There’s a kinda unpretentious, sincere beauty to ugliness. Beauty’s not the word, but tenderness. The exposed lines of flesh, soft and blemished. Mismatched colours and textures, badly applied make-up, cowlicks and misused gel, fake luxury or nauseating ones, quiet shabbiness and tatters. Stretches, and wrinkles, scabs and dandruff, melting skin and broken teeth, dirty glasses and too-long nails. The ugly as that which halts and arrests you, grabs you with its garish, prickly, sweaty, fat fingers. It doesn’t force you to look, it would often rather you didn’t, but it is forceful in its stillness. A suspending, awkward unpleasantness instead of smooth and seamless aesthetics of beauty, or even its more magnificent iterations, the ugly doesn’t offer you easy answers or any, but a furtive middle-finger, or a yellowing smile. Ugly is a story and wants you to pry but not, it doesn’t hide exactly but like any cheap costume, reveals as much as it gaudily obfuscates. Ugly is true and it tries and it is weak and it is deadly and it is everywhere in the being of everyone, it is the bad lie that tells you everything, it is effort, and I love ugly people.