sometimes you
get lucky and observe
beauty in its
traditional form..
sunsets,
perfect humans. more often, such beauty is
absent and
life is hard, ugly, or
mundane. more often, you're required to seek out beauty, to press its
essence out of scenes that would be conventionally termed
plain or sad or dull. you can't do it quite as easily without a little
alcohol, every once in a while.
without alcohol (or other
controlled substance) your
consciousness becomes
planar, you get used to seeing the world a certain way and maybe there are
variations, but they're slight. it's the benefit of temporary
schizophrenia, a
debate between strangers all within your mind. that period spent as
a different sort of you allows
comparison and sometime during that comparison of subtley different
perceptions things are shaken loose,
hidden treasures of truth -
beauties.
you figure out
how beautiful and perfect it is to be tragic and obvious, that there's a
romance to
failure, to filth, to
decay and
the passing of years unnoted. more light gets in, when you're
drunk. you don't need a garden or a masterpiece to shout its
glory at you. you can hear the
old slow whispered beauty of the circle of sweat left by a drink on a wooden bar that needs refinishing. the
incongruous, the
anomalies, like the brush of fingers across your cheek - you see that they're all
beautiful, too.