The World Hates Ugly People

The next time someone asks you to live long enough to blow a thousand candles, shoot them.

Old age sucks. When you are a 99-year-old, toothless, has-been snoring in the backyard in diapers, everyone, including yourself, starts wondering what the heck you are still doing around here.

You can’t enjoy a cigarette. A stiff shot of whisky would send you straight to the morgue. You have no teeth for chewing fatty roast meat. And the young pretty lass with a firm behind walking down the road could as well be a goat. Of what use is life then?

But in the unfortunate event that you live that long, and assuming that you retain a brain cell or two for memory, you will discover there are four things you haven’t seen: An ugly bride, an ugly baby, an ugly pastor and an ugly president.

We hate ugly people. That is the truth. You will never hear it whispered in a church, mosque or witchdoctor’s hut, but humanity discriminates against ugly people more than it scorns (at least in Africa) gays, women, integrity and clean public toilets.

Have you ever seen women swooning around an ugly baby, posing for photos, giving it lipstick-coloured double pecks and perfumed hugs?

I suspect ugly babies are hidden from sight, in the manner children with severe disability are tucked away in the darkest room of the house and only whispered about.

It isn’t that easy to make an ugly baby anyway. Boys in the estate don’t hover around the gate where the worst-looking broad in the neighbourhood lives. They don’t chase her like a pack of salivating wolves, even if she has a brain the size of a tractor engine.

Even before the Stone Age, it was always that girl with sleepy eyes. The one with juicy lips. The one with long legs, a sculpted butt and breasts so full they were to blame for all the bent lampposts on the road. All of the 40 boys in the estate would go chasing Sheila everywhere, but not that sorry-looking lass who was christened Anaconda by her daft mum after something she saw on television.

Go back to your school days. Teachers pet, remember? He or she was always tiny and so pretty or handsome it hurt. They always smelt fresh, even after fooling around on the pitch after school break. Clean clothes, fresh breath, not a hair out of place. Oooh, how Teacher loved them!