Another summer, and with it the understanding spring has gone, autumn looming, winter death, but for now we'll bake in long hot days, and live as if forever.

The first third of my life was getting deeper into a labyrinth, and the second third finding a way out.

Now I like to think I'm free, but then, out of nowhere, a memory of the early and mid-horror will return, and with it the darkness, loss, shame and regret.

Meanwhile, outside, above the clouds, the sun and stars are shining.

By the main account I had wasted my life.

But the truth is, I enjoyed it.

You could cut off my legs, put me in a bucket and lower me down a well in a storm, as long as I can manage my own time.

My struggles and triumphs were (and remain) no less great than Caesar's, and I have outlived him.

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.