What's he on about now?

In case the articles, essays and opinions throughtout this site just weren't enough for you, here's my online diary (a.k.a. 'blog'). It's as close as you'll come to the inside of my head, so don't say I didn't warn you
(and remember, you can always e-mail me if you love or loathe anything you're about to read)...


   Saturday, November 24, 2007

   ABYSS

This will be a hopelessly vague post but, believe it or not, sometimes I am actually concerned about my privacy. So no details but I'm writing to remind myself in the future how and why last night went so horribly wrong:

Trust your own instincts.
That voice in the back of your head knows what it's talking about.

At a party last night, I made a couple wonky choices, trying to "read" the room, and somehow became a really dreadful person. There's lots of thing I could blame it on but none of them stand up to much scrutiny. No, I got to see aspects of myself that I usually either beat down with a stick or run away from, screaming.

I shudder at my behaviour and hope that the host will forgive me.

I'm going to see Ben Lee in concert tonight -- he's got a lyric I like:
"I had to learn to sin successfully." It reminded me of one of my all-time favourite pieces of advice from Mark Twain:

Now then, I propose to inoculate for Sin. Suppose that every time you commit a transgression, a crime of any kind, you lay up in your heart a memory of the shame you felt when your Sin found you out, and so make it a perpetual reminder and perpetual protection against your ever committing that particular Sin again. That is to say, inoculate yourself forever against that particular Sin. Now what must be the result? Why this -- logically and infallibly: that the more crimes you commit (and forever amen) the richer you become, morally; and when you have committed all the trespasses, all the crimes that are known to the calendar of Sin, there you stand, white as an angel, pure as the driven Snow (protected forever from further Sin), the sky-kissing monument of moral perfection.

It's an argument that really makes me, though secretly, I hope Twain was right.

Labels: friends, introspective, repair