When a slug makes its way across the ground, does anyone look at the trail it leaves and think "that is beautiful"?
Truly there are all kinds of weirdos out there so somebody probably does. My Uncle Milbert was that kind of guy. He though all kinds of things were fascinating and beautiful.
He was a steel smeltig man who worked at Sloss Furnace in Birmingham Alabama. He was interested in all kinds of metallurgy and at every family get together you could find him engaging anyone who would listen, discussing the merits of iron versus aluminum. The thing you had to be certain to know was that they were both fantastic in their own rights.
Milbert thought slugs were beautiful, and steel was amazing, and humans could learn to be more virtuous if they would study some of the properties of paint.
Some people could never hit it off with him though, because he held a contemptuous view of activities that were distracting or primitive or wasteful. A couple of the things that fell into this category were fireworks, icecream, love, and shooting stars.
Fireworks released pollutants when they exploded. They were noisy, and left a mess to clean up afterwards. I kind of agree with him about that actually.
Icecream did not hold many vital nutrients and was an excess of sugar you could intake to pretend you were having a great day.
Love? I think he was just bitter because he could not have it. Nobody was stopping him from having it necessarily but any girl who got a whiff of what he was cooking ran the other way.
Shooting stars were almost okay - at least for us today they were fine. The problem is that man was not meant to live on one planet alone, and eventually we would go out into the big open sky and what would we find? Space dust everywhere. A giant open expanse carpet littered with space dust. Shooting stars were just the dust mites of the carpet of space. They flew around burning and shedding more and more debris.
In Uncle Milberts opinion if man could not figure things out quick enough, by the time we got to living on other planets, our astral super highways might be filled with just as much debris as Gaia was.
When Uncle Milbert died we added him to the community compost heap, and made a donation to a local homeless shelter which eventually got bought out and destroyed for the land it was on. Nobody can stand to visit Uncle Milbert because of the smell the heap and the relative filth of the area. The land for the homeless shelter was eventually renovated into a strip mall and whenever I go there I think of my uncle.
