Let ‘em Eat Thoughts and Prayers!

By Frederick J. Blahnik

Those kids are starving to death over there…..

They don’t have decent clothes to speak of for daily wear…..

They don’t have a safe place to stay, and when they do they’re crowded together so tightly they may as well be sardines squished inside a tin can…..

They’re getting bombed nearly every day of the week while being chased around constantly like hogs in a slaughterhouse…..

They’re being forced to live a stunted life of misery on a planet rich in natural resources…..

So what should we do with them?

What’s the best advice you can offer on this controversial subject?

Easy…..

Let ‘em eat thoughts and prayers!

You smugly sit there with a flush savings account to nicely complement the half-million-dollar house you live in…..

Not a material care in the world; not one!

Your mortgage has long since been paid off, your pantry is packed to overflowing with food and staples, the clothes you wear are expensively stylish, your pathway to “Heaven” is assured…..

You seemingly don’t have a care in the world, and surely none that involve a dire shortage of money…..

And yet those disadvantaged kids aren’t similarly blessed through no fault of their own…..

So what should we do with them?

What’s the best advice you can offer on this controversial subject?

Easy…..

Let ‘em eat thoughts and prayers!

Those aggrieved kids aren’t your personal problem, are they?

Damn right!  They don’t live in my neighborhood, hence that makes them someone else’s problem…..

Why the fuck should I care about some emaciated, googly-eyed children starving to death on the other side of the world anyway?

They’re not any of my concern; their parents should never have conceived them if they couldn’t afford to raise ‘em—RIGHT?!

Got enough REAL problems to worry about nowadays right here in this failing country of ours…..

So what should we do with them?

What’s the best advice you can offer on this controversial subject?

Easy…..

Let ‘em eat thoughts and prayers!

That’s right, just let ‘em eat thoughts and prayers!

…..and the years continued melting away akin to a glacier retreating under a blistering summer sun, and where he was once a recognized, undisputed expert in his chosen field of expertise such was no longer close to being the truth; he hadn’t been for some time. He had digressed into being a nobody, a cultural vagrant, an unwanted societal barnacle, a useless appendix jutting forth from humanity’s large intestine with no real job to do and no fundamental purpose in life.  The times had passed him by long ago—it was hard to put a finger on when that day or month or year actually was—and his base of knowledge currently was no more relevant than the messianic study of coprolites or unearthing and henceforth indexing stuffy relics from volcano-ravaged Pompei.  Instead of being a vital, contributing component of modern society, he was now just a boring, unnecessary vestige from the distant past who, if in a court of law was charged with taking up precious space and contaminating a finite oxygen supply by passing it through his parasitical lungs, would have had no choice but to plead guilty on both counts…..

…..that moment you’re still obsessing over is history now; move on from it! There is nothing to gain from gazing backwards in time and wondering how things might have turned out had this happened or that happened or he spoke up or she spoke up or if the atmospheric conditions had only been slightly different at the time or you were somehow created differently from what you actually embody today or if Jesus Christ had never been born in Bethlehem during the Time of Caesar in the first place.  Life happens, and after that it automatically morphs into history before quickly fading into irrelevance.  Move on with it lest you be left behind like all the pitiful septuagenarians and octogenarians who truly believe the future is a hot mess and that all the answers we need to solve today’s pressing problems somehow lie in the distant, very imperfect past…..

Let’s Lie Here Forever

By Frederick J. Blahnik

Let’s lie here forever

Wrapped up in each other’s arms tighter even than Saran

The feeling of making love still vivid in our minds

And the outside world no closer than tomorrow’s advent of dawn.

Let’s lie here forever

And celebrate the love we just made

Realizing that united we can accomplish anything

But separated we are no more powerful than two pitifully flailing bodies.

Let’s lie here forever

And talk about good times past, present, and future

Holding each other snugger than ticks to a hound dog’s ear

And savoring a bond that in this surreal moment could not be any stronger.

Let’s lie here forever

And listen to the wind singing to us through dirty glass windowpanes

Thinking that life couldn’t be more idyllic than it is in this instant

But knowing sorrowfully that good times never last.

Let’s lie here forever

And just wish the outside world and its litany of thorny problems away

Here, embraced in this two-person cocoon, nothing could possibly be sweeter

If only time would stop for us right now and then never restart.

Let’s lie here forever…..

And never return to that imperfect world we left behind

The love we feel right now transcends all of that a millionfold

Let’s never go back to it, okay?

OKAY???

…..and inherently well-intentioned people kept advising her to “Slow down some…..you‘ve gotta take it easier on our body…..slow down some, for God’s sake…..you’ve gotta take it a little bit easier…..slow down some, okay?!…..you’re foolishly putting your life at risk by trying to do too much at one time!”  And I would say to that:  Slow down for what?!  People grow older, not younger, and their bodies deteriorate over time; they never magically regenerate and get better and more healthful as time elapses.  From a strictly logical standpoint, slowing down is the WORST advice you could ever offer anyone as they grow older simply because that is tantamount to wasting some of your remaining relative youth merely to elongate that period of time when you are physically less able and less vital.  Slow down some?  HELL NO!!!  Speed up if anything, because life is short and getting shorter with each succeeding day, and inarguably the best time you have available to you is that time immediately in front of you now, not some nebulous time off in the unguaranteed future that will inarguably be worse from a wellness perspective and offer far fewer possibilities for genuine happiness than those that are currently available.  Therefore don’t slow down today, okay?  Rather, punch down on that accelerator pedal harder than ever and speed up in your later years to the extent your body will physically allow.  As a general rule, one should invariably strive to maximize the present at the expense of the future, especially given the fact the future is a wholly amorphous, uncertain entity that can suddenly and catastrophically disappear when one least expects it to happen…..

…..and the gossip hounds were back boiling hot on a new scent, struggling to think of ever more innovative means for how they could procure additional information on unsuspecting individuals that honestly was of no intrinsic value to them and for which their motives could only be described as self-serving and prurient.  This fact didn’t bother them one bit though; their only concern was digging ever deeper into other people’s lives so they would have that irrelevant information available to freely share with others in the future.  After all, what good is gossip if you can’t exchange it with other similarly gossipy people?  The answer:  None whatsoever!  Everyone knows, or should know at least, that gossip not shared indiscriminately is gossip wasted…..

…..this battle can never be won outright; it can only be fought and mitigated year after year after trying year.  There will never be a conclusion to the conflict per se; there will only be temporary lapses in fighting that might well masquerade as totemic victories for devilishly lengthy intervals, only to have the remorseless hoaxes exposed for what they truly manifest—hoaxes, shams, ruses—and next be followed by still more of the same tedious, unceasing, unrelenting combat as before.  There will never be an end to this skirmishing, only fleeting lulls in the fighting accompanied by false declarations of victory before warfare reignites once more and then again after that ad nauseum.  It is a Sisyphean struggle if ever there was one, so don’t get your hopes foolishly raised that you will see a cessation of hostilities in your lifetime, and probably not even in the next generation’s either.  Some things never ever change, and you can now count the ongoing struggle amongst those things…..

 “Before the fact” is invariably preferable to “After the fact”, for what should be obvious reasons.  If one exercises some degree of control over an outcome you are then not merely a slave to destiny or some deplorable lout wailing plaintively about a vague “opportunity” lost after the entire deck of cards has already been dealt.  You are still a player as opposed to strictly being a spectator.  You are still a pilot or perhaps a co-pilot and not merely a passenger on the airplane.  You are in the arena and not simply watching from the cheap seats high above.  You are an actor rather than just embodying an inconsequential prop.  You own the moment instead of the moment owning you.  You are human as opposed to being an unthinking automaton.

I can never trust her.  That’s right, I can never trust the gorgeous, fetching, ultra-talented woman, but surprisingly this fact has nothing to do with her and everything to do with me.  Confused?  Yeah, I know I would be too if presented with the previous conflicting statements.  But please understand that this startlingly gifted woman’s natural assets prey incessantly and unmercifully on my inherent insecurities, and I could never in my adult lifetime feel that I am equal in stature to the temptress’s lofty beauty interwoven with not only a towering intellect, but a gushingly winning personality as well.  Therefore it pains me to say I strongly feel I am not worthy to claim her as my lifetime companion.  She is way way above me on the evolutionary ladder, thus why would/should she ever settle for me as a monogamous life partner when there are countless other men out there in Guyville who would make a far better natural match for her in terms of looks and capabilities?  The brutally frank answer:  She shouldn’t have to.  And so despite her evident and professed love for me and the fact she seems undeniably smitten with a very ordinary Yours Truly’s underwhelming charms, I absolutely do not want to stand in the way of her finding a life companion who can satisfy her every desire and not just a thimbleful of them.  Not only over the next six months either, but over at least the next forty years and maybe more.

…..he couldn’t wait to brag about all the money he left behind on Earth’s surface when he got to the Afterlife but, strangely, no one wanted to hear about it there; they all seemed to have more important things on their minds.  How can this be, he thought to himself?  I amassed a glittery fortune when I was alive and sentient and financially killing it back on Good Old Earth, and now all these ignorant yahoos up here in Nirvana prioritize matters entirely differently and aren’t interested in offering me the credit I so richly deserve for having been a financial assassin down on Earth’s ultra-competitive crust.  And the guy’s frustration only grew and swiftly metastasized after that.  He was an unrivaled master at gathering and amassing and consolidating and amalgamating and hoarding assets, yet a premium clearly wasn’t placed on those distinct skills at his new place of residence.  Rather, generosity and altruism and beneficence seemed to be held in much higher regard, and those were qualities that admittedly had not been his forte as a mortal being.  To be blunter than a kid’s plastic knife, he had eternally scoffed at and interpreted the aforesaid qualities as weaknesses and signs of fragility and vulnerability i.e. windows of opportunity while a denizen of Earth, but now?  Yes—NOW???  Hmmmmmmm……….  Who knows…..maybe he would have to temporarily strategize a little differently in order to gain the upper hand on his unsuspecting dipshit brethren…..