Confidence breeds success.  And success breeds increased confidence…..this is a wonderful, self-perpetuating cycle, isn’t it?  But what is the key ingredient I haven’t spoken about yet?  Trying.  Effort.  Attempting.  Engaging.  In order to enjoy any measure of success, you must first have the guts to try.  You cannot succeed without first trying.  Such may sound like a moronically obvious statement, but you would be astounded to learn how many individuals sit on the sidelines—endlessly watching—and then have the audacity to complain about their lack of success and the fact they’ve never received any “breaks” in life.  What a crock of shit that is!  No one succeeds every time they attempt something, but those who have experienced failure are also the same people who will ultimately taste success. Those successes will henceforth multiply over time as the individual’s confidence initially blossoms and then continues to mushroom, oftentimes exponentially.  But first you must try.  Trying is the critical ingredient. Trying is paramount.  I hereby promise you this: Short of an incipient effort, nothing of merit will ever come your way.

…..after her horrific experience from the day before, she felt God and Satan and all the primal forces of nature must be conspiring together to bully her into submission.  Life just could not get any worse than this.  Goddamnitall, why had she even been born in the first place? Yes, why?!  It was a fair question; it was not an overreaction.. She couldn’t possibly dip any lower on the universal Scale of Happiness; she had already plummeted past the erstwhile nadir at warp speed and was now in uncharted territory and still sinking faster than a shot put dropped into a vat full of Jello.  But after a good night’s sleep to clear her head and a forthright dialogue with her inner psyche, she came to the mature realization that fortune waxes and wanes with complete randomness and that she had merely found herself at the bottom of that cyclical trough for one miserable day in her finite journey through the Valley of Consciousness. One miserable day, yes, that’s all it had been.  The temporal rotten apple in the barrel of life. The dregs at the bottom of a barrel of bourbon whiskey.  The armpit contaminating an otherwise pristine human body. Today will be a better day, for sure, she told herself.  Yes yes, it really will be!  HONEST!!!  Truth is, it couldn’t possibly be any worse than the calendar monster that had been racing around egregiously out of control, little different than an elephant at a tea party, which stunk to high heaven and answered exclusively to the moniker of “yesterday”.…..

The sagest advice EVER to anyone under forty years of age:  When ya could’ve……..YA SHOULD’VE!  Truly!!!  The physical capabilities and robustness and stamina of youth only last for a relatively short period of time, therefore do not take those priceless commodities for granted when you stand in proud possession of them.  Use ‘em often when you’re a “kid”—Use ‘em just as often as you possibly can!—and use ‘em a lot too! More than common sense and discretion and our old friend healthy moderation would ever dictate; overuse is not a factor that should even be considered.  Cuz when they’re gone, trust me……they’re gone for good!  SAYANORA, BOYS AND GIRLS!  OUT THE WINDOW!!! Fading youth is a trapdoor we all fall through from which escape is not possible. But if you’re one of those obstinate individuals who happens to have a bellicose streak running through you a mile wide and consequently don’t wanna trust my advice on this subject, I would strongly encourage you to conduct a speedy survey down at your nearest nursing home.  I‘ll bet one hundred dollars hard cash—One thousand dollars?—that you’ll discover the superannuated fossils hanging out at those long-range hospices will stand in near unanimous agreement with my frank assessment.

Are ignorance and stubbornness the same guy…..only with his hair parted just a little bit differently than before, maybe a few pounds lighter, sporting a three-day growth of beard now, and currently dressed in disparate, more-hip apparel?  Are ignorance and stubbornness actually the same person…..only answering to different aliases?  Do ignorance and stubbornness reflect the exact same genome…..only to be manifested as strikingly unique phenomes at a later date?  Are ignorance and blind stubbornness really the same entities masquerading under misleadingly different names?  I think so.  Yes yes, I definitely believe they are one and the same!  Ignorance and abject stubbornness are in fact identical entities, and the only means of differentiating them is by stealthily surveilling a situation and then watching to see whether Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde steps out from behind the curtain at any discrete moment in time.

…..he didn’t quite know what to expect as he walked into the crackling fire.  How could anyone possibly know?  Obviously it isn’t an experience that you live to talk about afterwards while sitting around a campfire bullshitting and roasting marshmallows with close friends, sharing embellished stories as you pleasurably tip one Bud Light after another. Therefore he was filled with trepidation, surely, but also an overwhelming sense of relief.  Relief that he no longer had to contemplate doing this rash, self-destructive act.  Relief that his torment would finally be over once and for all. Relief that he was being proactive, albeit certainly allowing for how insane and suicidal this provocative act genuinely was as opposed to just shambling around feeling utterly miserable while allowing others to chart his life’s course for him like he had inveterately done in the past. He was feeling all these emotions plus more as the bluish-yellow flames lapped at him fiendishly from every direction.  He continued forward with mulish absolutism anyway. And as the heat started becoming unbearable and as his eyelids began welding shut and as the bottoms of his feet screamed in agony while their bottoms chemically decomposed and as he could feel his skin begin the first stages of melting grotesquely inward onto his viscera and skeletal frame and as the raw pain he felt throughout his body exceeded by a googolplex cubed any he had felt before in his lifetime, he permitted himself a cryptic, ever-so-brief smile. Because this was what he had always lived for; this was what he authentically wanted to do; this was what he would die for today.  He was merely walking through a portal separating two distinct realms of being; it all seemed so entirely natural to him.  But I’m certain readers are probably asking themselves this question right now: How did the protagonist know with such vainglorious certainty there was another realm of existence awaiting him on the other side of consciousness? How could he possibly? Well, in truth, the suicidal fellow didn’t know for sure, but he was one hundred percent certain consciousness was a gargantuan hoax foisted on the aggregate Homo sapiens population by grandiloquent entities unknown ever since our distant ancestor Lucy found herself foraging for nuts and other edibles on the vast African savannah untold millennia ago. Hence anything he might encounter after voluntarily forfeiting mindfulness today couldn’t possibly be any more of a ruse than what he had been theoretically “living” for the past forty-five years. Could…..could…..could it?????…..

Merely passing along wisdom that was passed to you by elders is lazy and ordinarily not sufficient.  Rather, you should strive to expand upon that knowledge base so that when the time comes for you to pass that same tranche of wisdom on to younger generations, it has grown in stature and become enhanced in some way, shape, or form.  Such is the only way a society and humanity as a whole will grow and flourish.  Moreover, this is not just an individual’s prerogative; it is every individual’s cultural OBLIGATION.  Accordingly, expanding upon yesterday’s database is an ironclad responsibility that is incumbent upon every member of a society and certainly not merely a frivolous option to be considered if the circumstances surrounding you happen to be amenable at a convenient point in time.

She took his name on the occasion of their marriage, like so many women still do.  So now I ask this of you: What greater honor is there than that?  She definitely didn’t have to, after all; she could just as easily have kept her own cognomen and in today’s world all would have been nice and peachy and no one would have taken undue notice or basically given a damn. But regardless she voluntarily chucked aside the surname of her father and adopted the last name of her new life partner, and let me assure you there was nothing in the world that could have made her new husband any prouder than that.  Proud, absolutely, but he felt an undeniable sense of responsibility as well to continue honoring their now-shared last name to the nth degree so as not to give her any pause in the future for having made such a huge symbolic sacrifice to him.  If she thought it was a name worth adopting and implicitly trusted him to uphold its nobility ad infinitum, he sure as hell didn’t want to be an ungrateful asshole and disappoint her through immorality or malfeasance.

…..so you sold that highly desirable item and made a very tidy profit in doing so.  As a result, you’re feeling awfully good and savvy and all puffed up right now. But how long do you expect this glorious feeling to last?  More to the point…..what now?  YES, WHAT NOW?!  You’re currently sitting on a pile of money that you didn’t have just twenty-four short hours ago but, really, how sexy and self-affirming is it to stand in possession of bland, staid, pedestrian money?  If you haven’t read between the lines here, that was a rhetorical question: The answer is “owning” a shitload of money isn’t sexy in the least and only stirs one’s hormones and emotions to a minimal degree. Quite the opposite from owning a rare original painting, a nearly-impossible-to-secure autograph left behind by an apocryphal historical figure, an uber-muscular sports car, a luxe “cabin” on a pristine northern lake three hours from home, a turbocharged speedboat, a champion thoroughbred stallion, etc., etc., etc.  Making money is only intoxicating if it is reinvested in something far sexier and esoteric.  Because although a polyglot of digits in multiple banking accounts comes as a monumental relief for conservative, risk-averse folks, so too does Quaker oatmeal for breakfast, boxer shorts, Velcro sneakers, and two-hour naps in the afternoon if those are truly the people you are struggling to emulate in life……

Considerable time has passed.  Single years, decades, and now scores of years have long since passed under that inscrutable bridge paralleling human mortality.  I have changed much.  She has changed much.   The world around us has changed much.  Our relationship has changed much.   Everything has changed much. And now that once Gibraltar-like closeness we felt when we were unfalteringly together as nestlings no longer exists. That’s right, it no longer exists and no amount of pretension will alter that fact one scintilla.  Our interactions now more closely resemble the coolness and aloofness—properly tempered with the requisite politeness and diplomacy which modern society expects, of course—that one feels when in the presence of a benign stranger.  Tom Wolfe was spot-on when he said you can’t go home again, and no amount of sentimentalizing and treacly re-enacting will ever alter this stark truth with regard to places, times, and, most critically…..the people who pass through our lives as the years pass by and eventually dwindle away.

…..and throughout this and that and this and that and everything in between, time kept moving along slowly, ineluctably, inexorably…..and even though a mortal being could not empirically detect that movement with their five traditional senses, one could tell instinctually that life was moving along with an irresistible momentum all its own and that we were trapped aboard an incomprehensibly large ship from which there was no complicity and no escape.  We were all in it together—that I knew for a fact—yet incongruently we were all in it alone too; we were all strangers haphazardly clumped together through no volition of our own. We had no hand on the ghost ship’s rudder with which to influence the direction we were moving; we just stood by and watched dumbly as things slipped by in the pitch blackness, random amorphous things that we thought we might like to sample yet were seldom afforded an opportunity to do so.  We continued moving forward and onward…..forward and onward…..forward and onward…..not unlike undiscerning hogs being guided into a slaughterhouse, with no clear understanding of where we were going and obviously no inkling of where we would ultimately end up……