Beauty is Imperfection

(Originally posted Wednesday, November 28, 2007)

Remember when you did your hair up like Flock of Seagulls back in the ’80s? Ick! What were we thinking?

Remember when you begged your mom to make your hair big and buy you stone-washed jeans? What could possibly have been going through our minds?

Remember when you thought “Flatliners” was the best movie of 1990? Eww! What were we thinking, man?

Remember when you used to drunk dial an old boyfriend from a bar and he’d hang up on you and so you’d go home with a stranger and catch a raging case of the syph? Arg!! What were we thinking?

Remember when you got your genitals pierced and they started weeping pus? Not just regular pus, but kind of a red-whitish-gray kind of pus? What could we have been smoking?

Remember in Honduras when we drank that home-made aguardiente laced with radiator fluid and went blind? What could we have freakin’ been thinking about, Ese?

Remember when you thought you could save your marriage by going on Jerry Springer and instead you got into a fistfight with your wife’s new boyfriend and he kicked your punk ass on television while a chorus of nimrods yelled “Woo woo woo”? What was running through our heads?

Remember when you ignored all those smart, rational and dependable women because you wanted to wait for Uma Thurman, even though she was already married and not anywhere close to being in your league? Did somebody hit us with a stupid stick or what?

Remember when you borrowed home equity to buy a plasma screen TV as big as a swimming pool when at the same time you couldn’t be bothered to put $80 a month into a retirement plan that would generate double-digit compound returns? Were our heads just glued to our asses or what?

Remember when you smoked cigarettes through all nine months of your pregnancy and the baby came out all super-tiny and asthmatic? Ecchhh!! What could we have had running through our noggins?

Remember when you thought Ronald Reagan was so nice and wanted to help the working man, and now after 25 years in this pro-corporation enviroment he’s created, workers have no defined benefit pensions and no job security and no decent public schools and their income is lower than gerbil squat, so they have to work three jobs if they have a family? What kind of calculus were we doing on that one?

Remember when the U.S. had all the creole pigs in Haiti killed because of an irrational fear of African swine fever, wrecking the peasant economy in the process? What were we sniffing?

Remember when we thought 9/11 justified anything we did to anybody? Were we smoking crack?

Remember when we thought George Bush seemed like an easygoing guy, a real mensch, just like the rest of us, even though he was actually a rich, upper class privileged prep school scumbag twit who, very much unlike the rest of us, has spent his entire life being rewarded every time he makes a mistake, much like a toddler who is being toilet trained? Was there acid in our water supply or something? What were we thinking?

Remember the last time you did something smart? I don’t either. The smart things we do are never quite as memorable. Sigh.