#It's also equally possible what I'm describing is just an anxiety disorder

[w6ir0q4f]

Something I have come to understand far too late is that internalising and embodying the spirit of the phrase "It is what is it is" is something that actually requires discipline and resolve to achieve. It feels uncannily to me like there's a particular muscle that lets you swallow momentary hang ups and keep breathing and all you have to do is exercise it frequently.

The action of consciously deciding to let something I would ordinarily obsessively worry about pass and continue inhaling oxygen instead feels exactly the same to me as say, spontaneously deciding to do twenty push-ups - definitely achievable but something that takes a little energy and willpower.

[krakenoid]

The Worst Blowjob I Ever Gave

Most people have a type of person they're attracted to. This is just normal personal preference, utterly mundane. However, there is the far less common, possibly supernatural inverse- a specific type that is attracted to you. For a friend of mine, that type is hyperspecific: brunette female social workers named Mary who wear glasses. So, when my friend Mary said she was going into social work, I advised her to stay away from him lest she be drawn into his particular gravity well. This story, however, is not about him.

See, the type of man who is attracted to me is best described as "dudes who figured out I was bi a long time before I did." (It's no wonder that, since coming out, my already sparse romantic prospects dried up near-entirely.) It was one such man who received the worst blowjob I have ever given.

I was in my first year of college before I dropped out, in the midst of a deep, deep depression and subsequent ego death. Ego death, as I've had it explained to me, is the complete and utter loss of your sense of self. I knew on an academic level that I was Alan Aubrey, but I couldn't make the connection between me and the thing that stared out at me from the mirror. So, knowing that, I'm sure you understand the lengths to which I was willing to go to feel human again.

I met him at a party that I didn't really want to go to. I'm not sure what drew him to me, as I was sitting on a couch and staring deeply into a red solo cup filled with equal parts Mountain Dew and Smirnoff, which I had only taken to be polite. He was your stereotypical frat boy. Picture a frat boy in your mind. Yep, that's him. In part to protect his privacy, and in part because I've forgotten his name, we'll call him Chunt. Chunt was dressed in salmon-colored shorts and a lime green polo with the collar popped up. Christ, he was wearing fucking *loafers.* We got to talking, or rather he started talking to me and I occasionally interjected with a question or a joke. I was nervous both because of the unique combination of anxiety, ego death, and an autism-spectrum disorder and because I was noticing him in a way I had only noticed a few guys before.

I won't bore you with my extremely awkward attempts at flirtation, but an hour or so later we were in his dorm room, watching a pirated version of John Wick with Polish subtitles that could not be disabled. It was exactly like every other date you go on in college: Hanging out in a dorm room identical to your own, on a mattress exactly like your own, making out and only half paying attention to one of the most influential action blockbusters of the last decade. Eventually, he got his dick out, as one does.

It's worth noting, dear reader, that I had never given a blowjob before. I resolved to give it my level best and hoped that it would awaken some innate dick-sucking talent within me. Five minutes later, it had not. Ten minutes later, he was watching Fortnite clips on his phone. He didn't even nut. Do you know how humiliating it is to have one of the most stereotypically horny demographics on a college campus get bored of you sucking him off? Eventually, realizing my ministrations were doing more harm than good, I excused myself and exited Chunt's life forever.

I like to think that it was something like Robert Downey Jr. turning his life around and getting off hard drugs after eating a really bad cheeseburger. Maybe my futile attempts at fellatio somehow changed the trajectory of his life, hopefully for the better. I hope that he at least came to a realization, if not to my efforts. Perhaps he's on a different path now, but I'll never know and I don't particularly want to. I think it's best for both of us to leave that behind. Wherever Chunt is now, I wish him the best, and thank him for helping me realize that I am in fact bisexual, and also that I have standards.

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/4/2020: SOCIETY

Without having a survey to back me up, I feel comfortable asserting that as a horror fan, you go through different phases with SOCIETY. It’s a basic fact of life, and yet it morphs and mutates underneath you, shocking you anew just when you think you’ve got a grip on it. You never forget your first time, because there is simply nothing like it. Then, after you get over the initial shock of its patented brand of body horror, you start to take it for granted; it's so broad and monolithic that it becomes something like the Grand Canyon--when it’s not right there in front of you, you begin to experience it more iconically, as part of the wallpaper of existence, rather than an in-your-face confrontation with the limits of experience. Then, you revisit it every few years (or months, depending on what sort of person you are), and the prophylactic layer that your brain has wrapped around your memories of it--the one that allows you to think of SOCIETY as a fun, wacky cheap thrill--begins to crumble, and you realize all over again how iconoclastically vile it is. Wherever you happen to be at, with this inimitable genre landmark, you'd be hard pressed to deny that it earns its royal status among horror movies, just for being so uniquely fucked up.

Filmmaker Brian Yuzna is best known as the co-creator of the indispensable RE-ANIMATOR (or as the co-writer of HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS...depending on what sort of person you are, again), itself a milestone achievement in the blending of sex and gore that so characterized '80s horror production. That film clearly brought out the best in Yuzna and frequent collaborator Stuart Gordon (also of HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS fame...among other things), but it's interesting to see how they operate apart, to understand the unique ingredients that each filmmaker brought to the more perfect union of their classic Lovecraft adaptation. Gordon skewed darker and more intellectual, as evidenced by the end of his career with the shattering mob thriller KING OF THE ANTS, the disturbing true crime drama STUCK, and the Mamet-penned EDMOND. Yuzna, for his part, is almost anti-intellectual, preferring to cook up blackly comic, semi-pornographic nightmares like his two increasingly horny RE-ANIMATOR sequels, the terminal S&M fantasy RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD 3, and the shamelessly hokey comic book adaptation FAUST: LOVE OF THE DAMNED. Yuzna's lack of shame is really his defining feature as an artist, and nowhere is this more obvious than in his directorial debut and signature masterpiece, SOCIETY.

Salvador Dali's "The Great Masturbator," a chief visual inspiration for SOCIETY.

Yuzna was able to leverage the success of RE-ANIMATOR to lock in two directorial opportunities, BRIDE OF RE-ANIMATOR, and a bizarre body horror exercise about a Beverly Hills orphan who discovers that not only are his adoptive family from a different bloodline, but they're not even from the same species. That both pictures employed the writing team of Woody Keith and Rick Fry gives you a little taste of what to expect from SOCIETY, but to be frank, the latter threatens to make the former look like a very special episode of ER; "overkill" barely begins to describe SOCIETY’s ambitious assault on the human body. In a recent interview, the philipino-american director giggles perversely, "I think my friends were a little embarrassed for me (when they saw SOCIETY)," and this sound bite reminded me that the last, most important ingredient that Yuzna contributes to any project is unabashed joy. It's a little hard to imagine stomaching SOCIETY without it.

In this unusual scene from the class struggle in Beverly Hills, Billy Warlock (son of HALLOWEEN 2's Michael Myers, Dick Warlock) plays Bill Whitney, a rich, handsome, athletic high school student with a heavy duty anxiety disorder. Although he appears to have it all, he is plagued by nightmares and hallucinations, reflecting suspicions that the family that spoils him is also out to get him. Perhaps this is all understandable, though. Bill is under a lot of pressure these days, with his parents devoting all of their attention to his sister's coming out party, and his narcissistic girlfriend pushing him to ingratiate himself to the assholes higher up the social ladder; it's enough to make any teenager feel alienated and insecure. But, do these garden variety anxieties account for his visions of his sister's body deforming itself unnaturally, or the dubious evidence he finds that her debutante ball involves incestuous orgies and human sacrifice? Is Bill simply crumbling under the strain of societal expectations, or is the friction with his shrink, his parents, and his peers all symptomatic of an elaborate plot against him by elites who are truly less than human?

I can’t believe they use this cheapo blanket trick MORE THAN ONCE in a movie that is famous for its unforgettable special effects, and I guess I kind of love it.

In case I haven't made the answer abundantly obvious, I'll add that while SOCIETY is the purest expression of Yuzna-ness on the market, it has an important co-author in Screaming Mad George. The eccentric japanese FX master, whose name is apparently an amalgamation of Mad Magazine, Screamin' Jay Hawkins, and...George, has produced some of horror's most outrageous makeup and visual effects, mostly for Yuzna, many of them in SOCIETY. If you've seen even a trailer for Alex Winter's 1993 oddity FREAKED--which is itself a grossout criticism of American social standards--then you are already familiar with SMG's trademark style. He specializes in twisted perversions of the human form that would make a cenobite blush, driven by a penchant for puns, and influenced equally by THE THING's Rob Botin, and Big Daddy Roth’s Rat Fink style. Screaming Mad George is instrumental in articulating Yuzna's premise: that behind the shimmering veneer of success and sophistication, the upper class are just a bunch of degenerates, who literally degenerate into something unimaginable behind closed doors. It's impossible to imagine SOCIETY without his sinuous, slithering monstrosities, or his indescribable realization of their most important social event, "the shunt".

One of many great images from a zine I wish I owned, on SMG’s Facebook page.

It's easy to get overwhelmed by SOCIETY's visual impact, but its message is just as potent now as it was at the end of the Reagan era: Rich people are not only different from the rest of us, but in fact, they aren't even human. Writers Keith and Fry make an interesting choice of hero to help put this across. A lazier writer would have selected any archetype from the Freaks and Geeks set to create an easy Us vs Them tension, but SOCIETY is led by a promising young man who, for reasons he himself does not yet understand, is just not "the right kind of people". Bill appears to have every advantage in life, including a level of popularity that wins him presidency of the debate team despite his nerdier rival’s superior prowess--and yet, he suffers from a stigmatizing psychiatric disorder that is the natural result of feeling indefinably different from one's peers, and intuiting that, as a consequence, they don't even really like you. The shallow jock with deep-seated emotional problems is a much more interesting protagonist for this kind of social allegory than the charismatic outcasts that you get in movies like THE FACULTY and DISTURBING BEHAVIOR, for whom the idea that the elites could be aliens is just de rigueur.

It's worth noting that this complexity of character extends to Bill's love interest, sympathetic society girl Clarissa Carlyn (Playboy Playmate Devin DeVasquez). At first, she seems villainously eager to introduce Bill to the many splendors of "the shunting", but as the plot against him mounts to its horrifying conclusion, she defects. There appears to be a reason for this, although honestly, this is the most difficult part of SOCIETY for me to wrap my head around. Clarissa lives as an essentially independent adult, only burdened by her mother (Pamela Matheson), a possibly brain damaged hulk who lurks in and out of various scenes just to be disturbing, always announced by some toots on a tuba, before eventually siding with our heroes. I'm really not sure what's supposed to be going on in this part of the movie, except that this character contributes to a number of distasteful jokes. But, I hold on to the idea that by virtue of whatever disorder Mrs. Carlyn suffers from, she serves the purpose of priming Clarissa to rebel, since her very existence makes her daughter something of a societal outcast herself. That's the best I can do.

In any case, everyone working on SOCIETY commits completely, with Mrs. Carlyn being no exception. The movie's climactic orgy of the damned is an all hands on deck operation, just as reliant on Screaming Mad George's artistic abilities as it is on the actors' responsibility to make you believe that this fucked up shit is really happening. There's a visceral patina of sleaze spread over the entire film, dripping from the way that characters talk to and touch each other, flirting and flaunting their bodies in a distinctly unseemly fashion, even when it stays within the realm of mundane reality. This constant sinister, insinuating attitude on the part of the whole cast lays the foundation for what is to come, and while I appreciate everybody's hard work, my favorite performance is from an actor who only comes in at the very end: David Wiley as society king Judge Carter. Wiley's career consisted almost exclusively of the most ordinary sort of television work, which makes his outrageous turn in this alien porno flick all the more respectable. While other characters transition from suspicious pod people to full-on mutated perverts, Judge Carter has to show up just for the finale, establish his authority, rip off his clothes, and plunge straight into a sea of slime, happily fisting his way through the cast. Wiley meets this challenge with aplomb, making of himself a hybrid of Robert Englund and Gene Hackman, perfectly embodying the movie's joyful absurdity, and never betraying the slightest hint of embarrassment. 

SOCIETY is very much a don't-look-down type of endeavor, a fairy that could expire at the slightest lapse in faith. There's a visual pun in the last act that's so gross, so offensive, so frankly idiotic, that I don't have the courage to describe it; my whole body tenses up when I know this scene is coming, as if it were the meat hook scene in TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE or the brutal rape in the middle of SHOWGIRLS. I don't like it, but at the same time, I respect Yuzna's unhesitating commitment to show it to me, and I think that actor Charles Lucia should get some kind of award for shouldering the burden so valiantly. SOCIETY is a daring movie in the truest sense, a film with more balls than brains, and in this it exposes the limitation of intelligence and taste, and the real need for pure transgression, in producing art of any real value. You might argue with me about whether Yuzna's masturbatory magnum opus really qualifies as art, but to respond to that, I'll quote the great transgressor Alejandro Jodorowsky: "If you are great, EL TOPO is a great picture. If you are limited, EL TOPO is limited." So stick that in your shunt and smoke it.

PS Here, have this stuck in your head for the rest of your life.

[thedinbpd]

hi, i was thinking i might have bpd but i'm so unsure of myself, i keep worrying that i'm faking all of the symptoms in order to get a diagnosis worse than just depression and anxiety in order to explain why i'm such a failure. i'm worried to talk to my therapist or doctor about it because i feel being wrong about this would be the worst thing ever and i'd never be able to trust myself with anything in relation to myself ever again. anywho this is long and im sorry but i'd appreciate an opinion.

Hey there! Thanks for reaching out, and I’ll try to give the best advice that I can. I’m not an expert though.  

First, one of the best assumptions to make when deeply questioning aspects of yourself is that you’re likely not “faking it” or doing something to get attention. You wouldn’t think or care about something so much, if it wasn’t real in some type of way. 

Next, I think that even if you found out that you don’t have BPD, or if you don’t get officially diagnosed, that doesn’t mean that you can’t trust your ability to know things about yourself. It might mean that there are better ways to describe your symptoms and experiences, or even that a mental health professional didn’t get it right, or many other possibilities.  

Also, since you are in a place of trying to figure out what’s going and if you’re afraid to talk to mental health professionals right now, maybe do some research on BPD and other mental health disorders. Getting some education medically can be a good way to explore your symptoms. In addition to that, finding people’s personal anecdotes and asking questions is also a good way to get more information and see if you relate to some experiences. I would recommend avoiding platforms that encourage self destruction in any type of way though. That likely won’t be helpful. 

In the end, I do think at some point that you should talk to mental health professionals about your questions and concerns. Not all mental health professionals are created equal, but they do have some knowledge that people like me don’t and they also have more power in helping you find the right treatment.   

I hope that some of this helps, and I hope that you find the knowledge and treatment that will be best for you. :)