Scrutiny

No one can live up to the scrutiny the world requires.  Are people really worse now than decades ago?  Has there been no progress?
I think people are no worse.  I even think there's been progress.  But progress or no anyone, everyone, public eye or not, is under a microscope.  A 60 year old changing careers could have an unpaid parking ticket from their teens come back to steal their future. No matter what they made of themselves.  A person does wrongs all through their lives.  Other people are affected whether we're smart enough to realize it or not.  Whether forgiveness is asked or given or not eventually people move on.  But one day we could decide to take that thing we put behind us and pull it out.  Hold it against someone.  Get revenge.  Sometimes we are the perpetrators AND victims.  We dredge the past and decide we can't forgive ourselves. Whether ourselves or others when we pull it back out we call it justice.  It's not.  It's just vindictiveness.  And it's everywhere.   No single person out there will ever have every quality that "I" think is important ever including me.  If someone did happen to have them they surely wouldn't have "popped" into existence that way.  Their lives would been a travesty of mistakes, sins, misdeeds and wrongs when all laid out in one moment.  It seems there will never be tolerability in this world again.  The world is only tolerable within the walls of my own little world.  Going beyond them anymore is pointless.  If the world has not torn itself apart before the day I expire then let me not have to look at it.  Others can watch it burn.  I would rather sit in darkness because there I can at least have the light of my own thoughts.

Lies we tell ourselves

Uncle Rico bragged about his football prowess. 
Doesn't everybody brag?  Remember way back when the world hadn't beat them down and hope spewed forth from them like an open hydrant.
Take that into consideration when I say that those young days I see someone only tolerated.  Tolerated in choir because I could sing what needed to be sung.  Tolerated by friends who were at times amused at the lengths I would go to be liked.  A pet, a mascot.  Someone who could be talked into calling a bunch people to gang out when the others got bored and wanted a new scene. 
Of course, like all of us life only came to tear down what little confidence one has.
Uncle Rico may be stuck in the past but at least he was ON team.  He wasn't the mascot.
So I sit here now longing for the past when I didn't realize just how much I was merely tolerated.  I could pretend.