When I was a kid, I was a scab picker. Lots of those in the third grade, but I was the worst, I would get a scrape and it might not heal until a year or so later. Never really knew why I did it, might have been to keep my hands busy, might have been deep seated sub-conscious masochistic tendancies, I dunno. And you only ever remove so much of it, you never really dig in, just that surface layer, enough so you start bleeding just the tiniest bit. But it's something to think about, cause alot of kids do it, and I think it would be very telling to compare the psycholgical state of those kids years later as young adults. My theory is that those kids that never learned to just leave the damn scab alone will keep picking them for the rest of their lives, and not just the ones on their skin. I think they'll start picking at their emotional scabs too. I think that after a bad break up or a serious fight with their families or the loss of someone close, these kids will be picking and scratching at their heart strings until they get infected with it, until a band-aid and some neosporin just won't cut it.

So why do we do it? We know it hurts, we know it's bad for us, there are no concivable advantages to it, but we keep interfering with our natural healing. Might be one of the side effects to becoming a sentient species. Brain gets in the way of our animal nature. Might be that it seems so small a thing that we just start and never realize we never stopped. I do know that my heart hurts, and you can only romanticise that shit for so long before you realize that, at the end of the day, it's just pain and it's not pleasant.

If anyone finds a topical ointment for the soul, give me a heads up, huh?