Distrusting my own happiness, even while I obsess over my misery.

The smart kids from good homes – by which I mean, almost entirely, homes that understood career paths, the importance of money and good habits – focused on better goals early, and worked to achieve them.

Instead I kept my eyes on the prize, an orgasm while stoned immaculate or a cold beer on a hot day in a beautiful place with nothing but time and a book in my hands.

I wanted to go straight to the point of it all, to lose nothing, gain the world and so on.

In this I may have been mistaken, although of course by now some of those smart kids will have died, some perhaps even by their own hand.

In such cases I guess I win, by default.

I know what happens when you die. The pain ends.

You have to make your own standards, go by your own judgment, and see value where the world doesn’t.

That’s the challenge of making meaning out of an ugly, anonymous, unwilling and unrewarded life.

Eventually it becomes obvious that this is how things are and how they’ll remain, until something changes, and any change will likely come from outside, not within, and above all that change will likely be for the worse, not better.

A settling in, then, to a steady state of boredom punctuated by moments of terror and sudden decline, the good times found in forgetting.

I get a small table to myself in the corner of a backroom in a basement bar. For some the attraction would be the lively, diverse and interesting clientele, which due to the location is a mix of law students, theater kids, journalists, aging bohemians, and the occasional lost tourist, who didn’t expect such an interesting, warren-like space down the stairs and through the doors, with small rooms, nooks and possibilities.

But not me, or not entirely. Sure, I like being with this crowd, and being mistaken for one of them, for perhaps having a life and a future – or at my age an interesting past – but really I’m here for the music and beer, for a place to sit with a book, notebook and pen, to trip out on the alcohol and words and find my joy quietly in the whirling crowd, absorbing the buzz, feeling the anonymity and excitement of the city, embracing the fact no one cares who I am or what I’m doing.

Sometimes this is what I need to be happy, to simply disappear.

The cheapness, the meanness, the low-quality, low-value life.

How I spend my precious time.

A fear of the bad never ending, the good never lasting, a nervous energy that finds a way to ruin anything.

It’s only through the eyes of others that I see myself diminished.

To put it another way, I’d be happier if it weren’t for the expectations of others.

Still better, I'd be happier if it weren't for others.

Then at 50-something I suddenly became 20-something again, albeit with a debilitating disease that would see me dead in 10, 20, 30 years. Forty at most.

I began to live in earnest.

Experience and/or achievement.

A fantasy of a life so near and far.

I'll drive to the coast for a few days of pleasure. Stay in a nice hotel, eat out, swim and tan and meet with friends old and new in the evening. Travel with my long-term partner, both have a great time, no stress, no fuss, no looking at the prices or denying any pleasures.

Instead I am alone again, counting the money and never going anywhere, never doing anything, just a frozen state of nothing but decline and the ever growing mountain of regret.

This is the sum of my life, all that I'll see of the world.

I wouldn't start from here. I wouldn't take this bet. Not unless I were far more disadvantaged than I am now or ever was before.

I had chances, a lot of them.

I'm white, straight, male, able-bodied and so on, with good skin and a dick I've been proud of

I'm not dead, not yet, and it all ends in nothing, anyway.

I miss the coast. I miss company. I miss meals in restaurants and dancing past midnight, dancing anywhere at all.

There is a loss that's permanent and mounting, one that I add to in horror as I wake up and go through the motions. I work on coffee, vitamins, canned fish and masturbation. I rot my brain and know that I'm not only ignorant but stupid.

But things can always get worse.

My parents were good people, who surprised themselves and others by rising from poverty to a secure, lower middle class life, respected and respectable.

I grew up soft in some places, broken in others, and hard where I should have been yielding.

I did not continue their rise, did not add any shine to the family name, but instead frittered away my privileges and opportunities on sloth and indulgence, an unwillingness to grow up and face the world as it really is.

A disappointment - I can see it now - to myself and others.

I thought everything was going to be OK.