I sit down and make a mental list of everyone I know who has achieved something impressive and easy to understand, a simple headline statement that others will admire and indicates their time has not been wasted.

It's not a short list, even though I don't know many people, and drives home the feeling that I, and almost I alone, didn't get what was going on here, didn't see the importance of building a career in the wider scheme of building a life.

Instead I wandered off as if already accomplished, and did the small things I was interested in, mostly going into myself and living in nice places, making sure I had good lunches and plenty of sleep.

One gets older and disappoints oneself, yet in my body, in my head, I am and always have been the whole world.

Masturbation as a model and motive for life.

I come to the conclusion that, on a material basis, I wasted more than 20 years of my life living in the moment, following some reckless, bohemian impulse and the idea that death could come at any moment.

But it didn't.

Of course the sickness passes, as they all do, at least until they start to accrue and the failures cascade. The loss of this then that, an infirmity here, indignity there, a growing sense that it's too late to pull back.

All of that still years away, decades.

And I surrender, once again, to the warm feeling of being reborn, as winter turns to spring and then summer.

Then at certain moments the idea hits with the dullness of grease and grime that money is only the only value, that the wealthy the only folk truly alive, that to be poor is to be stupid, and in the final accounting one wasted life not only with the lack of it, but the lack of its wholehearted pursuit.

The short-lived joy of getting my pension sorted, of knowing that at least poverty is guaranteed and destitution less likely. A secure future of clipping coupons, special offers, mending and make doing, of involuntary vegetarianism and intermittent fasting, celebrating the smallest of victories and pleasures, of living at the bottom of the heap and learning to enjoy the view.

This had all been encoded in me from the earliest days, when I'd embraced a life of incurious sloth and indulgence, mocking the ambitions of others.

I get sick, age 30 years in two days and am confined to my bed, invalid and quarantined, reading books and making notes, going back to the days when my brain first exploded and I was full of hope. The places I would go, the things I would do, all of it now reduced to a mostly empty and unmade bed in a small room, in a nondescript town, in a small country in the middle of nowhere that no one plans to visit. My own incredible smallness in sync, once again, with the brevity of life and the meanness of my spirit.

I linger in sickness, explore it, feel the edges of infirmity and nurse regret for all the yoga yet undone, the friendships never made, the pain caused, the bottles drunk and the gradual dimming of the light.

I resolve, once again, to do better.

In midlife I found my true subject.

The bottomless realization that no one has ever envied me wisely.

Life careens from one near miss to another, punctuated by moments of stoned, drunken, musical, bookish, sexual, biophilic or otherwise forgetful bliss, a clear escape from time

Beyond that there's no stability, no still center other than terror.