Copyright 2019 by Frederick J. Blahnik.

 

All rights reserved.

 

This is the 4th edition of the book.  The 1st edition was published in 2010 and the 2nd in 2011.

 

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form whatsoever without the author’s prior written permission.  Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.  Purchase only authorized editions.

 

 

For information, address:

Frederick J. Blahnik

73892 325^th Street

Racine, Minnesota  55967

 

 

ISBN:  978-0-578-05177-2

 

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

 

Revised Edition/3rd Printing

 

 

 

 

 

 

The photograph on the front cover of this book, as well as the one on the back, were taken by the author in late July of 1993.  They both picture Francis Blahnik standing in front of the garage located on his hobby farm north of Spring Valley, Minnesota just prior to embarking on a solitary jaunt “out West” in his dilapidated Ford pick-up truck.

A Hijacked Destiny…..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Book Six in the Eight-Part Blahnik Family Twentieth Century Series

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Frederick J. Blahnik

• If something is meant to be…..it will be. If something is not meant to be…..it will not be.  If something is meant to survive…..it will survive.  If something is meant to perish…..it will perish.  There is a season for everything, and we exercise only a teensy bit of control over the seasons of our lives.  If this sounds like our temporal passages here on Earth are fated and largely determined in advance, well…..they are!  You are absolutely correct in that deduction.  Sometimes you’re the hammer and sometimes you’re the nail irrespective of your most fervent desires, and some transcendent entity far mightier than any of us puny earthlings makes that decision on a daily basis.  If you don’t believe such is the case, just ask the person who “miraculously” won the Powerball lottery out of a pool of millions or, more tragically, the innocent victim who was killed by a drunk driver or some aged fossil who should’ve had their driver’s license compassionately revoked a decade ago.  Fate rules; free will is a ruse on all but the most miniscule of stages.  Don’t fight fate.  Fighting fate is immanently stupid.  Rather, learn to embrace it, willfully adapt to its vagaries on a routine basis to whatever extent you can, and practice flexibility like it is the trendiest new religion out there.  To do otherwise defines both stubbornness and willful ignorance.

• There is a time for thinking and a time for acting, and the gulf in time separating these two cardinal activities is typically miniscule. Those who think too long and circuitously and don’t act expeditiously frequently miss out on golden opportunities to people who are more quick-witted and nimble between the ears.  Don’t be afraid to pull the trigger the second your finger contacts that danged thing if your gut is screaming at you to do so; opportunities, like trophy big game, typically only hang around for a moment before disappearing in a flash.  All they leave behind in their wake are regrets.  Waiting a long time to make an “informed” decision (code for procrastinating), together with the concept of aging gracefully, typically only applies to the creation of fine wines and diamonds.

• …..as the birthdays came and retreated now like so much melting snow in the early springtime, he of course felt older–but undeniably much wiser also!  Those things that are most important in life were now becoming increasingly clear to him and moving into sharper focus, issues that were quite hazy or even shrouded in secrecy when he was young and virile and so full of himself that by all rights he should have burst wide open and spilled innards all over his immediate surroundings.  And thus he accepted these advancing years with no small degree of consolation, because while his eyesight, hearing, and reflexes were ineluctably failing him as the days and weeks and years that had been allotted to him gradually washed away, his appreciation for life–coupled with the surefire happiness that invariably accompanies same–were growing by veritable leaps and bounds…..

• With regard to your elders, you learn immeasurably more listening to their regrets and admitted mistakes than by listening to and taking heed of any directives they might happen to throw in your direction. Remorse and regrets are fantastic teachers inasmuch as they are deeply rooted in honesty and humility; bombast, overconfidence, and tall tales, conversely, are fathered by conceit and only superficially rooted, and then in a quicksand-reminiscent substrate which consists of inflated egos residing in alternative universes.

• I’ll do it tomorrow…… What meaningless, presumptuous words those are!!!  You can no sooner claim ownership over the future than a turd can claim ownership over a latrine.  You render some degree of control over the present—Some degree, remember, but not ALL of it!—but the future is a beast of a wholly different nature that can never be tamed or throttled.  Anyone who talks smugly about their concrete plans for the future is transcending humanity’s reach and stepping into God’s sandals and, let me assure you with one hundred percent certainty…..those are some mighty big sandals for puny mortals to fill!

• …..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”.…..