You can’t turn back the clock. You can’t make old young again. You can’t make worn-out new again. You can’t squeeze a genie back into the bottle wherest it came. You can’t dream impossibility into reality. You can’t reset the natural pacemaker on a heart that has fallen irreparably into chaos. And you can’t turn back time. No, you can never turn back time irrespective of our most shrill, demanding proclamations. Time goes on relentlessly…..unerringly……metronomically…..forever…..but biological bodies do not and never have. Life dies eventually whereas time doesn’t. The lesson to be taken from this miniature sermon? DON’T WASTE TIME….EVER!!!  Death pays no dividends, only “death benefits” (How’s that for a classic oxymoron cooked up by idiotic life insurance linguists?!) to family members we leave behind.  And who in their right mind would consider that a fair tradeoff?

…..”Why do you waste an hour every week going to church?” he continually asked her, and all she could really say in response was that she just felt a lot better and more content when that anointed hour was over. Irrespective of her belief in Christianity—and her feelings were admittedly tepid when it came to such a seminal subject, that much was true—she just felt a lot more gratified and unselfish when she donated an hour of her time each week to some unknown cause apart from her usual personal agenda and edification. Thus she continued going to church, continued to sit and listen to some hubristic pastor ramble on superciliously for too long and far too confidently and way too passionately even though she had a million pressing things to do back at her residence, yet she continued to experience zero regrets when she’d arrive home late every Sunday forenoon, lightyears behind on her to-do list and anxious as Hell to begin catching up with all the demanding things on it.  And she also continued to tell him exactly the same thing whenever he aggressively queried her about that egregiously “wasted time”: “I go to church each week because I like the way I feel afterwards. No amount of work or pleasure could ever replace that transcendent feeling……”…..

We hominids make plans for the future and try bossing it around as though it’s a dumb, compliant head of livestock, yet it’s anything but.  Contrarily, the future is our unquestioned master—a tyrant masking a mercurial temper who brandishes a whip over our heads at all times—and we’re subject to her every whim and vicissitude regardless of how arbitrary and unfair those impulses may appear to be on the surface. Accordingly, let’s not mince words here and I’ll be brutally clear about one thing and one thing only: The future is NOT our personal playground to assiduously make plans for and lord over like it’s a piece of malleable chattel…..like it’s some type of subservient domain put here for human hedonistic pleasure. Rather, we’re invited guests only and we should therefore accord it—“it” in this case being that uncharted wilderness of time stretching out in front of us for as far as the eye can see and for as far as the mind can conjure—the same degree of respect at all times and definitely NOT take it for granted!

Is there something so dreadfully wrong with wanting to shield your loved ones from pain?  ANY type of pain, including and perhaps especially emotional hurting?  Because if there is, I’d be voraciously curious to hear someone’s explanation for this being the case.  Shielding one’s precious ones from pain of any sort is not only desirable behavior; it should be IMPERATIVE behavior if you’re any measure of person at all.  Every emotion resides on a broad spectrum, and it only stands to reason that thoughtful, moral people would want to share emotions sitting on the right side of said spectrum with their loved ones whenever possible. Emotions hanging out on the left side of the spectrum, however—the nasty, transgressive ones like anger, selfishness, rudeness, jealousy, guilt, and certainly worry as well—are best kept to oneself and should never be made into a burden for those we hold most dear.  Understand, Reader, this isn’t quantum mechanics we’re talking about here either; I can think of no good reason for WHY an individual would ever want to implicitly punish one of their loved ones with troubling, worrisome news if that same news could be kept to oneself.  Yes, that’s right: NOT A SINGLE GOOD REASON TO TROUBLE OTHERS WITH IRRELEVANT, IMMATERIAL NONSENSE THAT IS INHERENTLY BASHFUL AND OBLIQUELY BEGS FOR PRIVACY!

Pragmatism versus principleism.  This eternal debate rages unabated.  Should you do the smart thing or—in the event of extreme divergence, as is so often the case in day-to-day life—should you do the RIGHT thing?  Honestly, every circumstance is different, ergo you have as many “correct” answers to this query as there are circumstances to consider.  But as a general rule, if no one is being egregiously wounded or offended by a projected action of yours, opt for the pragmatic route. Principled actions obviously stand on rock-solid moral ground and make one’s conscience feel warm and tingly, but they don’t put food on the table nor do they protect one’s offspring from the wolf at the door nor do they yield bountiful crops of amber waves of grain where lowly rapeseed has previously been sown. Pragmatic actions oftentimes accomplish these objectives in an admittedly dirty, disreputable sort of way, therefore they should be habitually respected and even—Gasp!—revered.

…..after all those years of unspoken closeness—after a splendid era cast in cement that should have been easily capable of withstanding even the most stalwart forces of nature and all its omnipotent overseers—I could feel the two of us beginning to drift inexorably apart.  We were gradually headed in opposite directions with no prominent headlines announcing this unexpected divorce.  It wasn’t a tangible thing either, something right in your face, something well-defined and readily identifiable that a person could easily understand and wrap your arms around and perhaps do something about if such was your overriding desire.  Rather, I could just sense that a severance was happening, that our once-close relationship was slowly evaporating into thin air at the behest of fate, much as one senses it is going to imminently rain long before ominous dark clouds begin rolling in on the western horizon or one can sense that a day is gonna be shitty as all tarnation even before you roll out of bed in the morning.  And—sadly and I suppose most telling of all—I really didn’t mind or seem to care that this fateful separation was taking place. No, I didn’t care and, what’s more, I didn’t care either that I didn’t want to take any cathartic, decisive actions that might help restore past glories…..

…..she instinctively felt a compelling need to protect him from himself.  He obviously was in desperate need of a person to run interference for him in life, and she intuitively volunteered for the position.  He was, after all, incapable…..inutile…..hopeless almost.  Don’t ask me why she felt better qualified to run the life of a person—Any person!—other than herself, but she just KNEW deep in her heart that her instincts were uniquely superior to his and that she should therefore unfailingly be the point-person on every decision that impacted his life to any significant degree. She was doing him a big fuckin’ favor is all it truly boiled down to; can’t you see that, Reader?  Can’t you understand that?  Well…..CAN’T YA?!  It’s clearer than a glacial stream to me. Frankly, the guy should be arrantly grateful to her and the stupid nincompoop definitely shouldn’t feel one bit resentful nor be overly annoyed with this blatant intrusion into his life…..

Latent intelligence is not a viable substitute for accrued experience.  Never has been and never will be.  Intelligence is a worthwhile weapon only when it’s allowed to gain temper and weather sufficiently over time.  A virgin piece of premium grade iron ore is impressive in its own right and contains all the potential in the world, but until it has passed through the thousands-of-degrees Fahrenheit temperatures indigenous to a blast furnace, this raw piece of iron possesses no inherent value as a weapon.  Only when confronted with immense temperatures, pressures, and stressors does the original chunk of primal hematite eventually transform into a pluperfect specimen of tungsten steel.  The same holds true regarding intelligence.  Until someone has faced a varied range of life experiences and has had their latent intelligence tested in the searing flames of difficult, real-life circumstances, that supreme intellect—assuming a person truly possesses same, which of course is a variable and never a constant—is virtually worthless in addressing practical, everyday problems.

As one grows older—older in this case being middle-aged and beyond—the concept of a personal future disappears from one’s radar screen.  Past, present, and future are gradually replaced by past, present, and……your children’s future.  Your own future no longer matters one scintilla, but your offspring’s future expands exponentially to become the most important thing in the world to you. And this is unmistakably the direction life should evolve.  Your kids are connaturally worth it; they’ll carry your torch forward into the days ahead regardless of how dim or unworthy that torch’s illumination may be, and yet this really doesn’t matter.  Not at all. They’re still going to be doing it irrespective of whether their last name is Lincoln or Trump.  Conversely, there is nothing more detestable and pathetic in our terrestrial world than seeing a disgustingly large subset of vainglorious, self-entitled old buttfuckers recklessly wasting precious resources, especially medical services and available donor organs, in ruthless pursuit of their own version of immortality.  These flesh-and-blood abominations act as though their continued presence on Earth’s surface supersedes everyone else’s yearning for happiness and understandable desire to receive a fair, if not large, share of the health care pie. Well, just to set the record straight once and for all: You’re emphatically wrong in your mercenary thinking, Old Bastards, and the departure of people holding your selfish beliefs represents a net gain to society, not a net loss!

Each day is different in some respect. That difference may be elephantine or it may be atomic—doesn’t matter in the least—but this variance, more than anything else, is what makes life so especial and endearing in the first place. Stability may be comforting and every bit as soothing as a steaming Finnish sauna, yet it’s also intrinsically yawn-provoking. Thus change of any kind is a good thing and a prerequisite for personal growth.  Embrace any and all changes while affectionately wrapping your arms around them, since life is not suddenly going to shift into reverse and zoom backwards purely because change frightens you and you’re feeling nostalgic and you yearn for everything around you to remain exactly the same as it was in the past.  And do remember this point in passing too, in light of the fact it’s the most important kernel to be pried away from today’s corncob of advice: Whatever new change comes your way—positive, negative, or nonaligned—will only be transitory in nature, inasmuch as there will most assuredly be something newer and different following closely on its heels…..ad infinitum, ad infinitum, ad infinitum…..  In a world rife with a panoply of variables—Far too many to count only with integers, actually—change is ironically the one and only constant in each of our daily lives.