NOTE:  The following non-fiction short story is borrowed from an anthology of poetry entitled “The Changing Seasons of Life”, which was authored by Fred Blahnik and published in 2017.

 

Puppy and Skunk

By Frederick J. Blahnik

 

 

Puppy is vain and bombastic and hubristic and embarrassingly in love with himself…..

Skunk is none of those things…..

So it stands to reason that if the two should ever meet there would be fireworks, yes, lots and lots of fireworks…..

And they did…….and there were…..

Very much so!

 

Puppy insisted that because he was so much bigger and stronger and noisier than Skunk, he should naturally therefore be the boss of bosses and run the whole show…..

Skunk–a perfect little gentleman with impeccable manners–quietly disagreed with Puppy’s assessment of the situation……

This pair of inordinately disparate rivals could come to no sort of compromise…..

So Puppy thusly decided to take matters into his own hands……

And teach that tiny, disrespectful Skunk trespassing near his master’s property a lesson he wouldn’t soon forget.

 

A valuable lesson was learned that night, all right…..

But not by Skunk……

Oh, no no no, not by Skunk!!!

You see, the eagerly aggressive assailant–Puppy–caught a full dose of highly redolent, signature civet cat perfume right beneath his furry chinny-chin-chin……

And that instantly and effectively ended the assault against his seemingly overmatched smaller rival.

 

Skunk walked away from this brief skirmish proudly and with his dignity intact…..

Sadly, Puppy could not say the same…..

He slunk back to the rural acreage where he lived–tail tucked rigidly between his hind legs–while repulsing everybody and everything within fifty yards with his thoroughly disgusting odor…..

But the following morning, Puppy awoke with his tail wagging buoyantly once more and his confidence and curiosity and courage NEARLY restored to their previous stratospheric levels……

Yet he nonetheless was not the same reckless, uber-confident young dog from yesterday…..

No, today Puppy is one day older and one day smarter and a little less vain and bombastic and hubristic and he no longer is so embarrassingly in love with himself.

 

Oh, but that uber-energetic little rascal still reeks hideously of skunk spray and no living creature dares to come any closer than a stone’s throw away from our youthful, tail-wagging scalawag who just cannot understand this sudden, “inexplicable” dearth of love!!!

NOTE:  The following original, copyrighted joke is off-color in nature.  If that brand of humor is personally offensive to you, stop reading at this point!

 

A father and his rambunctious young son were visiting the local zoo one Saturday morning. The pair stopped by the monkey cage and–Lo and behold!!!–one of the male monkeys inside the enclosure was hunched way over giving itself a blow job and grinning rapturously all the while!  The boy stood transfixed for a few seconds as he gawked at the obviously extremely pleasured monkey, before wheeling and addressing his somewhat red-faced father.  “Daddy, daddy……..can I do that?!  Can I?!  CAN I?!?!” he implored while motioning toward the mischievous primate.  The father–a real stickler for proper English usage–instinctively moved to correct his son’s faulty grammar.  “May I do that, Junior!!  May I!!!!  MAY I!!!!!!!”  The small boy stared at his father with a puzzled expression etched across his confused face.  “Gosh, I don’t know, Daddy……..do you think you’re limber enough at your age???”

 

Everyone seems to applaud the concept of living life “on the edge”, of doing daring and innately dangerous things purely for the sake of gusto. But what of those who die prematurely as the result of such recklessness?  Was it really worth it for them?  Was gutsy bravado a worthy trade-off for a half or even two thirds of a normal, albeit somewhat mundane, life?  Adrenaline junkies surely draw a lot of predictable envy from boring, stolid watchers living their boring, stolid everyday lives in their boring, stolid, cookie-cutter communities, but that envy comes to a screeching halt when the daredevils die a premature death and unwittingly forfeit a surfeit of good years they might otherwise have savored.  Just remember this:  You don’t get any mulligans on living; one life is all you get.  Adventurism is great and intoxicating and as a whole to be commended, but there is a razor-thin line separating adventurism from recklessness, and reckless people typically wind up meeting their Maker far sooner than everyone else.

…..the alarm clock rang shrilly somewhere off to his left, and he instinctively realized that he was currently in the process of switching gears from a deeper level of consciousness to this shallower one which seemed to altogether characterize his banal days spent on Earth’s crust. And he grunted softly in dissatisfaction, for he knew that he was leaving unfinished business behind, probably never to be finished at any point in the future.  That dream from just seconds before still lingered in his brain because it was so vivid, so lifelike……so crucial to his very existence!  And yet he knew as soon as he hopped out of bed and started getting dressed for the new day now fully arrived, that weird but somehow essential storyline from the night before would hurriedly disappear from his memory banks not unlike the dementia which hangs around to relentlessly plague countless old farts–doubtless never to reappear in the exact same fashion.  So he mourned the inevitable loss of an integral part of himself as he pulled on his trousers and stared in the dresser mirror, inasmuch as that narrative in which he was the featured player just minutes earlier was now destined for consciousness’s trashbin, and–shifting ahead in time twenty four hours–then too he would almost certainly find himself decrying the permanent loss of another different but no less critical plotline ginned up by his subconscious gremlins while the remainder of his body slept…..

Ironically, true knowledge works in reverse. When you first enter adulthood in your early twenties, you are bursting with confidence and there is really nothing that you don’t know or can’t figure out by yourself.  And then over time–as you gradually grow older and see more and more years receding in your life’s rear-view mirror and theoretically acquire greater and greater “wisdom”–you gradually begin to lose some of that transcendent earlier confidence, piece by piece, as you begin to discover how little you really know.  And then by the time you reach late middle age or early old age, you realize gray is the primary color that suffuses almost every solution to a problem and subjectivity unerringly reigns supreme over objectivity in a referendum that isn’t particularly close.  True wisdom, you climactically come to recognize, represents the complete opposite of society’s conventional definition and more closely approximates ignorance.  True wisdom is coming to terms with how little you actually know relative to this big world we live in and, more importantly, humbly accepting the infinite number of things you will be shielded from learning in just one lifetime.

…..the future was a mystery to her.…..clueless……unmapped……an amorphous thing swathed in uncertainty and oftentimes fear. She felt much more comfortable looking back to the past, an entity she knew well and the one place she could easily connect to emotionally.  She didn’t like uncertainty, didn’t like it at all–was terrified of it actually–and she surely didn’t appreciate the feelings of helplessness and despair it engendered deep within her breast.  Therefore she made a habit of hiding from the future, of averting her gaze from anything beyond the moment at hand, and she likened her situation to a tiny vessel navigating through a pitch-black, stormy ocean with nary a compass to offer her guidance, let alone more sophisticated navigational devices…..

…..and although the project turned out satisfactory and overall was okay and everyone seemed generally happy with the end result, he knew in his heart it could have been far better and more innovative than where the needle on life’s imaginary quality gauge climactically stuck. Playing it safe and being cautious is a prudent strategy when you’re standing on the bare edge of a cliff or tiptoeing through a minefield, but life is not a minefield and ergo should be addressed head-on…..with an overbearing sense of creativity……with an overbearing sense of resolve…..with an overbearing sense of urgency…..with an overbearing sense of utilizing those gifts unique to humanity…..or otherwise you may as well have been hatched from an egg and covered with scales or feathers, for all the dull lifestyle options that origin entails…..

In the world of astronomy, there are only primary heavenly bodies and then their accompanying satellites. Same thing with humankind.  You can either set the course for your own life, or choose to be dependent and revolve around someone else’s.  But unlike in the cosmological world, this seminal decision is strictly yours to make.  Do you want to be a star with all of the wondrous independence that goes along with it……or are you going to settle for being a satellite–get permanently sucked into another individual’s seemingly irresistible gravitational field–and serially depend upon someone other than yourself for your happiness and your livelihood.  YOU—and only you—must ultimately make this destiny-determining decision!!!

…..she knew that time was growing short for him, yet she didn’t speak of it. He had so many years under his belt that the end could come at any time–suddenly, unexpectedly, without any hint or advance notice.  Yet how unexpected is it when an eighty-five-year who is in ostensibly good health succumbs to the inevitability of old age?  How genuinely unexpected can that be??  Mortality is a hard and fast law of humankind, and as one tests its outer limits nobody escapes its clutches regardless of how stellar their overall health has been previously…..even minutes or seconds earlier.  She understood that the concepts of “good health” and “unexpected death” among the octogenarian population were intrinsically foolish and the epitome of wishful thinking, and thus she sighed and braced herself for the inevitable phone call she knew–when measured against the spectrum of a full lifetime–would now be coming much sooner as opposed to later …..

NOTE:  The following poem was plucked from an anthology of poetry entitled “The Changing Seasons of Life”, which was authored by Fred Blahnik and published in book form in 2017.

 

Eternal

By Frederick J. Blahnik

 

I gazed into the clear blue eyes of my newborn daughter

And suddenly realized that I will never die

I have shared love and passed along life

And now I live outside my own body.

 

I know one day my heart will stop beating

My soul will escape then and go wherever it is that liberated souls go

And my body will eventually disintegrate into a modest spadeful of rich humus fertilizing those infernal, eternal dandelions.

 

But I will not be dead…….

That epiphany struck me the instant I witnessed the miracle of birth

Innocent eyes, tiny beating heart, rapidly expanding lungs…..

All miraculously evolved from my original seed

Three times over.

 

I cannot die while a part of me lives

Rather, a part of me has passed the transcendent torch on to a different part of myself

And somewhere down the line I will quite honorably drop out of this tiring race we call life

But that race will continue to be run in my physical absence, rest assured

And–barring unforeseen tragedy–I will always remain in it as an active, albeit invisible, participant.

 

I gazed into the clear blue eyes of my newborn daughter

And realized that I was staring into the future

Not just her future, but my future as well

So long as a part of her walks and breathes and ultimately propagates

I can never die…….

 

No, I will never truly die.