I remember Asia, and that real life happens elsewhere.

“Did you never try and get some of that good life?”

On days off, on vacation, the realization that life is always happening, someone is always having a good time.

There's joy in the world, even if unknown.

At some point we have the discussion about how disappointed we are with our lives, how ashamed, how happy no one from the past can see us now, the sad fate we have chosen, the misery without end, and the good luck not to have a Wikipedia page documenting it all.

Things that get put to the side and don’t get picked up until years later, decades. The work of youth done in old age. The journey into and out of myself, a maze of madness, sloth and indulgence, misplaced anger, misdirected energy, a horror at all the pleasures not deferred, the obvious traps not avoided, the pains and indignities that lie ahead.

A drink, sure. Why not?

It's hard to fathom what I've drunk and pissed away, but without alcohol - and beer, specifically - I'd never have gotten out of my head.

Acid helped, too, as did weed and mushrooms, coffee and tea, books, music, long walks and sex.

I was a broken a child stuck in a cage, and instead of going outward I went inward, and everything was cool except it wasn’t, because I kept making the same mistakes and was dirty, mean and angry at the world, the kind of kid and young man you don't want around. A disappointment and a mystery, a life seemingly aborted just after it began. Another sad statistic.

I escaped, to the extent I ever did, more by luck and privilege than effort. The old gods smiled on me, and so on, and I was able to build a small, independent life that grew like a fungus as a challenge to death.

In nearly all of this I was accompanied by alcohol, the key that unlocked that cage and unleashed the beast, but also beauty. That made me all the friends I ever had, and lost a lot of them, too.

I’m free now, more or less, of anything but shame and sloth and alcohol itself, stuck between moments of joy.

My life begins again, on this cool and sunny morning, when I resolve, once more, to drink less and be a better person.

The need to monetize, or think to monetize, or be ashamed of not monetizing, everything. Every waking moment a hustle, every night a fever dream of alcohol and weed to end the fear and fuel it. Old age, always on the horizon, never coming closer for years and then suddenly looming like a tower block in a power cut at night.

Everything is clear now. Everything has been a mistake.

The endless false starts, the stacks of notes and years of daydreams, fantasies, of putting off action in favor of immediate pleasures or sloth, of living the dream and waking up in middle age.

The hunt for meaning beyond the confines of youth and within those of financial and emotional instability, favored only by seemingly endless good health, and thus the promise of a long, impoverished and increasingly bitter and irrelevant old age, unless another life is possible, even now.

The world turns and I turn with it, here until the end of my time.

I wake up early, still dark outside, and suffer the horror of the night before the horror of the day, wasting an hour of wakefulness on pottering or otherwise masturbating that could’ve been spent on exercise, study, or work. On making things better, on accruing the health, skills or capital needed to flourish and prosper.

I’ve done this for years, decades, and the loss of life, liberty, happiness and so on such habits have caused me must be enormous, more than enough to make another world possible, even as one remains inconceivable.

And things can always get worse.

At base, I just wanted more time to waste. To browse books, walk the streets, and play with myself. There was no grand scheme – never was or will be – to become something or change the world. Instead an endless waste of time, a moving from this to that with no effect.

A shameful way to live, in the sense that I’d be ashamed to have my biography written, the truth of things known.

The sense of doom, of knowing, or at least feeling, that from now on there’s a decline, a further descent into meanness, poverty, regret and bitterness, into stiffness, weakness and decrepitude, into compromise, coping and delusion. The certain knowledge of being left behind as the world keeps being made new.

And even when this passes there’s the fear of simply fucking up, whether through carelessness, foolishness or illness, and losing even the little I have. The suffering of an even smaller life.

Joy must be within. It must be. I’ll go insane to make it so.

In a reverie of sloth I see that to get ahead, I should have done work that was needed, met some demand, made people happy with a product or a service, and so created a valuable role for myself in society, one that others would respect and reward with money. I think about this because I see a future that concerns me.

I should have been something else, but I wasn't someone else.