I love how the universe brings me to the topics I want to cover. This article is all about being beautiful people and what that truly means. I didn’t get this from my little flip book. I got this from a Matthew Lillard clip on TIK TOK. 

I’m a die hard Scream fan. I love those movies. With Scream 7 recently hitting theatres, you can bet your ass I dragged my step daughter to the theatre on night one. Because of this excitement and obsession, my algorithm is all things Scream.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhV-ltzpGW8

The clip that came my way was from a show called Mythical Kitchen. Matthew Lillard plays Stu Macher in the first an 7th scream films, but most know him as Shaggy from the Scooby Doo films. I loved him in Without A Paddle, a film that means a lot to me because it’s a film than my father and I bonded over at a time when we weren’t all that close. 

In the clip, Lillard gets emotional about how he noticed in history class that his mother wasn’t going to be a part in history and that she would be forgotten. Her response was that her children would be her history. Lillard then parlays that into explaining how all he wants is for his children to be beautiful people. 

As a father, it hit me deep to my core. When I look at my son’s beautiful brown eyes, I am overcome with my love for him.

It’s my job to shape his young brain, and all I want is for him to become a beautiful person. 

I am so proud of my step daughter lately. She’s done so much work on herself and the other day she told me how much she loves making strangers smile. If she sees a woman in a dress she thinks is cute, she goes out of her way to tell her.

It also made me think about my mother and how I believe that was her plan for me. Being a beautiful person doesn’t have anything to do with looks to me. It has to do with how you try and make the world a better place. A more beautiful place. 

A few articles ago, I wrote about how to make a difference. Basically I was steering others to do random acts of kindness from time to time and how that can legitimately make a difference in somebody’s day and even life. 

As a society, we’ve gotten away from the things that made the world a beautiful place. we don’t know our neighbours anymore. We’re divided by religion and politics. We’re more selfish. We don’t prioritize community as much as we used to. 

I can do more for certain, and I have made efforts to do more. Now I am not virtue signalling at all, and I’ll prove it; when I’m behind the wheel, I am kind of an asshole. I have a road rage. If another driver is not moving during a merge and treating it like a yield, I want to rub their noses on their windshields hypothetically. That’s not the trait of a beautiful person. I need to work on that. 

However, one thing that I do every single day of my life, is I speak and smile to strangers when I’m out and about. Tiny small talk and brightening somebody’s day. The other day a lady needed help reaching something on the top shelf while I was in a grocery store. I was happy to help and made a comment on how CT crunch is too delicious to be on the top shelf. We laughed and smiled together. 

If I overhear somebody’s conversation and I can be a part of it, I get excited to engage in their conversation. At the Scream 7 movie, it’s likely that I annoyed a lot of people in line, but the cashier was also a huge fan and we discussed our favourite ghost faces from the movies. 

On my way home from work one day, I saw an old lady who got her Van stuck in the snow. I have a tow rope, so I hopped out and offered to help her. I asked how long she had been there and she said 15 minutes. It made me sad how many people passed by without even stopping to see if she was okay. Where I’m from, almost everybody drives a truck and has a tow rope, so I know there were people who could’ve helped who didn’t. What a shame. 

I have never been the type to put somebody down, especially as an adult. As a kid I did partake is some group bullying and it still haunts me to this day. 

Now, I do enjoy playful ribbing of friends, and joking around, but even that sometimes doesn’t feel right. I truly want to prop everybody up. If we all did that universally can you imagine how motivated we’d be to achieve all we desire?

Being a musician in a town with tons of fellow musicians, it’s easy to be competitive. I’ve never won anything even though I believe I was worthy of winning many competitions (and trust me, I also know the ones I’ve competed in where I was horrible).

I think back to the time I placed 2nd at a local singing competition and how every one of the contestants spent a lot of time together hanging out and by the time our final performances started, we were all cheering for one another. Genuinely.

While I don’t think I have any best friends, I know for a fact that I have a lot of friends in general. I’m proud of the fact that I have been in over 12 wedding parties. I like to think it’s because I am a beautiful person. 

Like Matthew Lillard noted, a lot of us won’t be in the history books, but if we do good in the world and it spreads, that’s worth being in this life.

My mother died at 40. I still remember everything about her distinctly. She’s in my history and I live my life being the human she taught me to be. She raised me to have a big heart and that’s never wavered. I will always try to be a more beautiful person and I will be teaching my children the same thing. 

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, quoting that amazing Chuck Wicks song “you can’t imagine all the mountains we’d move if we loved, if we loved a little harder.”