Dusk; another wonderful day ends in corporate America. The sky is on fire with reds yellows and purples, or golds and royal plums if you like. The chemicals dumped into the sky by the industries that bring you everything you love make the sunset as glorious as the amazing life you live on the backs of peasants. Your masters in the oligarchs are pleased with your contentedness…
But lo, what is this? Across the twilight sky arcs a brilliant flash of light. What is it? You have no idea, maybe an airplane, maybe a meteor, a bolide, maybe an alien in a spacecraft. You don’t know what it is, so it is an unidentified flying object. The irony here is that you’ve given it a name, even though you don’t know what it is, so you can return to the task of removing your workshop pajamas, to put on your nightclub pajamas, in the hopes of meeting someone and eventually waking up next to them in your birthday pajamas.
A UFO, then, is just a way to explain something away. A lightning bolt kills your favorite sheep, you need to believe it happened for a reason, lest you becoming bogged down in an existential depression. So you invent and blame gods. A light flashes in the sky, and you need to make sure it’s not a hallucination, lest that good looking sex-companion in the designer pajamas turns out just to be a figment of your imagination as well. So it is a UFO.
The thing is, you are Ugly, Fat, and Old. You are a UFO as well.
I happen to know, for fact, that you’re not really ugly. You may not be on the cover of magazines, you may not star in movies, but you are not ugly. The lack of prettiness that you think you possess is not your sole identifying feature. When people think of you, you are not filed, in the network of memories their brains maintain, under connotations of ugly. I know this for a fact.
Same for how fat you are. Maybe you don’t have an athlete’s body. You’re not appearing on a box of Wheaties any time soon. According to that work of fiction called “BMI,” you are technically “overweight.” But again, the sum total of your being, in the hearts and minds if your friends and family and even the people who don’t like you, cannot be captured in the word “fat.” Maybe you think you could lose a few pounds. But you do not personify Platonic “fatness.”
And then there’s your age. Sorry, you’re not “old,” either. Age is relative—a mayfly is “old” after only 20 hours. A tortoise is not “old” even after 75 years. If you think you’re “old” it’s because of context, and trust me, there are much “older” people in the same contexts. You’re maybe not the youngest, but you certainly don’t represent all of the negatives attributes associated with “old.”
But you still consider yourself a UFO—why? Because that’s how you explain things, how you explain why you’re so unhappy, why you can’t have the things you think you want. You see what corporate America feeds you: visions of success from hard work, and the rewards are pretty, slender youths. Again with the irony—nobody who works as hard as we’re expected to work stays pretty, fit, or young. Nobody.
What am I asking you to do, here, is to quite calling yourself ugly, fat, and/or old, because every time you do, you are accepting the gestalt that your slave owners are foisting on you. The problem is, you’re a slaveowner too—you too benefit from the hard work that the unrewarded poor contribute to our gross national product. If you justify your misery by calling yourself a UFO, you also justify the crimes you commit against the poor. Stop making excuses. Accept how gorgeous you are. Own it, and let it motivate you to go get the things you deserve. The final irony: if you do, you’ll be stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. That flash in the night sky was just your imagination, internal inspiration, a spark urging you to recontextualize your existence.