…..so I went this morning to set up an on-line account for a soil testing kit I recently purchased through Amazon, and you would not believe the security measures those feckless sons-of-bitches subjected me to.  For a benign soil testing kit, no less!  Why, you would have thought the paranoid bastards at MySoil thought they were protecting the front gates to Fort Knox or the uber-secret recipe to Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried  Chicken or Elon Musk’s personal cell phone number, so stringent were the safeguards and password-creating protocols the MySoil folks forced me to follow just to register a pedestrian soil sample from my backyard garden into their data banks.  I can see the blaring front-page headline in the Chicago Tribune right now:  SOPHISTICATED COMPUTER HACKERS STEAL VITAL INFORMATION BELONGING TO A MULTITUDE OF BACKYARD GARDENERS!!!  And the secondary headline:  The Nefarious Thieves now have Access to the pH Levels of the Soil in Many Thousands of North American Food Plots!  A bona fide national security emergency, for sure…..

…..the head shrinker asked me if I was happy, but what frame of reference exists to reliably answer a question like that?  Seriously.  None that I know of.  The issue of happiness is so visceral, so subjective, so contextual…..that one can go through an entire life without ever knowing whether you were truly happy or truly miserable or, more likely, residing at some point falling between those two extremes until many years—decades—have passed and you can then look back with a degree of objectivity.  You always have a rough idea of how you are feeling inside at any given moment in time but that idea is impossible to quantify with any semblance of accuracy.  You may as well be throwing darts in the dark at a target situated fifty yards away.  We’re talking nothing but guesstimates here.  But this train of thought gets worse, however implausible the thought of that may be:  You have NO inkling how someone else might be feeling—irrespective of how close or even intimate you may feel your relationship with that individual is—and, what’s more, you will never be privy to vital information such as that which might appreciably advance your own happiness and emotional well-being.  If you are an even-keeled person and grossly unsure of your own level of rapture, how then would someone else similarly normal be able to measure theirs any more reliably?…..

(Excerpted from the book “The Hardest Life I Could Ever Love”, a memoir chronicling the life of Mary Blahnik)

Grandpa Snyder became critically ill in the summer of 1922, and I can recall Papa was seldom, if ever, at our own house at night after that.  Following a hard, physically exhausting day during grain harvest, Papa would sit up all night with Grandpa tending to his physical needs.  Grandpa died on August 1^st, 1922, and I can vividly recollect the strange activities that took place at our farm following his demise.  I was kept very close to our house throughout all those proceedings. 

Back during that antediluvian era, an undertaker brought a casket along and performed whatever preparations were necessary for burial right at the deceased person’s home.  The wake–or reviewal, as it was referred to back then–was held in the deceased person’s home, and friends and relatives maintained a constant vigil with the lifeless body throughout the night.  People—strange faces, people I did not recognize or come close to knowing—streamed into my grandparents’ home for hours on end, and I remember Grandma Snyder walking around her yard sobbing uncontrollably early on the morning of the funeral. 

At that time I did not comprehend yet what had truly happened, and it was not until after Grandma was alone—and then gradually as days, weeks, and eventually months elapsed while Grandpa never made another appearance within their diminutive house–that I finally came to realize my Grandpa was “dead”……and that he would never, ever return to be with us again.  Comprehending the grim, desolate finality of death left a tiny girl feeling terribly fearful and shaken…… 

            Following Grandpa’s death, Grandma would sometimes visit Uncle Matt, who was a bachelor and lived near Braham, a small town located between the Twin Cities and Duluth in upstate Minnesota.  Papa would transport her to Austin with the horse and buggy, and Grandma would then ride the train north from there.  I remember one time it was bone-chilling cold outdoors when she returned to her home following one of those visits; the incident I am about to describe must have occurred right in the heart of wintertime. 

Anyway, Grandma wandered over to our house shortly thereafter and announced in no uncertain terms that she smelled a skunk odor.  Papa checked the cellar under her house–old houses always had the entrance door to the cellar on the outside back in those days—and, sure enough, spotted “Mr. Skunk” loitering down there in the relatively warm environment.  Papa left the cellar door wide open, and soon the skunk–being ravenously hungry in the frigid weather–found his way outside.  Papa scrambled to retrieve his gun from inside our house, and then in his unthinking haste shot the stinky scoundrel right in the middle of our immediate yard. 

Big mistake, Papa!!!!! Inexcusably stupid for one so intelligent!!!

Not surprisingly, Grandma’s house, our house, and the whole yard surrounding both abodes reeked with that terrible, unmistakable skunky odor for days, if not weeks, afterward! 

• It’s NEVER about the words and creeds that you outwardly profess; it’s ALWAYS about the actions that you take and the examples that you set for others, especially youngsters or naïfs who may be closely observing you and holding you up as an exemplar. Show me, don’t tell me.  Act, don’t mime.  Lead, don’t follow.  Do, don’t talk.  Words may have consequences, but they are not lasting ones; they are mere puny surrogates wobbling precariously on spindly legs.  Contrarily, the consequences stemming from actions can be significant, long-lasting, life-altering, and sometimes even permanent.  Never forget that!   Words may help shape opinions, but actions shape lives.

Gone

By Frederick J. Blahnik

 

 

Gone…..

They’re all gone now…..

Scattered to every corner of the Earth…..

Our own little Blahnik diaspora…..

Like so much dandelion fluff caught up in an early May gale…..

My daughters have flown the coop…..

But I never expected them to fly so far away.

 

Gone…..

They’re out on their own now…..

Blazing a path in uncharted waters…..

Their exodus from our home is complete…..

Like so many forest animals fleeing a fearsome conflagration…..

My daughters have taken leave of Carla and me…..

And left behind nothing but faded memories of good times gone by.

 

Gone…..

They’re testing their wings now…..

But those wings must be strong and well-feathered, inasmuch as they’ve logged thousands of miles already……

Too far to be considered a mere test flight……

I don’t expect my three girls to return to our nest anytime soon……

At least not as the needy, shrill-voiced fledglings they once were…..

When they do return—and they eventually will, of course, if only for ephemeral feedings–they will be mature and stalwart and in full bloom.

 

Gone…..

 

Yes, our three daughters have flown the coop and are gone for good.

 

• A gift only becomes a gift when it is used for the first time. Prior to that point in time, a so-called “gift” is nothing more than an official transfer of a commodity; usage is what confers value to an item.  So too with natural talent.  If or until a natural gift is utilized, it is nothing more than a latent ability lying dormant just waiting to be ignited by a catalyst—in most instances the beneficiary’s inner drive—although there is no guarantee such a thing will ever happen; too frequently it doesn’t. In truth, squandered natural abilities are more commonplace than grains of sand on a three-mile-long ocean beach.  More commonplace than the stars in the sky.  More commonplace than mosquitoes on a muggy July evening.  The fact someone is born with immense talent does not mean that talent will ever be realized.  Potential does not equal fruition.  Fire requires a match to ignite it, and minus that match oxidation and the phenomenal power harnessed therein will never occur; it will forever remain just so much potential untapped energy.  Same thing with natural  human prowess. A gift unopened is a gift wasted.

When “Home” Is No Longer Home (“You Can’t Go Home Again….”)

By Frederick J. Blahnik

 

“You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”

 

—Thomas Wolfe

 

 

I went “home” last weekend after a long while away, but the place I visited was no longer home to me.  It had changed; I had changed; more likely, we both had changed over the intervening fourteen years, and those weren’t just picayune, subtle changes either.  No, these were highly significant alterations I’m talking about, and the words “subtlety” and “nuance” do not belong anywhere near this conversation.

I really don’t know what I was expecting.  I guess I was probably thinking I would feel an emotional attachment to that place, an emotional tether that would exist forever—albeit in varying, gradually diminishing strength—but a connection that would nonetheless remain with me until the day I die.  I was wrong.  I didn’t feel any such thing.  I didn’t feel anything really.  The old place was different.  It didn’t look the same, feel the same, seem the same.  Everything about its appearance was different from what I remembered, but that wasn’t all.  Setting aside the “look” part for a millisecond, please take note of the fact those other observations reflect directly on me and not on some small, sterile piece of ground situated in the southeastern toe of Minnesota.

No, the issue speaks directly to Yours Truly and my reaction to what I was witnessing at my old domicile.  You see, the original farm has undoubtedly changed significantly in appearance and texture over the years, but I have changed more.  Without question.  Without doubt.  Everything changes over time, inarguably, but human flesh and blood and human emotions–and especially human perspectives–change more than all the others.  These distinctly human things change markedly more than the soil underpinning our earthly existence and every one of the non-carbon-based objects surrounding us.

I couldn’t go home again because I am an immeasurably different person from when I left that rustic place as a callow lad.  I am completely different, so to call that place home now is a laughable misnomer.  It was home to me at one time, true, but it is no closer to being home to me now than I can rightfully claim 1976 is the year in which we are presently living and breathing.  That isn’t true, of course, and the place I left somewhat reluctantly a half lifetime ago no longer comes close to resembling a place I would now call home.  As Thomas Wolfe noted in his brilliant treatise, changes are occurring all the time—many of them unbeknownst to us—and inasmuch as it is impossible to turn back the clock and undo past changes and experiences, the “home” we think of in the past is as illusory and imaginary as sipping a pluperfect elixir from the Fountain of Youth.  You simply cannot return to something that doesn’t exist anymore.  You cannot go back in time and relive parts of your youth purely because you are not satisfied with some of the outcomes that derived from your immature behavior and some of the choices—yes, agreeably hurried, rash choices—that you made at the time.

The word “home” is a cruel misrepresentation, an apparition—-a lie really.  Home is where we happen to be at any given moment in time.  Obviously home is liberally interpreted to represent the location where one was raised as a youth, but that place began changing—or rather continued changes that are eternally ongoing—the second you left it.  And thus nowadays you don’t recognize it anymore.  Not at all.  Not any part of it.  That “home” has disappeared for good.  That “home” is gone.

Gone forever.

How can you go “home” to a place that no longer exists other than in your heart and in your hazy memories and in some nostalgic netherworld your brain has invented as an antidote against the bad times which occasionally rear their grotesque head in today’s frenetic world?  You cannot.  That type of feat would require a time machine, and of course those cryptic, esoteric things only exist in the fertile imaginations of sci-fi writers and lunatics.  The home of your youth is no more accessible than the body of your youth, and forty pounds added to one’s flabby gut, five hundred terrible night sleeps punctuated by severe insomnia, and ten thousand gray hairs later–all “earned” while floating downstream on a relentless, unalterable temporal river–mean that wish is no more likely than finding forty eight ounces of pure gold in the malodorous depths of a cesspool.  Not happening and never will.  That revered home you grew up in decades ago is a thing of the past, and since the past is wholly inaccessible so too is the utopian place where you were raised and quite fantastically morphed into a responsible adult without realizing such a transcendent process was even occurring.

But majorly more profound than anything else, people change over time, and those dear souls who constituted “home” back in my youth are no longer the same ones I knew then either.  Oh, they inhabit the same bodies as before and their voices still sound the same as before and they still sign their names exactly the same as before (albeit likely a trifle more tremulously with the passage of time) and they ardently profess to hold the same core beliefs and morals from when they were much younger, but trust me, they are not the same people I grew up with.  Those individuals are only shadows from the past.  Scepters.  Holograms.  Ghosts.  Time has changed all the people I remember, some to a surprising extent and in a surprising fashion–not always for the better.  If a chunk of limestone left exposed to the elements over a period of forty years suffers significant degradation over that same time span, why then would you expect something as fragile as flesh and blood and human emotions to be capable of resisting a similar natural onslaught?

The plain answer is:  They don’t.  Human beings change a lot over time, yet the most ironic aspect informing this dynamic is that the most significant change occurs inside their bodies, not externally.  And when I say inside, I am referring to within one’s brain—within one’s psyche, where the machinations of consciousness are constantly evolving and devolving and churning about and processing new stimuli every minute of every hour of every day and forming new conclusions and opinions based upon any and all new information received, sometimes odd and convoluted ones—and not the more obvious fattening in one’s midriff and the frustrating hair loss and the embarrassing flaccidity over every square inch of one’s outer body surface.

They change; you change; the world around us changes; change is the only constant informing a life spent on Earth.  Well, change and the Arrow of Time.  People—each person currently alive—represent the chief variable, and change and the infallibility of passing time are the omnipresent constants which work non-stop to shape our earthly existences.

David Bowie perhaps said it best in one of his more famous songs:  “Time may change me, but I can’t change time…..”

A big amen to that sentiment.

And a big nullity to sincerely believing that you can ever return to the home of your youth. That place—that Panglossian “home”–started disappearing the second you left it, and the disappearing act has only accelerated since that pivotal day in your life, although the patch of ground you left behind –if it could speak, which it obviously cannot—would say that it does not view the urgency of time in the same light as chronically desperate, frenzied, obsessively satisfaction-seeking members of the Homo sapiens species…..

• You can’t decide how people feel; you cannot crawl inside another person’s head; you cannot control his/her emotions like you would a kite in the sky or a dog on a leash or a puppet tethered to strings. You can vaingloriously attempt to guide people’s actions with silky words and earnest prompting and boorish posturing, but that is as far as one can go.  In the end, each individual will decide how they feel about anything and everything and obviously that is their God-given right. So just learn to live with this stark reality in lieu of no viable options.  The person in question may be irredeemable and an insufferable moron, but such is the way God fashioned them.  I’m not claiming, like many others do, that there is some sort of transcendent reason behind this state of affairs and that there is an inscrutable reason for everything that happens on Earth, both bad and good, but such is life and we only exercise absolute control over our own puny being and—in deference to cosmic fate—even that is a preposterous overstatement disproven every second of every day all around the world .  If someone insists on behaving like a stooge or a boor or a cult devotee, that is their prerogative and, analogous to fatuously attempting to defy gravity time and time again, there really isn’t anything one can do to alter a predetermined course of nature.

Suicide Watch

By Frederick J. Blahnik

 

They’ve had this guy on suicide watch for the past week……

Can you fuckin’ feature the surreal absurdity of that?!?!?!

Huh?!?!?!

I mean, can you truly TRULY fuckin’ feature that?????

Here he sits on Death Row—scheduled to be executed in a week’s time—and the dumb, son-of-a-bitchin’ bureaucrats running the prison have him on suicide watch, apparently afraid the condemned stiff will unfairly rob them of their civic duty and kill himself before they can indulge in the pleasure of legally murdering him themselves.

How’s that for random stupidity?!?!

Really, how does that rate as an Orwellian wasting of taxpayer dollars?!?!

The guy is gonna be dead in a week’s time anyway, yet the dumb son-of-a-bitches don’t want him to ruin the big publicity party they have gone to the effort of elaborately planning.  The media and those bombastic conservative shitheads on A.M. talk radio and the hypocritical Republican bastards who incessantly preach toughness against crime and other similar low-IQ miscreants would be disappointed—no no, “disappointed” is far too weak of a descriptive word…..totally aghast—if this great showcase of theirs is somehow stolen away from them by the featured performer himself at the proverbial last minute.  How selfish of that crazy, murdering bastard to just be thinking of himself at such a critical moment in time.  Why, the uncooperative, ungrateful piece of shit deserves to die a second and third and fourth time over even just for being so goddamned self-entitled and difficult to deal with!

Yeah, prison officials have had this guy on suicide watch for the past week now…..

One week and counting.

Why?!?!

Well, because they simply cannot afford NOT to…..!!!!!

That venal asshole, to think he might even be considering something so utterly harebrained just to be spiteful and purely to spoil an epic party prearranged months in advance with all of the big national news networks attending and bright lights shining and cameras rolling and tons of favorable publicity blowing back on an august detention center……

But……….d’ya think……………?????

 

I scarcely think we have to worry about something so grossly unlikely, don’t you…..???

 

Yet……………………………………where there’s a will there’s a way…..

 

(Long pause)

 

Quick…..double the guards and make one hundred percent certain that sneaky bastard doesn’t go and hang himself with a bedsheet or do something equally stupid and selfish, okay?!?!  We deserve our moment in the sun after all the bad publicity this institution has received lately, and this conniving asshole sure as hell ain’t gonna deprive us of what is rightfully ours.  An embarrassing unplanned death will never happen on MY watch, I can guarantee you that!!!

Didya hear me already, or are ya just plain dumb as a box of rocks?????

I SAID GO DOUBLE THE GUARDS OUTSIDE THE PRISONER’S CELL RIGHT NOW AND STRIP THE BUTTFUCKER’S BEDSHEETS THIS VERY INSTANT!!!!!  And make damned sure he doesn’t come in close proximity to any semi-sharp objects either!  That sorry assface can sleep on the cold cement floor and shit in his hands and half starve to death for all I care about his welfare until the midazolam flows!!!

After all, we can never be too careful with regard to societal safety nowadays.

• …..there wasn’t much she could do about the shitty situation at hand, so she just started crying. Crying like a big fuckin’ baby, yes, that’s precisely what she did.  Her hands were figuratively tied behind her back and the options she was facing amounted to absolutely nothing—NOTHING, I TELL YA!…..so what else is a sane person supposed to do in an impossible situation such as that?  Huh?!?!  Any suggestions?!?!  C’mon, no better ideas from any of you learned, esteemed readers?!?!  Well, okay then….don’t pass judgment on this beleaguered damsel in distress if your wits are no greater than hers.  So, yeah, that’s right, it’s agreed upon amongst all of us…..I guess you just feel sorry for yourself and bawl your lungs out like a fuckin’ baby howling for a Nuk.  Just feel horribly sorry for yourself and curse the gods above and hope that somebody takes pity on you and maybe offers you an encouraging word and a helping hand to carry you through your time of suffering.  It’s either that or go searching for the nearest gun holding at least one bullet in its chamber, and she wasn’t anywhere near the point of desperation where she felt like doing anything THAT drastic and stupid.  And thus she cried on wailingly, lugubriously—no closer to a workable solution and with no end in sight to her abject despair.…..