Let go of the past, for God’s sake!!!  Let go of it already!!!  It’s nothing more than yesterday’s news—LITERALLY!!!  Focus on what’s in front of you, not on what’s behind you!  The past is sand in the bottom of the hourglass.  It’s a ship that’s sailed.  It’s a used condom.  It’s a gnawed apple core shading towards brown in color.  It’s the extreme distal end of your digestive tract.  Who really gives a shit about those insipid, dated things anyway?  The present is unquestionably most important, the future—provided one is granted the divine luxury of entering that uncharted wilderness—is easily next most important on the spectrum of life, and the past?  Well, the past is not important at all.  A mound of useless refuse.  A nullity.  Nothing can be changed about the past, hence why should anyone find solace in constantly revisiting that vast wasteland which lies forlorn and irretrievable and receding in one’s rear-view mirror?  The answer is there is no reason.  The past is the province of professional historians, glory day enthusiasts, and Monday morning quarterbacks, but no one else has any real use for it.  Leave it behind where it belongs and set your sights on the present, for sure, but also on the future to a lesser extent.  Today matters; yesterday no longer does; tomorrow is purely a promissory note from the gods of destiny with no assurance that it will ever be cashed.  The moment.  Live for the moment.  Yes, live for the moment, for Christ’s sake, and only for the moment!  That is all you really have, both right now as you read this and then stretching into perpetuity too…..for as long (or short) as that grand illusion might last…..

…..she entertained so many dreams that if they were water you could have floated an ocean liner atop them with plenty of room to spare, yet those dreams bore no more resemblance to the real world than a banty cock does to an imperial rooster.  No more resemblance than a wren does to a ostrich.  No more resemblance than Donald Trump does to Abraham Lincoln.  No more resemblance than yin to yang.  She existed in a dream world—in a parallel universe devoid of savvy and wisdom—and coming to grips with reality was as impossible for her as it would be for you or me to take ample time relishing an ice cream cone while levitating on the surface of the sun.  Many things are possible in this sphinxian Universe of ours, but to provide appropriate balance and symmetry just as many are not…..

…..the hours came and went, the days came and went, the weeks came and went, the months came and went, the years came and went, the decades came and went…..and she still stubbornly kept struggling to decipher the meaning of life—the deep-down, transcendent reason for why human beings are allowed—Encouraged!—to live transitorily on the surface of this unassuming little planet of ours in a universe without end.  Why finitude in a system defined or, rather—undefined—by infinity?  That implicitly doesn’t make any sense.  Death and infinity are not compatible principles and do not come remotely close to explaining consciousness, even allowing for the fact those same molecules of life persevere and “live on” inertly against the backdrop of an endless universe after sentience has fled a mortal body.  How can order and disorder peacefully exist in the same system unless a greater power isn’t orchestrating the machinations of said system to ensure discordance?  Is there any beauty and meaning in nothingness…..in randomness…..in pointlessness…..in benign anarchy?  Are “nothing” and “irrelevance” the universal answers to everything?  How…..?????  Why?????  But the years finally caught up to her—predictably and in direct compliance with the elementary and well understood laws of biology and physiology—and she died quietly and minus the cacophony of saluting trumpets others might cherish, still no closer to the truth she pined for more than anything and sans any clue insofar as to why she had been born in the first place……

Sad but true:  Very often the only item that can be carried away from a monumental financial blunder is a hard lesson earned.  Lost money sometimes cannot be retrieved and on all-too-frequent occasions the financial drubbing one incurs cannot be ameliorated to an appreciable degree either.  You are left holding an empty bag containing nothing more substantial than a shitload of proverbial “experience”—the same onerous stuff those graybeards and dinosaurs and fossils who hang out down at Louie’s Café every morning drinking coffee and playing dominoes love to take turns expounding upon for seeming hours on end—and that definitely doesn’t seem like a fair, equitable trade-off from a mile-high perspective.  Yet it’s all you’re gonna get out of an ugly transaction gone unmercifully wrong, so you might as well crunch down on that bitter pill in your mouth, learn the basic life lesson to be learned from every calamity, and quickly move on to other more pressing and less dispiriting matters.  Stewing over past mistakes never rectified them, but doing so needlessly steals from the diminishing pool of time facing every mortal human being on Earth’s crust, which is code for anyone reading this.

…..and we somehow rendezvoused at this specific place and this specific point in time, through no conscious decision on our part, and we found ourselves, for better or worse, falling in love as the sun shone down upon us and the days spiraled out of control not unlike dandelion fluff being relentlessly buffeted  by a late spring gale.  We were simultaneously struck by a bolt of lighting, but this bolt of lightning energized both of us with a measure of affection that we had never come close to experiencing before in our short lifetimes.  Time held virtually no meaning to us and earthly concerns held even less.  We existed in a vacuum that blocked out all niggling nuisances such as when, where, why, and how.  The world didn’t stop spinning for my lover and me that fateful May but it may as well have; we paid no attention to minor details like night and day, eating and fasting, chasing after money during the workweek, acknowledging close family members and associates, and paying homage to a Divine Being whose presence could never be ascertained.   But little did we know—my lover and I—what the far-off future held in store for her and me, and when you stop to think about it…..that’s probably a very good and prudent thing too for two wholly virginal people so hopelessly besotted with one another before the twin monsters of heartbreak and  cynicism inevitably wreak their vengeance by burrowing deep into human consciousness….

…..he’s a user.  I can’t think of anything better to say about him.  He uses people for his own selfish purposes, which is about the worst thing that can be said about anyone.  He’s a user extraordinaire, and this fact doesn’t seem to bother him one bit either; he’s absolutely nonplussed by his perpetual transgressions.  Who knows?  Maybe the guy doesn’t have a conscience.  Maybe he’s emotionally retarded.  Maybe he isn’t even personally aware of this glaring character flaw of his, but I suspect otherwise; he’s too intelligent to miss something so obvious.  I prefer to think the lecher knows exactly what he is doing—how he is constantly using and exploiting trusting, gullible people—and doesn’t care.  That’s right, he doesn’t care one iota or even feign common decency by pretending to care on those not-infrequent occasions when he doesn’t give a rat’s ass and won’t hesitate to express his (non)feelings through both pharyngeal and body language……

Tell your story.  After all, it belongs strictly to YOU.  No one else can relate a tale in exactly the same fashion as its creator.  Which is the RIGHT fashion, inasmuch as you gave life to the thing, so it answers to you and you alone.  Don’t let others sidetrack you with serial criticisms and snide comments.  There will always be naysayers in life—these negativity merchants are every bit as ubiquitous as mosquitoes on a muggy summer evening—but they don’t matter one iota in the big scheme of things.  They are no more relevant or consequential than ants at a picnic.  Irritating as hell, yes, but grossly irrelevant.  Tell your story in the exact manner it pops into your head, and then sleep easily at night.  This story is YOUR creation, YOUR baby, YOUR indentured servant…..and anyone who claims otherwise is a shameless usurper.  Forget about those obnoxious people, okay?!  They are nothing more than a pack of bumptious miscreants.  Nothing more than immaterial assholes…..putrid slime at the bottom of an unpumped cesspool.  Be true to yourself and your unique inspirations, and if you abide by this sublime advice rest assured that you will habitually do right by yourself and slumber well in the evenings.  Tell your story to its rightful conclusion, and pursuantly climax this narrative with the requisite appropriate punctuation mark, whether that be a period, an ellipsis, an exclamation mark, or even a question mark if no resolution is possible in context.  You are now done; your job is complete; your finish line has been reached.  You have honored your God-given abilities and done well.  Sleep trouble-free tonight, My Friend, for you have definitely earned that paramount right.

As boatloads of money continued to pour in following the death of his loved one, he stopped to reflect for a moment on the irony and incongruity of being gifted with money as some sort of feeble, hapless surrogate to offset his indescribable loss.  People closest to him were attempting to crudely countermand the priceless gift of life which had just been snatched away from him in an extraordinarily cruel and unexpected fashion, but their gambit wasn’t working; it wasn’t working at all.  But that should come as no surprise.  Obviously cash offerings weren’t working; obviously their well-intentioned gesture wasn’t gaining traction and never would; obviously this stratagem was condemned to fail, and fail badly.  Money is no proxy for life and never will be, and they of all people should know that.  Money is man-made while consciousness is divine; the two reside on opposite ends of the intrinsic value spectrum and are not fungible in any way, shape, or form.  To even suggest otherwise, however unintentionally and with benevolence as the admitted driving factor, was little different than rubbing a tub of  salt into his deeply felt wounds.

…..and it needed to be done, begged to be done, had to be done ultimately…..so she went ahead and did it.  End of story.  Things happen to us adventitiously and we respond to them the best we know how.  No rationalizations, no lame excuses, no pie charts and fancy algorithms showcased in a formidable Power Point presentation—no detailed explanations—are generally necessary.  You step up to the plate and do what you have to do at the time with the arsenal of unique personal skills you have available to you and then let the chips fall where they may.  Sometimes you may hit a home run, sometimes you may double down the left-field line, sometimes you may reach base on a puny bunt single, and other times you may strike out (Hopefully hacking away unapologetically!), but you always want to be swinging the bat and you always want to be involved in the game as an active participant.  And, you know, this baseball metaphor probably serves as the best mantra for life as any that can be conjured or simply expressed…..

The biggest regrets in life are definitely not those things you tried and subsequently failed at doing.  Contrarily, the biggest regrets in life are those things you never had the courage to attempt in the first place.   You simply never bothered to stick your oars in the water.  You simply never bothered to open the door to the next room, let alone the one after that.  You simply never bothered to dance unless the dance floor was already teeming with other couples.  You simply never bothered to draw outside the lines for fear of being scolded.  You simply never bothered to walk the tightrope without a secure safety net in place beneath it.  You simply never bothered to venture into any dark room without the aid of a powerful flashlight.  You simply never bothered to bet on yourself when the stakes were at their all-time highest. You simply never TRIED.   Regrets like these gnaw at your guts as the past recedes into the distance at an ever accelerating rate while the future—Yes, the time left in your life and thus the only time that authentically matters!—shines with markedly less luster than during days gone by.  Trying begets memories.  Not trying leaves behind nothing more than a hollow sensation at the very core of your soul.