All my life is running away from damage, my only peace those moments stolen from despair.

I go back in time, to an age before it all went wrong, when I was still unborn.

Inside there’s infinity and bliss, so I’ll keep dancing, no matter how absurd.

It became apparent, after some decades - enough for whole stories to be told - that this would be the outline of my life. One spent pleasantly enough, if of no great import, and of interest to no one but myself.

But still, like a sickness, the urge to write and record, to set out in words an exhaustive account of my one true subject: the wearing and waste of my time on my terms, a celebration of endless surrender.

The pleasure at dining with someone doing worse.

Once again the end of things comes into view, and an awareness that the slightest push in one direction (or another) will break the spell, the matter brought to a close, and new lives (for others) begin.

I get tired and lie down in the middle of the day, some long raga playing softly as I close my eyes and breathe in and out, on the edge of sleep, letting the music guide me.

I imagine that I'm dying, as will happen one day, and there's no fear, no regret - other than the mess I'll leave behind - and mostly just a feeling of relief that it went OK, well enough, and I escaped the fate of being arrested or tortured or maimed or all the other ways I could've been unlucky, that I made it through unscathed.

I wake up, and begin to declutter.

It all ends, or seems to, for another uncountable time.

Then starts again, and I am free.

I avoid others out of a sense of shame and self-preservation, alive to the fact that I fucked up and can offer no explanation for my behavior that doesn't make my foolishness, sloth and degeneracy plain.

At the best of times it's only and all in my head, and this life is something private.

When that Zen sensibility meets that need to make rent and get laid.

Aghast at what I've done with my life, I waste another evening.

"Not just to live, but to live until I die. And this is why I drink and dance."

But in practice, and as a consequence, misery would be my métier and singular obsession.

At an age when some in my circle have accrued enough capital to see it rolling in unaided, while I have to fight for every euro, expenses chasing me from dawn to dusk, living in fear and hiding in the shadow of alcohol and junk food, hemmed in by other bums, sloths and degenerates near the bottom of the pile.

Yet inside, there's another life, as rich as that of a cat.

I'm a simple man, in all meanings of the phrase. Never mind not having an advanced degree, I don't have a clue, nor special interests or abilities, beyond myself and wasting time.

At the end of my life there won't be any eulogies, just one or two sighs of relief.

One of life's natural aristocrats, I was essentially useless and in need of beheading.

Looking back at my adventures, the remarkable thing is how distracted and unhappy I'd usually been in the moment, searching only for oblivion.

The still, quiet joy came later, defeated and resigned, at one with an endless blankness within. Life going on without me.

A pointless and defiant waste of time, a stand against ambition and striving, a habit I fell into.

I made myself unmade.

Others had the gall to be younger, some decades so.

Yes, today it all starts again, why not?

I make peace with the past and settle into the present with an eye to my long-term happiness.

It’s not too late. I can turn this around.