Day #86: You're Not Going to Monologue Your Way Out of This One

The title of this post may be the scariest thing I have ever heard:

"You're not going to monologue your way out of this one, Broccoli."

In an effort to be more proactive, I decided that I should start making amends with people I've wronged in the past.

Unfortunately, that would probably take another one hundred days.

So instead, I focused on the one that bothers me the most.

After a series of bad decisions, my friend Evan and I no longer talk, and it's been that way for about a year now.

I never actually outright apologized to Evan, so I figured as soon as I did, I'd be good to go.

(Yup, I actually thought that. Sorry to those of you who considered me a step above caveman.)

Maybe it's because, for the most part, I'm fairly quick to forgive. When you've spent most of your life screwing up, the one virtue you receive is forgiveness.

When Evan didn't respond to my e-mail asking for his forgiveness, I decided to take the advice I posted on here a few days ago and just give him time.

Of course, while I was doing that, I thought I could help things along.

I wrote a post I knew Evan would like called "Every Other Sunday." It had the sort of style and subject matter he responds to.

After I posted it, I sat back and waited for him to come around, because I know he reads most of what I post.

That's when I got the message:

"You're not going to monologue your way out of this one."

It's scary because I fall into that old problem writers, artists, and other people who create anything have:

Sometimes we believe that making art excuses us from having to act like decent human beings.

If you watch the news, you see celebrities behaving badly all the time and receive forgiveness as soon as their next movie hits number one or they make one witty talk show appearance.

So you learn to believe that you can just be an ass when you feel like it as long as you paint something really pretty the next day.

And it doesn't always work that way. Maybe it shouldn't ever work that way.

I guess there's no monologue good enough to fix what you've done when you hurt somebody.