Hubristic youth believes the world has been made needlessly complex, and that “I” alone, by some miracle (perhaps that same miracle that also placed me in the dead center of my own experience and not elsewhere?) have insight into to the simple heart of the matter…

Clearly this is an unstable state of affairs that is going to end one way or another. Most of the time it will eventually tip over into in its antithesis, a bitter-saccharine docility that accepts deportation to the outer regions of existence to play a far humbler role that’s become good enough for a new, much smaller, less central “me”.

There are other routes beyond of youth. There are better, far more desirable visions of maturity. But to have it, one must take alternate routes, and those routes are not highways (even when those highways are labeled “Alternative”).