Fate plays all sorts of games with us, but who are we to second guess the sundry, peculiar twists and turns our lives regularly encounter?  It is best not trying to understand life—It is intrinsically impossible to “understand” anyway—but rather just accept the random oddities and perceived bad luck that you may experience on a daily basis and react to those barbs and thorns the best way you know how.  Live your life without any expectations and be happy for it.  Adapt to the vagaries of life that come your way—many times unexpectedly—because rest guaranteed those scoundrels are innately contumacious and will not adapt to you.  Far too much time is wasted struggling to understand the “meaning” of life when in reality there is no deep-seated meaning.  Life is to live, not understand.  Life is a question, not an answer.  Life is an unfinished manuscript, not a polished memoir. Life is a riddle, not a bon mat.  Attaching more significance to life than this is not only supercilious, but highly counterproductive.  The common currency of life is irrefutably time, and a human being shouldn’t squander splendid finite minutes contemplating that which has no more transcendent meaning than eating, breathing, thinking, sleeping, copulating, loving…..just being!

……I was sure he was gonna die last night, but I prayerfully had another whole day with him today.  A whole day of companionship.  A whole day of sharing the sublimity of consciousness.  A whole day of co-existing with a creature I love unreservedly versus the backdrop of an endless Universe with no true beginning and no true end.  That’s worth something, isn’t it?  Just a little bit, maybe?  A trifle? That was a rhetorical question, by the way, if you haven’t deduced same by now. Actually, it’s worth a lot.  A helluva lot!  A WHOLE HELLUVA LOT!!!   It means the world and all to me, just as each successive day that he continues to be alive will mean the world to me as well.  Life is lived in bits and pieces—in tantalizingly small fragments akin to slowly savoring your way through a package of M&Ms knowing full well that’s there only a finite number of chocolate nuggets hiding in that tiny package—and every additional fragment of time that I can get with him now and over the next handful of days—however small and however short-lived those turn out to be—will warm my soul and feel like an earthshaking moral victory.  He will soon be leaving me, I know, but soon is not the same thing as right now; I can take some Lilliputian respite in knowing that…..

…..for as beautiful as she was on the outside, she was that much uglier on the inside.  You’re probably familiar with the expression “her/his shit don’t stink”, and that vulgar aphorism was especially true in her case. She treated other women like fresh dog feces and men even worse than that. Females at least were not subject to her withering rejections of affectionate advances, whereas men would just be emotionally guillotined if they made the grave mistake of thinking she was on the open market and thus might possibly harbor some degree, however minuscule, of carnal desire. She was primarily in love with herself, understand, but then one was left to wonder if even that held true: She seldom if ever smiled, reflecting an inner dissatisfaction that almost certainly must have extended to her feelings of self-worth. Yet at the end of the day, her saving grace was always that radiant, transcendent natural beauty; her looks were so ravishing that any woman who happened to wind up in her presence was automatically rendered to looking nothing more alluring than a disheveled swine worthy only of being her handmaiden.  And she knew it too. Oh, yes, did she ever know it!  She was the eternal belle of the ball, and all other females were her unwitting subjects; that’s just the way life played out in this instance. Lesson for today: Women should NEVER be born with her criminal level of beauty because it only serves to retard their emotional growth. Furthermore, freaky good looks permanently condemn ethereal divas to an existence of unasked-for deification and inescapable narcissism,,,,,

Distilled down to its barest essence, intelligence can best be described with this inordinately simple algorithm: Smart people think before they speak, while stupid people speak before they think.  That’s it!  That’s all there is to it!  That’s our “Eureka!” moment for today.  This, Reader, is the true, unabridged definition of intelligence.  The highly conceptualized and theorized idea of intelligence debated contentiously by mile-long panels of multi-degreed psychologists and neurologists is really no more complicated than the aforementioned shockingly elementary truism.  Smart people seldom, if ever, get themselves into trouble with their mouths, whereas stupid people unfailingly do; they just can’t seem to help themselves!  Diarrhea of the vocal cords is the canary-in-the-coalmine predictor and stand-alone hallmark which unfailingly defines a dearth of basic intelligence.  Smartness profiling is no more complex than recognizing this reality.

…..I walked into the display room and instinctively knew that every eye in the crowded place was trained upon me, yeah, that’s right, purely on lil’ ol’ me!  All those people were thinking that I was the biggest imbecile in our whole fuckin’ Universe, and I must confess that I didn’t blame them one scintilla for their derogatory attitudes either; I would’ve been thinking the exact same thing had I been inhabiting someone else’s skin during that transcendent moment. Yet I had to remain brazenly confident or, rather, struggle to project an unmistakable air of brazen confidence that I definitely wasn’t feeling at my core. Not the easiest thing to do, mind you, but the circumstances I faced that opprobrious day left me no other option, no face-saving alternative, no viable avenue of proxy behavior. I knew that I would just have to bide my time and settle for play-acting until a more gainful option came along…..IF a more gainful option eventually did come along. Truth is, I could only pray like Hell such a thing would happen…..and happen soon.  Oh yes, oh my God, so fuckin’ fuckin’ SOON, I tell ya!!!  Otherwise…..otherwise…..do any of my readers know if there have been any documented cases of an otherwise healthy individual dying from sheer embarrassment?…..

Is it truly beneficial to know the future, even something as trivial as the weather which in our positions as feckless human beings we can do absolutely nothing to alter?  I don’t think so.  Where would the excitement be…..the anticipation…..the piquancy…..the implicit romance…..if we knew in advance events that were about to occur? The vibrancy would be weirdly absent from life and substituted in its stead would be rote routines and vapidity and insipidness.  Say what you will about the unexpected, but no one can rightfully dispute that it keeps us on the edge of our seats and adds a razor edge to future moments as they unerringly develop and unfold.  Predictability is boring, as are predictable circumstances and predictable people and predictable outcomes. Bottom line, predictability is anathema. Why then would anyone in their right mind pine for it?

He was a slave to the past.  He found it virtually impossible to let go of the past. The past held him as its permanent hostage.  The past was his de facto master. And yet this dismal situation he found himself ensnared within was entirely volitional, entirely self-fulfilling, entirely of his own making.  He could quite easily have extricated himself from the dreary dynamic he was stuck in if he so desired. He could have broken free from the unwieldy chains and readily escaped if he truly chose, but he just didn’t want to. He was opposed to doing it. Strictly speaking the truth now, this everyday guy—this “Mr. Average” guy—was immanently satisfied with his current existence and therefore rebuffed any and all changes that came his way, obliviously ignoring the fact his present life was admittedly a sorry, sordid one that held scant hope for redemption while his future offered nothing more uplifting than a daunting megadose of the same wearisome bullshit.  But here’s the critical point to remember: He was CONTENT with the life he was leading even if he wasn’t outwardly happy with it, simply because said life fit him as tidily as that trusty old pair of Red Wing work boots sitting over in the corner. Change?  No no…..Hell no!!!…..he wanted no part of THAT at this delayed stage of his life.  Why upset the applecart and busy himself with fixing something that wasn’t even broken?  Huh? HUH?!  That wouldn’t make one bit of sense now, would it?!  He would much rather keep his antennae pulled down safely right next to his side, fly well beneath the radar, and stick to the monotonous life he knew so well, notwithstanding the fact the so-called “life” in question didn’t bring him true happiness, pleasure…..or even a minute degree of satisfaction.

The general acceptance of this truism notwithstanding, things are NEVER “meant to be”.  People—typically two people—must make a conscious decision in order to manifest destiny.   Accidents “happen”; life does not.  Decisions are made by discerning individuals; they don’t just fall haphazardly out of the sky or crawl out of the woodwork like a scurrilous Asian beetle on a warm March morning.  The workings of fate?  Well, yes, of course fate exists as a huge, shape-shifting, monolithic entity, but the big bus of fate requires a driver just like any other, thus you may as well commandeer that temporal vehicle and take your rightful place behind its steering wheel purely so you can influence the direction it is headed to the utmost of your ability. A million unsavory extraneous things could happen while you’re piloting said bus, true enough, but by taking firm control of its steering wheel you will henceforth have succeeded in eliminating one potential pitfall so I guess the number now stands at 999,999.  Forget the daunting scale for a second; that represents an absolute improvement—inarguably!

…..he was searching for a wholesome girl…..an industrious girl…..a resourceful girl…..a GENUINE girl…..yet, let’s face the plain, unforgiving facts here, so few of those exist anymore.  They are an endangered species, scarcely different from the Siberian tiger or the Florida manatee or an old-time, Roy Rogersesque western cowboy.  So when he finally lucked out and found an old-school girl for himself, he felt remarkable kinship to a gemstone miner in South Africa who has just unearthed the next Hope Diamond.  He vowed that he would treat this incomparably exquisite creature with respect, with gratitude, with no small degree of adulation, with saintliness even…..and that if their bond was ever to be broken, it would be as a direct result of her actions and not his own. Said was a promise he was destined to break, of course, but—Spoiler Alert!—the surprise here lies in the astonishingly short duration before his transgression occurred and not in its virtually guaranteed immediate disavowal, this coming from someone whose not always splendid behavior was almost as predictable as the phases of the moon…..

The absolute saddest thing in life is standing helplessly on the sidelines watching pure potential go unrealized.  So many people are arrantly talentless, and therefore to watch someone who isn’t waste their God-given gifts defies logic and is serious cause for dolor.  If only drive and ambition were as commonplace as raw ability, but they undisputably aren’t and the competition between the two isn’t particularly close. Dedication is the great equalizer in life, and I would automatically take one conscientious hard worker over ten precocious but lazy prodigies any day of the week if I badly needed to get a job done in a timely manner. Pity the underachieving louts! Life doesn’t owe them anything. Contrarily, they owe life EVERYTHING, more specifically compensation for pillaging finite resources on a tiny blue planet that, for all we know, is the only one in an infinitely huge Universe that nurtures life and accepts all comers, irrespective of their level of gratitude.