…..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 she had traveled back some sixty years in time, back to when she was a fetching young ingenue once more and all the 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 like the queen of the whole universe.  This sublime happiness the old lady was experiencing while entrapped within a 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 and nubile and an irresistible boy magnet in her sclerotic mind, even if her frail body and failing heart and the calendar hanging on one wall of her nursing home room emphatically suggested otherwise…..

In life, everyone is assigned a cross to bear.  The only question then is how big that cross will be and how and when it will manifest.  Some crosses are puny and constructed of toothpicks, others are intermediate in size and fashioned from 2X4 lumber, and the largest crosses are carved crudely from towering, rough-hewn oak trees.  What is the greatest factor that will determine which of the aforementioned crosses will be assigned to you personally?  Typically fate.  That’s right, fate is ordinarily the greatest determinant of the size and nature of the cross you will arbitrarily be assigned to carry upon your back throughout your life on Earth.  Unfair as facial acne, I know, but I’m simply speaking the truth here.  One would like to think that inherent altruism, good will toward others, and philanthropy would play a much larger role in this seminal equation, but sadly and unfortunately they don’t.  The forces of fate preponderantly decide the level of difficulty for the life you are asked to live, and at that point it is entirely up to you as an individual to “man up”, accept this kismet in whatever mood you decide upon, and subsequently soldier forward with the remainder of your life.  Bitching a lot and crying a river will not change your life’s trajectory one iota, but a mindset of total acceptance followed by a grim, steadfast determination to fashion the very best life out of what you have been offered by the forces of destiny WILL undeniably lead to a happier—if not frankly happy—outcome for you.

…..one instant she was alive—laughing, smiling, joking, talking, loving.…living, yes, living life to the fullest!!!…..and then in the next instant she was not.  Just like that.  No advance warning whatsoever.  No premonitions or spirit warnings or anything stereotypical like you always read about in the literature.  No NOTHING, I tell you!  She was here one second and then in the next instant she was gone.  And life, yes, life—that mysterious thing (???) that somehow differentiates us from rocks and houses and fences and swing-sets—disappeared at that moment as well, never to return.  Just went away with no warning and no fanfare.  Like…..Presto Vanish-o!!!  Yes, that slippery little entity we know and worship as life was thereafter gone in a literal heartbeat and the blink of an eye.  So now I ask of you:  How on Earth can one realistically deal with the gut-wrenching suddenness of something happening like that?  Yes, tell me, how can you possibly be expected to rationally cope with a separation that earthshaking and that abrupt?  How can you realistically digest it?  How can you intelligently explain it?  I sure as fuck don’t have any answers for you and I’ll freely admit as much.  Because if I did know how—If I accidentally stumbled upon even a whiff of an explanation for the Mephistophelian turmoil I am presently experiencing—I sure as hell wouldn’t be falling apart at the seams as I sit and write this now……agonizingly wondering why I was put here on Earth in the first place just to stand by powerless and slack-jawed—being forced to witness firsthand an event so viscerally heart-rending and dream-shattering and…..and…..and………utterly nonsensical…..

OH FUCK!!!!!  That didn’t go so well, dd it?!?!  Quite awful, actually!! Couldn’t have gone much worse!!  Well, move on the next moment then!!  No point living in the past; there’s nothing of value hanging out there.  The next moment is the only one that really matters after the one at hand has come and gone.  That moment from a second ago no longer has any relevance so there is no point fretting over it, even for a nanosecond.  Start over fresh with the next moment, okay?!?!  The moment to come is the only timeframe that matters after this moment at hand passes, and then the one after that and the one after that and so on and so on and so on.  That moment from a second ago is meaningless now—Utterly meaningless!!—as meaningless as wings on a helicopter or tits on a boar pig or ten carat diamonds lurking twenty miles beneath the surface of the Earth.  The past is a temporal graveyard rife with skeletal regrets and cartilaginous misgivings and broken promises; the present, a joyous arcade; the future…..a repository for boundless dreams.

For the nine hundredth and ninety ninth time, put your goddamned money where your mouth is or otherwise shut the fuck up!!!  Talking a big story may make you feel powerful and feed your starving ego, but in reality actions and money talk exponentially louder than words and all the words in the world are a puny defense when aligned against these two cosmic bulwarks. Words are nothing more than constrained corpuscles of air that celebrate recklessly after finally being liberated into the atmosphere immediately adjacent to the mouths of long-winded louts.  They henceforth  break ranks, dissipate, and rapidly disappear into the firmament—never to be seen or heard from again in the same construct they left some blowhard’s lungs.  Assigning too much credence to words is the epitome of naivete, if not outright stupidity.  Words lie, oftentimes prodigiously; actions and cold hard cash never do.

…..time will cure your heartbreak.  Truth of the matter is, time is the ONLY thing that will cure it.  Nothing else works:  Not talking and joking around with good friends, not sympathetic family members, not immersing yourself one hundred percent in work, not hoping for and then receiving unexpected distractions, not traveling to exotic locales, not overeating at the dinner table like a starved pig, not even going on a good, old-fashioned one-week bender with a case of Jim Beam whiskey and a bongful of powerful Minnesota Green.  The passage of time is the only antidote for true heartbreak, and unfortunately there is nothing one can do to speed along or hopscotch over this lengthy process.  I admit that is difficult to hear this early in the game when the memory of her is still so unbearably fresh in your mind that you can see her and hear her and smell her and touch her and taste her all at the same time, but it is better that you hear the unvarnished version of the truth right now and not some bastardized version from a well-meaning but nescient dunce meant to temporarily uplift your spirits and raise false expectations.  The only thing that will not change with the passage of time will be your memory of this hideous moment, although that memory will become somewhat blurred around the edges down the road and hence morph into something marginally more palatable.  The excruciating heartbreak will leave you in time, but your memory of it will not.  As dreadful as you are feeling right now—And I can sense that your unhappiness is off the charts—the memory of this exact moment will still be distinctly awful one year from now, five years from now, twenty years from now…..even when you are lying on your deathbed and emotionally preparing to depart the mortal realm you will still be thinking back to that mortifying time in your youth when you were unfairly and unceremoniously jilted by an unappreciative lover. That knife cuts unbelievably deep and leaves behind an ugly, permanent scar.  Unrequited love is the cruelest, severest, most heartless entity known to mankind.  It is a numbingly ruthless, coldblooded, equal opportunity assassin.  This has always been the case since hominids first lifted their knuckles from the ground in eastern Africa and started walking on two extremities rather than four too many millennia ago to count, and this will forever be the case in the future too so long as two separate sexes exist and a full range of emotions, including end especially sensual, romantic love, remain an integral component of human consciousness.  The intense heartbreak you are feeling right now will go away in time—Trust me on that!—but there is no shortcut that can be taken which will shorten this process and no medicines which can be ingested that will lessen the pain and grotesque sadness you are feeling in this moment.  The first sentence of this brief essay bears repeating at this juncture, my disconsolate friend, because it really says everything that needs to be said in the fewest words possible:  The slow passage of time will cure your heartbreak, but nothing else can or will even come close to accomplishing this grievously longed-for objective……

You cannot CONTROL the future; you can only DEAL WITH the quadrillion vagaries it unceasingly throws your way.  You are the undisputed servant, and fate is your stern taskmaster.  Life on Earth has always been this way and forever will be.  We should hope for the best and fear the worst.  Pray for rain while installing a deluxe irrigation system.  Hope the bully backs away as you ball your hands into fists and estimate the distance from your right foot to his crotch.  Slip a condom into your pants pocket while knowing full well it will likely still be there at the end of another luckless evening.  This is not being pessimistic or necessarily fatalistic; it only articulates and reinforces our human status as an infinitesimally puny lifeform in an infinite Universe that we will never be able to fully comprehend.  And if we are arrantly unable to comprehend our role and our place in a cosmos that defies description, of what value is our limited intelligence?  Precious little.  Human life matters, but then again it doesn’t matter too much; its main import lies in the eye of the beholder.

Just try your best to splice this upcoming day together one piece at a time…..one step at a time…..one thought at a time…..one breath at a time…..if that is what you have to do to survive it.  Never get too far out ahead of yourself.  Don’t take shortcuts with time.  The next moment is all that really matters, and then the one after that, followed by the one after that, the one after that, et al.  Lives are led sequentially, and we cannot hopscotch from one day to the next without experiencing all the moments in between; there is no condensed version of living.  But come to think of it:  Why on Earth would anyone pine for such an asinine thing anyway?!

 If not here…..where???  If not now…..when?????  If not me and you…..who???  All relevant questions, these, and all must be suitably answered before you can cavalierly walk away from a pressing dilemma without lifting a single finger to address it.  But if fashioning convenient excuses is your standard modus operandi and you never like to get involved in others’ business because you might run into—Gasp!!!—messy complications, now is the time to speak up and swiftly remove your sorry carcass from these premises, okay?  You’re either with us or you’re not; you cannot be both.  You cannot be split down the middle. You cannot be cut in two.  Trust me, we’ll get by just fine with or without you—preferably without you if your attitude continues to remain so shitty and self-centered and distracting.  A friend in need is a friend indeed, and you sure as hell ain’t behaving very friendly right now, Two-faced Asshole!  The door out of here is right over there, okay?  Why don’t you use it before I lose further patience and provide significant additional boost for your imminent exit with a fast-moving, well-placed foot into the cleavage of your bulging gluteus maximus muscles…..

Note: Excerpted from the forthcoming memoir “Jim Blahnik: Separating the Man from the Myth”, written by James P. Blahnik and edited by Frederick J. Blahnik

“Green Death”

By James P. Blahnik

First, allow me to provide a little background information for my assorted readers to make this story more complete.  In the fall of 1961 I was scheduled to do my student teaching assignment at Spring Valley High School–Spring Valley, Minnesota—while in pursuit of a high school teaching degree from Winona State College (it was still “College” at that time rather than the more pretentious “University”, a name change which was to come myriad years later).  Commuting from our Blahnik family farm just northeast of Austin, Minnesota was impractical and undoubtedly too far for someone living on cartoonishly limited means like me.  My Uncle Fred and Aunt Catherine Blahnik, who lived and farmed seven miles north of Spring Valley, next sprouted angels’ wings and graciously invited me stay with them for those three months of student teaching, simultaneously making my educational internship feasible and greatly reducing my living expenses.  I obviously jumped at their offer without thinking twice.

                One Saturday that fall Fred and Catherine invited me to ride along with them on their weekly grocery jaunt to Spring Valley, and I gladly accepted their offer.  My social schedule at the time, given the fact I was living about forty miles away from home and didn’t know a soul in or around Spring Valley, wasn’t exactly bursting at the seams so even an invitation to chaperone my middle-aged aunt and uncle on a pedestrian shopping excursion sounded about as exciting as personally attending the deciding seventh game of a hotly contested World Series.  I should probably note here that Catherine did not possess a Minnesota driver’s license (her choice) at the time and so that is why grocery shopping for the married couple was a two-person endeavor.

After Fred parked their car in front of the grocery store in downtown Spring Valley, Catherine suggested that I might like to accompany Fred over to the municipal liquor store across the street from the supermarket to have “a beer” while she shopped for household goods.  I had turned twenty one years of age the previous spring and felt that one beer was more than doable since I’d had a few myself during my legendary earlier sojourn in Winona (Heh heh heh!!!).  Thus my short, stocky, nearly bald uncle and I sat down at the bar in the liquor store and I expected Fred would probably order a popular tap beer, which he would then sip leisurely while relishing every last drop. 

Wrong!!!

Wrong ten times over, Jim!!!!!

Fred immediately ordered a can of Stite beer from the bartender.  My readers in the year 2021 have probably never heard of Stite before.  I had.  Having listened to a phalanx of neighboring farmers whispering conspiratorially with Cheshire grins away from the womenfolk when I was much younger, I knew that Stite packed a much bigger wallop than ordinary strong beer; the alcohol content in that tepid stuff is somewhere around five per cent.  Conversely, Stite was a malt liquor and contained around fourteen percent alcohol.  In other words, it possessed the eye of a tiger and the kick of a furious mule.  Of note, Stite malt liquor was also nicknamed “Green Death” owing to its putrid green color.  Stite came in eight ounce metal cans that required the use of a “church key” type opener to punch a hole in the top before one could consume any of the contents.

                I figured that Fred would unhurriedly sip on his can of Stite while I casually drank my twelve ounce glass of tap beer.  Wrong again!  Fred chugged that small can of malt liquor like a Green Beret on a deadly mission and instantly ordered another even while I rushed to finish my glass of draft beer.  Catherine usually took about thirty minutes to do her shopping so Fred was obviously operating on borrowed time, and trust me when I say he knew it and knew it well!  If I recall correctly, that wild man from the rural environs north of Spring Valley threw down FOUR Stites  in all and we subsequently stumbled out of the tavern with glazed-over eyes and slurred speech and met Catherine just as her groceries were being loaded into the trunk of their massive automobile by a supermarket employee.  And I must confess to my readers right now that I was having a hard time keeping the four glasses of draft beer I had poured injudiciously down my gullet in less time than it takes to fart in cadence from suddenly reappearing unexpectedly out of the same orifice they went in just minutes earlier.  I don’t remember much about the ride home to Fred’s and Catherine’s farm north of town that day, but the fact I am writing this essay right now offers incontrovertible proof that Fred somehow managed to navigate the route safely.  A little voice in the back of my brain tells me the man probably had considerable practice doing so…..

Now let’s fast forward several months to January, 1962 after I had returned to Winona to continue my matriculations at the state college located there.  It, once again, is a Saturday afternoon and I’m sitting alone in the sparsely furnished room another guy and I have rented for next to nothing.  For some reason which I don’t recall today, I decided to do some drinking.

                And not just wimpy, piss-ant drinking either……

No no no, professional, industrial-grade drinking like only a lonely college kid feeling down on his luck can do!!!

Hence I threw on my bulky parka and trudged a few blocks down the street to a nearby liquor store.  Perhaps recalling Fred’s Stite escapades from a few months before and how much my squat uncle had seemed to enjoy the putrid green stuff, I purchased a six-pack of Stite malt liquor.  Upon returning to my rental room I proceeded to consume that entire six-pack, but at an admittedly much slower rate than Fred had done back in Spring Valley.  Things would have turned out great if this story ended right now, but of course it doesn’t because that would be wholly unentertaining to my readers.  I decided to retrace my steps back to the same liquor store in downtown Winona and bought a second six-pack of Stite malt liquor.  I believe I threw down one more can of “Green Death” in my rental room before an epiphany visited me and I decided right then and there that this might be the perfect time to attend a varsity basketball game being contested on the Winona State campus.  Drinking stupidity had taken over by this juncture and I made certain to stuff a can of Stite malt liquor along with a church key opener into my coat pocket to ensure I wouldn’t get thirsty at the game.

                There was a fairly good-sized crowd at the basketball tilt that night but I managed to find a seat about halfway up the fold-out bleachers.  After a short interlude of watching basketball I grew slightly bored with the action and decided that now was the perfect time for some liquid refreshment, ergo I reached into my parka pocket and retrieved the can of Stite and church key opener I had brought along precisely for that purpose.  But…..having jostled about in my pocket for quite some time while I cheered the basketball exploits taking place in front of me, the beer was especially eager to escape the metal can constraining it.  Upon punching a hole in the top of the can with the church key opener, a loud Psssssssssttttt pierced the air all around me before a disgusting gusher of malt liquor raced from the metal can and sprayed all over a young woman sitting directly in front of me in the bleachers. 

Well, ahem, ahem………………let’s just say that attractive young woman didn’t embrace me in a warm bearhug and extend glad tidings in my direction after having been thoroughly inundated with malodorous “Green Death”.  Instead, she was ferocious and more put-out than a wet hen in a high pressure car wash and who could rightfully blame her?!  The coed proceeded to verbally assail me in a vicious manner as though I had stuck a .45 pistol in the small of her back and demanded not only all of her money, but presented her with a list of sexual favors I was expecting as well.  I know I would have been upset too if I had been accidentally sprayed with beer, but probably not as much as her.  Let’s face the bald truth here, Readers:  The pretty damsel in distress grossly overreacted to a relatively minor transgression…..

That said, the ornery bitch finally settled down and went back to watching the basketball game and I eventually finished drinking my devilish Stite and was then faced with the decision of what to do with the irksome empty can.  Of course, the prudent, responsible course of action would have been to just stick it back in my coat pocket and carry it back to my apartment and thereupon dispose of it in a trashcan, but in my omniscient “Stite Wisdom” I alternatively decided to drop the empty receptacle below the bleachers during a lull in the action where it landed on the hard floor with a resounding clatter that could easily be heard throughout the cavernous auditorium.

Cool, Jim, that was such a cool, suave, impressive thing to do…….yeah yeah, so so COOL, y’know…..especially right after you gave that attractive young woman an unappreciated Stite shower and now you openly and loudly litter on the gymnasium floor and all these total strangers are giving you angry, dirty looks mixed with unmistakable pity!!

                So anyway, after performing that stupid, impulsive act and distinguishing myself from the rest of the basketball crowd for the evening I returned to my room with no more fanfare and no further unsavory incidents.  But the next day a good friend of mine who witnessed my buffoonery informed me that, unbeknownst to Yours Truly, a Phy Ed professor at Winona State College had been seated two rows behind me at the game the night before.  Thank God that very tolerant bastard had mercy on one very fatuous fool because, at this particular time in the early 1960s, I believe proper punishment for a dumb infraction like I had committed—i.e. being visibly inebriated and openly consuming alcohol on campus–would have called for me to be expelled indefinitely from the institution of higher learning I had grown to love over the years. 

So, once again……..thank you, God Above and, most of all…..thank you, thank you, THANK YOU, Lamebrained but Altruistic Phy Ed Professor!