Now I realize that happiness in of itself is a rather empty goal, reserved for victims of unusual strokes, the congenitally mentally incapacitated, and the clinically deranged. You lesion a few tracts in your brain, and you can be permanently happy until your dying day, singing “zippy-de-doo-da” out of your asshole, your face guaranteed to freeze with a rictus grin. I can see it now, a corpse grinning maniacally in his/here casket.

And, yes, as the old cliché goes, anything worth having is difficult to attain.

So I don’t understand how I imagined things would necessarily turn out wonderfully, with petals of roses strewn upon my path.

These things take time, patience, and whole lot of masochistic determination.

And maybe the simple problem is that I am a lazy bastard too used to getting things handed to me on a silver platter. The few things that I’ve actually worked excruciatingly for have, in some ways, been accidental, given by the grace of good fortune and inertia. Still, it’s hard to gainsay the non-material worth of a good career and of not being suicidally depressed.

We take the paths with which we are faced with, and we shouldn’t wildly imagine what the destination is going to be like. But, as usual, I wander far afield, with ever increasing prolixity, so I’m just gonna stop now while I’m still ahead.