Dear reader, I tell you, I am an absurd man, I am a crazy man. But aren’t we all ridiculous and mad? You say you are sane and reasonable. But don’t you feel useless? Like your slaving job and trying to love your crazy lover? And shallow friends? You say, you hope you get promoted and you hope to find true love. And have kids. That would be meaningful enough for you. Anyway, you are too busy to contemplate meaning, you say. 

     I say, “I have a Ph. D. in English and have taught English around the World, and people everywhere welcomed me with open minds. It was fun for a while, but ultimately was just as empty as back home was.” So, I married a Saudi Princess and had a few kids and lived it up in Taipei, but the drunker I got, the more I suffered from ennui and found myself involved in crazy adventures and head splitting hangovers. My wife left me and took the kids, and I had nothing but booze and madness. One night I even loved a woman with four breasts, and I hung out with prostitutes and local and foreign poets and gangsters mostly. I didn’t bother to learn Chinese; I only was interested in worldly people who spoke English. And I wrote some poetry like: Oh the Chinese/And a life of ease/I love the striptease/Jeez/Seize the day/And I hope you are all unhappy getting a lay/ today.

     But I was bored and full of emptiness despite the fine life I’d had. And it was impossible to drown my sorrows. So, kind of reluctantly I turned to cocaine. As Eric Clapton sang, “She don’t lie… And if your day is done and you want to run on, cocaine, and if you want to get down, down on the ground, cocaine.” But I could afford it with my professorial post at a university. And the police left me alone.

     I tell you dear reader, that I had had the best of everything and was still profoundly unhappy. I was just a waster. Aren’t we all?