Life’s not over unfortunately

 

 

July 15, 1982

 

I’m 31 fucking year old, sleeping in the middle of the woods in Pennsylvania, thinking my life is over.

I’m not contemplating suicide.

That’s never been my kind of gig, even at the worst of times when I believed I was going to spend 20 years in jail.

What I mean rather is that it is over in a sense that I have done all that I will ever do and the rest of living is down hill from here.

I looked over the edge of Bushkill Falls today and wondered if anyone would miss me if I slipped and fell in.

I know all this amounts to my digging my own grave.

If you think a think it has an awful good chance of coming true.

I already foresee a time when I might welcome dying, not so much the blinking out of existence part, but rather to rest from life’s labors.

At some point I believe I will grow so weary that death becomes the only way I can possibly catch up on all the sleep I need.

Yes, my head gets full with all the typical clichés, of how I might have lived my life better.

Yet in truth, I can’t see how.

Maybe I might have turned out differently if I had finished high school and later college.

In both I despaired at falling behind and seeing those with whom I started moving on without me.

But I’m not sure I would like the drudge I would have become if I had finished things I started, laboring at some desk job as trapped in that as I felt in the factories and warehouses of my life.

Vague thought over wasted time also have passé through my brain.

I can’t figure out how I might have better used any of those wasted moments.

Yet it is this nagging feeling of conclusion that bothers me most

Somewhere in my dim consciousness I still believe I might amount to something, do something of importance, make my mark on the world.

I hate the idea of the closed door more than the concept of my ceasing to existing, being deprived of some opportunity others might enjoy in my place.

Perhaps I’m simply in this funk because I’ve had to face up to myself and my past over the last few weeks, seeing Louise and Ruby again, realizing that their lives have gone on without me, and somehow I feel lost.

I know when I get back to New Jersey, I’ll go out and get drunk.

This won’t solve anything – in fact, perhaps it amounts to even more wasted time – but while I’m drunk I won’t think so much, especially about death and my so called wasted life.