One reason the past seems so nice is because you know how it came out.

You think, “I arrived in the new city, and it thrilled me! I saw so many interesting things.”

Actually what you had on your mind at the time was how irritated you were about something. You were worrying about where you would stay that night and how you would find the place and would the taxi driver cheat you. In a new town, nothing looks the same as it does once you are used to it.

I sure don’t miss my youth because I remember so much of it.

Ah, the old Christmas songs! They remind me of comfort and home! But they also remind me that I was counting the hours of my Christmas vacation until I had to go back to school and wander around at recess trying to avoid the white trash bully I was scared of.

When you think of youth, you don’t remember that each and every tooth had to pulled out as the new ones came in. Do you remember walking around trying to decide to pull it out?

Do you remember the measles? Mumps? Just lying there with nothing at all to do but feel bad?

Do you remember boredom, boredom, and more boredom?

And the DECISIONS! It’s cute now to laugh at what you were afraid of and how little you knew. It wasn’t funny then.

There is a very important point here that relates your own personal history to history in general. It is contained in one very wise saying:

“You are not studying history. You are studying other people’s PRESENT.”

You see that guy looking at you from an 1880 photograph? To you, he is in the time of Garfield and Arthur, when the telephone was brand new. You see the past behind him and the future in front of him. You are seeing him as a part of history.

Actually that guy is sitting there in a time as modern as today. He is not a part of history. He is Modern Man, just like you are. The only difference is that you have the cheat sheet. You know what is coming next. You have tomorrow’s newspaper.

When you were young you didn’t have the cheat sheet. What drove you nuts then is cute today.

It’s the cheat sheet that makes all the difference.

It has become fashionable for one man to say to another, “I love you, man.”

That takes some getting used to for us old-timers, but not because we didn’t always tell our male friends that we loved them. We just did it in a different way.

At our recovery club, we had an old guy who died recently, and everybody misses him enormously. He would rather have died than say, “I love you, man.” But he said it all the time in his own way.

In fact, he had a separate-but-equal way of saying it.

When an old white buddy of his would come in, he would get around to looking at him for a minute and then say, “You know, you are the ugliest white man I ever saw in my life.”

On the other hand, when an old black buddy came in he would usually look at him a minute and say, “You are the ugliest man of color that was ever born.”

And what this meant was, “You don’t mind me saying that because you know I think the world of you.”

And he didn’t discriminate against women either. He referred to them as “You old bag.”

My brother will say, “Bob, comb your damned hair.” I’m 63 years old and he is older, and he is the only person who has the right to say that. He’s my brother.

It all means, “I love you, man.”

I just like the old way better.

This will sound like a cliché. But for me it has been basic to survival:

There is one friend you need in the world, and that is the one who looks back at you in your mirror. That is the person you are going to have 99% of your conversations with.

Level with him.

Everybody else is going to present a front to you. When you are about to do something dangerous, all the people around you are going to look brave compared to the quivering mass of jelly you know you are. But this macho crap is the least of it.

I have known war heroes who died because they could not live with themselves – many of them. After they won their medals they died of drugs or alcohol or suicide or killed themselves in other ways. It is a very common thing among war heroes. They have the kind of physical courage it takes to win medals but their weak point was moral courage.

There was a German who wrote, “If we treated anyone else the way we treat ourselves, we would be sadists.” That is very Germanic trait, and there is a lot that kind of German in people like those who read this blog. There is a hell of lot of it in me.

The reason psychopaths have such a huge advantage in our society is because a psychopath never blames himself for anything. You and I are the exact opposite, we blame ourselves for everything, no matter how hard we try to believe the “excuses” we make up.

They aren’t “excuses.” You don’t have anything like the power and wisdom you demand of yourself. You are being cruel to a person who screws life up in exactly the same way anybody else does. But since that person is you, you can’t excuse him.

You are surrounded by people who can explain to you how, though they like to make modest jokes about how they are merely human and are sometimes ridiculous, they are never really cruel or really wrong. You see me do it all the time. I know it is a form of self-defense, and the only difference is that I know I am being self-defensive.

One of my many psychiatric diagnoses is that I have a lot of “offensive” worries. This means exactly the opposite of what it sounds like. An “offensive” worry means that you are overly concerned about having hurt someone else. It would be better for me if I were more of a psychopath. A psychopath is incapable of “offensive” concerns.

Obviously if I had the answer to this problem I wouldn’t be writing this. Some things are incurable. But if you have something that is incurable you are going to have to live with it for the rest of your life, so you damned well better be aware, ALL the time, that you have it.

Forgive yourself, over and over and over and over.

You will be told that this is a license for you to let yourself go. I wish it were. The real fact is that no matter how hard people like you and me try, we will never forgive ourselves enough.