Soup Kitchen-ing

 I feel dumb.

To qualify, I feel dumb these days.

I also feel; left behind; overcome; trampled upon; overtaken; marginalized; destitute.

I don't know if I should have fed all these feelings into a generative AI program to get back a whole post about exactly what I am feeling - disseminated to the masses in an easy-to-digest, grammatically impeccable, particularly anodyne, and carefully overwrought perdre la boule.

The older I get, the more I seem to regret ever being born - all this aspiration and go-getting and transitory-mindedness and, eventually, responsible citizening in a foreign country... points to a large cosmic joke, the dust of which I increasingly sense to have been wasted on me.

It's regrettably too late now to turn back into dust, cosmic or otherwise. Too many stories of day-trippers in mid-life crises, leading on to full-life calamities for those left behind - cautionary tales that I cannot ignore any longer... Similar to how I feel when I think about powerful motorcycles and the open road these days: all well and good for back in the day, back when there was so much I didn't know about the vagaries of chance and sheer dumb luck.

I can catch the feels these days from those around me, just as I can low-key sense the extra-ness in my slow unravelling - which is a whole impermeable mood... but what is worse is that I feel like I must express myself in this way; a figurative gotcha smirk at a convivial mode of expression, shared among those with whom I could have nothing in common but to whom I still feel a need to relate.

Is this what being middle-aged is, then? The slowly tanking cred, the superflousness, the irritation at a voice being tolerated for the time-being...

I thought I was going to be consequential by now. 

I guess I just must need to feel lucky that I've survived thus far.