Beauty, Utility, and the Protocols of May

There was this old house I used to frequent next door.  It was a stunning example of Depression era microarchitecture.  All the walls, including internal, were 2X6 studs (vs. the more common 2X4), latticed over with slat and plastered until the walls were nearly a foot thick.  The basement was austere, but well finished by hand labor and user designed.  Everything about the house was over-built.  Anywhere roughcut lumber would do, the owner/builder had personally inspected and dried true boards.  The attention to detail was startling when you’re used to the homebuilding practices of today, where a set of different contracters comes in like an assembly line every day with thoughts only of profitability.  It’s a small house, but still stand true without a single plaster crack or floor warp after 80 years.

It’s also beautiful.

I wonder, more today than other days, about my sense of beauty.  I can find one woman beautiful and her very similar, and by other’s acounts ‘hot’, friend to be easily ignorable. I have had girlfriends who turn heads other than my own wherever we went, but never piqued any real visual interest in me.

I have some sense of my own aesthetic value, and I know it’s quantifiably up there.  That isn’t meant as bragging at all, it’s just observable phenomena that plays into my general point. I have no problem attracting women, though I’m usually clueless when it happens without some other female pointing it out.

In the world of pure aesthetics, I would do well.  But as I have said, my aesthetic sense is skewed by some unknowable factor.  I find some women distinctly, devastatingly attractive. Those are the ones that ruin me.  Every goddamn time.

For a while, I dated only women I found moderately attractive.  It let me stay sane. Then there would be a trickling pour of beauty I would notice about them or in them and before long, I was as distinctly and devastatingly attracted to them as I would be to Rashida Jones if she were to get a PhD  in marine biology.

There are attractions that spark and immolate like a saffron robe covered in gasoline. There are those slow burning attractions that have to build and stoke.  It’s like a prairie fire verses a forge.

Prairie fires are an engine of evolution, it’s true.

Forges are beautiful inside. There is a survival utility about them.

Like hips on a woman.  Like the way she says your name different than all others. Like the way you know she could follow you anywhere.

Either way, you’re fucked.