I avoid others out of a sense of shame and self-preservation, alive to the fact that I fucked up and can offer no explanation for my behavior that doesn't make my foolishness, sloth and degeneracy plain.

At the best of times it's only and all in my head, and this life is something private.

When that Zen sensibility meets that need to make rent and get laid.

Aghast at what I've done with my life, I waste another evening.

"Not just to live, but to live until I die. And this is why I drink and dance."

But in practice, and as a consequence, misery would be my métier and singular obsession.

At an age when some in my circle have accrued enough capital to see it rolling in unaided, while I have to fight for every euro, expenses chasing me from dawn to dusk, living in fear and hiding in the shadow of alcohol and junk food, hemmed in by other bums, sloths and degenerates near the bottom of the pile.

Yet inside, there's another life, as rich as that of a cat.

I'm a simple man, in all meanings of the phrase. Never mind not having an advanced degree, I don't have a clue, nor special interests or abilities, beyond myself and wasting time.

At the end of my life there won't be any eulogies, just one or two sighs of relief.

One of life's natural aristocrats, I was essentially useless and in need of beheading.

Looking back at my adventures, the remarkable thing is how distracted and unhappy I'd usually been in the moment, searching only for oblivion.

The still, quiet joy came later, defeated and resigned, at one with an endless blankness within. Life going on without me.

A pointless and defiant waste of time, a stand against ambition and striving, a habit I fell into.

I made myself unmade.

Others had the gall to be younger, some decades so.