Forgive Yourself

Last night I was out boozing in the loop...

I'm walking home with some people, and I start talking to this homeless dude. I zone out, and the next thing I knew all my friends are gone. At this point, I am pretty wasted. I buy this homeless dude a hot dog, and I am chilling out by the hot dog stand with him and some other loop denizens. As is my custom I start crying and talking crazy shit...

...and now I am going to try to reconstruct what I said, because I think its important...

If you're driving East on MO 40 coming out of downtown, on your right there is a warehouse with some really impressive graffiti on the roof. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to climb up onto this roof and write "Forgive Yourself" in giant letters. Every time I drive back to St. Louis from Michigan I see that shit and it hits me like a freight train.

In anybody's life, there is a cycle of hurting other people. Nobody indigenously wants to be selfish, or to fuck other people over, or hurt other people's feelings, but sometimes it happens by accident. Sometimes you have good intentions but you fuck someone over, and that shit hurts you too. You feel that you have betrayed something important and good inside of you and you fall into a kind of despair that is deep below the level of conscious thought. You become angry with yourself, and that subconscious leaks out. You turn it against other people, and the cycle starts again.

Sometimes, I find myself doing things I know are wrong, and I honestly can't say why I am doing them. And... I just wish I could live my life better. Whenever I see that graffiti, its this epiphany like ..."Thats what the fucking problem is. Why couldn't I think of that by myself?" I realize that I have got that cycle going on deep in my mind, and that I am not going to be able to break out of it until I forgive myself for the shit that I fucked up in the past.

...so last night I was saying this shit, and me and some random dude at the hot dog stand promised each other we would spread the word about the sign and about forgiving yourself.

So...this is that. Forgive yourself.