Without exception, do what ya say you’re gonna do.  If you talk the talk ya gotta walk the walk.  Understand now, ya don’t havta do any more than that, but NEVER EVER do less!  When you personally stand in front of the high jump pit, eye the apparatus, approximate your leg strength versus the tug of gravity, and climactically set the bar on its standards, that is the height you are subsequently required to clear; ya can’t and shouldn’t blame someone else at a later date for creating unrealistic expectations.  That is so fuckin’ lame! Quite simply, be true to your word—ALWAYS!!!  That’s what makes a good person; that’s what separates paladins from assholes; that defines character; that’s what, over time, makes reputations platinum as opposed to stinky and transforms casual acquaintances into genuine lifelong friendships.

…..”torn between two lovers, feelin’ like a fool, loving you both is breaking all the rules…..”   That classic ballad from the 1970s, sung by brunette songstress Mary McGregor, kept playing  through her mind as she contemplated her future and commiserated over the atrocious  bind she found herself embroiled within.  What was she to do anyway?!  Was there some way out of this shambolic mess?  As the undisputed fulcrum to this love triangle, could she somehow succeed in making three people happy when her best instincts kept telling her the real number was more apt to be zero?  Some might call her present predicament an embarrassment of riches; she was well aware of that and could hardly take issue with the frank assessment.  I mean, put yourself in her shoes for a second and just imagine…..being loved simultaneously and madly by two exquisite, yet diametrically opposite, suitors!!  Desirability squared!!!  Nirvana on planet Earth, right?!  The envy of every woman on the planet!  Yet she nonetheless struggled to find any sort of  silver lining in this weird cataclysm.  Rather, she could much sooner foresee the worst case scenario developing and developing breathtakingly quickly too, and that would be that instead of winding up with TWO exemplary lovers who she could call her own and count on for creditable companionship, she would ultimately end up with neither and find herself back at square one—lonely as before, a little bit older and more tarnished now, and squarely on the road to spinsterhood…..

…..she had to maintain an unwavering faith in God; that was the ONLY thing that would sustain her now.  There was no other method to deal with this excruciating situation she faced, no other way forward, no magical elixir she could ingest to guarantee a favorable outcome.  Insurance companies—those apex predators sitting atop every societal food chain—certainly couldn’t be looked to or depended upon in a dire  instance such as this. Nor could so-called friends or family—all subject to the foibles, frailties, failures, and ultimate fallibility indigenous to the human species.   No, God was her best and only remaining hope and she therefore planned to place her life in His hands while praying a shitload every night at bedtime and tripling down on her long-time, albeit when convenient, faith.  Iffy??  Well, of course it is, but if there are no viable alternatives available to her, what other choices does she have?  Don’t bother replying to this rhetorical query—the correct answer is a grand total of zero.  Blind faith is iffy, but so too is the future in general.  Ditto assuming anything in life and taking mortality for granted.  Putting your life solely in God’s hands is inveterately a risky proposition given the complete absence of any objective referencing, but when the future is unimaginably bleak and there is but one bullet left unused in the pistol you hold in your hand, the decision on how to proceed is actually relatively easy and already made for you.  Soldiers on the front lines and passengers on hijacked airplanes will enthusiastically endorse this fact, as will terminally ill patients…..

…..and the long-awaited day finally arrived like a prophet bearing gifts, yet she found the anticipated elegance and pulchritude of that lonely, beleaguered day fell far short of her lofty expectations.  Her admittedly excessive enthusiasm was dashed like a bug confronting a windshield moving at seventy miles an hour.   Disappointment reigned supreme.  The day felt rather ordinary, vapid…..not markedly dissimilar from any of the others which had preceded it.  And right then and there she was struck by an epiphany, one that would stick with her as her constant companion for the remainder of her days spent on Earth:  Every day IS exactly the same in character as the one which immediately precedes it—twenty four hours in length and bounded by the sun’s appearance and subsequent disappearance on each of its ends—and thus it was entirely up to her to shape the thing in the manner in which she would like to see it unfold.  It was the substrate, the putty, the globby paper mache; she was the sculptor assigned to oversee this construction project on a regular, ongoing basis. She was the master and each new day was her slave. And with this life-changing realization came a surge of optimism accompanied by some long overdue peace of mind—a natural tranquilizer which would help define her disposition and outlook on life from that pivotal point forward…..

…..she kept talking about heaven, obsessing about heaven…..”heaven this”…..”heaven that”…..”heaven above”…..”how wonderful heaven is going to be!”…..and he couldn’t help but scratch his head and wonder, “What is so detestable about this life we are living here on Earth right now??”  “Is there a valid reason why one should prioritize hurrying through a mortal life as we know it??”  “Is there a guarantee of something better down the road for any of us aside from the ironclad assurances of vainglorious, cocksure clergymen??”  He harbored few complaints with regard to his earthly environs—understood that each individual is ultimately responsible for generating their own level of happiness and should be held accountable for that precondition—so these naysayers who forever seemed unhappy with terrestrial life and were constantly pining for something better in the far-off future were a vexing mystery to him…..

…..oh, Little Girl, you hold my life in the palm of your hand, yet you obviously could care less about this transcendent truth!  I’m your servant, your slave, your paramour, your unapologetic adorer, your ardent worshiper…..and yet you don’t want me to be any of those things.  You sometimes want me to be your friend, but then other times you value my presence as nothing more than an object to block the sun from shining so brightly on your fair skin or to act as a sentinel for warning you of an army of mosquitoes that are massing just out of range, planning their audacious attack.  You mean everything to me, but I in turn mean nothing to you.  Is that what true love is then…..investing all of your time and all of your energy and all of your inner self into upgrading the life and comfort level of another…..without any realistic hope for reciprocity?  I don’t know.  I just don’t fuckin’ know for sure, but I wish to hell I did.  Could this be the unvarnished reality then…..that “true” love is a behemoth ruse, a cruel hoax, a house of mirrors??  But…..if that is what love legitimately represents and it could indeed wind up being so lopsided and asymmetrical…..then please sign me up for it this very instant, because I would gladly do those aforementioned indulgent things a thousand times over plus walk barefooted over a fifty-foot bed of burning coals and slay the hugest and vilest of the dragons just to be rewarded with but one of your heartwarming smiles and a passing peck on the cheek…..

…..and the new reality quickly became the old reality, and things that just days ago seemed fresh and exciting now seemed dull and unbearably tedious.  Why is this so?  Why do things become humdrum and pedestrian so quickly?  How can a life morph into a dreary existence after but a handful of spins on the carousel?  Once the shine wears off an apple, it no longer begs consumption.  Once you’ve been to Paris, your second and third and fourth views of the mythical city are not nearly as special.  Once you move past that nuclear first impression of her unparalleled beauty, her warts speedily become apparent and that lustrous sheen reflecting from her hair transforms into oiliness.  Same thing with life.  Once an experience has been sampled for the first time, it no longer holds the same allure that attracted you to it in the first place.  I guess you could say life is coldhearted and eminently lackluster because of this, yet that characterization does not do it sufficient justice and greatly oversimplifies its ethereal underlying meaning.  Life is pluperfect, but only if your expectations of it remain grounded in reality …..

We are all gatekeepers for the future.  Every…..single…..one…..of…..us.  Each of us has been handed a set of keys for the days ahead by the great, omnipotent overseer of the Universe(s), and it is then our responsibility to guard and maintain this temporal piece of property with the utmost respect and decorum, just as those who came before us struggled to do so for our sake.  But it seems in these current trying times not everyone is up to the task.  Some fall considerably short of the mark, and others don’t even realize there is a mark—that with the preternatural gift of life comes an attendant responsibility.  A responsibility to future generations, certainly.  A responsibility to the planet we call home.  A responsibility to the other co-inhabitants of this small celestial globe.  A responsibility to those in near proximity to us, as well as to those who reside on the other side of town, on the other side of the state, on the other side of the country, and on the other side of the world.  And mostly a paramount responsibility to oneself, yes, to that person staring back at you from the bathroom mirror each and every morning of the week.  Do what is right and moral—And your heart in the end will unfailingly tell you what is right and moral!—and then you will never have to fret about disappointment and shrinking away from that reflection in the mirror.

…..and she saved and saved and saved and saved and saved and saved and saved and saved and saved and saved and saved and saved and saved and saved and saved and saved most of the money she worked so hard to earn until one day years later when—secondary to the gradually deteriorating physical health which naturally accompanies the aging process for every human being who has ever walked the face of our blue planet— she was much less able to fully enjoy all that money she had accrued over the preceding years.  She next stopped for a moment to consider what exactly she had been saving her substantial stash of money for in the first place.  And what answer did she ultimately come up with?  Yes?????  An astoundingly savvy investment, maybe??  Well, no……..to be perfectly honest, she had forgotten the original reason by now, other than saving a lot of money seemed like a really good idea at the time and a slew of financial talking heads kept adamantly pushing this “sensible” plan on her until her natural resistance finally broke down and it became impossible for her to resist their logical suggestion.  Moreover, she wanted to be absolutely certain that she had sufficient money set aside in case of a major financial emergency.  Yes yes yes, that was the chief reason for saving her veritable Kilimanjaro of cash, she remembered now:  She wanted to have a giant nest egg set aside in case something went tragically wrong with her life, but thank God nothing like that had ever happened!  So now—decades later—she had this hard-earned bonanza to spend in any fashion she so desired, notwithstanding the fact she currently possessed considerably less mobility, considerably less mental acuity, and considerably less zest for life than had she elected to spend some of her earnings thirty years earlier when she was still vital, still energetic, still  nubile, and majorly more physically attractive…..

…..there were a bunch of foul-mouthed, teen-aged boys running around proudly sporting red MAGA caps and I instantly thought to myself:  What type of “greatness” are you referring to in all of the seventeen years or so that you have lived on the surface of this planet?  Just what constitutes your extensive frame of reference for making such a grandiose claim, Pimple-faced Kids, considering that you have served less than a score of years as a member of our unique American culture and thus your benchmark for measuring greatness is punier than Bobby Sands’ frame was in his final, suffering-filled days.  What makes YOU—someone who was sucking on your Mama’s titties and shitting into a diaper and being assigned timeouts for social misbehavior not so very long ago—a bona fide expert now, during these historically turbulent times, on the direction American society should be headed?  All valid questions, undoubtedly, yet every one of them begs unrequited for a satisfactory answer.  But before I become too angry and judgmental with those presumptuous, impudent young assholes and the brazen license they were showcasing by wearing MAGA caps that opprobrious afternoon, I must remember that they are merely the products of their upbringings.  Shitty, misguided upbringings, no question, but upbringings nonetheless.  My scorn should be directed at the young cretins’ parents for instilling odious values and beliefs in their progeny.  One should never expect a verdant vegetable to germinate and subsequently bloom where a cocklebur seed has been planted in the soil.  Nor does an apple ever fall too far away from the tree that spawned it, and one does not rightfully expect ornery hornets to produce barrels and barrels of succulent honey like their industrious, pollinating honeybee cousins are renowned for doing.  So I guess I should give those obnoxious teenagers a free pass for this day at least, if for no other reason than they are nothing more than ignorant kids who were brought up in morally warped households.  Additionally and as a footnote to this brief treatise, that aforementioned frame of reference I referred to does include one George W. Bush for the first eight years of this new millennium—scarcely a generation ago and therefore undeniably falling within a teenager’s memory span—and he was undisputedly an unenlightened, intelligence-challenged degenerate who easily ranked as the worst United States president of all time before one mendacious, fuckish guy by the name of Donald J. Trump came waltzing along to wrest the reprehensible title away from King Georgie Boy the Groundhog Impersonator (9-11-2001) with astonishing ease.  Thus I imagine from this skewed perspective there WAS a lot of “greatness” to recover after “W” did his utmost to wreck our venerated country over the course of eight tortuous years, but I seriously doubt that was the issue those shameless boys were referring to with the ill-suited caps they were wearing.  And furthermore, to expect greatness from an individual with as many glaring character defects as Donald J. Trump would be akin to begging for compassion from a deranged serial killer; such behavior simply defies every basic tenet of common sense……