Edgar Allan Poe said something to the effect of writers being unable to put truth to paper, because truth defies being put down to paper easily. It might well be true. It's sure not easy to write something that stands as fiction or even journalism or a poem or a lyric, that also shares so much with the real world. All verisimilitude in the arts is a kind of fabrication, an elaborate artifice, a dirty ruse and a fine line of spun bullshit. As such, the kinds of truth that writers might want to write into their work may either be truthiness with a dash of embellishment, or facts with a dose of editorial fondling. In any case, working in any kind of arts project has a way of precluding one from truth being put into the work.
In turn, there is something to the truth presented in things like honest testimonies of genuine horrors. You only have to read the accounts of people who fell victim to terrible things like the Holocaust or randy Catholic Priests or Genocide, or brutal white police beating up on indigenous peoples in custody. There is no adornment to their accounts - Artifice, or simply arti-ness subtracts from the power of such testimony. The honest blunt truth is not an artistic thing.
So I guess that's just a preamble to the fact that this tracks called 'My Only Regret' but that's one of those adornments to get the song over the line. It's natural in life to have lots of regrets. It's only in the Arts that we get to take the radical pose that perhaps we only have one thing that we regret in life. If we're going for even more truthiness, I can't really say I regret this one thing all that much. People can be really shitty to one another when they split up. One can't go around judging people by the way they treat you when they part company with you.
Such is life.
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