Otherwise I have to face the most awful truth, that some human beings have everything all at once.
You’ve heard of doom scrolling (looking at traumatic content obsessively) but what about the compulsion to scroll through content hating it, but finding yourself unable to stop? What about this then? It’s the new guilty pleasure TV. The same way we watched The Brady Bunch in the 80s, and wished the kids would get cancer.
Hate scrolling. It’s toxic if expressed, a joy if enjoyed privately. Hate scrolling. It is hate too. Scary raw poorly managed hate.
It’s about me. Wanting them. Wanting what they have. Wanting to be beautiful. Wanting not to be me. But strangely if I had their shiny faces, eyelashes like feathers, lips like carved liver, I’d put it all to waste. I’m clumsy with beauty. And my own would be a calamity.
I want confirmation the world has some balance and some justice. If it appears someone is beautiful and also blessed with intellect, I need to know that they are flawed in some way. Otherwise I have to face the most awful truth, that some human beings have everything all at once.
I remember in my 20s, kissing beautiful strangers and thinking ‘please be dumb’.
I don’t think you can be beautiful and intelligent.
I often watch beautiful actors being interviewed and I can see their intellect has been cultivated in a mirror like gaining 20 extra pounds to play a bloated alcoholic, not proper intellect earned through years of rigorous learning. It’s law like physics. You can’t be beautiful and smart. It’s not the beautiful peoples’ fault either. Their beauty does the talking, while their brain lays dormant. In a room full of people they always seem to find a position where onlookers can admire them unobstructed, while the intellectual is always blocked by a head nodding or shoulders leaning in. The intellectual is often found lining up outside the loo too, reminding people of their position in the line up. Beautiful people don’t wait for the loo because they can always see when it’s free from the position they hold, up there. We allow them to perch in this position almost knowing subconsciously that the view should remain unobstructed, because everyone deserves a look.
Popular opinion states that beautiful people are intimidating so the crowd naturally parts when they float in, leaving them to perch in the ideal position for admiration. But this is not true. Crowds usher in beauty and hang it like art. It’s good for all of us to share and facilitate each other’s appreciation of beauty because it makes us feel good. Unlike the intellectual who will inevitably remind you (in the line up for the loo or in the kitchen scooping up hummus with a crisp, or leaning over a balcony flicking a cigarette) of something ugly, at some point. They can’t help themselves. When the beauty and the intellectual meet in a room, it can go either way. Mutual appreciation or long devastating silences where each thinks the other is playing some sort of game. Paranoia sets in. The beauty decides to go shopping in the morning and the intellectual decides to take drugs. Like physics, this is law.
In my life I’ve had the pleasure of loving a few beautiful men paid and unpaid, and after a while noticed a fascinating phenomena. As each beauty lost their hair or acquired a beer belly, they each picked up a book or enrolled in a course. As their beauty faded, their intellect flickered. Beauty and brains can never find a home together. The human body simply cannot contain both simultaneously.
An old man said to me once “when that square jaw of yours disappears into your neck, you might find time to read the classics”.