Sometimes I must remember that words and music can be better than drugs.

I found out too late that I was not a serious person, and had lived a ridiculous life.

The world has never needed you, a situation that will not improve with age.

Of course I'm a legend in my own mind. Why wouldn't I be the main character in my own quiet, kitchen-sink story?

It's dull, but compelling. No plot and all story, a journey to the center of the self, obsessed with moments empty and alone.

Fifteen years and I'll be old, if not elderly. I've got shoes older than that, T-shirts.

Add another 15, if I'm lucky, and we're really getting up there.

Thirty years, say. More than enough for a life.

All I have to do is live long enough to get away with it, because there'll be no judgement that matters after death.

I feel bored, then remember I have around 2,000 books in my apartment, mostly unread and all once of interest.

What have I done with my time?

I wake up early, make coffee, sit at my desk and make no money, simply because there's no immediate path to profit from this position, and thus no validation from the world outside my head as to how my time is spent.

I have a place to live, food to eat, access to healthcare should I need it, and death as the promise of relief from all hope, worry and toil drawing closer every day, my life rolled up behind me like a rug, unrolling before me like the same.

I enjoy myself, regardless, and feel the magic within, aware that none of this matters.

Life is how you spend your time, and despite my relative poverty and objective sloth I spend mine how I like, more or less.

Now it's true there could be more travel, sex and eating out, more sight-seeing and discretionary spending, more actions that turned into stories, but I do what I want within the limits I've allowed to be set, knowing full well how my appetites and inclinations could destroy me.

I tell myself this as I do nothing once again, artfully balanced between pseudo-Zen mastery and boundless despair, adrift in the worlds inside and out, having fun at my own expense, helping no one and wasting the years I have left.

There's nothing to say, and I keep saying it.

The secret - one of the secrets - is to establish yourself when young in such a field where knowledge, skill and experience compound over the years, along with your earning power, in order to amass enough capital (social, cultural, financial) that you don't fall behind, don't fall out of safety, don't feel realistically threatened by social exclusion, homelessness, hunger and so on. To become secure in all possible areas of being.

But the way I was born I just couldn't be bothered, with my one true talent being for sitting quietly, alone, doing nothing.

A young man made for sloth and decadence, growing into his role.