How do I look?

I'm really not one to harp upon my physical appearance. You will note that what I look like has only been the subject of one post during my entire tenure here at That Good Night, and even then, I was making a South Park avatar.

I am not overly thrilled with the way I look. I don't consider myself ugly by any stretch; by the same token, if I make the conscious effort to think about the way I look and compare it to my fuzzy mental ideals, I don't stack up all that well. My eyebrows are a little too Andy-Rooney-esque, my physique manages to be both scrawny and flabby, my skin is sickly white, my smile is horribly thin and creepy, and there's hair everywhere I really don't need hair to be. I mean really people, hair on toes and the space between the knuckle joints on my fingers? Hair all over my forearms? That's just stupid. Also, the hair on my head has a mind of its goddamn own, so forget salvaging the headshot with a good cut.

I'm also non-photogenic to the extreme. Given the heartwarming description above, you may think to yourself "well no shit Sherlock," but when I say I am non-photogenic (or would it be unphotogenic?) I am objectively comparing the hard-knocks reality of what I look like in Real Life World to my doppelganger in Photo and Video World. It's bad news upon bad news.

In spite of all of this, or because of it, or both, I don't pay much attention to my appearance. I don't make any concerted effort to improve it. I'll run a brush or comb through my hair in the morning, shave when it really needs doing, and try not have food and shit all over my face and hands, etc. etc. But I absolutely will not get sucked into the black hole of Fashion, or dedicate greater and greater chunks of my time to grooming and preening. I can't do it. I don't like myself nearly enough to want to sculpt my body into something more attractive.

It's become clearer and clearer to me, however, that my stubborn refusal to engage in this particular game has cost me dearly. Raise your flags for feminism and equality, for honesty and kindess and intelligence being more important than looks, for the nice guys to not finish last and the meek to inherit the earth. Shout from the rooftops that engaging someone as a person is the wave of the future, and treating people like sex objects is a cro-magnon throwback.

Sing it loud and proud, drop the pamphlets, write the manifestos. I don't believe a word of it anymore. If there is one thing that defines the overwhelming majority of the human race in the modern age, it is their utter failure to transcend their instincts. They fuck like rabbits when their land is overpopulated, suck down fat and salt and sugar like all three will disappear tomorrow, kill each other over fairy tales and hunt out their mates with the unconscious mandates of their great-great-off-to-umpteen grandparents coursing through the veins and swimming in their brains:

Am I different? Probably not. But for all the birth-lotteries that I have won, for every unfair advantage I have stumbled into through no effort or fault of my own, in this realm, the realm of appearance and attraction, I am one of life's losers. My bitterness at my perpetual loss and failure has driven my intellectual efforts to understand that behavior of the hapless human race around me. I can pass this wisdom on to the losers of the future: understanding is not always forgiveness, and it is not always love. Sometimes what our eyes open to is nothing more than heartache and tragedy - a hot human mess.

Oh, by the way - I had a beard for about five months. Today I shaved the whole thing off. Thought I'd tell the internet.

Every girl I've met will say I'm great;
They'll tell you I'm the kind of guy
that any other girl should date.