If you believe in something badly enough or want something to happen badly enough, that wish will probably come true!  The five senses with which every human body naturally comes endowed subliminally shape themselves to accommodate what we are expecting or longing for.  A strongly held belief is akin to a detailed road map which will religiously lead us to the destination of our choosing.  Ergo, a strongly held belief is equivalent to probably ninety five percent of the so-called “knowledge” we carry around with us in our brains.  When you know precisely what you are looking for—be it a gold keepsake locket in a dresser drawer, the freshest watermelon in a bin overflowing with them at the local supermarket, the proverbial needle in a haystack, or—And here’s the crux of today’s lesson, children!—“factual” and/or sensory data points to support a powerfully held belief, finding that desired item pursuantly becomes immeasurably easier.  We inveterately see only that which we are looking for, and in the process generally ignore or disregard any observations and information that might obfuscate our Holy Grail of thought.  We know what we believe, and everything else is heresy.

…..I don’t ever wanna go back to that innately beguiling place.  Yeah, yeah, I know that it is alluring as all get out and beckons with the magnetism of a ravishing seductress, but the past is a fraud, a liar, a destroyer of youthful dreams.  It can never be trusted.  The circumstances surrounding me today are hopelessly fucked up and a complete unadulterated mess and maybe (likely) beyond redemption, but the past is not the answer for any of that; it is no tonic or remedy or secret sauce.  Rather, the past grossly misrepresents—lies even—with regard to its true underlying character.  Things were never so good back then as they appear nowadays.  Not all roses and no thorns.  Not all laughter and no pain.  Not all days blessed with radiant sunshine and a pronounced absence of stormy nights showcasing howling winds and pelting hail as house lights flickered on and off signifying mischievous electrical gremlins were in the process of deciding whether they wanted to pull the plug on the grid completely to inflict even more havoc into one’s personal life.  The past would have you believe that every day was a stroll through a redolent lilac garden and that Nirvana had at long last been found and that no ill was ever visited upon anyone, but that is all a big lie.  A huge, disgusting lie!!!  Bad things did happen to you back then—Lots and lots of them!—but for some unknown reason a mammoth filter has since been erected between the past and the present which screens out evil and drudgery and every unpleasantry and leaves in its wake nothing but rosy memories and sweet reminiscences.  Forget that deceitful shit already!  It’s all a charade, a big fib, a house constructed of flimsy Dollar Store cards.  The past is quite simply a mirror reflection of the present, only it features a younger version of your present day self—and you are inarguably a substantially wiser, more enlightened, less naive individual now than you were back then—yet with that aforementioned ginormous filter separating the two timeframes.  Nothing more and nothing less.  You are exactly the same person now as you were back in “the good old days”.  Same person, only undeniably smarter now as you struggle to navigate through a totally different era.  So don’t hyperventilate over the past and believe that it is some sort of panacea for the present and a benign refuge from today’s nagging, intractable problems.  It isn’t and never will be.  Those problems were just as nagging and intractable back then as they are today; “callow you” were just too credulous to realize it.  The past will always look highly attractive and superior to the present—That’s purely the nature of the flirtatious beast!—but don’t believe such nonsense for even a nanosecond.  The past makes a habit of lying indiscriminately and today is no different.  These problems you are currently facing and bemoaning are uncommonly challenging, no doubt, but looking backward in time is not a solution for any of them.  Work on solving your problems predicated upon today’s terms and circumstances exclusively.  The present can be brutal and bleak and unforgiving, but at least it’s inherently honest.  The same cannot be said of that dishonest scoundrel masquerading under the alias of “the past”; that deceitful asshole lies and distorts the truth all the time and, what’s worse, it takes great pleasure in doing so.  As a result, the shape-changing past inflicts a lot of needless pain upon undiscerning individuals who insist on looking backward rather than forward…..

“pride, principle, poise, and purpose”     When all is said and done and your final life script has been written and submitted for review, these are the only human character entities that authentically matter.  Nothing else.  Nothing more nuanced or multi-layered or esoteric. Nothing hiding in the attic or in a secret crawl-space or somewhere unobvious—lost between cracks and covert niches and camouflaged nearly to death.  Pride, principle, poise, and purpose.  If you live your life constantly tethered to these four foundational paragons—using them and them alone as the buoys to guide your one-time odyssey across a vast, pitch black, uncharted temporal body of water—you will never have anything to be ashamed of.  In the big, BIG scheme of things—the only scheme which ultimately matters, in other words—pride, principle, poise, and purpose rule the day and define you as a person and noble denizen of Earth; nothing else even comes close, nor should it.

They’re only words……..   Yes, they’re “only” words…..   But…..the underlying beauty of words is that—no matter how few or however many of them you use—they wield mind-blowing power and a redoubtable stature that don’t cost you ANYTHING!  That’s right—they don’t cost a thing!  For all of their connatural power, words cost absolutely NOTHING and will not decimate or even so much as minorly dent any of your bank accounts!!!  The most basic foundational truth in the discipline of economics is that there is no such thing as a free lunch, yet I would submit the written word comes closest to violating this fundamental theorem.  Words may not be technically free, but they give you distinctly more bang for the buck than any other form of currency—literally or figuratively.

Forty

By Frederick J. Blahnik

When I was just ten years old…….

I saw this geezer down by the lake one day.

The old fart was gray around the temples, had the beginnings of a beer belly—I heard through the grapevine that the superannuated son-of-a-bitch had even fought in World War II (where they probably used spears and catapults for weapons)!

This man was ancient, I tell you, a relic from the past…..a fuckin’ living fossil…..a true brontosaur!

I bet he was at least forty years old!!!

When I was twenty years old…….

I saw this middle-aged guy at college one day.

He was tooling around campus in a red convertible, chasing after young coeds—y’know, I was actually embarrassed for the immature, detestable creep.

The old coot was old enough to be their dad–perhaps even a granddad if he had his eyes trained on one of the freshmen babes.

Hell, he could easily have been forty years old!!!

When I was thirty years old……..

And driving to work one day, I saw this overweight fellow jogging down a bike path sans a shirt.

He was sweating profusely, his oversized tits sagged just like a woman’s and, what’s more, those grotesque flabby appendages bounced crazily to and fro every time his feet smacked the ground.

This ugly freak of nature presented a tawdry spectacle to my ambushed, unaccustomed eyes; I wouldn’t have traded places with the poor slob for a million dollars.

He epitomized one of those conceited forty-year-olds you see all the time–hopelessly trapped in a youthful time warp–struggling in vain to defy his genetic destiny!!!

Last week I stopped at the supermarket after work for a few groceries.

I ran into an old high school classmate I hadn’t seen in years.

We talked about old times–“the glory days”–about how quickly the years and decades and succession of presidents had flown by.

This guy looked great, quite youthful actually, not much different than I remembered him as an All-Conference running back on the varsity football team our senior year.

As we said our good-byes, he mentioned that he would be turning forty years old next week.

Forty years old?

FORTY YEARS OLD?!?!?!

Are you absolutely positive?!?!?!?!

HE’S turning forty?!?!

HIM?!?!?!?!?!?!

My high school classmate…..a good friend of mine back when we were wild teenagers growing up together…..a kid with whom I walked down our gymnasium aisle not that many years ago, we listened semi-attentively as a monotonous speaker struggled to explain why the occasion in question was in fact a “commencement” rather than an ending despite every voice inside me screaming otherwise, and then my buddy and I together with every other member of our graduating class paraded triumphantly back down that same aisle out into the exhilaratingly fresh spring air to conquer the world which was waiting expectantly for our grandiose debut.

IMPOSSIBLE!!!!!!!!!! 

Utterly fuckin’ impossible, I tell you!!!!!

THIS………CANNOT.………BE!!!!!!!!!!

Why, the fellow standing in front of me now at a Fred Meyer supermarket still looks sprightly and virile and a trifle pugnacious……exactly the same as he did back in high school!!!

I guess forty can’t be that old anymore……

I must’ve been wrong all those other times in the past.

Yesterday I attended a business seminar down at the convention center.

One of the guys there was bitching and complaining about everything under the sun.

He had a three-vessel heart bypass operation last spring, he’ll probably need to have his right knee replaced sometime soon, his prostate is grossly inflamed and going straight to hell and now he has an irresistible urge to piss all the time.

The poor bastard! 

His whole body is falling to pieces all around him even as he continues inhabiting that pitiful, decrepit thing.                                                

Staring at this feeble guy for a few seconds, it was easy to appreciate the sad dilemma he’s facing…….

Why, I’d bet all of my next paycheck plus some that the whiny old graybeard isn’t a day under sixty!!

…..the light went out in his life—not A light, THE light—the day she left unexpectedly, sans explanation or remorse, and it was forever extinguished after that.  He kept on living, of course, the functional aspects of living at least—eating, breathing, pumping blood, producing hormones, excreting bodily wastes, commanding five disparate senses—but the purpose he once enthusiastically subscribed to for occupying a cherished spot on Earth’s lush surface no longer existed.  He lived on only because it seemed too much of an effort for him to take his own life in collaboration with the embarrassment he knew it would cause his family if he followed through with such a selfish, cowardly act.  You see, it wasn’t that living without her was that awfully BAD in any strict sense, it was just……it was just…..it was just……just…..just…..just a bunch of day-after-day nothingness…..a yawning wasteland—a temporal vacuum devoid of all passion and pleasure which suggested infinity to no insignificant extent and  gave every impression of lasting forever…..

The best way to finish a challenging project is to start it.  And, no, I am not being flip and facetious by saying this either.  Procrastination is the chief enemy of productivity and will unremittingly stand in its way if given the chance. Never allow this to happen!  Don’t just start that difficult project you’ve been putting off since roughly the same time intermittent raindrops started falling on Noah’s head and the thought of building a massive ark crept into the back of his mind, but proceed briskly into it until you surpass the threshold of no return.  Only then, after you are too deep into an endeavor to sensibly turn back, can you temporarily let your guard down and allow yourself the luxury of relaxation, albeit not for too long.  Rest at that juncture—but not indefinitely.  Remember—you don’t have any laurels to rest upon yet; those will come at a later date!

The concept of trying is undoubtedly the most misunderstood one governing human inter-dynamics, chiefly because “trying” cannot be measured empirically.  As such, results matter but trying doesn’t.  So there!  Allow me to explain:  Trying per se is great.  Obviously, trying is the only bridge that leads to concrete results in the end.  Yet trying is such an elusive, amorphous little creature, in the sense that the intensity and sincerity of any and all attempts cannot be reliably measured.  The concept of trying is so relative as to render any attempts to measure it virtually worthless.  I think I can better illustrate this point with a couple of salient examples.  Two fat men decide to go on a diet.  The first fat man cuts his calories intake to 2000 calories a day and runs a mile every day.  The second fat man “cuts” his calorie intake to 4000 calories a day and walks twice around his block for his requisite daily exercise.  Now, both men are undisputedly “trying” to lose weight, but who do you think will be the most successful?  In this instance the second fat man is indeed trying to lose weight, but his results are obviously going to fall far short of the first man’s.  As such, it can be fairly stated that the first man “did”, while the second man merely “tried”.  Second example:  Two bright high school seniors fervently want to be accepted into a prestigious Ivy League college.  The first youngster not only hits the books hard during the regular school week, but she also studies hard on the weekends and signs up for an ACT preparation course in order that she will be better prepared when it comes time for her to sit for the seminal admissions requirement.  The second senior—equally bright as the first one and no more financially disadvantaged—simply works really hard during the school week and posts sterling grades to show for it, but does nothing over-and-above that to promote his credentials.  When admission letters are ultimately sent out, not surprisingly the first senior is accepted into the elite educational institution while the second misses out. Now, truthfully, both of these young people tried—some might even say tried hard—but the first youngster’s effort was markedly more impressive.  As such, the results tell the story.  Bottom line to all of this?  Trying matters, of course—that is the only bridge which connects one with success—but results ultimately and logically quash any amount of trying.  In the end, results matter and trying doesn’t.  Doesn’t sound right or especially fair, I know, but such is the arbitrary way of the world.  Ours is a results-based culture, and merely trying in any of its almost infinite range of gradations just doesn’t cut it.  Try, yes, but focus majorly more on succeeding.  If all you can ever claim credit for is trying, that probably means the sincerity or intensity of your effort—or both in conjunction—was sadly lacking.  Serial trying without ever actually succeeding reflects back on you personally; society or government should not be blamed for deficiencies stemming from your paltry effort.  So let’s go back to the very beginning now:  Whenever a person tells you that they will “try” to do something without making a true commitment to accomplishing that task, you may as well throw their words in the wastebasket and assume the task will not be accomplished.  Their response is purely a lazy, stunted way of saying they will not promise a determined effort, and—let me ask you now—what good is any sort of effort short of that desired gold standard?  Long story short,  serial tryers strive to try and serial doers strive to do, and the results achieved by both cohorts consistently reflect the legitimacy and earnestness of their efforts.

…..how cruel the gods!!!  How fickle is fate!!!  How confoundingly tragic the fabric of life!!!  If one could possess only a trifle of the knowledge one accrues with advancing age to complement the surfeit of confidence one is invested with in youth, that lethal combination would create a gigantic, unstoppable, irresistible force!  There is nothing—Yes, positively NOTHING!!!—a person weaponized with both prescience and brimming self-confidence would be forbidden from accomplishing, oftentimes with astonishing ease.  Yet sadly, just as the one quality boldly advances, the other lets out a plaintive whimper as the antecedent to a disheartening, irrevocable retreat.  How terribly unfortunate and ironic this pitiable situation truthfully is!!!  Or…..could it be the two traits are somehow directly inter-related, and that their relationship is by nature an inverse, interdependent one…..???

…..supposing the world was coming to an end soon, she resolved to buy a RV and see as much of the planet as possible before Armageddon ultimately arrived.  It became her life’s mission; it became an obsession with her.  Ten years later she was still out on the highway, still doggedly chugging along from town to town, from national park to national park, from one alleged tourist attraction to the next, still executing the same game plan as before, still adamant in her belief that the end was near and she must therefore hurry about her business like there was no tomorrow.  Time must not be wasted.  She was vehement about seeing EVERYTHING on Earth’s surface before the dreaded apocalypse arrived.  Everything, that is, except the trivial mundane minutiae which serves as the glue holding one’s life together and seamlessly binds the past to the present and to the future without an individual every being consciously aware of its presence…..