Always be preparing for death. Cleaning up, sorting things out, making it easy for those left behind.

Do not surrender to hoarding, nostalgia or a false sense of immortality.

Be ready to die tomorrow and disappear soon after.

When you're that lost you can only wish for misfortune on others, to bring them down to your level, then beneath it, so you can all suffer together, although them a little more, while others continue to exploit, fuck and mangle you and yours without concern, for profit, amusement and indifference, and still others do well by doing good.

Another world was once possible, and may still be for others, but not for you with a foul mood, depression, and blank lack of effort and hope.

There are the years you have wasted, and the years still to waste, with nothing left over for life.

Shame coats everything with bitterness, even the promise of death.

Only now, decades later, can I see what an awful young man I was, how broken by a broken upbringing, all wasted energy, anger, entitlement, arrogance and shame.

The fact I've made it so far (so far) ought to be a cautionary tale to all who believe in justice.

Although, of course, I am poor.

Assume $1,000 is 1 mm, $1 million is 1 m, $1 billion is 1 km, $8.849 billion the height of Everest and $100 billion, of course, a clear 100 km into the sky. Unfathomable and redundant excess.

Yet wasting time and energy on small distinctions at the bottom of the pile, instead of recognizing that we're all, almost all, in a precarious state, wondering where the next day's / week's / month's / year's income will come from and whether we'll ever visit Florence.

Meanwhile, inside, a feeling of joy.

Let me tell you about this friend of mine who's dead, while you and I are still alive.

Feeling good (nice and empty), then the memory of how I let my parents down intrudes, then my children and partner, first and last of all myself.

The shame and grief that only end with death.

I can never discount the possibility that I'm mentally disabled in various important ways, or ways that are important for life as it's lived today, or - more specifically - for the life I've chosen to accept.

I probably shouldn't be here.

After happiness (or at least contentment) I wake up and feel lost again, wholly within myself, in full awareness of the material reality of my situation, the lack of bonds and fellow feeling, the precarious status of the roof above my head, the knowledge that people much younger - men and women, not boys and girls - have done and are doing things I envy, even as they remain outside my inclinations and abilities, as distant and implausible as the moon.

The horror, once again, of a naturally limited life and my own loss, waste and decay.

The shame at my biography.

Easy enough now to look back and do the basic math, to see that we met when barely young and spent these years together, enough to need both hands and one foot to count, and to look ahead, see the number inside my head and instinctively know the calculation must be wrong. We will be old soon, and then elderly.

I pull out an index card and write the numbers down, add and subtract the old fashioned way, like a child half the age of my jacket, the date and place of purchase having been written inside, by myself (of course) on a trip to Japan that was planned around the cherry blossom season. I remember the picnic under the trees, the walk up to and through a castle, and my excitement at finding this item, the only thing that remains from that trip, back when such things were still possible.

Good denim, cut like a sports jacket, exactly my size and fit. I knew then it would age well and was worth the high price for the use I'd get out of it, the emotions and experiences I would have in it. And here it still is, half a world and a quarter of a life away, looking good, aging well, the pockets a little worn and stretched, the fabric faded, but a living thing turned to the warmth and movement of my body, a part of me and my history that will live on, however briefly, after I am dead.

More so than anything else.

What matters most is how I feel.