It might not seem like I am fan of beauty.

Things I have advocated for in this blog:

• building a guillotine for using on police
• making post-modern art
• enjoyment of morbidity
• being ugly
• anarcho-primitivism
• being childish
• being homeless
• doing parkour, especially badly
• eating dirt
• urban blight
• drinking Redbull
• fickleness
• laughing at the pain of strangers
• vandalism
• dancing badly
• laziness
• using plastic as a food ingredient
• incorrect taxonomy
• idolizing recklessly violent individuals
• quitting your job if they don’t let you wear wet clothes
• indulging depressive impulses
• publicly making a fool of yourself
• being a Juggalo

How can a person who advocates for these horrors claim to be an aesthete?

Easy. By holding two contradictory opinions at the same time.

I genuinely believe in the human need to strive for beauty and orderliness and harmony, and I genuinely believe that exhibiting chaotic behavior is fun and worthwhile and meaningful.

I’m not saying “I was only joking.” I meant that stuff. I am like an onion, remember? Layers.

And now I’m saying that beauty is fun too.

Beautiful things that are fun

I love lists. Such a fabulously lazy way to write.

• a perfectly ordered bookshelf
• cleanliness
• beautifully presented food
• neoclassical architecture
• literary fiction
• healthiness
• sharing things with loved ones
• maternity
• childhood
• science
• ASMR
• taking responsibility
• laughter

How I learned to freely self-contradict

I read a book called “Pretty Shield: Medicine Woman of the Crow,” which is a biography of a Crow woman that was written by an English man, by writing down the sign-language translation of her story. So it was translated twice - from Crow to sign-language, and sign-language to English. As you can imagine, there is quite a bit of controversy in the Crow community about this book’s accuracy.

We don’t know what parts of it are real and which parts of it are misunderstandings.

I was on high alert when I read it.

In one part of the book, when she is describing her tribes social structure, she said that the men were the hunters and warriors, and the women did the safer jobs like processing the prey, making shelter, moving housing from one location to the next, keeping the animals, and preparing food.

In another part of the book she tells a story about when she was 5 years old, she got her first “own” horse and her first bow and arrows. She hopped on her horse with her friend and they hunted a baby bison together, successfully. They turned this bison into meat, leather for a child-sized tent, and other goodies. The adults around her beamed with pride.

So the men are the hunters, but the adults allow, and are proud of a 5 year old girl hunting.

Which one of these are true: both, one, the other, or neither? We’ll never know.

But what if both are true? What if it was men’s role to hunt, and people who were not men hunted? A contradiction!

Can it be fine? Can two contradictory statements be true? What if we just say “yes.” What if we just let it be true?

Nothing happens. It’s literally fine. Try it!