There was a knot in me that I spent 40 years unpicking.

Going through an honest account of my childhood and youth, it was easy to conclude that I deserved the poverty of the life I had accrued, and any good fortune had slipped past the gods as injustice.

Once again, and not even for the first time today, I marvel at the psychedelic wonder of the world and my place in it.

I abandoned mediocrity for disaster.

I would not take death from the rich.

Beneath it all there was the simple disappointment that the only things I'd succeeded at were avoidance and sloth. I was happy, day by day, and there were always moments I enjoyed, although there was an undeniable lack of color that had been with me from the start, a clear disconnect between myself and the way the world worked, the demands it made and the rewards on offer.

But even then I had to admit that what I wanted could not be expressed without a sense of failure and shame.

Ambition numbed and atrophied, I found peace and satisfaction in my idiocy, until I wised up and saw what I had wasted.

I forget there were others in the world, and fell into myself.

Hiding in a cafe with another beer, I escaped a better fate and wanted to be no one.

The anger that broke me was still inside, all it needed was a drink.