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…..

If a difficult issue is staring you straight in the face, it is either a problem or an opportunity; there are no other possibilities, and the sole determinant of the answer is your attitude.  Virtually every issue is invariably malleable, and with a good hammer and chisel paired with a generous helping of fortitude you can almost always sculpt a workable—Dare I say favorable?—solution out of any perceived dilemma.  Of course, if you’re cursed with a chronic defeatist attitude, you’ll instinctively look for a sinister funnel cloud rather than a majestic rainbow and wind up beating a premature hasty retreat in the face of imagined danger.  The outcome of all such situations is wholly dependent upon your attitude but, then again, so too can be said about one’s overall outlook on life.

Those who love life the dearest can let it go of it the easiest.  Those who embrace life like a bewitching mistress can bid farewell to it with the fewest regrets.  Those who have been to Rome and Paris and Rio de Janeiro do not yearn undyingly for an encore visit. Those intrepid souls who have run with the bulls at Pamplona aren’t scared shitless by a docile steer stanchioned in a livestock barn at the local county fair. Such is the bizarre paradox of living: The harder you have loved, the easier it is to say goodbye to that temptress while, conversely, those who have lived life with undue caution and treated it like a fragile ornament find it most difficult to confront death and are terrified by the mere thought of their imminent demise. Once you’ve eaten all the way through a luscious apple or nearly all the way through it, throwing away the leftover core is not particularly difficult. But, on the other hand, if you never took a gigantic chomp out of the tantalizing fruit to begin with and it therefore still appears (and no doubt is) pristine…..???

Too much time of our lives–—Far too much of it!—is dictated not by what we like to do but instead occupied by what we dislike or even hate to do.  It shouldn’t be this way.  No, not at all! Each and every person should make a conscious point of dedicating their lives to the pursuit of pleasure and satisfaction, not gritting one’s teeth and finding out the hard way just how much displeasure and outright pain one human body can endure over the course of a lifetime. Such does not constitute living. Rather, it constitutes bare tolerance, which is the polar opposite of why we Homo sapiens were created and placed on Earth’s surface in the first place.  Life should be a refreshing jog through a scenic park, not a grueling marathon through a junkyard.

Stasis is our trusted friend, okay?  If something ain’t broke, for God’s sake don’t don a dunce cap and stubbornly struggle to fix it!  Change in and of itself is not inherently evil, but those who advocate for change merely because they are bored to death and yearn to disrupt the status quo are anarchists at best, stupid meddlers at worst.  Stasis and change are like identical twins, in that neither is better than the other until one starts acting up and needlessly disrupting things, at which point you should step in and take decisive action to rectify the situation…..but not one second earlier!  Change can readily make a situation better, but it can just as easily make a situation worse than before.  Knowing the difference and when change will truly be beneficial pretty much defines the word “intelligence”.

You can never outrun mistakes of the past, no matter how hard you try and how much distance you manage to traverse and how mightily you struggle to rationalize those stubborn knaves; they become a permanent part of you, no different than your physical features and your God-given personality.  You must thus somehow come to terms with your mistakes in a manner that allows you to proceed forward with a clear conscience and an unburdened mind. Mistakes will affect and bedevil EVERYONE throughout the course of their lifetimes; that much is a given and as etched in stone as Moses’ apocryphal Ten Commandments.  Yet this fact we know for sure as well: How we react to mistakes that occur spontaneously and in no logical order is the true test of one’s character and the only meaningful variable secondary to that larger-than-life equation which governs our day-to-day existences.

…..there wasn’t much she could do about the shitty situation at hand, therefore she just started crying. Crying like a big fuckin’ baby; yeah, that’s precisely what she did.  Her hands were figuratively tied behind her back and the options she was facing amounted to absolutely nothing—ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOTHING, I TELL YA!…..so what else is a sane person supposed to do in an impossible situation such as that?  Huh?! Any suggestions?! Pertinent insights?! C’mon now, no better ideas from any of my learned, esteemed readers?!  Well, okay then, don’t even consider passing judgment on this beleaguered damsel in distress if your wits are no more sophisticated than hers. So yeah, that’s right, it seems to be agreed upon amongst all of us…..I guess you just feel sorry for yourself and bawl your lungs out like a fuckin’ starving baby howling for a Nuk. Just feel horribly sorry for yourself and curse the gods above and the demons below 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 stupid and THAT drastic. Ergo she cried on wailingly, lugubriously, interminably—no closer to a workable solution than before and with no end in sight to her abject despair.…..

…..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!