I once read somewhere that people don’t judge others as harshly as people like to think they do. Teenagers, at least, are a prime example, with their intent belief in this myth. Adolescents are far too absorbed in themselves to really know what’s going on in the world around them, thinking they must be perfect for somebody, anybody, in order to obtain some sort of gratification. In fact, I used to be one of those people. At least up until I turned fourteen years old and I just stopped caring about frivolous things of that sort.

Before then, I was never brave enough to do things I actually wanted to do. My hair was long, as was fashionable and popular amongst my peers, though I could never get it to the pin-straight perfection they had it at; my hair always curled rebelliously. My clothes consisted of jeans and oversized t-shirts to make sure I didn’t stand out or make a spectacle out of myself. I was always quiet, because I was always used to my older brother talking and getting all of the attention. I thought that anything I might add to conversation might be extraneous information, and people would just glare at me in contempt, wondering where I had suddenly found the gall to taint their conversation with such words of seeming blasphemy leaking from the corners of my satanic mouth.

I can truthfully say that a man elicited my change, the coming out of my shell. No, this was not some sort of elicit love affair during a summer camp nor was he a teacher I had come across in school that had touched my soul so deeply with my lust for learning. I can also truthfully say that he was a poet and that he was rather fond of pornography. I knew him as PornoPoet.

In all honesty, PornoPoet changed my life and made me the person I am today, though I have never met him, and hope that I shall never meet him still. He is a disgusting middle aged man that I found on a blogging website I used to frequent, who posts pictures of himself naked from the waist up in a public blog called “Long Haired Men.” These pictures seem to be the object of eternal lust from middle aged ladies who long for their smutty-romance-book-cover hero, though are chained down to Sensible Henry the Accountant in wedded bliss. PornoPoet has no qualms with showing his sweaty, flabby body, his long, wretched mane, or the heart he routinely shaves into his kinky chest hair to anybody willing to find him on the internet. The day my eyes first beheld PornoPoet I realized something.

My hair looked just like his.

The fact that I in any way resembled someone who I found so utterly grotesque filled my entire being with an intense feeling of self deprecation. I thought that if I saw myself in this way, then others must find my appearance as lethal to the eyes as I found PornoPoet’s to mine. Just as Jesus knew he was the son of God, I knew something of myself: it was time for a change. The next day I went to a salon and I asked the hairdresser to hack off a good foot and a half of my hair. I think the reason for my shy demeanor before was because my hair was weighing my skull down into my brain, denying it the normal thinking process other brains are subject to on a daily basis.

Yeah, I got a compliment here and there for my “life-changing” decision, but really, people were too busy primping and preening themselves to care what I did. So I figured I’d try to push the envelope to grab the attention from the people who ignored me.

What I learned from there on out was a major lesson in human nature: no matter what one does, nobody gives a damn. I tested this theory through an array of experiments. The most famous of these experiments was when I wore a mini skirt after not shaving my legs for a good week and a half, leaving them with deliciously long stubble. When nobody noticed a thing, my results were conclusive. This is a dog-eat-dog world we live in, and nobody will ever be concerned about what one does or how one acts, despite what lengths one goes through to get that kind of attention.

What I am now asking of whomever is reading this is for everyone to become their own PornoPoet and do whatever it is that makes them happy. As that band I truly dislike, Kansas, put it, our lives are merely dust in the wind. All we are is dust in the wi-i-i-nd. Life is too short to worry about how one looks today when one might not even live to see the morrow. If today was one’s last day on earth, I’m sure one wouldn’t waste it smothering concealer over a pimple or wishing that certain bodily appendages were larger. One would just go live. Because remember, nobody gives a damn about you except yourself.