80 bottles of beer

In which our Hero procrastinates traveling to work because now he’s only 79 entries from a nice round pointless number

[BonnieRose] suggested we make something of a garden/art project out of our OpenDiary by setting down regrets to be buried with the rest of the site. I’m intrigued by the idea. At the same time, some of those are great stones buried deep, and I don’t know that I want to disinter them. What if there’s unprocessed hurt there?

How about metaregrets?

Perhaps you may, Gentle Reader, recall my ill-fated and ill-advised fling from long enough ago that I’m okay not recapping it. There’s enough to regret there and I have in these pages at more length than compassion for you would entirely permit. The biggest regret, to me, is not the specific mistake but the more general decision to ignore my own standards of morals and ethics to try on a different view. I used to think that I was raised to an unreasonably restrictive and conservative world view that didn’t tolerate the new realities of the world. Now I think that some of those conservative values have deep and fundamental humanistic value (that was inherently obvious even when I chose to ignore them, it isn’t about epiphany, it’s about “duhhh!”). I shouldn’t have gone there, at all, and yet, here I am, wiser if a little bit hollow-eyed.

I’m glad to report there’s no grudge left at least. Sadness that things happened and how things happened, and the cold shadow of looming regret over that part of my world, but no anger. Whatever else was going on, I made my own choices and earned my own needless scars.

I’ve already put contact information into a more official farewell to this place. Everything since that entry is just doodling in the notebook because there are a few pages left. Just in case, though, good bye.