…..supposing the world was coming to an end soon, she resolved to buy an RV and see as much of the planet as possible before Armageddon ultimately arrived. It became her life’s mission; it became her guiding North Star; it became a raging obsession within her breast. Ten years later she was still out on the highway, still doggedly chugging along from one town to the next, from one national park to the next, 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, y’hear?  We only have so much time in our finite lives to ride the champion racehorse!  She was vehement about seeing EVERYTHING on Earth’s surface before the dreaded apocalypse arrived. Yes—literally EVERYTHING!!!  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 the present to the future and aimlessness to purposefulness without an individual ever being consciously aware of its presence. Life happens while we’re foolishly chasing after “absolute” goals that often turn out to be frivolous, misguided ones…..

The general acceptance of this truism notwithstanding, things are NEVER “meant to be”.  People—typically two people—must make a conscious decision in order to manifest destiny.  Accidents “happen”; life does not.  Decisions are made by discerning individuals; they don’t just fall haphazardly out of the sky or come crawling out of the woodwork like a scurrilous Asian beetle on a warm March morning.  The workings of fate?  Well, yes, of course fate exists as a huge, shape-shifting, monolithic entity, but the big bus of fate requires a driver just like any other, thus you may as well commandeer that temporal vehicle and take your rightful place behind its steering wheel purely so you can influence the direction it’s headed to the utmost of your ability. A million unsavory extraneous things could happen while you’re piloting said bus, true enough, but by taking rigid control of its steering wheel you’ll henceforth have succeeded in eliminating one potential pitfall, ergo I guess that number now stands at 999,999. Forget the daunting scale facing you for a second; behaving proactively represents an absolute improvement in your personal outlook—without exception!

…..the days dragged on and on like one of those excruciatingly elongated dental appointments where you wind up leaving feeling like a beaten Persian rug hanging from a clothesline, and she wondered to herself if something different and more exciting might lie ahead in the days, weeks, and months stretching out before her akin to a boundless Sahara. Because, quite frankly, she’d grown weary of life itself and the same monotonous, repetitious routine that she found herself mindlessly plodding through every day of the year. No known alternative to life and consciousness exists—She certainly understood and accepted this basic factor in the grandiose equation!—yet she nonetheless found herself wondering with increasing frequency if human life on the small planet Earth was all that it was cracked up to be, and why others celebrated it as though it was some kind of sublime gift even as she had grown frightfully bored with the whole deal and was therefore passively exploring viable alternatives…..and others not so viable…..

Hope springs eternal.  That’s the one and only thing that can never be taken from us.  Where there’s life, there’s hope, and you can perpetually take some small measure of consolation in knowing this.  Probabilities are few, while possibilities abound akin to mosquitoes in a Louisiana swamp in the heart of summertime, yet all it takes is but one of those nearly infinite possibilities to manifest in order for you to realize a personal dream.  Never let go of your dream.  Never!  That’s for others to do, for habitual quitters, because quitters instinctively waffle and then quit while dreamers forge ahead irrespective of any and all obstacles placed in their way.  If a dream insists on stubbornly taking up valuable space inside your cranium, it’s probably worth pursuing…..and pursuing with reckless abandon too! There’s no other way…..

…..he thought love, like the dodo bird and saber-toothed cats and the dinosaurs, was an extinct species until the day he met her. She opened his eyes and his heart to sensations and feelings that he had never felt before in his brief lifetime. She was the key that unlocked his heart, and to his surprise he realized that he had never understood before now that it had been secured steadfastly shut—a fortress protected on all sides by redoubtable moats and strategically placed concertina wire. She was all he ever thought about anymore, all he ever dreamt about, all he ever wanted…..all he ever needed going forward.  But then when she abruptly left in the dead of one otherwise nondescript night without saying a word or even leaving a note, the two-timing bitch took his empyreal love with her and he was left mucking about forlornly in a depressive stupor, wondering whether the previous three months had really transpired or, alternatively, whether the whole thing had just been some cruel figment cooked up by his overactive imagination…..

…..a large dark cloud blocked the light of the sun. It lingered for quite some time too, until one was left to wonder whether the sepulchral entity didn’t have a mind of its own and was behaving badly on purpose and purely out of spite for earthlings.  But in time it, too, like every cloud that had preceded it in the brilliantly azure sky, moved on, allowing tiny rays of sunshine to gradually peek out from behind its bulbous, fleeing rear end. The landscape down on Earth’s crust changed remarkably at that juncture and everyone’s spirits buoyed dramatically, including even the chronic naysayers who stridently insist overcast days never make them depressed. The monstrous cloud finally moved on entirely until it was out of sight and out of mind, permitting the sun to shine down in all its lustrous majesty. The world we live in seemed a better place right then and there and life seemed so much more worth embracing and cherishing than before, even if practically speaking nothing of substance had changed in the interim……

Is today the end of the beginning…..or the beginning of the end?  Or something else?  Or both?  An interesting point to ponder, isn’t it?  But obviously, tantamount to almost everything else in life, this riddle boils down to one’s attitude.  If you believe the best is still before you, it will be. Contrarily, if you believe your best days lie in your rearview mirrors and the days looming ahead will be anticlimactic and dejecting, they most assuredly will be also.  Any situation you encounter in life invariably gets distilled down to one’s fundamental attitude; you must then decide the outcome based on the information available to you at the time.  Oh, and for your information and ongoing edification: The correct response to the question in the opening sentence of this paragraph is the end of the beginning. That answer should remain the same for both nine-day-olds as well as ninety-year-olds. Losers need not apply! They, like Chicken Little, inveterately think the sky is falling down.

I know this is probably sickeningly cliché to hear once again and for approximately the millionth time in your life, but each day that passes by advances you twenty-four hours closer to your eventual and certain death.  You cannot relive that day.  You don’t get a second chance at it; no mulligans!  You won’t miraculously gain passage into a secret time machine and suddenly roar backwards in defiance of the Roman calendar while experiencing a Homeric rebirth. None of these things will ever happen, of course; that’s only wishful thinking carried to an extreme.  Conversely, time will continue flowing along just like Old Man River, and the upstream locales we witnessed or experienced as recently as yesterday are now gone forever.  They are memories…..useless artifacts…..irrelevant residua…..history; completely inaccessible to us anymore irrespective of any and all regrets that we may continue harboring in our hearts germane to them. As such, regrets are ghosts of the past—flowers blooming lustily on the altar of a wedding long since concluded after all the guests have departed.  Regrets are cruel that way, but that’s precisely why we want to leave them in the past where they were birthed and still rightfully belong.

Permanence doesn’t exist.  Does not.  Never has.  Never will.  The concept of permanence is impossible to understand. Nothing lasts forever; nothing stays the same; nothing is immutable.  Not we humans, not the Earth we live on, not our sun, not our galaxy, and not our universe either although no one residing on a tiny, blue, inconsequential planet niched somewhere off in a distant corner of the Milky Way star cluster will ever be privy to its cold, whimpering demise. Nothing lasts forever; nothing stays the same; nothing is immutable. Certainly not the batch of dreams we hatched and pursuantly incubated when we were only knee-high to a grasshopper and still fervently believed in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the benevolence of government at every level and the intrinsic equality of all human beings. In terms of theory, permanence and infinity belong squarely in the same conversation, in the sense neither can be understood or logically explained with the feeble entity that passes for human intellect. On metaphysically complex issues such as the ones I referenced, we of the Homo sapiens species can only speculate and make unsupported, unsubstantiated guesses, rendering us little different than the yak, the ostrich, and the ring-tailed lemur. No better than those cognitively maligned creatures insofar as comprehending existential conundrums, but assuredly no worse either if you want to be charitable and look at the bright side of things. Nothing lasts forever; nothing stays the same; nothing is immutable. Period.

……they argued perpetually over the relative merits of dogs versus cats, yet he could never come close to understanding her point of view. Cats are loathsome creatures—sterile and implacable and sans emotions—yet she still defended them as though they are affectionate and loving and therefore deserving of unfettered loyalty. She was grossly misinformed about the subject without even realizing it. So tell me this, Reader: Why would anyone with a functional brain love a cat?  You could just as easily say you love the Delta table-saw sitting inorganic and smothered in sawdust out in your garage as saying you love a cat. Sure, both objects serve a useful purpose—the table-saw for trimming lumber to size, the cat for catching an occasional mouse when it’s in the mood—but there’s nothing innately lovable about either. In his mind, love and loyalty were interchangeable entities, and he had never in his lifetime claimed fealty to a table-saw, let alone a cat that refused to come rushing up wagging its tail and slobbering all over everything when he arrived home from work at the end of a particularly stressful day. See, dogs are immanently and irresistibly lovable and automatically warm a person’s heart when they do neat stuff like that. And cats?  NOOOOO!!!!!…..