Human life is not for everyone. Let’s face it, some people are not well suited for an earthly existence.  They struggle to adjust to life’s many peaks and valleys 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 and eight years and eighteen blue moons. Just because you were born doesn’t 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 unexpectedly from those suddenly barren apple and citrus trees. And these challenged people have no choice but to adapt quickly and learn to survive as opposed to thrive, to count their limited blessings instead of whimpering loudly about the frequent hurdles that spring up in their way, to settle for small pleasures in contrast to being the recipients of major, oftentimes undeserved, largesse, and—climactically…..to be satisfied with mediocrity in the end.  Yes, that’s right, to settle for much-derided mediocrity and, furthermore, to then feign ersatz happiness with same. Act like you’re a pig joyously gulping down slop compared to its erstwhile friend stuffed inside a livestock trailer that is being backed up to the intake door to a bustling slaughterhouse. Act like you’re the life of the party garnering flirtatious glances from every voluptuous, bodacious harlot in the joint rather than perpetually embodying the habitual wallflower. Act like you’re the hammer for a change instead of always manifesting the nail. Yes, I know these are awfully big asks, but what other recourse is there? Huh?! Bawling over your dinner each night while chronically decrying the unfairness and terribleness of life? Life is not fair by any stretch of the imagination, and these faux heroic people stand as Case Example #1 to support this assertion. Remember: They did not choose life; the metaphysical arbiters of life arbitrarily chose them and pursuantly threw myriad significant obstacles in their pathways as the Arrow of Time unalterably inched its way rightward. That said, these lost souls are nonetheless left to deal with the mess they were handed in the best manner they know how.  Nothing is fair also means that EVERYTHING is fair…..in love, in war, and in life itself. GET USED TO IT!!!

Some people live big lives while others live teensy lives.  Why is this so?  Why do certain people have such a disproportionately greater impact on humanity than their lesser compatriots, yet seemingly without expending any more effort and energy than their struggling counterparts?  The answer is fear or, rather, lack thereof.  Individuals who are not afraid to try new things, go new places, and meet new people live noteworthily larger lives than individuals who cling to their hometowns, cling to their small clique of friends, cling to their old traditions, and cling to the past analogous to an infant staunchly clutching onto its filthy security blanket. People like these—And there are a whole shitload of them probably comprising a sizable majority; let’s not fool ourselves here!—are akin to bloated cucumbers that, left unattended out in the garden, eventually turn a pukey shade of yellow and rot on the vine.  Change is nearly always synonymous with personal growth; stasis is nearly always synonymous with stagnation leading to an ultimate unnoticed demise.

Once in a while in life—not often, mind you, but every now and then—you just have to take a deep breath, close your eyes…..and dive into the deep end of the pool off the high board!  Throw caution to the wind.  Defy rationality.  Veer off the safe, beaten path.  Follow your gut instincts.  Trust in your inner self.  Cast aside your strict, oppressive budget.  Close your eyes and plunge into the darkness. Above all else: BELIEVE in yourself with all your heart and all your soul!  If all you ever do is chase after convention, then you are no better off and no more refined than any of the multitude of Holstein-Friesians that obsequiously follow the bell cow in from pasture every evening to be drained of their milk.  But, trust me, you are better than those mindless, docile beasts!  You’ve been blessed with a strong sense of free will; do not squander this empyreal gift by being afraid to take chances.  Life is all about making choices, but if you allow society and others to blindly make all those choices for you, then you slavishly deserve the boring, pedestrian fate that invariably awaits.

…..an opportunity was there for the taking, but like all stupid ignoramuses I mistook it for a problem instead and instinctively fled the scene in a panic without acting or even thinking clearly.  And akin to virtually every opportunity that manifests, this chance was present for only an instant before it disappeared with all the grandiosity of a ghost, and I was then left to live with eternal regrets of what might have been had I only possessed the courage and intuition to recognize the lopsided rewards I could reasonably expect to harvest in a nonpunitive period of time and thereupon marshalled the courage needed to confront this highly fluid situation forcefully and head-on.  But that didn’t happen.  No, nothing remotely close to that happened.  Rather, I failed to act decisively during that pivotal moment so I’m now left holding an empty bag as I trudge away from the scene of the “crime” pushing a wheelbarrow loaded chockfull of regrets, remorse, and ruefulness, even as some other lucky fool (Luck?!  Hell no, luck had nothing to do with the outcome!) runs off grinning fiendishly with his jumbo-sized sack overflowing with lucre…..

…..when the moment of truth arrived unannounced and of a sudden, he didn’t know whether he could trust his employer after all his years of professional servitude.  Honestly, he really didn’t know for sure!  And that left him with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach and a horrible, horrible aftertaste…..easily the most horrible aftertaste he had ever experienced in his lifetime.  Because when “the shit hits the fan” and “the rubber hits the road” and “the egg hits the skillet”, you must know instantly who you can trust and who you cannot trust; there simply isn’t sufficient time to conduct sophisticated, comprehensive surveys at such a critical juncture. Time is never your ally, of course, but especially at crucial moments such as these.  And if you don’t instinctively know the answer—if you have to waste unsalvageable time weighing possibilities against probabilities and then factor in potential consequences to boot—that is equivalent to a negative response, and the uncertainty that engulfs your ostensibly loyal employer at such a transcendent moment tells you everything you really need to know regarding your happiness and long-term prospects with the company in question. Implicit trust should never have to be earned more than once; it is always on them and not on you…..

…..I called her name and she didn’t answer. I called again…..still no reply.  Called her a third time…..same (non)response. And of course that’s when I started getting nervous, started getting antsier than a dropped potato chip at a summer picnic.  This wasn’t like her, wasn’t characteristic of her normal behavior.  Something must be wrong…..something drastic maybe?  So I went to investigate the mystery, and what I found stopped me dead in my tracks.  She was there alright, there right where she was supposed to be…..but not as a living, breathing organism anymore. Rigor mortis had obviously already set in, and her eyes—although still hauntingly open—were glazed over and drying up rapidly not unlike fresh grapes into raisins.  What the…..?! The bizarre spectacle didn’t afford any time to answer my hypothetical question, however, because I suddenly turned pale and got sick then and narrowly missed hitting her stiff body with a blistering stream of vomitus.  Shiiiiitttt!!!  Goddamnitall!!!  HOLY FUCK ALREADY!!!  “Great!” I thought to myself.  Now you have more than a dead body lying in your bedroom under suspicious circumstances to contend with; you also have this smelly, unseemly mess to clean off your carpet before the gross stuff settles into the fabric and subsequently reeks for half an eternity whenever indoor humidity winds up spiking over the summer months. Why, of all life’s niggling problems, and solely because of HER!!!.…..

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.