An essay about my love for the physically and morally repugnant, and some sort of weak attempt at justifying/explaining it, in the context of knowing with some certainty that not everyone considers this interest/attraction "normal". Published on Heathen Harvest, gently edited by Sage Weatherford.
"Some of us seem drawn to ugly art, strange music, and real-life
depravity, and some of us don’t. I have an inkling that the two are
related (being drawn to ugly strangeness in sound/vision, and being
interested in ugly strangeness in real life), but of course nothing is
ever actually that simple, and I definitely know people who refuse to
watch scary/freaky movies but insist on weird/noisy music at all times,
so I’m pretty sure whatever conclusions I come up with will be highly
variable in their personal mileage, and the whole
lumping-this-all-together thing I’m attempting here may very well be a
terrible mistake. But, well, I’m going to attempt it anyway."