Tag Archives: depression

June 20, 2016 · 2:30 pm

You and Whose Army

A flat, in theatre terms, is a set of two-by-fours in the shape of a rectangle, 8 or 10 feet tall, with one side covered in plywood or muslin. They’re painted over and over again, fitted together on a stage in configurations necessary to give the impression of the walls of a house, or the sky behind a barn, or whatever else it is that’s needed to convey to the audience that what’s in the background is a real thing and not a bunch of plywood and paint. The back of a flat is basically an unfinished frame, the edges of boards sticking out. One of these was lying flat side down on the floor backstage during a rehearsal for The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940, at Southeastern Illinois College, in the early spring of 2002. I played a cross-dressing murderous maid in the play, and wore a terrible, thousand-year-old dirty blonde wig with the appearance and the texture of a really old scrubby sponge. I was pulling it onto my head, running from one side of the stage to the other, in the pitch black behind the little false sitting room, made of flats painted pink, that made up the set. I barely felt something hit my toe, then I was going down hard, flying forward to meet the ground, and landed smack dab in the middle of the flat on the floor. The edge of the two-by-four in the center of the flat collided with my right thigh muscle. For weeks, I had a dark bruise the size of my wide open hand, running sideways across my thigh.

I complained about it a whole lot, surely. It hurt! Also you could totally see it under my dark black tights I had to wear for the entirety of the play. It was unmistakable: a big raised black/blue area, which eventually turned to purple, then faded to green, then yellow, and finally went away. The thing is, it’s still there, I see it every time I’m in a yoga class and I go into downward dog. I’m face to face with my thighs in tight pants and I can see the depression, the area of my leg that looks like a bit’s been scooped out with a ladle. Oh, hello, Imperfection! There you are. And look at that: you’ve positioned yourself right above the stubby little scar left behind from the time I attempted to make Barbie a t-shirt with an old sweatshirt and my mother’s sharpest sewing scissors and ended up stabbing myself in the leg, then running around in circles making the stab hole bigger! Then getting stitched up by some half-drunk dope in the shittiest small-town emergency room in the world, ending up with a scar that looks like a puffy, sick caterpillar!

(The doctor used some kind of thick, hooked needle to stab seven or eight tiny holes in my leg around the cut, then connected the holes together. As the cut healed, a little chasm formed between the two sides, a chasm that filled with scar tissue and became a scar the size and thickness of my pinky finger. There are even scar marks where the stitches went in, so incompetent was this guy. If a kid suffered this injury today, and went to an emergency room that was better prepared for injuries of this type, she’d get more than a few stitches to hold the wound all the way closed, and end up with a smaller scar. They told me, when I asked about scarring, already concerned in second grade about marks that don’t go away, that the scar would get smaller and smaller, and eventually move up my leg as I grew, as if the skin on my legs would stretch like leggings, until the scar would disappear into my crotch. That didn’t happen. It stayed right where it was.)

HELLO MY NAME IS SKITTLES

When the flat, uh, flattened my leg, I felt the same panic I felt when I’d cut that leg open years before. There was something about these injuries that scared and disappointed me. I was cartwheeling through life, destroying my body, screwing it up. It wouldn’t be the same anymore. These things were happening to it and leaving evidence that they’d happened. I wouldn’t look right anymore. I was damaged and you could tell just by looking at me. This is why I hated getting fillings at the dentist: some of your tooth, your tooth, that was there when you were born, is now just gone, dust floating away in thin air. You watch it go through the orange plastic over the drill, you smell it burning. It’s gone like it was never there. They don’t save it for you in a little jar, you’ve just lost some part of you forever. Then they fill the hole it left behind, the place where there used to be stuff that was made of you, with some kind of goop that’s going to crack and need to be replaced in a few years. You leave and there’s something in your mouth that doesn’t belong to you. I’m terrified of that concept. Isn’t everyone else? Shouldn’t we be?

The other day, I surprised myself by how mean I could be. I looked in the mirror and wiped a bit of excess eyeliner away with my fingertip. I stood back and looked at the body in front of me, which I described to myself as huge. I examined the face, which I called pasty and pale and worthless. These things come to me so easily, it’s like someone else is sitting next to me saying them. They happen before I have time to fully form them as thoughts in my head. They’re my voice, but meaner. After all of these mean things, they said

You should really apologize to people for having to look at you.

The neighbor girl used to say “Go like this” and then bare her teeth at me, her lips peeled back so I could see both shiny rows, top and bottom. Sometimes I said I didn’t want to, but usually I gave in on the first command to get it over with. I’d do it, and she and whichever of her friends she had invited over for an afternoon of swimming in her bean-shaped pool on the other side of the fence would step forward and peer into my mouth. They’d stare in horror at the crooked little teeth, struggling for a place in the front, pushing each other out of the way. They’d be especially interested in one particular tooth in the bottom center, the one that had a little brown spot on it, right in the middle. They’d stare with their hands on their hips, as I mouth-breathed into their faces, and when they got to the little brown tooth, they would all fake a shudder and say “Ugh!”, rubbing their hands together as if they needed to go wash off somewhere to avoid becoming like me. And because children are marvelously blunt, I got to field all kinds of questions and comments about my mouth.

“Your teeth are so ugly. Why are they so ugly?”

“Why don’t you get them fixed?”

“Don’t you brush your teeth?”

“You should get braces.”

This stuff is all minor-league. I mean, all of us were plopped down suddenly one day into a world where all of our imperfections were pointed out to us, and all of everyone else’s imperfections started to become really, really obvious. Then everyone started to separate into groups based on this information. So it goes, right? You’re a little bit weird and there’s something on your tooth. You can’t come over and swim, and you can’t have crushes on any of these seven boys, okay? That’s how it works! We’ll come by when we want to see a freak show.

Sometimes I’m still nervous to talk to or around kids. For years and years after being subjected to repeated torture by the neighbor girl, forced oral examinations, taunting, and general exclusion based on the fact of my terrible mouth, I’d say something around a kid and they’d say, “You know you have something on your teeth?” I’d have to explain that it was always there. “Why? Can’t you get it off? Can’t you brush your teeth? Can’t you get rid of it?” They were like little radars finding that one lone signal in the grid that shouldn’t have been there, trying to destroy it with shame. People usually shushed their kids after a few protestations, but the same situation happened again and again. That fucking brown spot on my teeth was like a magnet for questions. And sometimes adults would point it out to me! Some of them meant well, I’m sure, in an “oh, you have a piece of something in your bottom teeth” kind of way. But some grew defiant when I’d say, “Oh, no–that’s a part of my tooth, it’s always like that.” They’d puff up a little bit, embarrassed, and shoot back something to the tune of “Well why don’t you get it fixed?!”

Is there anything worse than an adult who can’t deal with their feelings?

My stepfather’s teeth were terrible. They were a crowded mess, top and bottom. They were all different shades of yellow, black, and dark gray. They were actively rotting away in his jaw, as was the mucus constantly pooling in his sinuses, which made his temper worse and his snivelly voice all the more nasal and piercing. The smell of his face was nauseating: if you were in trouble, he’d breathe his rot-stench breath down on you, as close to your face as he could get. I think of it now as an animal’s spit-shiny teeth in your face, strings of saliva trickling down out of the corners of the cracked lips. I can still smell the rotten teeth and sinuses, the beer breath, the Speed Stick. Those were his smells, those are the smells of my terror.

He’d hold my head. With one arm under my chin, bicep smashed against my right ear, he’d hold me in a headlock in front of the sink. I was too small to see the mirror without standing on my toes, so I stared at my forehead and gripped the edge of the sink. With his other arm, he furiously scrubbed my bottom row of teeth. He held my head tight so it was still as he scrubbed. He scrubbed until I bled, and then some. He scrubbed until he got too angry to continue, or too bored. He went down to the basement and came back up with a wire shop brush, Next time I’m using this, waving it in my face. I never knew when he would brush my teeth for me: it came out of nowhere. I’d be sitting there talking, laughing, telling someone a story, and the next thing you know, he’d be exploding in anger at me, screaming about that fucking spot and how disgusting and lazy I was for never brushing my teeth. He’d drag me off to the bathroom and there we’d stand for what seemed like hours: him scrubbing the skin away from my gums, determined to get that spot out. Me inhaling the stench from his rotten mouth and waiting for it to end.

Choose your adventure.

These were things he said:

You’re a quitter. You’ll never finish anything

Food would last a lot longer around here if you didn’t glut so much, Miss Piggy

You’re worthless

You’re a psychopath

Stupid

Big mouth

Fatass

You’re a disgusting pig

Monster

You’re an embarrassment

And on and on. It didn’t always start with me opening my mouth, with him catching sight of my teeth. It could be something as small as not getting a dish clean enough. It could be for making too much noise. For eating to much. For having a radio on loud enough for him to hear when he was standing with his ear pressed to my bedroom door. There was no telling when or how much anger I’d inspire in him, or for what. When you were the target, everyone else would just sit around, pretending to pay attention to the TV or read a newspaper. We were a family of ghosts, navigating the house quietly, invisible to each other, trying to steer clear of this screaming, angry man and his torments.

There was one time, one time when I decided I was too old (at fourteen) to be threatened like this. He’d been trying to help me with my math homework, and both of us were frustrated with it. He, of course, began screaming about how I wasn’t trying hard enough. He said if I didn’t do it, “it” being some kind of function related to the math homework, he’d beat my ass.

“I’ll beat your ass,” he said.

“No you won’t,” I said.

“Oh yes I will,” he said.

Then I was on the floor. He’d grabbed both of my ankles and yanked me off the couch. I’d tried to turn and grab the cushion and ended up on my stomach, my cheek scraping the carpet. He wrenched one arm behind my back in some kind of wrestling choke hold and sat on it. It felt like being stabbed in the shoulder. It felt like someone was trying to tear my arm off. We stayed there like that for a long time, him punching, punching, punching into my back. In my struggle, I had flipped up the corner of the fabric at the bottom of the couch and I could see its broken leg, the one he had steadied with a small stack of books. I kept thinking of myself as being punched down to be as flat as Flat Stanley, small enough to climb into an envelope, to hide between the pages of a book.

There is safety in dimension.

But I must have been screaming. I must have been screaming because I looked up and my brother was running down the stairs. I saw the light from the windows behind his head. I saw his shoes where he stood inches from my head, speechless, absorbing the scene. Eventually, my mother came down the stairs and screamed for him to stop. I packed my things and moved in with my grandparents, my mother’s parents.

After the divorce, during the custody hearings, my brother denied having seen the beating. I insisted to the judge that it had happened. He replied, “I don’t think he meant it that way, I don’t think he’ll do it again.” My grandmother and my aunt, my mother’s sister, the ones I had run to after that final beating, showed up to court and sat on the side of my abuser. Everyone thought it best that I forgave him. Everyone thought it best that I moved on. The state of Illinois thought it best that I visit him three nights a week. “If you don’t get your ass out here,” he said over the phone, “I’ll have your mother put in jail.”

Sometimes, the truth just gets overtaken in a wave of bullshit, of good intentions, of bad ones, of the way people wish things were, instead of how they actually are. Sometimes Jedi mind tricks really work in the way that someone can wave their hand and say “that didn’t really happen, and anyway, even if it did, I’m sure he’s sorry, even if he hasn’t said so, and he’s never done anything like that to me, or in front of me, so how can I be sure it’s even true?” I guarantee you that there is a whole mountain of evil out there hiding behind a forest of people who just don’t want to believe it could happen. I guarantee you that the balance of power is all someone needs to do awful things to you and never be called up to question for it.

My brother still doesn’t speak to me. Neither does my younger sister. Both of them have said “She’s crazy.” I don’t blame them. He is their father. He is the mountain.

Now tell me how it is I’m supposed to go through life opening my mouth and talking to people? Tell me how it is I’m supposed to trust that they won’t look into my mouth, down my throat, and tell me all the things that are wrong with me? Sometimes I am so afraid to be in the world, I can barely look at a bus driver or stand to have someone sit near me in the doctor’s office. Sometimes my head swims so fast with all the things I should say to sound like a normal person, I end up squeaking like a rusty door and making no sense, answering questions backwards and upside-down, coming off like a completely insane person. There’s not enough time to think, not enough time to generate the right answer, the one that will keep me safe from whatever harm this other person might be ready to inflict on me.

Tell me how it is I’m supposed to look in the mirror and say nice things to myself?

The last time I saw him, he was in a bookstore with his wife, a squat little woman with a frown that appeared to be carved into her face. Her arms were crossed, she scowled at me from across a row of books. That nasally, rotten voice said “Hi.” I returned his casual greeting as if it didn’t mean anything to me, as if he hadn’t terrorized me for the first half of my life. I wondered later if he could see, from where he was standing, inside my mouth, if he could see the clean white tooth in the middle of the bottom row, where the dentist had drilled out the brown and replaced it with some kind of white tooth spackle.

I wanted to tell him she’d done this, how I’d been ashamed to see a dentist for years, and when I finally had gone, I’d shown her that spot and told her I hadn’t brushed enough when I was a child. “No,” she’d said, “that’s a deformity. You’ve got one in a back molar, too. You had an illness or a fever when these teeth were growing in your jaw that’s caused this. You didn’t do anything wrong, it’s anatomy.” IT’S ANATOMY, I wanted to scream at him. I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING WRONG.

“You will need a skin graft here, though,” the dentist had continued. “Did you do really hard brushing or something on these bottom teeth when you were little? Because the gums are just completely worn away.”

“No,” I said. I didn’t do it. But someone did. I told her about the forced brushings I endured in a headlock and she winced. She patted my shoulder and shook her head.

Apart from the day in the bookstore, I have avoided any further contact with time and distance. Before my little sister gave up on speaking to me, she sat down one day and told me that she thought he was really sorry “for everything that had happened,” and really missed me, and did I know? Did I know he had a picture of me as a baby on his dresser?

“If he’s sorry,” I said, “why hasn’t he ever apologized to me? Why are you doing it for him?” That was one of the last times she spoke to me. Because I am crazy.

Another time, a few years ago, Facebook notified me that my name had been used in a post on my abuser’s wall. “Happy Birthday,” it said, “wherever you are.”

I threw my head back and laughed like an actual crazy person. Wherever you are. IT’S FUCKING FACEBOOK, I screamed. I AM ON IT. YOU JUST TAGGED ME. YOU KNOW EXACTLY WHERE I AM AND EXACTLY HOW TO FIND ME. Then I started crying because there’s really nothing like your name being used in a passive-aggressive call for pity from someone who works harder to convince the world he’s a good person than the people he’s hurt. On your birthday.

But sometimes I’m not sad about it at all. Sometimes I’m so angry I could burn up, smash things, run screaming through the streets. I hate that I was a child and he could do these things to me. I hate that he had the power, that other people gave it to him time and again. I hate whatever happened to him when he was a child that made him such an awful man, that made him go to battle over the smallest things with little children. I really hate that nobody spoke up for me until they absolutely had to in a court of law, and I hate that even then, the odds were in his favor, based on the ideals of forgiveness, love, family. I hate that it opened the door right back up for him. I hate that I still have to deal with the mess he made.

Sometimes I stand there and stare at myself in the mirror and I can’t believe how old I am. I can’t believe I’ve got a life apart from his, I can’t believe I’ve managed to get away from all of it and be a whole person. I can’t believe that someone saying terrible things about you doesn’t make them true. Then I start to wonder about him. I wonder what would happen if he tried to pull any of that shit today. I’ve surrounded myself with people who would protect me. Even if all of them fell, I’ve armored myself. I wish he would come at me now, where I have the power, and just try it all again. Come out of the dark, from behind the trees. Come and see who I am now.

My doctor looked at my leg in an x-ray. “The muscle took a hit,” she said, “but the bone is strong.”

The dentist tapped at my bottom teeth with her metal tool. “The gum is worn away,” she said, “but the teeth are sound.”

I’m bigger now than I was when I was two, eight, fourteen. My bones are strong, my teeth are sharp.

Come and see.

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Tagged as abuse, assholes, body, depression, family, rage

January 13, 2015 · 5:25 pm

Black Helmet II: The Dark Knight Takes a Nap

It’s winter. It’s cold. It’s dark. The ankle-deep snow and the boots and the pencil skirt make it increasingly difficult for me to stumble to the train every day. Everything leaks and stinks and drips and pools and soaks and is misery in its filthiest, most staining form. The dog is suffering from the Hot Monster Sharts which we’ve just discovered is a gastrointestinal parasite which causes urgency, diarrhea, and dog gas that is so bad you will have to burn your house down to get the smell out of the curtains, and while you’re standing there with your sick dog watching the house burn, you’ll wish you were inside letting the flames eat your flesh and clear your sinuses of the stink. So it’s a week- to two-week course of “treatment”, which is squirting chalky stuff down the throat of a struggling, scared, 60lb dog who just wants you to love him and gives you his WHY YOU PUNISHING ME? face the whole time. And then there’s the black helmet of clinical depression because my brain is fucking broken and won’t make enough of one chemical or another, and I’m eternally Vitamin D deficient even though they have me taking it twice a fucking day now, and I am STILL no fun to be around because all I do is stare at the TV and say things like “Her eyeballs are weird” and “I bet he’s such a fucking bitch in real life.” And a key part to fighting depression without brain-numbing, creativity-killing medication is to get your heart rate up for at least 30 minutes a day, which is literally the worst fucking thing anyone could tell you to do while you’re depressed, so cut to me at the gym every goddamn day, running on a treadmill in front of a gigantic television that only ever seems to show episodes of Duck Dynasty and that one show where poor people beg for money so they can develop their stupid ideas and sell them in a commercial at 4am. Except for that one time when the TVs were playing something different, one was a commercial for the Time-Life Johnny Carson Collection that played on loop, one was a documentary about mobsters with a lot of close-ups of the blown-apart heads and faces of gunshot victims from 1950s crime scenes, and one was some bitch with weird eyeballs eating french fries in front of her computer screen and talking into a headseat about hacking.

Glad we got that out of the way. What’s up with you?

Holiday Film Review, Part 2*

*I’ve been reminded that you maybe shouldn’t read these if you want to watch these movies and be surprised by stuff that happens in them. I believe that is called a “spoiler alert.” However, in my opinion, these movies are spoilers themselves, in that they spoil all that is good about film, and about the world in general. They will spoil your life. So there is your spoiler alert: these movies will make everything awful. Nothing in any of the movies I write about will surprise you if you go in with the knowledge that I hate everything and everything about the movie is horrible.

The Taking of Deborah Logan, 2014

What Netflix says happens in this movie: “For her Ph.D. thesis, Mia decides to film a woman’s Alzheimer’s battle, but when symptoms turn strange, the family suspects something more sinister.”

What really happens in this movie: Apparently when you get to medical school, they ask you to pick a disease out of a book or they spin a wheel and throw a ball that lands on one and then they make you go and figure out what it is and why it is. They also let you pick how you want to do that. For instance, if you want to make a stop-motion movie using some Play-Doh or old Ninja Turtles to teach people about Lou Gehrig’s disease, that’s cool. Apparently that is how we know everything we know about medicine. I for one am glad it works that way because if it wasn’t for that type of medical education, we would not have all of this excellent found footage, and plus nobody would have ever been able to get the devil or an evil spirit or anything on film! MEDICINE! It’s not just for taking at parties, y’all.

So this medical student wants to make a medical movie about Alzheimer’s because nobody knows anything about it or has ever seen it or studied it up close. I mean this movie takes place on a planet where we are totally in the dark about that stuff. So they hook her up with two camera guys and the three of them find a nice lesbian with an alzheimey mother. Mommy Skinflute’s symptoms so far have been a combination of forgetting things, wearing Ann Taylor clothes, and turning into a cartoon skellington. Daughter Lesbian is at her wit’s end because there’s bills and shit to pay on the farm and hospice care has been expensive and somehow the medical student has also been given money to pay whomever lets her attempt to film Alzheimer’s in motion. Maybe she’s just retarded and her parents are rich and they’ve given her some money and made her think she’s in medical school? Thus begins the greatest medical documentary of all time!

I’M HOME! THERE WAS A SALE AT CHICO’S! WHERE AM I? WHAT IS A CHICO’S?

Mommy Skinflute is not cool with having a film crew and a nosy student in her house. Also she’s dealing with the fact that she’s totally dying of this disease and it’s making her do weird stuff and she’d rather not have it all caught on film. She’s right to feel that way because every time shit starts popping off, they run into her bedroom and she’s all naked and floating around or standing in the dark and slamming windows with her mind and shit. The student isn’t real sure but she’s thinking maybe this is not Alzheimer’s, and if it is, that’s messed up and also really cool that we got it on tape! Anyway, they’re getting a lot of embarrassing footage of Mommy Skinflute and the next day they insist on filming her while they show it to her, saying things like DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN YOU TRIED TO PEEL YOUR FACE OFF, MOMMY SKINFLUTE? DO YOU REMEMBER THAT? and she’s fucking terrified and confused and also her face is half peeled off so she’s not feeling great. The medical student is like “We don’t want to be in the way” but naturally about 75% of the footage is taken through a window or peeking out from behind a door while Skinflute and Lesbian have a private conversation. “We will just be hiding behind the drapes here, filming you guys. Act normal.” So naturally Mommy gets mad and kind of annoyed with everyone because, let’s just pretend we’re dealing with a real Alzheimer’s patient here, I don’t think you’re supposed to follow them around and scare them and film them spacing out and then show that to them and be like “See how much your brain is deteriorating? Sad, huh?” But this is just for pretend so we’re going to do whatever we want.

So Mommy Skinflute goes for a brief stay in the hospital because of the flying around and growling and face-peeling. The doctor is like “Shit, guys, I don’t know what is going on here but clearly it’s probably the Alzheimer’s and it’s probably really aggressive. That’s probably what it is, maybe. Also, it’s totally fine if you want to film all of the goings-on in the hospital, including this private doctor/patient conversation, because HIPAA is not a big deal.” But of course, Mommy Skinflute can’t stay in the hospital, because more creepy things will happen at home, so home we go! Into about the third night of horror, Daughter Lesbian starts opening up about why she wears baggy jeans and flannel shirts all the time, and the answer isn’t because she’s a lesbian: it’s because her mom shamed her for being a lesbian! Oh no! Now the bitch is upstairs fucking spinning around on the ceiling! She also divulges that Mommy used to run a switchboard business to support her daughter’s flannel shirt habit and also there was this one guy who used to live in town who killed a whole lot of young girls? And threw them in the river out by the abandoned quarry? But he vanished years ago. Some say he moved to France and some say he is buried in Mommy Skinflute’s yard and his ghost haunts her brains and some say the whole thing was made up for the plot of a movie called The Taking of Deborah Logan. But sorry–what were you asking? What brand of adult diapers we buy for her?

I just want to know which evil spirit took my daughter away and replaced her with this lumberjack man.

I just want to know which evil spirit took my daughter away and replaced her with this middle-aged lumberjack man.

So they keep catching Mommy digging in the yard at midnight, or sitting in front of her old switchboard, naked as a jaybird, jamming the plug into the same switchboard number over and over until the damn thing explodes. She goes back into the hospital because of the explodey switchboard burns and begs to be killed, but everyone is like “Nope, we can’t, we have to film you doing stuff until you die.” One of her old buddies tries to grant her wish and a TV flies off the wall and smashes his head, but it’s cool because they put him straight into surgery and juuuuuust before he goes under, he tells Daughter Lesbian that Mommy Skinflute is harboring the spirit of the Little Girl River Killer! OH NO! IT’S NOT ALZHEIMER’S AT ALLLLLL. WHICH IS INTERESTING BECAUSE APPARENTLY POSSESSION HAS THE SAME SYMPTOMS?! But the show must go on, regardless of the change in diagnosis. Daughter Lesbian and the student filmmakers are now on a quest to find and destroy a bag of murder bones. They figure out that Mommy Skinflute murdered the killer when she found out Daughter Lesbian was going to be his next and final victim, and threw his bone sack in her yard. They go looking for it and realize that the bitch went out and dug it up a few nights ago and hid it in the attic. You know, when she was possessed by him, she hid his bones from herself. Make sense? I didn’t think so! Mommy Skinflute, you are henceforth required to tell us who you are at any given moment!

OK so are you like, possessed right now? Or did you just finish the rest of that baked ziti we had in the fridge? You have to tell us, that’s the deal.

They find the bag of stink bones up in the attic and then watch a documentary about how to properly dispose of a serial killer’s bones. I think they got it on Netflix. Anyway, the whole burn-them-in-the-fireplace operation does not go well. The fireplace explodes and throws them all across the room and one of the camera guys is like, “Fuck it, this is so dumb, I can’t be in this stupid movie anymore.” Everybody smiles nervously and they’re like “uhh you mean you’re not going to help us make this medical footage that is totally real heheheh?” and he’s like “No like I’m not going to be a part of this Millenium Entertainment/Eagle Films movie. You guys should leave too, this is the dumbest thing ever. I will drive you into town right now if you stop being in this movie.” You think you’re going to find him hanging in the woods behind the house later, you know, like nobody gets away that easily! but you’re wrong. He really did leave. He just straight up bailed on the entire thing.

Meanwhile, Mommy Skinflute is in the hospital repeatedly abducting a cancer child. She puts the kid into a trance and the two of them wander around the hallways into the Abandoned Part of the Hospital, which every hospital has, and if you didn’t know, now you know. They keep having to go get them and put Little Cancer Trance back to beddy-bye and strap Mommy Skinflute back to her bed. But! They didn’t think about the fact that Mommy Skinflute isn’t necessarily attached to her skin, and can remove it like a sock, and will do so in order to get out of hospital bed restraints. She can, and she does! Off they go, Cancer Girl and a skinless Mommy Skinflute, skipping up the mountainside to…duh duh DUHHHHHH…the Abandoned Quarry!

There are a lot of abandoned things in this town. If it were my hometown, all of this scary shit would be taking place in old Wal-Marts. At least this town has some cool things to abandon. The quarry is at the top of a hill in the woods and it’s flanked by some old lean-tos and boards. Scary boards! Our filmmaking medical student, her last remaining cameraman, Daughter Lesbian, and now some cops take off up the mountain after the hospital escapees. Of course, the first thing that happens is that Mommy Skinflute rips out the throat of one of the cops and instead of fucking calling for a helicopter with 20 guns on it and some tanks and RPGs like any other cop in the United States would do, the lady cop is like “I’m going to need your camera guy to take my cop buddy down the hill while we continue to track this elderly woman and mostly-dead kid through the woods.” So the camera guy is like “OMGOD, Medical Student! You have to film the rest of the movie!” She protests at first because she’s either being polite or she’s like me and she just honestly didn’t understand why, in this situation, first priority is making sure we get all this on film. They waste a bunch of time talking about “you haaaave to” and finally she takes the camera and the movie continues. There’s lots of running through the woods and climbing through shit in the quarry and screaming and stuff. You can pretty much fast-forward all of that. Just imagine some girl going OH MY GOD WHAT WAS THAT OH SHIT OH SHIT OKAY IT WAS JUST A LARGE FERN.

When you get to the part in the quarry where Daughter Lesbian and Medical Student crawl through a long rock tunnel, you better fucking play that shit because your mind is about to get blown all the fuck over the place in ways you never saw coming. Holy hell. I cannot even tell you what they’re about to find around that corner, but I am definitely going to tell you what they find around that corner, because I have never cracked up so hard in my life. I almost fell off the couch and banged my head against the floor laughing. Because apparently, Little Girl River Killer has not only inhabited Mommy Skinflute’s body out of revenge, he also intends to finish the ritual he started 30 years ago. He is also part snake. And it is the snake part that is now inhabiting Mommy! So, of course, Mommy is attempting to fucking eat. the. cancer. baby. like. a. snake.

NOM NOM NOM

I have to say that I just started clapping at this part. Motherfucker unhinged her own goddamn jaw just to eat this scrawny kid. That takes talent, and finesse. It’s sad, though, because clearly Mommy Skinflute is very hungry, and has been this way for the entirety of the movie, and what do these assholes do? They freak out and scream and make her barf up the kid’s head and bang some sticks together to chase her off into the quarry. It’s so fucked because you’re not really supposed to go out into nature and start messing with stuff. Who gave this medical student the right to go out into the wild and interfere with the circle of life, i.e., stop a nice lady who is possessed by a snake spirit and a murderer from eating what will likely be her only meal for 4-6 months that is something nobody will really miss because it was just sitting around in a hospital anyway?

Ugh, God. The movie ends with Mommy Skinflute in the nuthouse because the snake DNA scrambled her brain. What’s lucky though is that someone had the smarts to turn all of this helpful medical footage into a movie about a murdering snake spirit! Yay! And the movie ends with the little barfed-up cancer girl, who is no longer a cancer girl, but a totally normal girl who turns to the camera and glares like she’s saying “pssst: the murderer snake lives in me now.” I don’t know how that happened, but they will probably explain it all in a grainy 2-minute clip from an old documentary about murder snakes in the next movie. And there has to be a next movie because we never found out if having a snake mommy cured Daughter Lesbian of her flannel-shirt-and-Carhartt-pants addiction. Also we didn’t get to see our medical student “graduate,” meaning we didn’t get to watch her walk through her living room in her mom’s bathrobe with a square of cardboard on her head while her dad hummed “Pomp and Circumstance.” We need Part Two, dammit!

Any time Netflix has a movie that came out during the current year, I fucking watch it, because that trash knows no bounds. Especially if it’s some kind of supernatural trash. More trash! Keep bringing me trash! I want to put it all in my trash holes!

What other people are saying: “Very good scary movie and I am a pretty tough critic. This made me stop it at least 3 times to get my bearings and revisit it and didn’t finish the movie until the next day.” Maybe before you pressed play on this, you should have made sure you were not a GIGANTIC PUSS.

Divergent, 2014

What HBO says happens in this movie: “In a dystopian, post-apocalyptic world in which people are grouped within distinct factions based on their character traits, one girl stands apart. Shailene Woodley stars in this first adaptation of Veronica Roth’s best-selling book trilogy as the ‘divergent’ teen whose uniqueness makes her a threat to the conformist society in which she exists.”

What really happens in this movie: I’ll tell you what happens in this movie, Shailene Woodley happens in this movie, and she’s just like a big old baby face with a bunch of lip gloss smeared all over it. She lives in this world where nobody’s special, and everybody’s pre-destined to be whatever it is they’re going to be, and as if you didn’t already fucking know what was going to happen: she finds out in the first 10 minutes that she’s the EXCEPTION to all of this! She’s the most specialest in a world full of gray-and-navy colored dummies! She’s got all the courage and all the brains and all the heart and all the who knows what the fuck else because I wasn’t paying attention anymore to how their Future Society was broken down. It’s like watching the head cheerleader pull up in her new Mustang with her hot boyfriend and then get crowned Prom Queen and react like “oh my god, what? Me? Who knew it would be me?” Because, fuck off, of course it’s going to be her. The beginning of the movie is just a shit bucket full of Shailene Woodley looking at things like she’s thinking really sweet thoughts and then people saying “You’re so beautiful and wonderful, how did you get to be so beautiful and wonderful and also humble?” So she goes to take her futuristic Meyers-Briggs, which is done with needles and brightly colored serums in the future FYI, and the test administrator is like WOW you are all the things, a divergent (which is, oddly, the title of the movie??), go hide somewhere because everyone is going to be jelly of you and want to kill you.

This perm is going to look so rad, also it’s going to let you know which vet school to apply for.

So right about the time you’re totally fucking sick of her shit and wishing she’d shut up, it’s Job Fair day, when all the kids of a certain age go down to the auditorium and decide what group they’re going to join for the rest of their lives. It means they have to move out of their parent’s house and get real jobs, so everybody’s real sad. They can choose to go to the Math & Science Academy where apparently everyone wears blazers that go down to the floor because what’s more intelligent than accidentally peeing all over your own clothes every time you go to the bathroom? They can also decide to join the Borings, who are actually two different clans of people: one group of them never looks in the mirror because they’re scared of ghosts or something, and the other ones are always picketing for world peace and handing out oranges, yawwwwn. Then there’s the group that always tells the truth about everything and of course nobody likes them because they’re always going to weddings and stuff and saying things like “I’m so happy for you but your invitation was the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.” Finally there’s the Axe Body Spray club and these assholes just wear a lot of leather and run around jumping off shit and throwing collectible dragon knives they bought off the Internet. That’s pretty much all of your choices, unless you count the choice that nobody really wants, which is that you can just join nobody’s club and walk around on the streets all day with a bunch of mentally ill people. Not our girl! Not our specialest special!

Shoehorn Woodley chooses to join the Leather Daddies because they’re not scared of anything and she wants to show them what’s up. She also is quite fond of swishing her long beautiful hair around everywhere and wants everyone to see how great it looks when she’s jumping between concrete piles. Unfortunately, she finds out the first week that she has to shoot a gun and learn how to punch people and also piss and shit in an open bathroom area right next to everyone’s bunks. She was NOT expecting that. She gets the crap beat out of her a lot, but in a sexy way that doesn’t bruise up her face too much because nobody loves you if you’re busted. Mostly she gets beat up by this one bigger girl who is a total fucking bad ass at fighting but also is not very physically attractive because you can’t be both unless you’re Shinybean Woodley. On the bright side, they let her choose a new name for herself and she’s excited about that because she’s always hated being Sherbet Woodley and wants a new cool Axe Body Spray flavor for a name. She chooses “Tris” which I think is just about the biggest waste of a free name change I’ve ever heard of. You’d think she would go for Roboslop or Bangorn the Destroyer or at least Princess_Choppy117 or something. Nah, she shoots for the forgettable, because it’s not like she ever had the chance to get a degree in marketing, you guys.

“Can’t I just beat her in like a waist measurement contest or can’t we just ask all the dudes who they think is the prettiest?”

Luckily, Twats doesn’t get banged up too bad and the hottest dude, who’s also kind of her training boss, starts to leave little notes in her locker and wink at her and stuff. He also notices that she’s a Divergent-type person and tells her to cut the crap or she’ll get herself killed. All the Leather Babies have to take these tests where they do a hit of acid and go running around in their own brains, which are hooked up to TV screens so everyone can watch everyone else deal with their worst fears, which is boring shit like getting attacked by birds and dealing with chronic IBS. Twats is, of course, the best at handling this scary stuff because she always remembers she’s on acid and remains level headed and is also perfect and beautiful and smart and aces the test every time and is then like “oh, what? What was my score again? I didn’t hear the announcement, I was busy being humble.” Fuck. But she has to knock that shit off and start faking bad test results because “Nobody’s ever scored that high!” of fucking course and it will look suspicious. You’re TOO GOOD, Twats! Simmer down!

Hot Leather apparently doesn’t care that she’s a stuck up asshole, because I guess her hair is SO pretty, and starts to hang with her on a daily basis. Some guy who’s jealous of her tries to throw her off a cliff, but Hot Leather saves her, and next thing you know he’s like “want to see all my tats” and she’s like ummm okay but this has nothing to do with me though? And his tats are all on his back so he has to take off his shirt and guess what! Now he’s shirtless and they’re making out and there’s NO RULES in this place, and he’s hot, and rarin’ to go, and I am sitting there screaming YEAHHH FUCK HER FUCK HER at the TV with popcorn chunks spraying across the room…but this fucking bitch pulls the plug because “I don’t wanna move this fast.” I could not believe my eyes because WHAT’S THE USE OF HAVING GREAT HAIR AND WEARING LEATHER ALL THE TIME AND LIVING IN A PLACE WITH NO ADULT SUPERVISION IF YOU CAN’T DO SEX ON HOT DUDES.

DON’T STOP GET IT GET IT

Hot Leather has a heart of gold and puts his cock away and puts his shirt back on and is like “oh no totally I wasn’t even going there, are you kidding? I just want to watch you sleep because nice dudes have no sex drive, just like good girls, you silly.” He puts Real Housewives on the TV and respectfully sleeps on the floor whilst Twat spreads out in his king-sized bed and turns that thing into her own personal fart pocket. She leans down to look at him on the floor and coos “Who’s special? You’re special!” and taps him on the nose “boop boop boop!” before going to sleep. His dick falls off and rolls under the bed and by the time he finds it in the morning, it’s so covered with dust bunnies he doesn’t even bother putting it back on.

This movie could have ended right there, in my opinion. I figured if they were going to make everyone share a big wide open bathroom and watch each other poop and stuff they would at least talk about how everybody’s climbing into everybody else’s bunk all the time for a little bed spring squeaky-squeaky action. But it’s like there’s some kind of unspoken moral code that everyone’s following which is: be nice and tender to girls when they get their lips busted in combat and also NO FUCKING. But Twats and Hot Leather are destined to be together because they are BOTH divergent! What could be better than a pair of fuckfaces with all of the talents in the known world?! Oh god, just blow this shit up. I want this movie to be over with. It’s not, though. There’s a whole lot more to it. They hook Twats up to the acid machine again and this time her worst, deepest, darkest fear is…getting date raped by Hot Leather! What a fucking joke. Dude basically rolled up his penis into a little ball and put it in a Silly-Putty container the second she says ‘no thanks’ and she’s STILL such a fucking slice of baby cake, that’s her worst fear. Someone fucking tried to throw her off a cliff! She survived attempted murder and everyone around her has a gun or a knife and what’s she scared of? Rape. Because, women! Sex crime victims 4-ever!

Kate Winslet shows up and reveals that she is not Kate Winslet, she is the leader of the Math & Science Academy. She comes in and everyone ignores the pee smell emanating from her floor-length white drape business jacket, and urine stains aren’t all she’s got up her sleeve! She also wants to give all the Leather Daddies a hit of acid laced with a mind control drug that makes them go out and shoot all the members of the other clubs. She does just that, but it doesn’t work on Twats because I don’t know if you know this but she’s SPECIAL and so is Hot Leather. So the two of them are running around during the zombified melee like “what do we do?!” and it never occurs to them to get the fuck out of there and just go somewhere less fucked up and live on an island and have a million perfect children. They want to FIGHT. So this big war starts and Ashley Judd gets gunned down and then Twats’s dad gets blown up, but she manages to save Hot Leather and reverse the bad acid trip and save a bunch of Borings from extinction. Her brother shows up after being in the bathroom in the library at the Math & Science Academy this whole time and they all get on a train and ride away to some other shit hole beyond the giant fence that surrounds the city, where they’ll probably sleep in hammocks and poop in a hole in the ground and jerk off a lot because EVEN THERE you’re not allowed to screw. That’s the real tragedy, followed closely by the fact that there’s a second movie on the way, and it appears as if the main issue in that one is that Shingles Woodley’s hair has gotten caught in some kind of machinery at the hammock factory, so she has nothing left to shake defiantly at her challengers.

My beautiful tresses would have looked SO GOOD in this smog!

For the last fucking time…I’m not letting you use my head to scrub the dishes.

What other people are saying: “Dramatically, Divergent wanders, but over rich philosophical soil.” Oh give me a fucking break. Know what makes soil so rich? Poop.

HELLO, SHOE LOVER

Pork Intolerance

There’s a barbecue restaurant around the corner from work. They push all this “WOOD FIRED OVEN” and “SMOKED PULLED PORK” stuff, but really when you go in there it’s like a Sbarro: everything is sitting in a little chute under heat lamps, and there’s a giant microwave in the back. But it’s also like Chipotle in that they slide you past the chute, grabbing handfuls of things from metal containers, and slap everything into a styrofoam clamshell,. No matter what you order as far as meat, sides, or drink, every worker in the assembly line says the same thing: “Great choice!” They smack their lips and slap a little cup of greasy, crusty mac and cheese onto your styrofoam platter. “Great choice!”

I get that this is positive reinforcement, it’s meant to signify that even these workers, these people who WORK here, are totally down with the food. They eat it all the time! And they LOVE it. It’s the same as when you work in a clothing store and you’re expected to wear the clothes they’re selling. I know what it is. But I can’t help but think that proclaiming something a “Great choice!” means that somewhere out there, there is some configuration of the food that is not the great choice: there’s some combination of something you could order there that they’d just look at with dead eyes and then say “$7.59, please.”

Also, you don’t know me. I might have some kind of mac and cheese disease or pork intolerance and this food will straight up kill me. Maybe I’m here for a piece of brisket to eat on the toilet so I can just keel over onto the tarp I’ve spread out on the bathroom floor. The point is, you don’t KNOW. You could be sending me to my suicide with a big old pat on the back. GREAT CHOICE!

GREAT JOB ON THAT ORDER, CHAMP!

It’s like at DSW when you stand in line at the register, the person says “Next shoe lover, please!” when it’s your turn. Then when you walk up there they go “HELLO SHOE LOVER!”

Anyway. The other day I went to the new Chipotle-style pizza place next to the Chipotle-style barbecue place across from the Chipotle. I’m in this place in my life where pizza sounds like a good option for every single meal. Also I’ve got a lot of anxiety right now. So I was nervous as fuck to go to this pizza place because I knew they were going to try and make the experience like AN EXPERIENCE and over complicate things and ask me all kinds of pizza questions. I mean, I didn’t want to build my own. I wanted something directly off the menu. My hands were sweating. I just wanted to get out of there (with a pizza). So the lady at the beginning of the Pizza Maker line asks the guy half a foot in front of me “Have you been here before?!” and he says no so she launches into this high-speed overview of how to select fucking ingredients off a list that you would like them to put on a circle of dough for you. Her lips were moving so fast I thought I was going to pass out, she was like the Micro Machines man of pizza mechanics.

So she explains the intricacies of a Basic Restaurant Menu With Under 20 Items On It and ol’ boy moves on. She then turns to me and offers me the exact same motormouth “Hihowareyouhaveyoubeenherebefore” to which I say, “Uhhhh YES” hoping she will just leave me alone, also because I was less than a foot away while she explained the whole damn thing to the other guy, so I felt like maybe I should get a pass. So she says “YAY WELCOME BACK” with this genuine smile on her face like I’m her best friend but I left town for a couple of months and she super totes missed me. Well, she missed me so much she decides explain the entire goddamn premise of the restaurant to me anyway! “Oh, so you already know that–” and then there it is again, the Guide to Getting Pizza Here. In my opinion, it should not be any more difficult than this:

1. I say the words meaning the kind of pizza I want,

2. You go get that pizza or tell someone who can get that pizza,

3. You take my money, then

4. I leave with pizza.

But no. They just had to dook it up unnecessarily. So after she’s done acknowledging what I already know and then repeating it to me, she allows me to order just a basic old no-frills pizza straight off the menu, and I move on down the line. The thing is? I’m cursed when it comes to ordering things. No matter what it is, if it’s something I really want, they will either be out of it or just screw up my order so that what I want isn’t what I want anymore. It’s a CURSE. It happens to me ALL the TIME. Ask anyone. So I’m standing there trying not to be excited about the ricotta cheese that, according to the menu, they’re going to add to my pizza. I’m shaking in my DSW boots because I can’t help myself! I’m repeating don’t think about the ricotta, don’t think about the ricotta over and over in my head, but all I can see flashing behind my eyes are giant dollops of ricotta sizzling and bubbling on my pizza’s crust. Oh, heaven! What joy! RICOTTA! So, of course, my pizza slides right past the cheese station with nothing but mozzarella on it. I follow it down the line and realize that at the part where the salt and pepper are offered as toppings for your toppings is the END. No ricotta for you, fucko. So I verrry delicately say, “Uhhm. Is…is that supposed to have…ricotta cheese?” The lady who was juuust about to toss my pizza in the Ready to Bake queue looks down at my nekkid pizza and says, “Oh, yeah, I guess it is.” So they add the ricotta. PHEW. This ricotta disaster has been averted, until next time.

So they pop my pizza into the flame den at the back and ring me up, and tell me to stand over to the side until my name is called. I stand in this huge crowd of people, some of whom have been standing there since I showed up at the end of the ordering line. I quickly realized why: cooked, boxed pizzas were piling up on the counter, unclaimed and cooling rapidly. Two guys were running the pick-up station: one of them arranging the hot pizzas on the little papers with people’s names and orders on them, then sliding them down to the guy who either boxes them or puts them on a tray, then hollers out the name on the order. However, the latter was a deaf guy. So not only was the attempt to pronounce a lot of different Sharpie-scribbled names very loud and in a fast-paced environment already awkward and difficult, he also could not hear what he was saying. Which maybe, MAYBE, pizza place? Mayyyybe that’s not the best job for this guy? Because it went like this:

Pizza Caller: “HAAAAHHHBUWWWWHHH? HAAAAHBUWWWHH?”

Pizza Line: ???????

Pizza Caller: Throws pizza onto stack of waiting pizzas, grabs another. “WUHHHBAWWIEEE?”

Pizza Line: Everyone stares at each other, waiting for someone to make a move. “Did he say–I mean…I can’t…”

Pizza Caller: “JUHBOHHWEEE?”

And on and on.

So all of the customers stand there in this crowd of awkward turmoil, and people just start grabbing random pizzas, reading names on boxes, swapping between each other, and getting the fuck out of there because nobody wants to point out that because of his disability the guy can’t be understood in such a loud and frantic environment. I mean, I can see how someone would read this like OHMAGAH, HOW CAN YOU HATE ON THIS GUY FOR BEING DEAF but that’s really not what it is, pally. They had at least fifteen employees behind that register making pizza crust, refilling ingredients, putting pizzas in ovens, and even the guy right next to the deaf guy who was just organizing orders for him. From what I could tell, none of these jobs involved needing to speak clearly or hear anything anyone asked you from across the counter. It was just such a weird choice to put him in that position. I was frozen because I didn’t know which pizza was mine and I was scared to make it more awkward for him by asking him which was mine and possibly still not understanding. So I just sorted through all of the boxes and looked for my name and hightailed it out.

Limp Dick Pizza is a real disorder.

The pizza comes out fast at that joint because they have this whole “Fast fired! Cooked in 180 minutes!” thing they’re always on about, it’s on every sign and menu and they even tell you that at the beginning of the line, whether you want them to or not. So when I lifted a slice out of the box by the end crust and tried to take a bite, it did what things do when you hurry and just went straight limp dick, sagging down onto my wrist, its toppings flopping out onto the bottom of the box. All of my beautiful ricotta just splattered all over the place. Ricotta disaster accepted.

Panic at the Crisco

Some days, especially these gray, cold, drizzly days of early fall and in this, the latest and deepest wave of clinical depression, the choice is clear:

A. Google ex-boyfriends, or

B. Watch ISIS beheading videos.

Since I’m still too scared and horrified to do B (thankfully), I just look up ex-boyfriends to be on the safe side. And OHMYGOD is that ever a bad idea! One is just as bad an idea as the other. They make you feel the same, anyway. It’s all tragedy porn in the end.

We had a dinner party on Saturday for four friends to christen our new dining room table, which we bought because we’re grown ups and we’re engaged and we thought that maybe we should stop eating every meal on the couch in front of The Daily Show. (The great thing about the TV though is that it’s a grown up TV which turns on an axis so we can still watch The Daily Show from our grown up dining room table so yeahhhh!) In an attempt to fuck-start my brain, I planned an elaborate menu including lots of difficult things I’d never made before that seemed a bit tricky. I timed everything with detailed reminders on my phone. I was going to be that person who can chat with guests while ensuring that her parmesan-thyme popovers rise perfectly and don’t burn and are also not eggy in the middle which is apparently a thing that can happen. And for the most part, I WAS that person, up until The Pants had the audacity to sit in the wrong seat as everyone came to the table.

NO. I DON’T MIND. I REEEEALLY DON’T.

“YOU HAVE TO SIT ACROSS FROM ME AT THE HEAD OF THE TABLE!!!!!!!!!!!!” I barked, somewhat louder and more shrill than I’d meant to, but in a way that was definitely indicative of what was going on in my head. My next thought was OH GOD WHAT IF THE POLENTA GETS COLD? Dinner was kind of tense because not only had I just yelped all crazy-eyed at my boyfriend like Carolyn Burnham, but there was a baby guest doing baby things (like crying and needing to be fed and stuff) and something about it freaked me the fuck out. It was so SMALL and BREAKABLE and NEEDED THINGS for which all adult conversation had to cease in order to appropriately deliver. It was a sort of culture shock, I guess. We’ve talked about babies, and the very real idea of having some of them, but when there’s one at your table and you’re freaking out about the texture/temperature of the polenta and the height of the popovers and the doneness of the fish and why can’t he just fucking sit where I envisioned him sitting?!, the whole idea of babies as an IDEA kind of goes out the window. Yikes, there’s an actual baby here! What do we do with it??? Don’t put it down, what if it gets mad?!

The thing about having babies around is that you have to be a chill person. They can smell fear, like hyenas or your mom, or mom hyenas. They know you’re anxious and worried about the polenta and they react by shitting their pants and crying, because what else can they do? I really don’t know how my friends do it. Babies seem really great and cute and snuggly until they start to cry and barf everywhere, then they’re just upsetting. What about me? Who’s going to stop me from crying?? It doesn’t matter anymore!

eggghhhhhh. This is all far too heavy for a Tuesday morning.

Lean Cuisine Rejects

Deep in the Stouffer’s vault sits a freezer full of bad ideas.

Crash Diet Classics:

Box of Lettuce
A selection of the finest cuts of lettuce. Defrost on High for 4 minutes, poke a hole in the plastic, defrost on High for another 2 minutes. Allow hot lettuce to cool for 2 minutes.

Broth Plate
Enough brown-flavored broth to cover the bottom of a shallow dinner plate. Heat, covered, for 12 seconds, pour onto dinner plate. Pretend it is pizza.

Pictures of Pie
A stack of award-winning color photography of assorted slices of pie, delicately arranged on expensive china, with a bottle of water and a stick of sugar-free gum.

Green Tea Coffee
A plastic carafe of plain green tea, brewed exclusively in a coffeemaker that hasn’t been cleaned in a long time, so it at least tastes a little bit like that sweet, sweet black nectar.

Delicious Depression:

Hunk of Cheese
A slab of white cheese wrapped in cellophane with a side of the two Ritz cracker that were left in the bottom of the box, along with a few stale Entertainment Crackers, the wheat ones nobody would eat at New Year’s. Why did you even buy the wheat ones?? Dummy.

Asian Carp with Whipped Potatoes
A slice of our best Asian Carp, imported directly from upper Lake Michigan, where they’ve invaded and killed off most of the other species but they’ve also eaten a lot of the garbage we’ve thrown in there so it’s not all bad! Best served heated for 2 1/2 minutes and with plastic soda can ring removed, if present. Season potatoes with own tears.

Refrigerator Smorgasbord
Leftover pizza and a side of chicken curry smothered in a robust Ranch dressing, however much is left in the bottom of the bottle.

Classic Mac & Cheese
Ten servings of our classic low-fat macaroni and cheese packaged in one extra-large container. Heat on High for 20 minutes, allow to cool, wash your hair before eating. Or after. Just wash your hair.

Everyday Collection:

New Boyfriend Bolognese
Fettuccine noodles in cream sauce with Romano cheese and prosciutto. Heat on High for 3 minutes, answer phone, no you haven’t had dinner yet! Scrape into misshapen Gladware, throw in back of fridge. Eat half of a hamburger at a bar instead, not the whole thing because then your pants will fit weird, reheat bolognese at 3 in the morning, eat while seated on kitchen floor.

Rosemary Lemongrass Salmon
Whole salmon filet with fresh vegetables on a bed of brown rice with edamame, in a rosemary lemongrass sauce. You left it in the freezer at home because you had to leave early for a meeting. Don’t worry, there are 47 more meetings you have to get to today and at least half of them will have a plate of cookies involved.

Judgemental Jambalaya
Half a cup of delicately spiced rice with crisp vegetables and two salad shrimp. Cut a slit in plastic and heat on High for 3 1/2 minutes. Eat slowly and deliberately in the employee lounge while saying things like “oh wow, I didn’t know fat free could be so good” and “MMMMM”, while staring at Heather with her bagel and cream cheese until she gets uncomfortable and throws the other half in the trash. Retrieve other half from trash, remove debris, enjoy.

I’ve Written Other Jokes, But These Are The Ones I’m Going To Tell

Accomplishments In The 24 Hours Since Deactivating Facebook

Bought fancy expensive smoked sea salts. (Will probably become amazing chef.)

Remembered that Twitter exists.

Some work stuff that probably wasn’t important and is definitely going to have to be done again.

Made a joke about fantasy football that was pretty OK and hurt someone’s feelings at the same time.

Bought a $7 magazine.

Ate some hummus.

Remembered that Instagram exists.

Poop Jokes in Hell

I’m on a quest to Do Things. It’s because I’m feeling the scaly little fingers of depression poking at the back of my throat and I hate all of my clothes and I’ve watched all of Parks & Rec and 30 Rock at least ten times through and I can’t sleep at night. That’s normal, right? So I would lay awake scanning Facebook to see what other people were Doing and it turns out that most people were Doing Things and I’m doing nothing. I CAN’T EVEN SLEEP RIGHT.

On Monday night I went to stand up comedy open mic night at the little movie theater bar by my house. I just wanted to watch how this kind of thing went down. I don’t know how it’s possible that I forgot what it’s like to be around people who are very Personalityish, entire rooms full of them. How did I forget the few theater classes I took in college? Oh Christ, I forgot the few theater classes I took in college! And that’s how I ended up sitting at the bar waiting for this thing to start, listening to a dude in a collared sweater with a throat zipper talk about his “craft” and give a guy in a trucker hat with large ironic words on it pointers on his “material.” Oh nooooo.

So we filed in to this little room behind the bar and found some seats. There was a VERY energetic girl zipping around, to and fro, up and down, pulling on her clothes and her hair and just generally being a weirdo. Something about her was familiar but I couldn’t figure out what, because my thoughts were interrupted by the sound check, which was:

“ARRIGHT STOP WHATCHA DOIN, CAUSE I’M ABOUT TO RUIN…”

Oh nooooooooooooo.

It was Zippy on the mic, throwing down some white girl rap. To be funny! Because who says mic checks have to be boring when they can be trite?! Ehhhhgghghg. So it’s when Zippy takes the mic and starts the show with jokes about a dude she used to date (“He put a ring on it!” and the room literally sagged under the weight of 1000 cheap one-liners farting to death) that I realize how I know her: she was a leasing agent for the owners of my apartment several years ago. She used to bust into my apartment on Saturday mornings with total strangers who would peek into my bedroom as I hurried to cover my butt. I stood on the other side of my door once and listened to her tell some prospective renters that “the current renter is difficult.” So holy shit if I wasn’t a little creeped out that now here she was in front of me telling me about how she’s Jewish, joke about some guy she dated, Fran Drescher impersonation, hurr hurr durrp. Give it up for all of these nervous people you don’t know!

First up: a guy. First joke: a poop joke. Nothing to see here, move along.

What followed was a veritable parade of dongs. There were a few women in there, but the swagger and attitude and stink of dong pretty much overshadowed the whole operation. Here’s how it went:

Poop joke guy. It was about thinking he was crazy when he was twelve because he would shit and there wouldn’t be anything in the toilet. This was funny to me because the only video I could find on YouTube of a comedian performing at this open mic night was of a guy telling a story about this one time when he was 5 and he pooped his pants. I thought “I bet every joke will be a poop joke,” which is why the first joke thrilled me so, if thrilled=crushed with disappointment (because people were LAUGHING.). It was then that I noticed that this same venue holds a monthly story slam wherein all the stories are about shitting yourself. I’m not kidding. Their flyer says “Have you ever shit your pants?” (Yes but I don’t see why I should tell you about it, sir!)

A guy who said he was going to do an impression of the inner voice of every comedian who would perform that evening, then proceeded to scream “LOVE MEEE” into the mic. You could hear the crunchy spiny bits of the tumbleweeds passing through the room on the wood floor after that, and it was super awkward, so he went back to his little notebook and said into the mic “what else, what ellllse…” before just quitting entirely.

A guy who talked about hating ex girlfriends and burning bridges because “that’s stupid to do when you’re in your 20s, but I’m in my 30s now…”

The guy from the bar, who talked about his craaaazy family and how mean they are. He said he had written OTHER jokes but that these were the ones he wanted to tell tonight “so fuckin’ deal with it.”

This guy who made me so uncomfortable, I leaned over and whispered that we HAD to leave right after he was done, because it was like he was doing his Dane Cook impression. Like right down to the facial expressions and body movement. You know, jerking around and impersonating women with head tosses and one hip jutted out, smacking his mouth with all of his words, using the space around him to trot about like a pony with one leg shorter than the others, playing with his own spiked hair like he wasn’t going to go to the bathroom after his set and put it back the way it had been. And he was getting close and leaning in and staaaaring and almost challenging everyone to look at him. Creeeepyyyy.

I hate to put all the women in the same category but damn if they didn’t make it so easy to do. They told jokes about dating and that’s pretty much it.

Etc. etc. etc., and the one thing all these men had in common was this swaggery bravado, like they didn’t need you to laugh. They were just there because they were CHAAAARACTERRRRRS and they knew they were funny and they needed to practice on your face. It was like watching someone take a masturbation selfie. It felt so false, like I should be in another room or something. Which most of them were, between each other’s 3 1/2 minute sets. They were crowded around the bar ignoring all of the other comedians until it was their turn, then they expected your full attention. Which kind of strikes me as weird and disingenuous. But isn’t the whole thing like that?

Meanwhile, through the entire thing, Zippy was seated directly to the left of the performer. She took her hair down. She put her hair up. She changed the height of her ponytail. She yanked at the tongues of her sneakers. She took her sneakers off, put them back on. Whipped her hair back and forth. Up and down. Pulled on the zippers on her athletic jacket. All of this while holding up her phone every time the 3 minute alarm went off. Holding up her phone RIGHT NEXT TO the performer. Like instead of in the back of the room. She laughed in a way that was almost intentionally Fran Drescher-y. Like “NYAHHAHAHAHHAHAHA.”

This is what it’s going to be like in Hell, isn’t it? Or maybe the Hell part is when you’re walking home wondering what your therapist is going to say when you tell her all this stuff, and also the part about how you can’t walk by a trash can without thinking someone’s going to jump out from behind it and tell you a horrible joke.

I must poll my friends who do stand-up and find out HOW they have the energy to put two sentences together after being around other stand-up comedians. Because fuuuuuck.

Yo Linden

There were a couple of weeks in August when all I could stand to have on my TV was every episode of The Killing ever made. I love that show. Is it the constant rain and sadness that I identify with? Is it because it’s in Seattle? Is it because Detective Linden is the best lady cop in the entire world ever?

I mean, take a look at her. She wears the same sweater throughout all of Season 1. She’s tired and frazzled. Her makeup is minimal so as to appear nonexistent. Her hair is all fucked up, either oiled back or fuzzed up like she brushed her ponytail backwards to get all that frizz going. She chews gum constantly and her jaw does that tightening thing that, in any other Lady Cop Push Up Bra Hour show, would be considered unattractive. She scowls, and not in that pouty way. She also gets fucked over a lot because she can’t fucking do everything perfectly. Like raise her kid. She’s colossally bad at raising her kid, which is a really brave choice for a show. I caught myself thinking “what a dick, leaving that kid alone in a hotel room while he’s sick” and wondering aloud why the show kind of glossed over that. Then I remembered all the times that men have been shitty fathers on TV shows and I’ve thought “well but he had to go to work, so….so you know.” Nobody makes a big deal about that.

I appreciate the fact that she’s struggling with some kind of mental illness, but the jury’s still out on whether the choice to have her deal with that has any intended connection to her mishandling of personal affairs. I don’t get the sense that the show’s writers are saying “any woman who doesn’t focus completely 100% on motherhood is crazy,” but I can see how some would think that.

She’s not buying what you’re selling, bub.

I usually find cop shows to be kind of dumb and boring, especially if it’s about two lady cops who are trying to haaaave it alllllll! (See Rizzoli & Isles. I mean, whose fucking names are Rizzoli and Isles? I highly doubt a Rizzoli has ever met an Isles. Also I’d be pissed if I was a lady cop, running around in my smart little lady cop pantsuits, and the sergeant assigned as my partner ANOTHER lady cop because she also likes pantsuits. Does he think we’re going to get along based on the pantsuits thing? I’m here to work, Sergeant, so you can re-assign Isles to the K-9 unit she came from! Then I’d be like OHHHH SLAMMM and high five a man cop and it would be this total funny and rad moment because that’s what happens when ladies are just one’a the guyzz.)

Anyway, about Linden. I kind of feel about her the way I felt the first time I saw Die Hard: kiiind of turned on, but mostly because I wanted to be the character, not because I wanted to fuck the character. That’s never made sense to me before, because people would say things like “You like Bruce Willis? Yeah he’s hot.” Yeah, sure. But when I was a kid and watching Die Hard in my grandma’s recliner, I wasn’t thinking “dang I’d do some sex on Bruce Willis,” I was thinking how cool it would be if I could make my muscles so huge that I could effortlessly slide down a cable inside an air vent while it blew up behind me. That would really be something! Maybe somewhere along the line I, as a girl, was discouraged from doing anything but sexualizing male characters and their badassery. I mean, you can appreciate them, you can’t do what they do.

Enter Lara Croft. With Tomb Raider I, not only could you do what she could do, you were a hot girl at the same time! So people would want to fuck you, which made it okay for you to do man things. Like put together ancient statues from pieces you find all around an underground maze you can only enter by stepping on sensitized plates on the ground in the correct order. Also other stuff, like shimmy across ledges and pull yourself up and ride an ATV through the jungle, shooting monkeys with a rocket launcher. Or an Uzi. You know. Depending on which cheat code you put in. Anyway, what a novelty! Huge titties and a gun!

In my heaven, Angelina Jolie isn’t the Tomb Raider of the two completely heinous films crapped upon us by the sticky bunghole of Hollywood. The Lara Croft I envision is more like Linden: short, sinewy. Tense and focused. A little bit on the manic side because you kind of have to be in order to do anything very difficult and consuming. Flat-chested, because you’re banging up against the sides of the cave walls you’re climbing all day and humongous Jolie tits would make that impossible. Careful with guns (especially on an ATV, dude) and not nice to men just because they’re men. Not nice to anyone, actually. TOO BUSY RAIDIN’ TOMBS OVER HERE TO BE NICE. A frown and a muscular jaw for the ages.

Fuck it. I have inspired myself. I’m quitting librarianship and becoming a lady cop who raids tombs in the slow season.

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Tagged as Comedy, depression, Detective Linden, Tomb Raider, trying