Blue fountain

While I was at my family reunion, some cousins and aunts and I went on a shopping pilgrimage. One place had this awful fountain outside of it... with water dyed dark blue. My 14-yr old cousin, Hannah, and I were pretty grossed out. But I think the owners meant for the fountain to look beautiful.

The food in grocery stores is always perfect-looking - and you don't want to know what they have to do to make it all look that way. Why do we have to have everything look so excessively beautiful? Here are the tomatoes I picked yesterday from my Dad's garden (they away on vacation). They ain't pretty, but they taste amazing:

Maybe life is ugly, so we try to make as many other things beautiful as we can, and we shy away from the things that remind us that life is suffering, and that we're all going to decay and die. An ethics professor I had once said that people understood death much better before refrigeration. Maybe before we started living in the suburbs, too. Now we're sheltered from a lot of ordinary ugliness. Do we expect life to be the same way? Are we ruffled by ordinary ugliness, or the lack of perfect, unadulterated happiness in our lives? Do we get angry with ourselves because we don't have a life like a perfect tomato? Or a dyed blue fountain?

All I know is that I find that I can't stop thinking about how I'm going to spend the real paycheck I hope to be making sometime this year - on new clothes, a new car, a new cell phone, new housewares, new shoes... that will all make my life better. So there you go.