Musings from the Shitter: Volume Sixteen

In which football is briefly benched, and something heavier takes the pitch.

Right…so usually, these musings spiral (or stagger) around football…my team, the beautiful game, the not so beautiful bits of it, the tribalism, and the soul sapping banality of mid table mediocrity. The usual.

But not this one.

This one veers. Swerves. Takes the off ramp into something messier, more human, and frankly less enjoyable than a 3-2 away win on a wet Saturday. It’s not about football at all. No red cards, no dodgy referees, no "we go again next week." It’s about fucking up. And what happens after. Or doesn’t.

Now…if you're already rolling your eyes, waiting for the punchline, there isn't one. This isn’t some tidy parable dressed in sports metaphor. This one comes from the same place…literally, physically, yes, the loo…but also from that low, unvarnished part of the mind where you actually think, stripped of the daily bullshit and whatever curated version of yourself you feed the world.

There’s still a kind of observation here, sure…still a musing. Just not the kind that ends with a scoreline.

Read it if you want. Or don’t.
This is volume sixteen.
Still from the same seat. Just a different kind of game.

Everyone does dumb shit. And not just “oops” dumb or “whoopsie daisy” dumb but the kind of dumb that seems engineered by some feral, attention starved inner saboteur that lives inside all of us, the one that whispers "this is a great idea" just before the leap off the roof or the third bottle of cheap vodka or, say, bleaching your friend’s asshole because you said you fucking would. (Let’s just sit with that image for a second...a moment that feels like a dare disguised as camaraderie, which is really just nihilism doing its best impression of intimacy.)

We laugh. Of course we do. Because absurdity is the last form of catharsis we have left in a world that’s basically a chaos engine painted over with wellness slogans and home loan ads. We laugh at the dumb shit because otherwise we’d have to admit how close we are, all of us, to doing something equally idiotic, equally self-imploding, equally us.

But dumb shit bites back. Dumb shit is like a slow burning fuse you didn’t realise you lit. It might look like a bellyflop at first, but eventually, you notice something worse…bruises that don't heal right, friends that ghost you, consequences that whisper like ghosts in the hallways of your life. Jumping off the roof and missing the pool…that’s just Darwinism. But what about the dumb shit that bleeds onto someone else?

That’s where it all shifts. That’s where justice enters the chat.

See, there’s a flavor of dumb that stops being funny. It stops being absurd and starts becoming a slow, cowardly violence. It’s the kind of dumb that doesn’t just fuck you over…it burns someone else’s house down while you were playing with matches and telling yourself it was “just a spark.” That’s not the kind of mistake people forgive with a chuckle and a sticky plaster. That’s the kind where people want answers. Justice. And not the kind handed down by robed institutions, not always, but the deeper kind…the human kind. The "make it make sense" kind.

And in that mess…somewhere between apology and accountability…I find myself stuck.

Because I want justice. I do. It makes the world feel like it’s not spinning off its axis in the middle of some moral black hole. But I also want people to be better. Like, genuinely better. I want those who get pulled out of the fire not to go right back in, but to feel the burn, carry the burn scars, and walk forward differently. Not a second chance. Not a redemption arc. Just… a goddamn crutch. Something real to lean on while they limp toward something resembling humanity again.

And that requires something rarer than gold or clean drinking water…actual accountability.

Because forgiveness? Yeah. I don’t know. It’s become one of those words that got chewed up by self help books and podcasts hosted by dudes who look nothing like my friends and call it “inner work.” Most people don’t ask for forgiveness…they ask for image rehab. They want to say sorry in a way that makes them feel better. They want closure as a performance, not a reckoning.

But when I do see something real…and I mean rare as fuck…it’s when someone who fucked up in a way that scorched the earth behind them finally, finally lets the enormity of what they did hit them like a truck going 100 into a brick wall.

Not the “I’m sorry you were hurt” bullshit.

I’m talking about the kind of sorry that drags your shame into the daylight and forces you to live with it. Sorry that leaves a scar. Sorry that makes your hands shake when you say it because you know it’s not enough. And it never will be. But you say it anyway. Because the person you hurt deserves that much.

It’s not about repairing the damage…you can’t. It’s about carrying it with you, like some fucked up backpack filled with all the broken pieces you left in your wake.

And in that…if you can stomach it…you start to see the first twitch of something human. Something almost holy. Not because anyone forgave you, but because you finally stopped forgiving yourself for free.

But most of us? We're too high up on our fucking horses to even see the ground, let alone eat shit on it.

We live in a time where judgment is currency, and everyone’s rich. We’re addicted to the high of watching someone fall, because it reminds us…falsely…that we’re still standing. But the truth is, we’re all one step away. One dumb, selfish moment away from being the villain in someone else’s story.

And here’s the thing…coming back from that isn’t glamorous. It’s not some montage with sad music and tearful apologies and rain soaked reunions. It’s a crawl. Through broken glass. Alone. No applause. No redemption points. Just silence…and your own mess. And the choice…clean it up… or rot in it.

Most people rot.

Because change…the real kind…isn’t aesthetic. It’s bone marrow deep. It’s painful. It’s boring. It’s fucking humiliating. It means dismantling who you thought you were, brick by brick, until you’re left with nothing but the blueprint of the person you might become if you’re lucky, and brave, and willing to be deeply, uncomfortably honest.

But hey, the horse is high. The air’s thin. And the fall? The fall is long. So we stay up there…judging, deflecting, posting #growth while refusing to bleed even a drop of actual truth.

Because it’s safer than the dirt.