can only be fought and mitigated year after year after trying year.  There will never be a conclusion to the conflict per se; there will only be temporary lapses in fighting that might well masquerade as totemic victories for devilishly lengthy intervals, only to have the remorseless hoaxes exposed for what they truly manifest—hoaxes, shams, ruses—and next be followed by still more of the same tedious, unceasing, unrelenting combat as before.  There will never be an end to this skirmishing, only fleeting lulls in the fighting accompanied by false declarations of victory before warfare reignites once more and then again after that ad nauseum.  It is a Sisyphean struggle if ever there was one, so don’t get your hopes foolishly raised that you will see a cessation of hostilities in your lifetime, and probably not even in the next generation’s either.  Some things never ever change, and you can now count the ongoing struggle amongst those things…..

 “Before the fact” is invariably preferable to “After the fact”, for what should be obvious reasons.  If one exercises some degree of control over an outcome you are then not merely a slave to destiny or some deplorable lout wailing plaintively about a vague “opportunity” lost after the entire deck of cards has already been dealt.  You are still a player as opposed to strictly being a spectator.  You are still a pilot or perhaps a co-pilot and not merely a passenger on the airplane.  You are in the arena and not simply watching from the cheap seats high above.  You are an actor rather than just embodying an inconsequential prop.  You own the moment instead of the moment owning you.  You are human as opposed to being an unthinking automaton.

I can never trust her.  That’s right, I can never trust the gorgeous, fetching, ultra-talented woman, but surprisingly this fact has nothing to do with her and everything to do with me.  Confused?  Yeah, I know I would be too if presented with the previous conflicting statements.  But please understand that this startlingly gifted woman’s natural assets prey incessantly and unmercifully on my inherent insecurities, and I could never in my adult lifetime feel that I am equal in stature to the temptress’s lofty beauty interwoven with not only a towering intellect, but a gushingly winning personality as well.  Therefore it pains me to say I strongly feel I am not worthy to claim her as my lifetime companion.  She is way way above me on the evolutionary ladder, thus why would/should she ever settle for me as a monogamous life partner when there are countless other men out there in Guyville who would make a far better natural match for her in terms of looks and capabilities?  The brutally frank answer:  She shouldn’t have to.  And so despite her evident and professed love for me and the fact she seems undeniably smitten with a very ordinary Yours Truly’s underwhelming charms, I absolutely do not want to stand in the way of her finding a life companion who can satisfy her every desire and not just a thimbleful of them.  Not only over the next six months either, but over at least the next forty years and maybe more.

…..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.