The nonsensical noise prattling on in my head and the emptiness that begs to be filled, along with the looming dark cloud hovering above wraps me in a thick melancholic fog. A peaceful permanent sleep, please. Every fucking day with this shit. I’m over dramatizing. It’s most days. My friend, my good friend, my partner—that is my business partner, who I blame, at least partially, for my continued stay by burdening me with his investment. My burdensome friend, thinking himself a competent psychologist, suggests that I might be suffering from a “midlife crisis.” I am relieved, for a quick second, thinking, that’s great, I’m just going through a phase. All this time I thought I’m depressed because my girlfriend is busy twisting me up in knots, playing volleyball with my emotions and beating my self-esteem into the ground. As if that weren’t enough, my efforts to develop a nutritional business with my girlfriend—now ex-girlfriend—is in the toilet along with the relationship, and the toilet won’t flush. Furthering my emotional downturn—I am struggling with the second business venture, and like the first, it’s floating in the toilet bowl. Other depression-causing factors are the plaguing thoughts that I am wasting the remaining years of my life on unimportant or doubtful pursuits, such as writing this story, (pause) at this same desk, in this same apartment I have been living in for over 25 years. And now that the economy is in dire straits, and the future of the world is rather bleak, I am sliding further down into the infernal reaches of hell. No, in rethinking it, it is not so much about the economy and future of the world, it is about making poor choices in life, and continuing to make poor choices. It is about living nearsightedly for the past 25 years in New York City, and not having sufficient funds for a soft-landing into old age. Age!—Don’t get me started. What I want my body to do isn’t what it always wants to do. It takes a lot longer to bounce back after illness and injuries these days. Bruises last longer. My bones crackle and pop like the Kellogg’s cereal Snap, Crackle, Pop. I feel stiff in the mornings. My superman feeling is gone, along with my x-ray vision. I have to resort to using fucking reading glasses. Wait a minute, we are closer to the real cause of my agony—too much kryptonite in my tea, my life force is draining away, I am mortal, and the constant existential question rages within me now more than ever!

Ah, perhaps that is exactly what they wrap the term “midlife” around… What if you woke up and found yourself in a completely different world or reality? What if, after spending most of your life in pursuit of a dream, you woke up one day and found yourself asking, what’s it all about? What if our quest for life’s meaning got buried along the way while we were “living,” and the question, what’s it all about? surfaced to haunt you after years of distractions? Now this might be where we find ourselves wanting to abuse ourselves in masochistic behavior. So what self-destructive choices are there for us? Should we shave our heads bald, buy a Harley-Davidson, abuse drugs, overindulge in sex, hide away on an organic farm (getting closer to a good idea), go back with the ex, be the depressed lifeless couch potato and wallow in self pity, or spend too much time on the George Washington Bridge bathing in suicidal ideations? How am I to move forward? Isn’t that what I was doing; going for the gold, taking the bull-by-the-horns, following the American Dream! Perhaps the “crisis” is exactly that: the point where you realize something is bloody wrong, that your path has been misguided. That everything is a lie! A goddamned bloody lie!