You got out and said I'm sorry

I know I was a lot of things

Kalick had once given a talk at a Hitler Youth meeting entitled “Machiavelli, or the Attempt to Achieve a Relationship to Power.”… The last time I ran across him, in the cloakroom at my parents’ house, he had looked at me sadly and said: “For every man there is a chance, Christians call it grace.” I didn’t answer. After all, I wasn’t a Christian. (Heinrich Böll, The Clown)

A recurring theme, floating around out there: “we don’t have a social template for forgiveness.” Like all people who need to be forgiven a lot and whose sins mostly consist in doing the same dumb thing over and over, I have a certain amount of interest in this, because I would both like to not be the sum of those things and also I’m mad all the time.

But what follows is my own thinking out loud, not really a response to anything anybody’s said. So if you’re somebody I know and you are reading this and thinking, that’s not what I said!, don’t worry, I know, I’m just arguing with myself.