It wasn’t so much that I could relate to the sentiment, despite having more than my share of embarrassing artifacts to disown. It was more to do with wanting to free myself from those most oppressive expectations — the ones I set up for myself.  I had quite an elaborate self-image going at the time, based on the two Oscars, Madison and The Grouch, a willfully unkempt, heavy-smoking, sardonic poet, always looking for everything’s underbelly, and I saw no reason to change. Destructive? Unsustainable? White guy’s affordable affectation? Yes, but the real problem was that I could no longer ignore the widening gap between any pointless egregiousness of mine and the complexities I was up against. I was getting restless waiting for the epiphany all this stuff was supposed to lead to.

Of course it never works out that way. After my father died, I left my shitty little do-nothing job and found a better one, one that I thought would honor his memory, putting together a monthly procedural journal for orthopedic surgeons. Which was all well and good, until my boss changed his business model to one that provided lousy service and fewer products for more money.

There was, however, one bright spot in all this — and I married her. Karyn was not the kind of woman I was used to getting attention from. She was, and still is, thorough, outgoing, unafraid, and unaffected — my polar opposite in many respects. She showed me great tenderness in those pheremone-drunk early days, which has grown into an easy, trusting togetherness, with its own rhythms and in-jokes galore.

Oh, we fight. Fuck yeah. Nasty, hurtful storms that can last for days and always feel so final. But over time I’ve started to see those fights as features in our shared emotional landscape, that is, as a means to get ever closer, however gracelessly, to our better selves. This makes me happy in a way I could never appreciate, say, five or ten years ago.

Is this joy born of a lower testosterone level and lower expectations? Absolutely not. I have given up nothing of my former self, furled no freak flag, nor did I get my hallelujah moment either. Instead, with Karyn’s help, I’m expanding the circle, loving everything in the longer term, process over payload, and above all, people in their failed glory and their glorious failures. I know this sounds atmospheric and over-fabulous, but I’m trying to describe a certain feeling, and that’s the nature of the beast.