Losing at 40

....The last two days, my esophagus seems to have hit a new low/high, as it seems to have risen my heartrate to the point of dramatic shortness of breath. Yesterday, all it took was a bagel, a scone, and a cookie. Today, all it took was a bunch of tortilla chips last night at my first rock band rehearsal in seven years... It was a huge amount of fun, but I abstained from cigarettes, booze, salsa, guac, and weed. All it took was some chips and I felt like death for most of the next day. I know, I know, I should have eaten less of it both days, but compared to the happypill-induced fatty I was at 30 this is a triumph. And come on, nobody deserves it. 

....Two days ago I got a refill on my prescriptions, without which I'm a lot less bearable than an oversharing facebook ranter. The nice guy at the mom and pop pharmacy I now use told me he could refill everything except for one pill, and I may have to go without the one pill for three weeks. This, obviously, is not an option, but the spiel I'll have to go through with the insurance company is exactly the sort of situation that some of these medications are supposed to head off. My father found those extra pills which were somehow at his house, but in the meantime I had lost the two refilled pills, so now, instead of dealing with insurance to get two weeks of one pill, I may have to deal with the insurance company to beg for three months of two pills, one of which is the pill I particularly count upon to keep me the poster child of sanity you currently read. 

....For over a year, my ex-girlfriend who cut off all contact has been part of a friend messaging group I set up without my noticing. There's been no activity in the room since we were together, but a very close friend accidentally sent a message to that chatroom which briefly started it up again for the first time since we were dating and the 'chat flare-up' was over two days later. I'm sure it's the exact opposite of helpful for her to have her phone blow up with messages from my friends, but 30 friends seem to have gotten a notification yesterday that she left the room, and I find myself yet again sitting amid the remains of a wound I thought I'd finally begun to heal that's still clearly a bleeding sore.

....I had a car accident today. Not even a scratch on either car, but the lady in the other car got out and yelled at me, only for two other drivers to roll down their windows to cheer her. I literally broke down and cried, I'd already felt like an idiot but I couldn't help it. When she saw me break down her response was "Why are you crying?! I'm the one who should be crying!" I gave her my information without taking hers. I knew it was my fault, and why? I was looking beneath my seat for the medicine I'd lost, medicine without which I will likely be in trouble with a lot worse than an insurance company. I thought my foot was on the break as I searched underneath my seat - and of course, was too lost in my own thoughts to realize I was moving forward. How many moments much worse than this will I have over the course of my life?

....I sit in my car for two hours this evening, the first hour blubbering after the accident, the second hour, sitting immobile in my car, wondering if I'm capable of anything at all, if this is the moment I have to come to terms with the fact that this is what my life will always be, or if this is finally the moment I permanently lose contact with the sane world for a couple years at a time or more - and also wonder if that even matters ,because my health is clearly such that I often find it hard to believe I am long for this planet.

....At 40, life begins to take its ultimate trajectory. Unless we're all killed by war, the people who've 'launched' sail through the next 40 years with relatively little trouble. They write their tickets: their jobs, their families, their futures, with nary a thought to people they need never think about. Those who don't 'launch'; they go from one trouble to the next with no letup. And life would seem to show, more and more every year, that my life's trajectory is, at best, little more than an invalid. A lifelong remorseless joke in which the biggest smarty-pants anybody knows is in fact the dumbest man on the planet, incapable of being anything but a perpetual source of burden and fear.

Conservatives talk incessantly about a 'culture of victimhood,' but life doesn't need any help in making victims of its survivors. For a good 75% of the world's citizens, life is a perpetual earthquake lived upon a faultline. No doubt, some of the imperiled deal with it better than others, but the tremors are every day, and  severe enough that every one of them threatens to collapse the walls in which we live. 

If you want to understand how millions of people come to believe things you find loathsome, it's no secret. Life is so much easier to bear with something to blame for the fact that it's disappointing.  Lots of people turn to violently radical politics, lots of people turn to the most orthodox sorts of religion, lots of people turn to subcultures, lots of people turn to drugs, but the pain of living life without an explanation is so great that most people will do anything they can to make sense of their worst moments; even if it means subscribing to movements that kill millions, even if it means throwing away any chance for future happiness, even if it means believing in things that take away the chances for happiness of everyone you love, even if it means trying to end the earth itself, all that is better than living without an explanation for why life is so hard. 

To the surprising number of you readers rounding 40 who are 'winners', my congratulations. Your hard work mattered, but not nearly as much as the genetic lottery that permitted you to work hard. Your amiable personality mattered, but not nearly as much as the genetic lottery that made you agreeable. Your credentials mattered, but not nearly as much as the demographic lottery that gave you the advantages to reach for your achievements. 

The rest of us, the 'losers,' we are still here, me and billions of others. The more winners overestimate their ability to live lives free of those losers whose calls they screen, the more we losers are left to our own devices, and the more we fuck the world up for everybody.