To spend one's time as agreeably as possible, treading lightly on the Earth and other entities, helping more than hurting, and ready for death at three hours' notice.

Then somehow it all works, despite looking bad on paper, and the idea of getting old seems a good one, to be welcomed.

"We'll get through this," I think, "together and mostly unharmed."

Then I take another hit of the joint and see stars.

 I wasn't a good man, and got what I deserved.

So many people smarter, more focused and hard-working than me, a man who decided to drop out of life and found that it went on regardless.

I used to think about sex all the time, but now it's just money and death.

Incredible that misery has such variety and variation, enough to make a life.

Reading the obituaries, and the relief that this will end for everyone.

The absolute perfection of my social isolation, reduced to commercial transactions and gawking.

No one will remember our ecstasy.

I had the kingdom of myself, at the loss of the world.

At a certain point the aim was just to stay in good health while maintaining my vices, or at least to ensure that the end, when it came, was exceptionally rapid, without much fuss or expense.

“I'm not here to put on a show,” I said, “I'm here to explore the limits of my being.”

And yet I ended every day with a beer and a bong, watching the years slip away and my life fail to grow, until all youth was over.

How will you escape death - by wealth, fame, art, sex, health, love, technology, family and/or fitness?

(There's no escape.)

There was no fall from grace.

I used to be far, far more fucked up.

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.