You're Obsessed With Pretty

You're obsessed with pretty. I'm obsessed with pretty. We're obsessed with pretty. Shiny things, pretty things, things with bows. The obsession has grown to the point that we confuse pretty for important. We crave pretty things for ourselves, for our homes, the latest gadget, the latest toy, the latest piece of technology that makes the perfectly good technology we already have obsolete.

We go into debt for pretty. We feel bad about ourselves if we do not consider ourselves pretty relative to those around us. We are constantly battling, not for freedom or for knowledge, or for the deeper meaning of this fragile and oh so rare existence, but for trinkets and shiny things.

Why? Why is the human animal so largely obsessed with collecting pretty, as if the pretty might somehow rub off on us and make us pretty too? The television tells us which celebrities are pretty and we rush to be more like them. We style our hair, buy their perfume, pad our butts to, just for a minute, be prettier.

Then the fashion changes, and like rabid orienteering enthusiasts, we rush for another value of pretty. Another way point on the map of the fabric of fashion. This time the pants will be puffier, the sleeves will be shorter, the sunglasses will be larger and we will smile around smugly and congratulate ourselves on having reached the point before everyone else does and we must rush off once more to find a new bastion of pretty, an untapped source of pretty that has yet to be drained and made ugly by the masses.

We see the ugly, but we ignore it because the ugly doesn't make us feel good. The ugly seems too big, too overwhelming, too hard to change. The ugly is that which we cannot change, the essential nature of life and death, the fact that creation must constantly cannibalize parts of itself so that other parts can survive. We seek not the dark truth, but the pretty dream.

We seek pretty with such fervor that the dark creeps up from behind us and consumes us whilst we are not watching. We are dressed in our pretty clothes, circling around in a dark void we do not understand. Where did the horrid specter of terrorism come from? Did it emerge, fully formed one day in 2001? No, away from the sparkling lights and shiny things it had been brewing for decades, but we did not see it because it was not pretty. We only saw the monster when it swallowed us whole, and still we try our best to ignore it.

Although we are swimming in the belly of the beast we spin tales and dream dreams of pretty things once more.