His home was a big wooden crate that he found outside a furniture store.  He found an old mattress and gathered up as many thrown away coats and blankets as he could find to brace himself for the winter. He tried to make his home as comfortable as he could.
Most of the money that he got from begging was used to buy cheap wine. It helped him forget the predicament that he got himself into.  It also helped him fantasize about the present and reminisce about the past.
His glory days were behind him.  They all started as a dream of hearing a symphony perform his masterpiece years ago.  His friend who heard him play it on the piano was awestruck by his ideas.  He was a friend of the music director who in turn, heard it also.  He told him to orchestrate it and copy out the parts, then bring it to him so the orchestra could work on it.  There was one particular passage that gave his heart wings to fly when he played it on the piano.
It had never been done before, but in order for the music to sound right, it had to be executed perfectly with the right dynamics and feeling.  His friend thought it was the most beautiful passage that he had ever heard before.
They rehearsed it diligently for six months before it was time to perform his composition.  That one passage was still not up to his expectations, but they went ahead anyway and played it.
The media reviewed it and said that it was beautiful, and that the composer was an up and coming musical genius.  Everybody raved about it except the composer.  They still didn’t play that one passage the way he wanted to hear it.  It was just a sixteen measure legato swell that changed the mood and introduced a new key change.
A composer has to be sensitive, but not as much as to expect everyone else to have that same degree of sensitivity.  When there are many different minds involved in a project, there has to be a reconciliation made between what can be done and what can’t be done.  He let his expectations get the best of him. He kept murmuring in his head, “Liars, liars.  My composition was awful. I’m not worthy of all that praise.  The critics don’t know what they are talking about.”
He started drinking heavily to forget about it, but it got the best of him.  He lost his family and his home, then took to the streets.  One has to be sensitive to write such a masterpiece, but realize to the fact that the musicians are just human beings and not perfect like the way he wished they were.
He passed away at the age of forty, penniless, and was buried in an unmarked grave.  Nobody cared about that up and coming musical genius anymore.