My life is a countdown, to what, I don’t know.

I only know that it seems to be happening in reverse order. I was born an old man, grumpy and set in my ways. Then I entered school, even though I already knew everything. It was a mere formality. I retired at age 21 from a job I never had to live as a country gentleman in an estate that didn’t even exist. I hated cities with the zeal of a reformer and the intensity of a zealot. They were an obstruction in my pastoral lifestyle. Finally I resigned myself to go into business, the gravity too overwhelming to resist. When I finally broke free, my adolescence began and I was ready to truly learn. Now I’m a child, bald as a baby’s butt without all the powder, playing in the fields of the Lord and watching a sunset that never ends. My childhood was sketchy. Adolescence was a disaster. My twenties were good and bad. My thirties were my lost decade, lost to business. The forties were better, an intellectual revolution. The fifties are looking better and better. And I’m not even losing my memory; it’s just getting full.

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