You cannot CONTROL the future; you can only DEAL WITH the quadrillion vagaries it unceasingly throws your way.  You are the undisputed servant and fate is your stern taskmaster.  Life on Earth has always been this way and forever will be.  We should hope for the best and fear the worst. Pray for rain even while installing a deluxe irrigation system.  Hope the bully backs away even as you ball your hands into fists and estimate the distance from your right foot to his crotch. Slip a condom into your pants pocket knowing full well it’ll likely still be there at the end of another luckless evening. Attempt that next-to-impossible bank shot in billiards even while reaching into your wallet to pay off your ballsy bet. Shit or get off the pot. This is not being pessimistic or necessarily fatalistic; it only articulates and reinforces our human status as an infinitesimally puny lifeform in an infinite Universe that we’ll never be able to fully comprehend.  And if we are arrantly unable to comprehend our role and our place in a cosmos that defies description, of what value is our limited simian intelligence really?  Precious little. That’s right: PRECIOUS. FUCKIN’. LITTLE! Human life matters, of course, but then again it doesn’t matter too much; its main import lies in the eye of the beholder and not anyone or anything more transcendent than that.

A desperate man, unlike an innately sane individual, is particularly dangerous given the fact he feels he has nothing to live for anymore and hence has nothing to lose.  Nothing to lose, understand.  NOTHING!!!  Since he really doesn’t, you see; preordained fate has become a given for him.  In a desperado’s warped mind, his race has already been run and his time has now come. He bears no powerful, mood-altering allegiance to any locale, cause, or—most importantly—living person.  Therefore beware of desperate people, because just as their lives lose value in direct proportion to their increasing level of desperation, so too does yours if you happen to interact or be in close proximity to one of these sociopaths as the situational temperature spikes ever higher and their life’s trajectory spirals ever downward—spinning faster and faster and careening frighteningly out of control.  If a person like this has no clue what they’re going to do next, how in God’s name then are you supposed to psychopathically extrapolate that essential information yourself? Two-word answer: You cannot. So just be careful when you’re around them…..

Understanding organic conception and its nemesis death is relatively easy, but neither affords any clues insofar as where consciousness arises from and what ultimately becomes of it following each of our earthly demises.  Consciousness may live on in another, altogether different realm, but then again it may not.  No one knows for sure; human sentience is and will everlastingly remain a giant riddle.  Anyone who claims to know definitively where a soul goes once life ceases to exist in a human body—if in fact it goes anywhere or does anything—is at best a crass speculator and at worst a sniggering, pathological liar. Consciousness is far and away the greatest mystery we humans experience in our lifetimes—a mystery modern science cannot come remotely close to understanding despite its emissaries’ boastful, outlandish claims to especial insights—and, for better or worse, it will forever remain so.  Consciousness arises from nothingness and ultimately disappears back into nothingness. From nothing…..bless (or infect, depending on how you look at it) a human organism for a handful of years or decades or scores of years…..TO nothing. For longterm peace of mind, a person is infinitely better off embracing this conundrum rather than seeking to “solve” it.  One solves New York Times crossword puzzles and mathematical theorems and clever Sherlock Holmes mysteries, not transcendent, supernatural miracles.

…..too bad, too bad, too bad, but the future is now sitting out on our front doorsteps, yes it is, yes it is, YES… IT… IS!  No more planning.  No more prophesying.  No more wishing and wondering and what-iffing.  No more procrastinating.  The future is right here now before us—big and bold and beautiful—and you must accept this plain fact and deal with it upfront. Whereas before the future was always an amorphous blob stationed somewhere way out yonder over that faraway horizon, today we have arrived at our destination and it is no longer imaginary or hypothetical or even remotely blurred.  Consequently…..if you’ve needlessly been putting off crucial decisions—make them NOW!  If you’ve been lollygagging with regard to important work that needs to be done—do it NOW!  If you’ve been inventing new and ever more outrageous reasons not to solidify and reinforce existing relationships in conjunction with building dynamic new ones—correct and rejigger that immature behavior NOW!  If you’ve got a longstanding “bone to pick” with a perceived enemy—do it NOW before you choke on the damned thing! Yes, the future—The big, bright, bombastic future featuring all its reckless peccadillos and imperial glory!—has pounced upon us out of the darkness in this instant with unrestrained fury, and the detailed ledger of dreams and theoreticals that you were meticulously compiling for soooooooooo long in the past has—as of this precise moment—officially expired and the pressing needs of the here and now have ruthlessly replaced it. I sincerely hope you are equal to the daunting task……

…..he would always love her, of that he was one hundred percent certain, yet he also knew that he could never implicitly trust the beguiling vixen.  She was a paradox extraordinaire, a binary contortionist.  Her charisma was exceeded only by her casual deviousness, a deviousness representing a fatal noose that strangled many an unwary male suitor before he came along.  Her magnetism was exceeded only by her lust for excitement, yet no principles or scruples were locked in place to effectively harness that lust and help keep it in check.  Her vivacious attractiveness was exceeded only by her desire to sample every new thing that sprang up in front of her, but no boundaries stood in place to squelch or temper this ungoverned desire of hers.  She was a real handful, all right, but a handful of WHAT is fair to pointedly ask.  Trouble.  Yes, lots and lots and LOTS of trouble for any man who found himself ensnared within her carefully woven web.  And so that’s the Faustian dilemma this pathetic male chump, not unlike countless men before him stretching all the way back to the savannahs of eastern Africa, faced: Blind love versus trust.  Her hypnotic charms held him captive and there was positively nothing he could do short of suicide to free himself from the mesmerizing dragnet she lay down.  But, amazingly, here’s the real mind-blowing kicker to this whole riddle I’ve laid out for you:  This otherwise uber-proud man who was being treated like a puppy dog on a short leash was utterly content with his current station in life and sincerely didn’t WANT to break free of the bedeviling woman’s Svengali charms; no, he really didn’t; he was that smitten with something euphemistically referred to as “love”. And all this despite the fact she meant everything to him and he meant absolutely nothing to her…..

True wisdom lies in knowing when you should stop beating your head against a concrete wall and consider how you should manage a problem rather than how you might frankly solve that problem.  Implicit in the previous statement, of course, is recognition that certain intractable, refractory problems cannot be “solved” in the classic sense and thus must be managed in the best way possible.  In other words, fight only battles that are technically winnable and leave the rest for dumb people to agonize over and determinedly wage.   “Dumb” and “stubborn” are virtually and for all practical purposes interchangeable words, thus toiling to convince people of this ilk anything is an exercise in utter futility; you may as well be Sisyphus pushing his monstrous boulder up a steep slope for all eternity.  However, there is no net cosmic loss in allowing stubborn fools to fight hopeless battles for indefinite interludes given the obvious fact they don’t respond to well-reasoned arguments and consequently their time isn’t nearly as valuable as your time, nor will it ever be. Let them do their thing and you do your thing and seldom, if ever, will the betwixt be between.

I will ask, but I will not beg.  I don’t beg………..    I will plead, I will implore, I will beseech, I will coax, I will cajole, I will wheedle, I will inveigle, I will entreat…..but I will never EVER beg!  Begging is unbecoming of a dignified human being, and anyone who expects said as a precondition for doing ANYTHING is woefully misguided and a classless, scurrilous miscreant scraped from the dark, murky bottom of a putrid whiskey barrel. Dogs beg, squirrels beg, chipmunks beg, sparrows beg, gerbils beg, questions beg, pardons beg…..but humans…..humans should NEVER be asked to beg for anything. Period.

People with true courage embrace the future and aren’t afraid to take risks, even significant ones.  People wanting for courage, on the other hand, cling to the status quo—and by extension, to the past—like it’s a giant security blanket.  They never know what they are capable of accomplishing because they’re chronically terrified of leaving their comfort zone behind, even temporarily.  These people’s lives unfold safely, but pitifully.  They connect with the past because no surprises lie there.  The future cannot be predicted, thus it is a minefield that should be avoided at all costs. Let others take risks; THEY prefer stasis. Let others experience a wide spectrum of emotions; THEY prefer but one: Personal security!  Yes yes, give them security or give them…..fun and excitement and vibrant challenges and exhilaration?  Well, now that you put it that way…..

She doesn’t miss me.  Apparently not at all.  A big fuckin’ nullity.  Zero squared, no…..zero CUBED! So let me ask you this pointed question right now: How much stronger of a character indictment could there be than that?  Seriously.  A tired old axiom holds that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but what if the heart doesn’t discern any feeling at all?  What if the heart doesn’t give two and a half shits that it has neither seen nor heard from her since last week?  What if said heart is even frankly ambivalent about the whole matter?  Her heart obviously hasn’t been growing fonder during this time spent away, and one could convincingly argue that our original strong relationship-—if one ever truly existed, that is—is now substantially weaker than before.  One could even tiptoe a step further down the path of logic and suggest that this now feeble relationship is in critical condition, on life support, and—Long pregnant pause here—nearing extinction. Jesus Christ……did I really just say that?! Seriously?? WOW!!!  So much for happy fairytale endings, I guess. But full disclosure, I always thought those ridiculous, smarmy things were for the birds anyway.

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—providing my heretofore aureate luck holds out indefinitely—for twenty-four-carat memories that’ll put everything presently residing in my Memory Hall of Fame to abject 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 fossils 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 immediate 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 freely 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 should 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’s 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 that 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 said problems and make them more intractable and long-lasting.  You can never be the solution to a problem that you admittedly caused yourself.  If a major predicament germinated and subsequently exploded skyward and thrived during your watch, then that is YOUR problem and not to be blamed on succeeding generations.  At this juncture, just graciously step aside and allow younger, more mentally nimble individuals clean up the mess that 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 irrefutable 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 country and world “great” again—is not just grossly immature behavior; it is a heinous reflection on an entire generation—YOUR GENERATION!—as well.  And it is, conversely, just about the most selfish, egotistical, tantrum-throwing behavior any human being of any demographic could ever engage in. 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 infinitely better even if you and your misguided ilk personally do not.