• …..each day was numbingly similar to the one preceding it, and she started to wonder if maybe this isn’t what that strange thing called depression was. Nothing dramatic, nothing transcendent, nothing earthshaking…..just more and more of the same old boring stuff day after day without any new wrinkles—ever.  Understand now, she was in love with life—Don’t presume otherwise, okay?!—yet if it had ever been truly stimulating to her—and, under careful scrutiny, she wasn’t altogether sure that it had—such stimulation had ceased to exist long long ago, sometime before she fell into a drudge-laden profession and stopped meeting new people and making new acquaintances.  Every day was paralyzingly the same for her now, the exact same—Xeroxed copies piled atop one another in a disheveled heap.  She didn’t know what to call this lame state of affairs currently facing her—Was it in fact clinical depression???—but, looking back, she did remember there was a time not so distant when she hadn’t come within ten miles of being constantly buffeted by these suffocating trade winds of melancholy…..

• There are no such things as “hard facts”. There are only sensory interpretations, which vary wildly among each individual.  A colorblind person can tell you what colors she is seeing, and she is not wrong.  A partially deaf person can tell you about the limited specific tones which register with him, and he is not wrong.  A person bereft of taste buds can tell you that a gourmet meal prepared by the finest chef in the world tastes horrifically bland, and they are not wrong.  An ignoramus can tell you only what she/he believes to be true based on their limited cognitive skills, but that doesn’t necessarily make her/him wrong and stupid.  Long story short, sensory interpretations—in conjunction with the “facts” these interpretations inevitably lead to—are relative to every person who has ever walked the face of this planet.  Ergo, anyone who cites a “fact” to you is confusing it with their personal opinion.  There are no exceptions to this rule either.  NONE!!!  Anyone who vehemently professes to knowing a “fact” may be certain of only one thing:  Her/his own ongoing intellectual ineptitude, stagnation, and biases.

• …..after her horrific experience from the day before, she felt God and Satan and all the primal forces of nature must be conspiring together to bully her into submission. Life just could not get any worse than this; why had she even been born?  She couldn’t possibly dip any lower on the universal happiness scale; she had plummeted past the nadir and was currently in uncharted territory.  But after a good night’s sleep to clear her head and a forthright dialogue with her inner psyche, she came to the mature realization that fortune waxes and wanes with complete randomness and she had merely found herself at the bottom of that cyclical trough for one miserable day.  Today will be a better day, for sure.  Yes.  It really will be!  HONEST!!!  Truth is, it couldn’t possibly be any worse than that temporal monster brazenly running around out of control using the moniker “yesterday”.…..

• …..she instinctively felt a compelling need to protect him from himself. He obviously was in need of a person to run interference for him, and she instinctively volunteered for the position.   He was incapable, inutile…..hopeless almost.  Don’t ask me why she felt better qualified to run the life of a person–Any person!–other than herself, but she just KNEW deep in her heart that her instincts were superior to his and that she should therefore unfailingly be the pointperson on every decision that impacted his life to any significant degree.  She was doing him a big fuckin’ favor is all it really boiled down to; can’t ya see that, reader?!?!  Can’t ya understand that?!?!  Well…..can’t ya?!?!  It’s clearer than a glacial stream to me.  That guy should be arrantly grateful to her, after all, and the stupid nincompoop definitely should not feel one bit resentful and be overly annoyed with this blatant intrusion into his life…..

• Today is a new day…..I will try my best to find myself within it. I may feel lost and misguided at times, but there is absolutely no shame in that.  I will just shove this carbon-based, clumsily biped conveyance into “Drive” and thence never once look back.  The past consists entirely of memories, some good but not all, while the present and future hold the potential for creating memories majorly superior to the ones currently existing in my cerebral vaults.  I therefore intend to mine the present and hopefully the future as well–should my aureate luck hold out indefinitely–for twenty-four-carat memories that’ll put everything presently residing in my Memory Hall of Fame to shame.  “Make America Great Again!”???  It’s already great, as is the rest of our world and our universe.  Nothing is more irksome than hearing some red-faced oldster snarling at length about how we must pull together to make the world that we live in “great again”, when obviously by dint of their age alone they must have been an integral party to its alleged downfall, whenever that degeneration supposedly happened.  If ya ain’t part of the solution then you’re part of the problem, and grumpy old dinosaurs who insist on pointing to the past as the seminal roadmap that we should utilize for navigating the tricky byways up ahead egregiously miss this point.  Cavemen did not persevere and ultimately prevail by turning their backs on fire, their successors did not persevere and prevail by turning their backs on the wheel, people of the middle ages did not persevere and prevail by turning their backs on the printing press, the descendants who followed them did not persevere and prevail by turning their backs on the internal combustion engine, their successors did not persevere and prevail by eschewing their yearning to fly not unlike the birds in the sky—first within the bounds of our earthly atmosphere and much later breathtakingly beyond those bounds—and our most recent ancestors did not persevere and prevail by ignoring the magisterial power inherent to the splitting of the atom.  Why should we be any different or, more appropriately–why would we WANT to be any different–than any of our predecessors extending all the way back to the troglodyte era?  Make America great again???  It has always been great, just as the history and culture of mankind has sought greatness ever since we became bipedal creatures and migrated en masse out of eastern Africa eons ago.  That greatness has never been defined by looking backwards during times of need, during times of strife, during times of volatility, during times of trouble.  No, human greatness has always been defined by how we react to adversity by looking and moving FORWARD, not backwards.  The future holds the innovative solutions for the new problems we humans constantly seem to create and stumble into without trying; the past only holds the reasons and root causes for those same problems.  Seeking to rectify current problems with old “solutions” will only exacerbate those problems and make them more intractable and long-lasting.  You can never be the solution to a problem which you admittedly caused yourself.  If a major problem germinated and subsequently exploded skyward and thrived during your watch, then that is YOUR problem and not to be blamed on succeeding generations.  At that juncture, just graciously step aside and allow younger, more mentally nimble people to clean up the mess you were largely responsible for creating.  That is the proper thing to do, that is the logical thing to do, that is the moral thing to do…..that is the RIGHT thing to do!  To do otherwise–to stand red-faced in the middle of the road with the veins in the temples of your skull dangerously distended, all outraged and disgruntled and unreasonably opinionated while chanting hypnotically about the need to make our world “great” again–is not just grossly immature behavior and a heinous reflection on an entire generation.  It is, rather, just about the most selfish, tantrum-throwing behavior any human being of any generation could ever engage in. Shame shame shame on you if you find yourself falling within such a misguided subset! Your descendants–your DNA bearers, your flesh and blood reincarnated, your legacy namesakes–deserve better even if you personally do not.

• Those “scientists” who claim they will one day discover and understand the origin of consciousness are the same ignoramuses who claim they’ll one day understand the origin and scope of our Universe. Stupid hubristic fools indeed!!!  Certain things such as the aforementioned cannot be “discovered”; they are so stunningly transcendent they could never possibly be isolated and dissected by mere humans laboring in a far-off corner of the very Universe in which they reside.  It would be analogous to asking a single cell within our bodies to understand the workings of the overriding physiological system it belongs to, or like asking a bacterium within our gut to expound upon the current weather conditions outside its host’s body.  Everyone and everything–including and especially certain vainglorious scientists–encounter absolute limits they cannot surmount at a defined point in time, limits which are impossible for us to overcome as human beings regardless of effort and determination and trillions of dollars invested.  Some things simply cannot be empirically proven or disproven owing to our relatively feeble status as scrawny pawns in a much larger chess match being played by Divine Beings, coupled with the embedded nature of our very existence.  This is not only true because we embody a barely mentionable minor player within an extraordinarily complex universe, but also owing to the fact one can never use science as a tool to investigate our own mystical personal selves.  A mirror reflects in but one direction, and so too does consciousness.  There are definitely distinct limits to what contemporary science can hope to accomplish, yet a handful of arrogant, overeducated people are nonetheless loath to accept this immutable fact.

• 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 set the bar, that is the height you are required to clear; ya can’t and shouldn’t blame someone else at a later date for creating unrealistic expectations.  Quite simply, be true to your word—ALWAYS!!!  That’s what makes a good person; that’s what separates paladins from assholes; that’s what, over time, makes reputations platinum as opposed to stinky and transforms casual acquaintances into genuine lifelong friendships.

• Inertia is easily the most difficult force to overcome in nature. Sitting still and not doing anything to upset the status quo feels totally natural.  Moving…..acting dynamically…..changing the way things are currently done…..THAT feels distinctly unnatural.  Just reposing on one’s arse and permitting life to flow by unobstructed feels way more normal and comfortable than confronting it head-on and struggling unrelentingly to affect real change and real improvements in the lot of mankind, improvements which then can be passed along to one’s descendants with a clear conscience. Yet you MUST do this if you ever hope to amount to anything more than a cipher…..just another anonymous Social Security Number issued by the federal government, “living” a humdrum shadowy existence spent clinging parasitically to the gut of society–a pitiful saga which ultimately culminates in a pedestrian obituary showcasing a grainy black-and-white photograph taken decades earlier drowning amongst legions of others on the unread second page of the local daily newspaper.

• …..she thought they could still be friends, but–Let’s face the cruel facts here, people!!–she was as naïve as the day is long. He had been around her and on top of her and inside her and all points in transit to boot, and there was no way in this fuckin’ world of ours that he wanted anything to do with a so-called “Platonic” friendship with the girl he loved more than anything on the whole third planet from the Sun; no one else even came close.  He wanted the deep, meaningful, sexual relationship they had savored in the past; she no longer did.  And hence there was no room for the compromised, let’s-get-together-for-occasional-beers-and-pretend-that-we-were-never-intimate-lovers type of relationship she proposed, and so they went their separate ways after that and the world kept turning on its tilted axis and the birds kept singing from their havens in the treetops and FICA kept withholding obscene amounts of money from their bi-weekly paychecks and after a while the pre-doomed pair nearly forgot they ever knew each other.  Rather……she nearly forgot.  He never did and never could……

• The bigger the obstacle you plow through or hurdle over, the greater your level of resultant satisfaction. Only stands to reason, doesn’t it?  Puny accomplishments equal puny satisfaction.  Doctors rake in the cash hand-over-fist; you only get paid a pittance to go scrub the urinals.  Home run hitters get paid the big bucks; singles hitters languish in microscopic print on the back pages of a newspaper’s sports section.   An “A” score on a daunting test engenders great pride; a tepid “C” is enough to slink out the back door of the classroom in shame.  Authentic heroes bask in the limelight; cowards tremble in the shadows.  Thus, set your goals appropriately high and do not settle for pedestrian “accomplishments”.  It is far nobler to fail attempting to summit Denali than to brag outlandishly while you stand atop Bunny Hill.