When I was young I thought that peak experiences were the only thing worth living for. We’d take LSD and head for the coast. The beaches of Humboldt County are beautiful, wild, given to glimpses of infinity. But setting the bar that high proved unrealistic; only people in love with life or who are twenty years old set such ridiculous goals.

So peak experiences announced themselves with less frequency, and when they did they departed with more haste than they had in the past. Life took over. In time I came to value them less, came to distrust them, like other grown-ups. What were they worth anyway? They certainly didn’t help you make money. No one thought better of you for having one. If you made too much of a fuss pursuing them, people began to think you were a deadbeat, or a poet.

For a long time I buckled down and accepted the fact that Meaning was a thing outside myself and perhaps therefore inaccessible. The option of puffing myself up through acquisition and consumption never suited me. It was a matter of emotional makeup, not rectitude of any sort. I just wasn’t made to play the game only to win. I believed in the quality of play, in experience itself; so I won less often than would’ve been necessary to become a titan, to become one of those who always wins regardless of the price paid. I couldn’t rid myself of the yen for that which we all know to be out there somewhere: the real thing.