Precision
Once, on a night a long time ago, maybe like two years now and some change, somebody said something to me, something which for various reasons I deflected, despite deep down not wanting to. I did it out of a kind of over-inflated sense of duty, of loyalty, of such things that my anachronistic self tends to value, much to the confusion of others, and to the chagrin, often enough, of my own better judgment. Since that night a long time ago and since that moment, I have regretted the choice I made not to respond to the statement that was made to me in a different way; I’ve born the sucker’s torch, I’ve replayed the tape how many times. Look, despite what’s good for me or you or anyone we know, I have complicated relationships to both regret and guilt, and have often known that those relationships should and maybe even could be minimized. Well, whatever, so it goes. Sometimes, you hold em too long, and sometimes you just make a bad call. I made a bad call, and I’ve “felt it” in the form of a dull and nagging sensation somewhere in the back of my something ever since. Tonight, however, along with a whole flood of other things, that regret, the singular awareness of simply having made the wrong choice strikes me like a dart, a stake in the gullet, a precise point which parallels the acute awareness, the precision of the knowledge of the wrongness, the cowardice, the mis-placed-ness of the choice that was made. It is an uncanny thing to be able to zero in with such visceral clarity to a moment like that. A moment where you can see the probability matrices present themselves, the alternating paths that life could have taken lay themselves out clearly, like two green lines departing from either side of your face (perhaps one comes from one eye and the other from the other) and to know that you picked wrong. It’s like those dominos they toppled the other night in Berlin: the events at the end of the line are connected with those at the beginning.
I wonder if it’s ever a good idea to talk about shit like this on the internet. Who knows. Just do yourself a favor and think about the long term, think about the teleological suspension of the ethical, think about Abraham. Now there was a guy who knew what he had to do.