The Forge

So, i figured you might like to see a blog i started writing a while back that never ended up being posted. There aren't many of them, but they do exist: i get an idea, i start writing, and then eventually decide i'm just... "not feeling it." This one came to being around mid-May but never got published. Or, as you'll see, finished.

I saw a commercial this afternoon for a new anti-wrinkle injection procedure that "your doctor" can perform for you if you're the sort of person that prefers plastic to au naturale in the face department. The ad boasted something along the lines of, "Everyone will notice; nobody will know." Let's take a moment and reflect on the absurd paradox--no, not paradox because that word implies at least partial truth--let's reflect on the outright lie that the proponents of this procedure have projected. How, pray tell, could anyone radically alter their face and not expect to be noticed? And, moreover, how can you notice something without knowing it exists?

This aside, the truly irking fact is that the procedure, as well as a myriad of similar products, exists at all. Everyone over the age of, say, twenty is dreadfully concerned with how she looks and the first sign of aging (a, shall we say, natural phenomenon among human beings) indicates an immediate need for creams, gels and injections to remove those tell-tale signs from an otherwise 'perfect' face. And evidently this need to maintain a childlike face long after the vericose veins have begun to surface has been going on for quite some time; Creme de Vie claims that "the quest for a wrinkle-free face has been the holy grail since man started walking upright."

And it isn't just wrinkles that women are concerned with these days. Scars, pimples, blemishes--in a word, skin-- are all terrible problems and the solution is a pound or two of cosmetics. Unfortunately so many women these days are forgetting that the word cosmetics means agents that enhance beauty, not (as many advertisers would like us to believe) create it. I say this not because I wish to doom those that are helplessly dependent on makeup to a life of ugliness, but because I fear so many members of the "fairer" sex have forgotten what natural radiance is. In a world where capitalist monsters want you to believe that "lush, vivid lips" and "longer, thicker lashes" are the key to success and happiness, you've lost the ability to imagine beauty without these superfluous features.

The stories I hear sicken me. Women--wives, even--who wake up early just so they can "look good enough" when their partner wakes up, consequently creating a scenario in which a husband may not have seen his wife's true face in years. Teenagers committing suicide because the wonderful curse of acne was just too much to bear when mirrors (or people) were in proximity. And the result of all this forced doctoring is, unlike the beautiful world of stolen glances and heads-in-the-clouds promised by flashy ads, these victims of society lose sight of the...


So yeah, figured since i've got nothing to say and i'm dying in my dorm from this ridiculous extent of congestion, i'd be lazy and post something i'd already written. Hope it was worth it.