A consoling thought: it could always have been worse.

I had no ambition, and achieved it.

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.

I threw away half my life to hurt my father.

I slice ginger, boil water, and purge the poison and dismay.

I never knew I was poor until it was too late to do much of anything about it.

 And just like that, I did nothing.

Sex ended far too soon, with much of life ahead of me.

 All I sought was oblivion and ecstasy, an endless round of indulgence, but in my poverty I ended up with drudgery and pain.

Something in me broke again, as I looked at the wreck of my life.

Lost in a world of my own, ignored and going deeper.