I thought I knew everything and I did…..other than humility.  And in the face of that sobering reality, I realized I knew nothing at all.  That’s right, nothing at all; not one fuckin’ viscerally important thing!  The life I found myself living was only a pretense for the life I should be living; it was a ruse; it was a caricature; it was all a big sham.  People who believe they have all the right answers cannot and should not be trusted and stand in want of the greatest gift of all:  Self-enlightenment in understanding that there are an infinite multitude of cosmic questions for which there ARE no definitive answers within reach of mere mortals, and never will be either.

…..and throughout this and that and everything else besides, time kept moving along slowly, ineluctably, inexorably…..and even though a mortal person could not empirically detect that movement with the five traditional senses, one could sense instinctually that life was moving along with an irresistible momentum all its own and that one was trapped aboard an incomprehensibly large ship from which there was no complicity and no escape.  We were all in it together, yet incongruently we were all in it alone as well. We had no hand on the rudder with which to influence the direction we were going; we just stood by and watched dumbly as things slipped by in the pitch blackness, amorphous things that we thought we might like to sample but were never afforded the opportunity…..

Everyone always thinks the adverse consequence won’t happen to them, that they are too smart to allow such a thing to happen, that genetics will keep them healthy, that their mental acuity is unsurpassed, that the rigorous physical conditioning they perform daily will shield them from injuries and bodily degeneration, that fate is everlastingly on their side, that their uniqueness and peculiar set of skills wed to incessant luck will protect them from ever experiencing the dark side of life like a disturbingly large percentage of earthlings must face.  But how realistic is this?  How grounded in logic is this approach to life?  How likely are these people to be the glaring exception to a cardinal rule that everyone else must genuflect to?  Not likely, let me assure you.  Almost nonexistent, actually.  These credulous fantasts are only deluding themselves.  Lying to themselves.  Rationalizing a dire situation to make it more attractive.  Rationalization.  Rationalizing is the skill these florid Panglossians employ most often to tranquilize their souls. Accordingly, this is the skill they are best at—bar none!  They excel at inventing fake reasons to boost their egos and prop up their ersatz arguments. Until destiny cruelly intervenes and they no longer can.

Human life is not for everyone.  Some people are not well suited for it.  They struggle to adjust, and continue struggling just as hard at eighty years of age if they happen to make it that far as they did at eight months.  Just because you are born does not mean the road ahead is perpetually straight, perpetually flat, perpetually sunny, paved with newly-poured pothole-free asphalt throughout its duration, and overhung with apple and citrus trees boasting epicurean fruit ripe for the plucking every step of the way.  For some people that scenario may be and is the case, but for others—for an unfortunately copious number, in fact—the aforementioned road is a godawfully curvy, hilly, overcast, pothole-infested nightmare with poisonous snakes periodically lunging at them from the suddenly barren apple and citrus trees. And these people have no choice but to adapt quickly and learn to survive as opposed to thrive, to count their blessings as opposed to whimpering loudly about the occasional hurdle, to settle for small pleasures in contrast to being the recipients of major oftentimes undeserved largesse, and to be satisfied with mediocrity in the end.  That’s right, to settle for mediocrity and, furthermore, to feign happiness with it.  Life is not fair, and these faux heroic people stand as Case Example #1 to support this assertion.  They did not choose life; life arbitrarily chose them and pursuantly threw significant obstacles in their pathway, but they are nonetheless left to deal with the mess they were handed in the best manner they know how.   

She honestly believes there is a higher purpose to life than chasing simple pleasures and benignly pursuing happiness.  A greater, nobler purpose for humanity.  A metaphysical calling.  A crusade of sorts.  So be it then, but I obviously do not agree with her pretentious assessment.  A higher purpose to life may indeed exist, but a case—however dubious—can likewise be made for the presence of UFOs, Dark Matter, and parallel universes to our own.  Which is to say I don’t know for sure and neither does she.  It’s all conjecturing, positing, postulating, theorizing, or any other word you can dredge up that signifies sophisticated thinking sans any proof to support a point of view.  The whole idea is subjective in nature, thus let’s leave it at that.  But a problem arises when individuals of her ilk vaingloriously attempt to inject objectivity into an innately subjective equation.  The two are not compatible and shall forever remain so.  That disconnect is plainly wrong and should never be tolerated, yet expecting her to graciously accept this logical explanation would be as futile as trying to fend off an enraged, charging bull elephant with a pea shooter.

…..one brick at a time.  There are no shortcuts.  That is the only way a construction project, even the biggest, most massive construction project one could ever imagine, can proceed.  One tiresome, exhausting, monotonous, wearying brick at a time.  And eventually progress will be noted, albeit sometimes minimal, seemingly disproportionate progress relative to the immense effort one has poured into a close-to-the-heart endeavor.  And it is at those times one should silently celebrate your perseverance and fortitude and rededicate yourself to continuing onward with the same level of dogged determination that you have exhibited up until now.  This admittedly may at times seem like a losing battle, but bless yourself for being engaged in a battle at all rather than embodying one of those wretched people who everlastingly remain on the sidelines and curse the efforts of others even while their own life—or what passes for a life anyway—unalterably slips away without causing even an inconsequential blip on the cosmic radar…..

Is that best done tomorrow…..or today?  Can you give me one compelling reason—a value added, if you will—why that task is better left for tomorrow rather than just doing it today and getting it out of the way?  In the absence of a good reason, I can surely give you one supporting the assertion that it is better to do the task right away rather than procrastinating it to another day (And let’s face the bold truth here:  If you are procrastinating the task in question to tomorrow, then you almost certainly will not do it tomorrow either and will invent come corny reason why it should be done the day after that or the day after that or the day after that, etc., etc. etc., ad infinitum  And what might that reason be?  Simple.  Tomorrow is not guaranteed, whereas the moment directly in front of you is.  Truth is, that is the ONLY piece of temporal real estate that you exercise any degree of control over; all the rest is quicksand that can pull you under at any second. Having said all this, I know you will put off doing that chore regardless.  Why?  Because just like liars lie and cheaters cheat and lovers love, procrastinators procrastinate until all their life choices suddenly pass out of their hands sans advance warning, at which point they can relax and no longer have to feel residual guilt over a job not well done for the simple reason it was never started, let alone completed.

He lived a little life, replete with little aspirations, little dreams, little excitement, and, by extension, little “accomplishments” too.  But that was all fine and dandy with him; he never aspired to be a game-changer, a world-shaker, a legacy-leaver, an exemplar.  His only goal in life for as long as he could remember was to live as long as he possibly could, which then logically translated into pursuing a life path as bereft of danger and perceived obstacles as humanly possible so as to advance his paramount objective of advancing longevity, even and ESPECIALLY if that came at the expense of excitement and risk-taking.  Adventure-seeking and risk-taking were best left to others badly in want of common sense; his primary concern was purely and simply to remain on the surface of Earth as a conscious entity for as long as he could.  They could fight all they wanted over the nectareous frosting so long as they left the lion’s share of the cake for him.  All that empyreal stuff on the emotion spectrum—excitement, piquancy, adrenaline, sexy add-ons— was for the losers in life. He didn’t require any of those non-essential things, and he found that through rote drudgery he could get by ridiculously easy without them. Other people could rue the boringness and monotony of his life all they wanted, but it suited him just fine.  At least that’s what he told himself, and a surprisingly large swath of his brain had actually come to believe this self-fed propaganda.

Words are not weapons unless you allow them to be.  Words do not inflict injury unless you allow them to.  Words are inherently weak and pathetic little cowards.  Words are nothing more than ghostly corpuscles of air that revert back to an atmospheric gaseous blend once they leave a person’s mouth.  Words are spineless wee things with an unfathomably short half-life; they are more overrated than a five second fuck in the fast lane, more overrated than a ten minute power nap, more overrated than Ben and Jerry’s ice cream.  The human psyche does not contain pain receptors, so how can one rightfully claim words are injurious in the classic sense?  Physical pain is a real, verifiable sensation.  When nerve endings are irritated, they respond by hurting, sometimes A LOT.  Psychological pain?  Hardly.  This is not to say one cannot have your feelings bruised by rude commentary because obviously that is not the case, but no useful purpose is served by assigning spoken words more heft than they deserve.  Physical pain, in its extreme, is overpowering and unassailable; it is fully capable of bringing paragons to their knees.  Psychological pain in the guise of having to endure insults and/or hurtful words is not.  One type of pain is distinctly bearable; the other is not.  And therein lies the seismic difference between physical pain and emotional discomfort.  They are not the same—not even close to being the same—and guileless attempts to conflate guns and knives and brass knuckles with evanescent corpuscles of air for the purpose of equivalence are both illogical and wrong.

Bitterness naturally metastasizes; it has no other option but to do this.  If forced to hunker down inside an organism for any appreciable period of time, bitterness will inevitably and insidiously destroy that organism from within.  In that sense, bitterness is no different than any other malignancy, because that is precisely what it manifests in the emotional arena, if not the physical one.