Distrusting my own happiness, even while I obsess over my misery.

The smart kids from good homes – by which I mean, almost entirely, homes that understood career paths, the importance of money and good habits – focused on better goals early, and worked to achieve them.

Instead I kept my eyes on the prize, an orgasm while stoned immaculate or a cold beer on a hot day in a beautiful place with nothing but time and a book in my hands.

I wanted to go straight to the point of it all, to lose nothing, gain the world and so on.

In this I may have been mistaken, although of course by now some of those smart kids will have died, some perhaps even by their own hand.

In such cases I guess I win, by default.

I know what happens when you die. The pain ends.

You have to make your own standards, go by your own judgment, and see value where the world doesn’t.

That’s the challenge of making meaning out of an ugly, anonymous, unwilling and unrewarded life.

Eventually it becomes obvious that this is how things are and how they’ll remain, until something changes. And any change will be forced from outside, not within, and above all that change will be for the worse, not better.

A settling in, then, to a steady state of boredom punctuated by moments of terror and sudden decline, the good times found in forgetting.

I get a small table to myself in the corner of a backroom in a basement bar. For some the attraction would be interacting with the lively, diverse and interesting clientele, which due to the location is a mix of law students, theater kids, journalists, aging bohemians, and the occasional tourist, who didn’t expect such an interesting, warren-like space down the stairs and through the doors, with small rooms, nooks and possibilities.

But not me, or not entirely.

Sure, I like being with this crowd, and being mistaken for one of them, for perhaps having a life and a future – or at my age an interesting past – but really I’m here for the music and beer, for a place to sit with a book, notebook and pen, to trip out on the alcohol and words and find my joy quietly in the whirling crowd, absorbing the buzz, feeling the anonymity and excitement of the city, embracing the fact no one cares who I am or what I’m doing.

Sometimes this is what I need to be happy, to simply disappear.

The cheapness, the meanness, the low-quality, low-value life.

How I spend my precious time.

A fear of the bad never ending, the good never lasting, a nervous energy that finds a way to ruin anything.

It’s only through the eyes of others that I see myself diminished.

To put it another way: I’d be happier if it weren’t for the expectations of others.

Still better, I'd be happier if it weren't for others.

Then at 50-something I suddenly became 30-something again, albeit with a debilitating disease that would see me dead in 10, 20, 30 years. Forty at most.

I began to live in earnest.

Experience and/or achievement.