Ain’t nothing like regret, to make you feel alive.

That was something an ex of mine scrawled and stuck up on her wall, just after taking my heart and hurling it a thousand miles from her, into a sulphurous pit full of twelve-inch nails, starving wolves and flaming tar. Of course, we got back together about two weeks afterwards, then split up, got back together, split, together and so on until by the end we were shambling subhuman wraiths crawling desperately around looking for our souls. We never found them. We didn’t know what they looked like anymore.

Anyway. Life is fucked up. We all know that, and if you’re in that tiny bracket of folks that think things are going swimmingly, well – you’re a wanktard. We all do things, stupid things, that we regret. It’s in our nature. We have to learn from our own mistakes. What’s not in our nature is to take advice, especially when it comes to things we desire, and no matter how much we understand the advice or realise how idiotic we’re being, we say “but you don’t understand!” and go right ahead and put our heads in food blenders, learning the hard way that any road worth going down is paved with idiots putting their heads in blenders. Facts.

One of these roads is the one to love and all that crazy hoopla. We all want to be loved, fall in love, be taken by love, be caught, bound, gagged and owned by love. It’s another thing that’s in our nature. If you don’t suffer from this willingness to have love gather you up in its arms and switch all your higher brain functions to doe-eyed autopilot, then you are a monkey.

So if we combine these facts – that we don’t heed advice and we do blunder down the land-mine-ridden path to love – we’ve got to expect your legs to be blown apart. Keep up with these metaphors, now. So you’re sitting there, on your exploded waist, in a pile of blood and slow-seeping viscera, and you think “why me?”. Well it’s not just you, don’t be so melodramatic. Everybody’s made mistakes and regretted stuff they’ve done, and everybody’s scrawled their own messages of warning and put them up on posters in the “for god’s sake remember this shit!” part of their brain.

Then, perhaps, next time we won’t blunder with such a god-awfully camp gait down these roads, maybe even stopping now and then to give highbrow, unheeded advice to the people with their heads in ten-speed liquidisers. Yeah, this is you getting wise or something. Don’t knock it.

But whatever. The point I’m getting at here is your past. The sordid, fucked-up mess that you shirk from telling anybody in case they look at you funny forever and ever. But that’s wrong. People are wrong for doing that. The past is so vitally important in that it made you the person you are today, but it’s also so utterly unimportant in terms of who you actually are today. Oh, contrary notions… I’ll say it one more time, with semi-colons, so maybe you’ll get it:

People change; and this is the precise reason that the past is important, and also the reason it should be disregarded.

The next time you fail to tell anybody how you cockjacked your best friend’s partner and regretted it ever since, remember that you’re just accommodating other people’s problems. What you regret is the past, remains the past, and only exists in the present as a vestige. If you still do the things you regret now, well okay – fuck off, you’re retarded. But if you learnt something from a mistake, then that mistake is just part of your beautiful evolution.