Old friends come for a casual lunch, stopping by on the way home from elsewhere. We get a little high and they stay until almost midnight, and my mood stays good for days.

So many lives I’d like to lead, to have led, spinning off in all directions, the multiverse inside my head, fueled by curiosity and indulgence, pleasure and sloth, love and more love and more love.

A drive to be both fully in the moment and wholly out of time.

If only health and happiness were enough.

What started as cynicism and despair evolved into an acceptance and then celebration of all that remains, which is everything.

It took me some time to get started, to go off the rails and escape a respectable fate. But ever since then I've been endlessly, tirelessly fascinated with myself and how the world inside interacts with the one I see and the one that more objectively is. Both on the surface - as represented in the roles we play and the cultures we inhabit and make - and the one that remains largely unknowable, which lurks deep at the base of it all.

Everything which happens to me happens only when I'm alive, including my knowledge of all the things I didn't and don't experience, and all the things I imagine and misunderstand. So much compressed into a handful of decades, if that - like everyone, everywhere, ever.

I sit quietly, eyes closed, and breathe in and out, let the worlds within me expand in all directions and then collapse to a point. My breath, my body, the smallness of my presence. 

Absurd, unfathomable, and awesome.

Two thirds in, if lucky, and we hunker down and understand there'll be few more fresh starts, that dramatic changes for the better are unlikely, and our final form, near final, is closer than the last chance of escape we once had.

Yet the joy is real, the feeling that we got away with something, learned some of the secrets, all quite simple, and did more or less what was planned, which was nothing, while avoiding the worst of the fates.

My heroes, such as they were - the people I thought had it all figured out - were calm, cool and collected. Monkish artists, going in to go out, going out to go in. They were at ease, free of demons, so it seemed, although on closer inspection, a look at life not the art, things were often very different. Alcoholism, poverty, sexual misconduct, self-loathing, selfishness, timidity, jealousy, madness and in many cases early death having followed a trail of tears and suffering, with more left in their wake. Not a way of being or series of events one would wish upon a child.

There was consensual reality, then whatever happened within my skin and skull, and I was in thrall to the latter.

I drink less alcohol, more herbal tea, to calm my nerves and not fuck up, not waste time, not become even more of a wreck.

Above all I cling to the belief there’s another story to be told, and perhaps I’ll live to tell it.

I practiced nothing, so mastered nothing beyond being myself.