Mid-Life Crisis

The day I turned nine years old, I realized that I was almost ten, but had done nothing with my life.  My youth had been wasted, I was sure.  I felt a sort of emptiness and despair as I opened my presents.  What did I have to show for my elementary school years?  It was an early mid-life crisis that continued fairly unbroken for the next thirty years.

Generally, it's helpful to have had so much practice with mid-life crises.  I'll think my life is over and it's all meaningless, life is just a series of days you spend behaving and then at the end of it all you go, "Fuck," but then I'll remember - I've been feeling this way since I was nine.  How serious can this feeling be?  I've been dealing with this shit my entire life, it's just a fucking feeling.

But then sometimes I'll veer into a more pessismistic reading and think, holy shit, I've been feeling this way since I was nine.  I'm going to waste my entire life, thinking that I'm wasting my life.  What the fuck am I doing?  It's very meta. 

So when that happens, I pick up smoking again.  I tried to explain all this to the wife when she caught me hiding behind the shed in our yard with a Camel Light, but she seemed to not see the connection.