…..she thought she was authentically special and unique and sublime—irreplaceable to the human species, if the clandestine truth of the matter must be revealed in this literary passage. As such, she demanded that she be able to commandeer a small piece of finite and, by extension, invaluable ground and deface it with an engraved chunk of granite so that other earthlings could commemorate her and worship her demigodesque memory for all eternity after she died and moved on or didn’t move on (The jury is out and will forever be out on this supernatural subject) to another plane of existence. Predictably, said never happened and now that Lilliputian piece of real estate that she so greedily appropriated stands unnoticed and unattended three hundred and sixty-five days out of the year and, as such—arrantly wasted in lieu of some useful purpose like food generation or recreational park space…..

…..the alarm clock rang shrilly somewhere off to his left and he instinctively realized that he was currently in the process of switching gears from a deeper level of consciousness to this shallower one that seemed to altogether characterize his banal days spent on Earth’s rocky crust. And he grunted softly in dissatisfaction then because he knew that he was leaving unfinished business behind, probably never to be completed at any point in the future. The dream from just seconds before lingered in his brain since it was so vivid, so lifelike……so crucial to his very existence!  And yet he knew as soon as he hopped out of bed and started getting dressed for the virgin day now fully arrived, that weird but somehow essential storyline from the night before would hurriedly disappear from his memory banks not unlike the dementia that skulks around to relentlessly plague and sabotage countless old farts’ recall capabilities—doubtless never to reappear in the exact same fashion. Ergo he mourned the inevitable loss of an integral part of his entity as he pulled on his trousers, scrambled to find a clean dirty shirt, and stared in the dresser mirror, because the narrative in which he was the featured player just minutes earlier was now destined for consciousness’s trash bin and—zooming ahead in time some twenty-four hours—there too he would almost certainly find himself decrying the permanent loss of another different but no less vital plotline ginned up by subconscious gremlins while the rest of his body slept and reenergized for the next day…..

Get it right straight out of the chute, or problems are likely to surface immediately and then ramify exponentially if you screw something up at the outset!  Do your utmost not to be caught off guard when facing a new situation because even a slight lapse of judgment can and likely WILL come back to haunt you ten- or even twenty-fold. This isn’t to say the middlegame and the endgame are not equally important in the grand scheme of things, but mathematics teaches us that incorrect variables introduced early in an equation reverberate disproportionately throughout the remaining equation, whereas incorrect variables introduced at a later juncture don’t impact the final product to such an exaggerated degree. In other words, all errors are NOT created equal; early mistakes are more insidious and infect the patient to a far greater extent than opportunistic pathogens that gleefully pile on in the latter stages of a pandemic. For the sake of convenience, just remember this counterintuitive little aphorism: First is worst!

…..what are you waiting for exactly?  Is there a better time to do what obviously needs to be done?  Huh?!  Well…..IS THERE?!  I think not too!  So get your fat, lazy ass in gear this very instant and do what needs to be done!  Enough already with the goddamned all-day procrastinating!  An important job is waiting for you and, trust me, time by nature is NOT a connaturally patient entity! Time doesn’t stop moving simply because you do, nor will it ever.  Hence go do the work now and get it over with, lest someone else or—more likely—fate intervenes and ultimately denies you the opportunity. Yes, distilled down to its barest essence, that’s actually what this whole fucking dynamic inherently represents:  A sublime opportunity, and if you don’t grab the elaborately disguised opportunity by the horns right now and wrestle it to the ground and pin its shoulders to the mat you’ll then have a lot of explaining to do to Someone far greater than myself and your exasperated friends and family members waiting back home…..

…..when she unexpectedly left him standing all alone on the altar not unlike a flagpole in the center of a sprawling suburban mall, she at least was sufficiently generous to leave behind a token present in his honor as well:  A gaping hole in his soul that no amount of mortar or putty or spackling could ever hope to repair or gloss over.  He became an emotional cripple following her surprise disappearance, albeit through no fault of his own.  To wit: How can you ever hope to function as a normal human being once your soul has been publicly ripped to shreds and subsequently left lying exposed for all the vultures of the world to peck on and fight over?  Yes indeed, he was undeniably a pitiful pitiful creature in the aftermath of being jilted on the altar, and his pursuant life—or what purportedly posed for a life, that is—was pitiful and sickeningly brittle too.  About the only thing he could think of doing after she abruptly abandoned him at the front of a church packed full of eager celebrants was to begin counting down the months, weeks, and days until his forgettable sojourn on the surface of this small planet would prayerfully come to an end. Just hurry up and wait. Time can’t disappear fast enough anymore. Let’s get this whole fuckin’ charade over with as quickly and painlessly as possible!  Accelerate the timetable, maybe, something that was easily within his physical capabilities?  Nah.  Nah……nah…..nah, only crazy, unhinged lunatics did anything that outrageously extreme. He surely wasn’t to such a desperate juncture yet, although he did make certain to file a mental note to himself that he shouldn’t absolutely rule out this nuclear option in the future if his life continued its inexorable downward spiral…..

Many, if not most, investments will NOT turn out to be big winners.  That’s just commonsense wed to simple arithmetic; if investing was simple, everyone on your block would own a palatial mansion with two Maseratis and a luxury speedboat parked conspicuously in their driveways.  But they don’t, of course.  You must accept this stark reality straight up front if you decide to run the risk of investing some or all your money in entities or instruments that run some degree of risk.  Yet never forget the flip side of the coin either, which is this: All it takes is one or two or three big “hits” to offset all the losses you may be forced to absorb on other investments in your financial portfolio.  Said is purely the price you must pay for being in the game—the “cover charge” to gain entrance into the cutthroat financial world, in other words.  Because if you don’t want to run any risk whatsoever—If you wanna play everything perfectly safe and be absolutely guaranteed that you’ll never lose one penny of value—go and “invest” all your earnings in a commercial bank savings account, but then don’t let me hear you complaining one peep as you go about collecting a whopping one percent interest bonus on your “investment” at the end of the calendar year. Better yet, why don’t you follow Gramps’ savvy investment lead and stash all your earnings in a coffee can as a prelude to sneaking outside after dark to bury that “savings account” in your backyard for long-term safekeeping.  Your money will doubtless be secure and risk-free hidden beneath the soil as it shares space with nightcrawlers, grubworms, nematodes, and others of their ilk, but a peculiar hunch of mine keeps insisting the cash you hide away probably won’t grow too much in value over time.  Truthfully—even assuming a low rate of inflation, which naturally is never an ironclad certainty—any money you have hidden away in your coffee can will depreciate in value with astonishing rapidity not unlike the once-new car sitting in your driveway or the still sparkling year-old appliances anchoring your kitchen.

You obviously always want to control the circumstances surrounding you, but on not infrequent occasions those circumstances—all willingness aside—will take control over your body instead and render you a helpless bystander. Call it fate or destiny or fortune if you want; an outcome is far more crucial than the method of arriving at it, ergo methodology is essentially immaterial anyway.  We exercise control over some of the vagaries attending our lives, but that percentage is so miniscule as to be virtually meaningless.  Life is akin to a mammoth block of granite that we continually chip away at in an attempt to sculpt something of lasting beauty from the monolithic object.  If we’re appropriately patient and work earnestly at this Sisyphean task, over a period of many years we’ll make progress on our redoubtable block of granite—impressive, noticeable progress even.  Yet we’re never granted sufficient time to complete our crusade or to markedly transform that giant chunk of rock into anything other than its original iteration. The lesson to be garnered from all this? In the end learn to be satisfied with a job unfinished since that is an exact microcosm for the lives we human beings lead.

Life owes me nothing.  Quite the opposite, I owe life EVERYTHING!  Each new day that comes in my direction is a gift from above, a present bestowed upon me that could’ve just as easily gone to a potential being far less fortunate.  ONE egg cell from my mother conjoined with ONE sperm cell from my father to form ME.  I am just the extraordinarily lucky beneficiary of that chance union; if the presence or timing of either had been different by even a Planck length or an attosecond, someone else would have been created at that transcendent instant and not me.  I am therefore eternally grateful for a stroke of fortune that I can take no credit for and which I can never hope to repay; all I can do is jubilate over life every day like that sun-ordained bloc of time is my last one, all while giving heartfelt thanks for the pluperfect gift of consciousness. Not just when things are going rosy for Yours Truly either—That part is risibly easy!—but when the sky turns pitch-black and the wheels start falling off my life cart as well.

You cannot worry and be genuinely happy at the same time. An obvious non sequitur, I know. It’s physically impossible.  Commonsense.  Passes the intuition test with flying colors. Two emotions that organically take up residence on opposite ends of the emotion spectrum cannot co-exist amicably; they’re unspoken enemies.  Therefore, NEVER violate someone else’s happiness with selfish and unnecessary sharing of unfortunate personal information, including and ESPECIALLY as this dictum pertains to family members and close relatives. To do so is flat-out venal and inordinately self-serving.  Shoulder whatever burdens come your way stoically and with minimal complaints, but above all else keep these problems to yourself and ONLY yourself.  Dumping your personal worries out into the public square so that others, through no fault of their own, will involuntarily be forced to worry about you and your well-being is patently unfair and the epitome of egotism. Only inherently selfish people behave in such a detestable manner; considerate individuals know better.

…..the deathbed felt cold and sterile to the octogenarian’s hunched back, but she wasn’t living in this particular charmed decade anymore anyway. Her mind had left her body far behind and traveled back some sixty-five years in time, back to when she was a fetching young ingenue all over again and the undisputed talk of the town.  Awe-struck boys within a ten-mile radius beat a path to her doorstep every night of the week and would nearly come to blows as they begged embarrassingly for her indulgences, and not a day went by when she didn’t feel wholly invincible and very much the queen of the entire universe. The sublime happiness the senescent filly experienced while entrapped within this cruel time warp wasn’t some trifling, relative thing either. Rather, the ravishing debutante from yore knew it to be a permanent fixture written in the stars. She would ALWAYS be young, nubile, and an irresistible boy magnet in her sclerotic, confused mind, even if her frail body and failing heart and the calendar hanging on one wall of her tiny nursing home room emphatically suggested otherwise…..