#what would venting even accomplish? what would revealing myself prove? whats the point

[liinos]

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[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER PRE-GAME 9/30/2020: 30 MILES FROM NOWHERE/CONFESSIONAL (2019)

Spoiler alert. Or whatever. It’s not going to matter, you don’t care.

So, I've been away for a minute. Just about any reason to be away from Tumblr is probably a good reason, but I have an especially good one. I'm finally working on a "real" writing project, which demands, and deserves, all of my attention. My social media abstinence isn't just a matter of time management, though. Once I had a long term obligation on my plate, I became very aware of how the short term satisfaction I get from posting mindless rants was eating away at the fuel I have available for sustained efforts. When I wind myself up with a 500-1000 word blog post, it generates a lot of electricity, but I blow it all as soon as I experience the catharsis of posting it, and I'm further pacified by ego-stroking likes and reblogs. Not to sound like a sanctimonious luddite--I mean, I'm still here, after all!--but it turns out that the staying focused on the long haul has been surprisingly revivifying. In fact, I haven't been talking about my big fancy project for the same reason; I don't want to lose any of the juice I've been storing up by wasting it on the shallow pleasure of describing it. Also such things should probably be somewhat confidential until they're approaching the publishing stage, but I digress! There is an actual reason I'm saying all this, that has more to do with this blog.

(Don’t get all excited, I’m not doing EVIL ED right now, I just need a relatable image.)

As I got deeper into my experience of "real" film writing, I started to reflect on the meaning of my personal writing. Like, the point of it. I tend to write in a sweaty, compulsive, sadomasochistic haze, in which I'm sometimes hyperbolically generous, and sometimes--perhaps more often, unfortunately--as nasty as humanly possible. Sometimes the movies deserve it, when they're lazy, pretentious, or otherwise demonstrate an open contempt for the audience aka ME. Often, though, I'm just creating an opportunity to vent my generalized rage and frustration. That can be very entertaining for myself and (hopefully) my teensy-but-devoted readership, but lately I've asked myself whether there isn't some negative tradeoff for all this amusement. In this phase of my life, it's reasonable to assume I'll make more and more friends and acquaintances who create things I don't always care for, but I don't necessarily think they deserve to be abused for it. As much as I have a right to say whatever I want, technically, I'd be embarrassed if I were caught just jacking myself off by making fun of their work in public. And more to the point, I don't necessarily want to contribute to the growing atmosphere in which people feel more afraid to try and fail, because the public so commonly misidentifies sarcasm and mean-spiritedness as intelligence and superiority, and that form of petty darkness spreads across the internet a lot faster than a movie can reach a wider audience. After all, I'm in the process of potentially turning myself into one of those well-meaning failures right now. I could stand to be a little more deliberate about how I speak, and about what, in general.

My father is an art critic, and once in an extra petulant moment, teenage-me asked him in an accusative tone what he thought the point of his profession was. He replied calmly that he wouldn't publish any comment that he didn't think the artist could make use of somehow. I don't know if he always stuck to that policy, but the thought sure stuck with me.

So anyway, over the last few months I've been giving myself a bit of an attitude adjustment, through a combination of personal reflection, and hard work on something meaningful/not for the internet. I've been feeling all proud of myself and shit, but today reminded me that any path to enlightenment is always marked by setbacks, doubt, and temptation. For today, in complete innocence (or at least a melange of innocence and ignorance, as I very much invite this type of problem), I managed to watch TWO (2) movies about an academic film-cum-psychology project, focused on a gang of college buddies who inevitably reveal what bad people they are under the unique conditions of the project, and then the project turns out to be run NOT by its presumed-dead originator, but by the originator's even-crazier lover. It's amazing how particular something can be, and still be utterly obvious and cliche. In my defense, I really tried to turn the second movie off, because it was...just instantly terrible, but the seed of suspicion had taken root--is this randomly selected movie ACTUALLY EXACTLY THE SAME AS THE PREVIOUS MOVIE?--and I just had to find out if this could be true. I suffered, deliberately, for another hour and a half, to confirm my awful hunch. I don't know how I would have felt if I had turned out to be wrong (better? worse?), but I don't have to worry about that now. Now I just have to worry about my overpowering impulse to be as ugly as possible about what I have personally subjected myself to.

(The completely deceptive poster for our not at all witchy or eerie opening feature.) 

In need of a passable time-waster this afternoon, I put on 30 MILES FROM NOWHERE. Released in March of 2019, Caitlin Koller's claustrophobic black comedy feels oddly like a product of 2020. A group of estranged, middle-aged college pals of the BIG CHILL ilk--which one of the characters calls out, out loud, just so ya know--come together for a fallen comrade's funeral, only to find themselves trapped in his widow's increasingly creepy cabin in the woods. Said comrade was driven to suicide by the failure of a psychological experiment he conducted that plunged its subject into madness, and if you don't realize right away that the obnoxious and unstable cast are the new subjects of their not-quite-dead friend's renewed project, then you're firing a lot slower than 24 frames per second. The dialog is often decent, aiding a handful of funny, natural performances...but it's hard to forget that you're just waiting for the conspicuously crazy widow to reveal that the "unexplained events" in and around the cabin are part of a controlled attempt to get the guests to devolve into their worst selves, which isn't such a difficult task considering the undesirable state they all arrive in.

It just made me ask myself, what was the point of this? Why do people make movies that are entirely predicated on the shock of the twist, knowing that if the twist isn't so shocking--or is baldly obvious from the start--then the whole experience just falls apart? Why not hedge your bets with a little more depth, or purpose, or style, or really anything more reliable than a smug attempt to prove that your script is smarter than your audience? Even if you do manage to pull off this dubious accomplishment, it reduces your movie to something like the experience of having somebody jump out of a closet and scream in your ear to "get" you. I've always felt concerned that if somebody ever tries to "get" me like that, I might just automatically punch them in the face. But anyway, whatever shred of good will this movie could have accrued with its plucky performances is blown away by the final insult, when the cops arrive to clean up the inevitable bloody mess. The responding officers are hilariously unimpressed and unsurprised by the byzantine scheme that has resulted in a shocking act of violence, because the cabin's "guest book", which our heroes all filled out, was actually the signatory page of a complicated waiver form granting full permission to the hosts to, like, do whatever the hell they want to everybody. Presumably this shit just goes on all the time, leading the local law to shrug off anything that happens to or because of the dumbassed lab rats who frequent the cabin? I dunno. I mean, what can I say? ACAB, I guess!

At the time, I managed to resist the urge to take to the internet and decry the crimes of this lame-o party joke. I really don't like the sensation that a movie is just trying to trick me into thinking something that isn't true. But, this isn't, like, an affront to cinema. People make annoying, below average movies all the time, and maybe you kinda have to, if you eventually want to make better movies. I imagine myself in the shoes of the people who actually put some elbow grease into this production, having to wade through the rantings of internet ghouls like myself while they're trying to see how their efforts are paying off. Making a movie is probably a lot harder than I think it is.

But that's part of the point I'm heading toward. I'm always amazed by people's willingness to pour huge amounts of energy and capital into something to which there is ultimately very little point. I mean, I have bad, unoriginal, boring ideas every single day of my life. But I almost never DO any of them. I have a hard enough time convincing myself to just get out of bed in the morning, let alone devote blood, sweat, and money to deliver unto the world material evidence of my personal mediocrity. I can't imagine thinking it would be worth it, for myself or the unfortunate people who are subjected to my project, to actually execute on my bad ideas. I'm being judgmental, but honestly, I don't even know if my attitude makes me better or worse than someone who accomplishes the task of completing and selling a movie that's mainly a waste of time. Movies are so complicated, and realizing them requires the consensus of so many people, that it's sort of incredible that there are people capable of making one that doesn't have a powerfully compelling motivation behind it. People who are able to do such a thing obviously have something that I don't, and it isn't just "consideration for the audience."

So, I could probably stand to be more forgiving--or just, less eager to absolutely flay someone alive on my dumb little blog because they so opened themselves up to my arsenal of elaborate insults. But like...not all the time. Sometimes, a movie really fucking asks for it, and in revealing itself to me, it has effectively signed a waiver giving me patent freedom to do whatever I want to it. CONFESSIONAL is the latest movie to give me such a gift. After the final credit rolled in 30 MILES FROM NOWHERE, I looked for a little palate cleanser. As little as I like movies that put their single egg in the motheaten basket of a "shocking twist", I also have a problem with what I identify as canned theater. Not that I think all movies have to be lavish productions, but I think they should try to do something that is natively cinematic. It's very rare that I'm impressed by anything that is literally all talk. So, I went in search of some more familiar form of trash to help me recallibrate, and trash is definitely what I got.

(Me crying over my own bad decisions.)

To be fair, I kind of should have known that I was in for a challenging experience. The 2019 found footage thriller CONFESSIONAL is more or less based on the "confessional" part of sleazy reality TV shows, isolating each cast member in a soundproof stall so they can spill the rotten contents of their guts. Unfortunately, I spotted a review suggesting that the movie succeeded, against all odds, at remaining visually dynamic despite the unchanging scenery, and I was intrigued. The reviewer was correct, impressively; the monotony of the coffin-like environment with its dark foam walls was the least of my concerns. Other problems superseded that threat, immediately. The plot concerns a group of college pals who come together to remember a recently deceased friend--a filmmaker who expired mysteriously while completing a psychology-tinged project in which she recorded all of her friends' most shameful personal secrets. Now, somebody else has taken over the project...someone who "has never been identified", according to an early title card in this movie-within-a-movie (EVEN THOUGH THIS PERSON WILL BE EXPLICITLY IDENTIFIED AT THE END OF THE MOVIE SO LIKE WHY), but who seems likely to be the decedent's ex-lover...who continues to expose their subjects' most shameful secrets on film. I mean, what the fuck? Did I somehow manage to pick a second movie with almost the exact same plot??? I couldn't believe it. I didn't know if I could take it. My prospects only got worse when the cast showed up and started talking. I tried to turn the movie off. I backed out and walked away from it, twice. But I couldn't leave it alone. I had to know if it was really the same movie.

CONFESSIONAL concerns characters who are contemporaneously in college, which actually goes a long way to making everything worse. Each of these walking cliches is connected in some way to Amelia, a film student whose mysterious death has created a campus scandal, leaving shattered hearts and lives in its wake. The living have each received a blackmail-flavored invitation to speak about the deceased in a tiny "confessional booth" somewhere on campus, where, predictably, they find themselves locked in until they confess whatever they know about Amelia, and their classmates. I don't know why practically every single movie about young people has to be so miserable, but this is one of those. I assume that it has something to do with the fact that youth is simultaneously so desired and so ignored. People in their teens and early 20s are so sexually coveted, yet so easily dismissed as individuals, that we wind up with all this media that panders to them relentlessly (or at least, panders to the legions of ticket-buying perverts who enjoy watching them prance around), without almost any consideration of how they actually think and act, and look. Movies like FAT GIRL and  WELCOME TO THE DOLL HOUSE may be accused of their own form of pandering, a venal form of voyeuristic schadenfreude, but at least they reflect something of the awkwardness, isolation, and incompleteness of adolescence; something more than the dissociated, pornographic fantasies of adults who have long since forgotten what it was like to be powerless and ignored, or desired by people who don't even like you.

Not that CONFESSIONAL is supposed to be a work of grim realism, but it is most definitely rooted in a fantasy about college life that makes its contrived, message-y plot a lot harder to take. With almost the sole exception of "the nerdy one", every single character looks like a Bratz doll, oozing an exaggerated indecency that belies the movie's pretentious insistence on addressing the sex & gender Issues of the Day. What you get is a really good example of what happens when millennial characters are modeled, not on any actual millennials, but on other forms of marketing that are aimed at millennials, which are themselves just based on other preexisting youth-targeted commercials, et al ad nauseam. Even setting aside the deliriously slutty wardrobe choices, makeup appears to have been laid on with a trowel, coating each actor in a thick creamy layer of spackle that only makes any scars, pits, or other evidence of individuality look utterly bizarre. Accordingly, everybody preens, pouts, and generally behaves as if they're about to take off their clothes, which might be a huge relief given the profusion of chafing, cheapo mesh and straps they're laboring under.

So, ok, not every movie can have a great costume department, but the dialog here is a perfect match for the disastrous aesthetic decisions. Actually, this is the real reason I almost walked out on CONFESSIONAL. If I may ramble briefly, without substantiating any of my broad-ranging claims: Sometime in the late 90s/early 00s, horror cinema seemed to suffer a degenerative slide away from genuine thrills and chills, and into a version of the genre that is best characterized as the Slutty Halloween Costume approach. Any sense of existential dread, revulsion, or bodily vulnerability was widely replaced by a cutesy, Hot Topic-y preference for fast fashion and sex appeal, in which bloodshed more facilitated an informal wet teeshirt contest than any real fear induction. Horror's new mall goth look came with an equally shallow, boring verbal affectation: a sullen, sleazy, tooth-sucking sarcasm, that ushered in a new era in which, instead of making fun of the scummy coked-out dialog in porno movies, we now expect everybody to just talk like that, because it's hot. There's probably a line to be drawn between this unfortunate development, and the boneheaded real-world trend of identifying "sarcasm" as an important personal selling point on dating sites, but I won't try to prove that here. For now, I will just say that as soon as I heard the CONFESSIONAL characters start to speak, with their sneering, insinuating tones, with the vocal fry, with the head wagging, the jutting jaws, the smoldering gazes, the juvenile dragging-out of horny grownup words like de-bauch-er-y...I almost lost my nerve. Listening to these little creeps hissing and spitting for 84 minutes is a lot like being hit on by some barfly who continues to bludgeon you with his hot breath and corny lines without ever noticing that you've thrown up into your pint.

Uh, anyway. So what actually happens in the movie. Why would anyone ever allow someone to record video of them revealing the ugliest, most embarrassing parts of themselves? Especially a kid, for whom popularity and reputation are often a matter of life or death--literally and specifically, in the case of this story. The flimsy reason is that the late filmmaker, Amelia, was the most awesomest girl ever. Everybody loved her, because she was so sweet, and so smart, and so cool, and so nice, and so deep, and so original, and so talented, and so sexy, and just like, the bestest most perfectest girl in the whole wide world. N.B. "The greatest of all time" is, perhaps counter-intuitively, a really bad quality that makes for really shitty, boring characters. For better or worse, Amelia is rarely on screen (and when she is, she's no Laura Palmer, frankly), so it's up to the viewer to just sort of imagine a type of person who could make you act against your best interests on account of you just like them so much. After all, so many of the characters were obsessed with her in some way, that it's like they're here to help you clap your hands and believe in this seductive, compelling part of the movie, that just isn't actually there on the screen. The anonymous antihero behind the confessional booth scheme slowly extracts from each character the selfish, destructive behavior that in some way contributed to the tragic loss of the most amazing person of all time--and part of the result is, if not a very interesting excuse for Amelia's death, then a story so wacky that I really wish they had centered the movie on it, instead of on the tawdry soap opera we're locked into. Even if that imaginary movie had been really bad, and it probably would have been, at it would at least have been entertaining.

Part of what leads up to the death of Amelia is the existence of a secret school fight club, led by a stereotypically sleazy gender studies major, named Major, who is out to prove men's inherent superiority. The club is called CFB, or Cock Fights Back, which is somehow a garbled pun relating to cock fights, and Trump's famous line of "locker room talk": "grab'em by the pussy" > "pussy grabs back" > "cock fights back". CFB is different from your ordinary fight club in that the fights are always between girls and boys, and the boys are always blindfolded, in order to prove that a fully-abled female is no match for even a handicapped male. To complicate things, a new designer amphetamine is gaining popularity on campus, called "odds-on", meaning that it makes you the odds-on favorite in your CFB fight. As awkward as that is, it also seems that men are never the guaranteed winners of these fights, which makes you wonder why Major insists on continuing to host them. As much as I would have preferred to watch a stupid movie about this stupid idea, I'm stuck instead with a movie in which Major is such an aggressive MRA because he's secretly gay, and he thinks that hating women is a great way to hide that...as if that isn't what we all openly suspect about aggro MRAs. Secret gayness is a big part of this movie, involving multiple characters, although it amounts to very little other than the perpetuation of some stale, harmful cliches about how unfulfilled homosexual urges lead to suicide, sexual abuse, and murder. CONFESSIONAL is just as reliant on this grim vision of gay life, as it is on its weirdly obtuse discussion of drug addiction, for the suffocating sense of self-importance that it uses to try to elevate itself above its porn-y trappings. None of the movie's hot button issues are given any real thought, but are only dragged through the mud to create the illusion that there's a point to all this, thus relieving the film of any sense of innocence that could have made its condescending sleaziness forgivable.

Admittedly, I can't really remember all the details of the film's tortured intrigue anymore, even though I basically just saw it. A lot of its meandering revelations just left me thinking, "Why did I need to know that? Why should I care?" I do know that about half way through this ordeal, I became really anxious about whether it would turn out that CONFESSIONAL did NOT have exactly the same plot as 30 MILES FROM NOWHERE after all, and I put myself through all this for nothing. But no, I was right to begin with. The wonderful Amelia's ethically dubious film project has been picked up by the unhinged lesbian character who loved her so much she wanted to become her, and killing Amelia and usurping her confessional project was apparently the best way of doing that. I guess exposing all the dark, violent secrets of all these tangentially involved characters was just an added bonus, or whatever. Ultimately, this ugly, ignorant PSA about something-or-other only deals itself further damage by relying so heavily on the potential of its clumsy twist to blow your mind, which it does not at all.

So that was it, that's how I burned a whole afternoon allowing my mind to implode-not-explode under the ponderous force of TWO (2) movies about exactly the same exhausted cliche that is still being peddled by certain pretentious assholes as fresh and exciting, and beyond the capacity of the audience to anticipate. There's probably a whole slew of other movies that employ this overly familiar "surprise", but I don't have it in me to dig them out of my long-suffering brain. Feel free to contribute in the comments. For now, I must prepare myself for the ordeal of Blogtober, during which I will *hopefully* choose my screening selections and words more thoughtfully than I have in previous years, when this blog was motivated by just as much abject misanthropy as these movies, which do nothing but willfully insult the audience's intelligence. Maybe today's detour into degradation will help me go forth toward more additive experiences, having purged several lungfuls of meaningless venom from my system, and this season will bring with it more interesting, provocative posts than the last. Or maybe not! In any case, I promise to keep trying my hardest to make it funny.

PS I actually love both FAT GIRL and WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE. I’m “just saying”. 

[caranfindel]

Recap/Review 12.20: "Twigs & Twine & Tasha Banes"

THEN: Dad’s on a hunting trip, and he hasn’t been home in a few days.

Shit, you guys, they’re taking us back to the pilot. It’s a risky move, showing this particular scene, because it reminds us of how awesome the show was back in the day. This scene has always been one of my favorites, with Sam blowing off Dean’s concern and then Dean repeating what he said but adding the oh-so-telling information (though we didn’t know it at the time) that Dad was on a hunting trip and Sam not breaking eye contact with Dean as he quietly asks/tells Jessica to excuse them for a minute and damn. I love this scene.

Anyway. The rest of the “Then:” hot witch twins, Ketch wants to know the secret behind Sam’s shiny hair, Cas, the Colt.

NOW: A lovely woman who looks way too young to be Max and Alicia’s mother drives up to an inn in a large old house, where she encounters a nasty older woman with a big ring and a big attitude (although I did think “what a delicate constitution you must have” was clever). She offers to cleanse her aura, saying it looks “a little muddy,” and I suspect this is a witch’s version of a southern woman saying “well bless your heart” - they both translate to “why don’t you fuck off and die?” The younger woman is Tasha Banes, here on both business and pleasure (but probably ending up with neither). She does some witchcraft using the order “reveal,” and ends up in an apparently very malodorous cellar, where she’s quickly stabbed through the abdomen. Like I said, neither business nor pleasure is getting accomplished here.

Title card!

Sam and Dean are in the bunker, freaking out about Cas. (Also, they’re both proving my point about Dean being the better dresser, since he’s wearing a nice solid grayish-greenish shirt that probably does things with his eyes when he’s not in a dark bunker, while Sam’s in an unflattering blue and red plaid.) Dean’s venting and chewing on his nails, which almost never happens. Sam’s quietly trying to figure out how to fix it. Dean says he’s always been able to forgive Cas’s missteps in the past, which, well, okay, maybe not but let’s move on. “But last night, I did not recognize the guy staring back at me.” Like that’s a first. Like Godstiel and Leviathan!Cas never happened.

Winchesters in distress. I like it.

Sam decides this conversation isn’t depressing and in fixable enough and unwraps a bundle on the table in front of him. It’s the remains of the Colt. There’s actually more remaining than I thought -it seems like most of the damage was the destruction of the barrel. Dean asks if he can fix it, and Sam answers “I hope so.” That’s actually kind of encouraging. I thought it was gone for good. I’d love to see Smart!Sam figure out how to rebuild it.

We hear the sound of a phone vibrating against a hard surface, but Sam checks his pocket anyway (insert your own hard surface joke here) and declares it not his. It’s not Dean’s either. It’s an abandoned phone, hidden on the table under a book, and apparently it’s one of Mary’s. I’d really like to know where the characters on Supernatural get these phones that hold a charge for weeks at a time (or, in the case of Bobby’s old phone in “Ask Jeeves,” years).

The caller is Alicia Banes, and let’s not ask why she called Mary instead of Sam in the first place because it makes me unhappy and I don’t want to think about it. They do a very cute thing where Max disputes half the things she says because he thinks she’s making a mountain out of a molehill. (Considering that we’ve already seen Tasha Banes get stabbed, I don’t think it’s a spoiler to point out that he’s wrong.) Alicia is worried about their mother because she was hunting a witch and hasn’t checked in as usual.

I did not notice, until now, that it looks like they may be stopped at a crossroads. Coincidence?

To everyone’s surprise, Sam tells her that he and Dean will meet them in Wyoming. Dean thinks they should be concentrating on Cas, but Sam points out that there’s nothing they can do about that right now, Jody’s put out an APB, and rather than sit around banging their heads against a wall, they should get out there, blah blah blah, and then he says this: “Their mom’s on a hunting trip, and hasn’t been home in a week.”

Dean can’t believe Sam is using that line on him. I can’t believe that’s the only reason they reminded us about it.

We get a few extra, quiet seconds of Dean looking… Sad? Undecided? Anxious? Is he thinking of John? Cas? Mary? Apparently it’s Mary, because he takes out his phone and calls her. She doesn’t answer because she’s… strapped to a chair in the BMoL bunker. With huge screws sticking out of her chest?

Well, that was unexpected!

Her phone is buzzing, and Ketch throws water in her face to wake her up. “Please be a dear,” he says, “and shut that bloody thing off.” I spend a second or two wondering if I missed something in the last episode, but then we see Actual Mary in the background, holding the bloody thing. So, the one in the chair is a shifter. Okay then. With her gray clothing, being strapped down by the BMoL, and having water thrown on her, I’m getting a real Sam-in-the-basement vibe. (And don’t forget the screws in her chest. Insert your own getting screwed joke here.) Despite his use of the word “please,” Ketch angrily makes it clear that he wants her to not answer it, so Dean leaves a message. He tells her about the hunt, says he’ll text the info in case she can help, and then does the lip thing and asks her to call back even if she can’t help. Because there’s some stuff going down and it’s got him “spun out” and he just needs to talk to his mama, dammit.

Dammit.

Ketch continues to torture the shifter (and it turns out the things in her chest are spikes, not screws, but my point still stands) and assures her that looking like Mary ain’t gonna make the torture any less torturous. In fact, I think Mary and I are thinking the same thing, and that is that he really seems to get into hurting someone who looks just like Mary. Also, he’s asking for the location of the shifter’s family (pointedly correcting Mary, who calls the shifter he, by referring to it), obviously intending to torture and kill them as well, so. Good luck with getting those answers. He must have learned his interview technique from Toni Bevell. But he promises that the pain will end when the shifter answers his questions.

Shifter Mary laughs at him and says “That eye of yours twitches when you lie.” He responds that his eye twitches all the time, which is probably true, and then punches her. The physical contact allows her to take on his own form, which throws him a little bit. But what really throws him is when it says, in a very non-Brit drawl, “Well then. I guess I know all about you.” Guys. Ketch is not really British.

He reaches for more spikes, but we cut quickly to the Impala, and then Sam and Dean meeting the Banes twins at a scenic water’s edge somewhere. It must be the next day, because Alicia isn’t wearing her cute outfit, and Sam has changed into an even more unfortunate plaid shirt. Dean’s wearing the Red Shirt of Bad Decisions (and now that I’ve seen this name on Tumblr, I want to claim credit for it), so hopefully something awesomely bad is going to happen. Alicia says that their mother was hunting a “borrower witch,” and Sam explains for the audience that this is a witch who gets their power from a demon deal. And in case we forgot Max is a horn dog, he tells us he got the phone number of the bartender at the only vegan restaurant in town.

(Sidebar: I know of people were excited about Sam/Max, and I’ve read some fics in this vein that I found quite enjoyable. But honestly, I don’t trust him. Sure, he’s sweet and he’s hot and he seemed to be into Sam but he told us he used his witchy powers to seduce men. And if that means “to make myself look hot so men will be attracted to me,” that’s okay. But if he means “to make men want me,” or “to make men think they want me,” that’s a little too close to Toni Bevell for my taste, and I would prefer that he keep it away from my precious Sammy. Also, he seems to be kind of a player, and I’m not slut-shaming, but I don’t think a booty call is what Sam wants or needs.)

(Yes, I do spend a lot of time thinking about what Sam wants and needs. Does that surprise you?)

But I digress. Max compliments the car (because, witchy powers or not, Max sure as hell knows how to work a guy) and Dean takes him for a tour of the trunk. There’s yet another shout-out to the grenade launcher. Those guys really need to use the damn thing this season. It’s funny to me that Dean casually discusses their need for witch-killing bullets in front of a witch. I mean, yeah, they’re hunting a witch, but it would be like Max showing Dean his new hunter-killing spell. It’s just awkward to me.

“Is that a grenade launcher, or are you just happy to see me?”

Sam and Alicia stand around looking beautifully windblown and discussing how their lives are parallel. Max and Tasha are “natural witches,” so they’re extra close, while Alicia has “no magic.” Except artificial witch magic, I guess. Sam tells her that Dean and John had the same bond, with hunting. Alicia asks about Mary, and I expect Sam to say “well, she wasn’t around to bond with when I was growing up, because she was dead,” but I forgot that Alicia knows her as the hunter who is in the here-and-now. Instead he says “she gets into a case and just.. vanishes.” (Just like John, huh?) Alicia comments that Mary’s a great hunter, so I guess they’ve done some hunting together? Is that why she called Mary for help? She doesn’t think she seems like much of a hugger, which Sam doesn’t dispute, even though I’m pretty sure their first hug (since her resurrection) was initiated by Mary.

I would hug you, Sam. Just give me the opportunity.

Team Banechester shows up at the inn and spots Tasha’s car. They also spot a peculiar looking guy next to the cellar doors. Max speaks for everyone when he declares him “not weird, at all” and Sam gives him an adorable awkward little wave, which is not returned.

Maybe it’s that shirt, Sammy.

Dean instructs the twins to “stay behind us” and Alicia says “yeah, sure” but I don’t think she means that because she brandishes an engraved blade and storms inside. She’s greeted by the same kindly clerk who checked Tasha in, and then by Tasha herself. Duh duh duuuuuhhhh!!!! Alicia is thrilled, Max is smug, and Tasha announces they can all hang in her room because she has wine.

Up in her room, Tasha says the witch hunt was a bust. And her phone hasn’t been charging, which is why she didn’t respond to Alicia’s frantic texts and calls. Alicia questions why she ignored her protocol to always call on the fourth day of a hunt, and I was under the impression Tasha was a witch and not a full-time hunter. (And do her hunts always take longer than four days?) Tasha struggles to open the wine while apologizing, and then something weird happens and she makes a face. She asks Sam to pour the wine and then turns away to straighten her broken finger. And remember that, because we’re going to talk about it later. So Alicia puts on some make-out music and Sam pours wine and a million fanfics are started but we’ll have to pause that, because as Dean adorably sniffs at his wine, Tasha announces she ordered vegan takeout and Sam offers to go pick it up. He pats Dean on the leg and instructs him to drink, so Dean empties Sam’s glass into his and it’s very, very cute.

AO3 tag of the day: Dean plus wine plus a trio of hot witches equals a fun time for all.

Cut to the weirdly futuristic BMoL bunker. Having finished his torture session, Ketch is “pumping with adrenaline” and would like to work some of that off with Mary. She shuts him down and says they’d agreed it was a one-time thing, and if she’s referring to the conversation they had when we saw her re-dressing and him cocking his leg out from under the sheets in an unappealing way, I don’t blame him for not getting that. Because I didn’t get it either.

She’s mad because his little torture session didn’t get them any intel; “that shifter was never going to be betray his family.” (Hmmm… I wonder if a Shifter!Mary refusing to betray family is going to mean anything.) Ketch is convinced that pain still works sometimes. “For example,” he says, in his fake Brit accent, “seeing you in pain made me want to have illicit hotel sex with you.” No, he doesn’t, but you know that’s what he’s thinking. He actually says “Anyone who tells you torture is never the answer? They have never been under the knife.” (Mr. Ketch, may I introduce Sam Fucking Winchester?) Mary’s still disgusted that he enjoyed it so much, and says she hasn’t seen that side of him (which is a relief, because I hope she won’t hang around long after seeing it) and he points out that she’s not going to become the Jiminy Cricket of the BMoL, because they don’t need a conscience. (Sidebar: Jiminy Cricket reference reminds me of Dean being Soulless Sam’s Jiminy and aw. Soulless Sam. That was awesome for a bit, wasn’t it?) They believe the ends justify the means. Speaking of the means, he snarks that she should feel free to call Mick and write him up, but she hasn’t heard from Mick - he’s not answering his phone or sending emails. Ketch reminds Mary she should call Dean, lest he think Mummy doesn’t love him. Oooh, burn.

Dean’s staring at his phone thinking exactly that. Tasha joins him on the couch and he tells her what a great job she did raising her kids. She says she just got lucky, and asks him about his own childhood. She then gives us this motto: Parents seem smart and perfect, but when you grow up, you realize they’re just people. I guess that’s why Sam went to pick up the food - so Dean could hear this little speech.

Contemplate that one for a while, Dean, since your contemplation face is so pretty.

In the BMoL bunker, we see Mary listening to Dean’s sad message. But before she can call him back, she hears Ketch on the phone. He says “I can’t just send him Economy Comfort” and then refers to a package with a lot number, and apparently Mary deduces the package and the “him” are the same thing, because she looks pretty distressed about it. Her phone then buzzes, loudly, with a call from Dean. Ketch hears it and looks suspicious, because quite frankly she’s acting suspicious. If she’d answered it, as if she didn’t care who heard and had nothing to hide, he might have thought she’d just now arrived at his door. It turns out he’s actually in Mick’s office, and she wants to use the computer to read her email. Ketch rudely stands behind her and watches her log in.

She has messages from Dean (hunt-related but also one that could go either way and another where he’s openly “just checking” from in yesterday, aw, poor baby) and Sam (apparently hunt-related) and oh, look, a message from Mick that just arrived today.

How convenient.

Oddly enough, the new message from Mick is flagged, just like the messages from Biggerson’s and Online Games. But she’s outwardly satisfied with Mick’s message, saying he’ll be stuck in London for a few more weeks.

Back at the inn, Sam shows up with the food and then gives Dean a significant head tilt, which is not all that subtle but I still love the way they respond to and respect each other’s signals. Like, it didn’t even occur to Dean not to meet Sam out in the hall. He leaves his phone on the end table, which will probably matter later.

Sam shows Dean a flyer he picked up at the restaurant - it’s a missing person flyer, for the unfriendly guy they saw at the cellar door earlier that day. The guys head for the cellar, but we don’t. We head up the stairs to the room where the nasty woman from the lobby is humming along as she creates a person-like structure out of twigs, with a big opening where the heart would go. Hmm.

In the BMoL, Mary calls Dean, but he doesn’t have his phone on him. She says she’s been hunting with Ketch, and apologizes for not being there for them. But she will be, as soon as she finishes this. And she misses and loves them. He’ll probably be happy to have that message someday. Let’s just get out of order and carry on with her story. She sneaks into a storage area and finds a trunk with the lot number Ketch mentioned on the phone. It’s not locked or anything, so she lifts the lid and discovers Mick’s body. Which would be in an unpleasant state of decay at this point. Ew. She leaves that room and sees Ketch coming, so she tries to get into a couple of different rooms, but her handprint doesn’t allow her access. Finally someone leaves a room and she slips in while the door is open. On the wall are several computer monitors, showing various information about several hunters: Garth, Claire, Eileen - and her, and Dean, and Sam.

It’s amusing to me that the photo they use for Dean is security camera footage of Demon!Dean.

She touches the Dean screen and plays a sound file of the conversation they had right after Ketch bugged the bunker, about how much they don’t trust him. She calls Dean again and leaves a message, telling him they have a problem. When she opens the door to leave, Ketch is standing there. He cheerfully tells her that her handprint didn’t work on the door because she���s not meant to be there. She asks why Mick’s body is in a box, and he blames an “unfortunate werewolf mishap.” She calls him a psychopath (and when two of your exes call you that, it might indicate you have a problem, Mr. Ketch) and asks if he killed Mick. He goes all evil villain and says Mick was weak and wasn’t “one of us.” Mary punches him and they fight, while he continues with the evil villain monologue and brags about killing the federal agents and “a psychic girl they thought was human.” Ketch says it’s the end of the American hunters, but he can keep her safe. She declines the offer and punches him in the crotch with the magic brass knuckles. Unfortunately, he has a taser, which trumps brass knuckles every time.

Back at the inn, Sam quickly picks the lock on the cellar door (I like that Sam tends to do the lock picking when they’re together) and the Winchesters are assaulted by a foul odor of death. There’s a cute, realistic brother moment where Dean tries to get Sam to go downstairs first and Sam refuses. So, as Max leaves for his date with the hot bartender, Sam and Dean make their way down into the cellar and find the bodies of the missing guy and the cheery inn clerk. And another body, under a tarp. Oh snap, it’s Tasha. Their hearts have all been ripped out. Unfortunately, they turned on the light, which attracted Max’s attention. He comes downstairs and they try to block him from seeing his mother’s body, but it doesn’t work. Oh, poor Max.

Next Max is in Not!Tasha’s room, throwing Not!Tasha against a wall and asking what she is. The Winchesters busy themselves holding Alicia back while Max does a “reveal!” spell and Not!Tasha tells him to go to the nasty lady’s room. Nasty Lady feels this, snaps her fingers, and the desk clerk’s eyes glow white. Missing Guy shows up in the hallway and Max magically tosses him out the window. As Not!Tasha spasms on the floor and Alicia freaks out, the desk clerk shows up and starts punching and tossing Sam, magically repairing himself when Sam breaks his neck.

Speaking of necks, here’s Sam’s. You’re welcome.

While this is happening, Dean and Max burst into Nasty Lady’s room. She recognizes Max as having magic and says maybe he’ll take the deal that his mother declined. She glues him and Dean into place and shows them Tasha’s death. She explains that, since she sold her soul for power, when she dies her soul will go to Hell unless she can find someone to take over her magic. You know, that doesn’t sound like a deal a demon would make. I don’t know why they’d give you an out like that. Since Tasha refused, Nasty Lady cut out her heart and put it into one of her stick creatures, making it come to life with the power of her ring. “That doll has all of your mother’s memories. It’s her, mostly.” She tells Max that if he kills her, all of the dolls will fall apart. But if he takes her power, Not!Tasha will stay around forever.

The kindly desk clerk chokes Sam, as one does, and Alicia leaves Not!Tasha’s side to save him. But then Not!Tasha’s eyes glow and she gets up and stabs Alicia with her own engraved blade.

Max is clearly considering the offer. Dean tells him “your mother is gone; it’s awful and it sucks -” and he’s interrupted by a finger snap from Nasty Lady that immobilizes him. And really, who is Dean Winchester to give this particular speech anyway? She takes the ring off and offers it to Max, but while she’s not wearing it, Dean is able to shoot and kill her. As she falls to the floor, the dolls attacking Sam and Alicia collapse into dust. Sam runs to Alicia’s side and says “we’re going to get you some help” and if that reminds you of Dean saying basically the same thing to Sam as they knelt in the mud at Cold Oak, it’s probably for a good reason.

Dean tells Max that touching the ring would have bound him to a deal with a demon and he would have lost his soul, and then we hear Sam’s panicked call and mmmm, panicky Sam, I like it. By the time Dean and Max arrive, Alicia is dead, and again, if Max crying over the body of his sibling/hunting partner/best friend gives you Cold Oak feels, you’re not alone.

And I should feel bad about it, but I’m torn, because it gives me this.

Aftermath! Max tells the Winchesters he could have saved his mother and sister if he’d just taken Alicia seriously. Sam tentatively offers to “get supplies” and Dean comes right out and says “"we’ve gotta burn the bodies, Max” because yeah, that worked so well on you, didn’t it, Dean? Max tells them to stop talking and go away, and he’ll do it.

We see the Winchesters in the Impala, with Sam telling Dean he did the right thing. As Dean muses that he didn’t save Max at all, and their loving family is gone, we see Max picking up the ring. Because of course Dean left it right there on the floor. Seriously, you told Max that touching the ring would you bind you to a demon deal, and you left it on the floor? What the fuck, Dean? Or maybe that part wasn’t an accident after all, because as we watch Max put his sister’s body on the bed next to the twig doll the witch made, Dean says “we do terrible things all the time to save each other. I mean, that’s what you to for family? Who am I to stop him?” Sam thinks Max will be okay, but Dean, well, Dean knows this side of the equation better than Sam does, so he’s not so sure. And he’s right, because we see Max cut out his dead sister’s heart and put it in the twig doll. Then he’s helping Not!Alicia get dressed and telling her they have to go, now. As they leave, we see real Alicia’s body on the bed. Max takes the witch’s ring and spell book, and magically sets real Alicia’s body on fire. Aw, Max.

Back to the Impala. (This is a long aftermath, guys.) Dean looks over and sees Sam sleeping.

And godDAMN, sleeping Sam is pretty. So is driving Dean.

He sees he has two messages from Mary on his phone, so he plays them; first the one about how she misses and loves them, and then the one about there being a problem. Ominous music plays, and Dean tries to wake Sam up, but Sam doesn’t wake up and Dean tries harder and the music gets more ominous and I don’t understand what’s happening here. Is something wrong with Sam?

We cut away very quickly to actual Mary, strapped into a chair just like Shifter!Mary, getting a face full of water. Ketch is disappointed that she wasn’t as ruthless as he hoped. Mary’s phone buzzes, and a familiar pantsuit-with-an-accent enters and declines the call. She tells Mary she’s an asset, sits down with her familiar notepad and pen, and says “let’s begin.” Yes, Posh Spice is back!

Okay, first, let’s talk about Not!Tasha. Did she or didn’t she know she wasn’t real? Because when she broke her finger, she didn’t freak out. She turned away, so no one else could see her, and fixed it. So did she know she needed to stay undercover? And what does that mean about Not!Alicia? She doesn’t seem to have a clue what happened to her. And yet, if she has all of Alicia’s memories, she’s going to remember being stabbed, just as Tasha should have remembered that.

And now let’s talk about Mary and her complete lack of subterfuge. For someone who went out of the country to hunt, leaving a toddler at home, she’s certainly bad at hiding her thoughts now. When you’re locked in a small room with a psychopath, you don’t say “Hey, I know what you’re up to, and you’re a pyschopath.” You pretend to go along. You say “Yes, dear, I understand what you’re saying about my sons. Maybe we should discuss that later, after some illicit hotel sex. If you’ll excuse me, I need to go get the fuck out - I mean, I need to go powder my nose.” You don’t ask about the body with a bullet in its head. You don’t let on that you know things that will cause the psychopath to want to kill you. You just don’t.

And what about all the parallels? Max lost his parent/role model and his sibling/partner/best friend and made an awful, soul-condemning deal to not be alone. Mary watched Ketch torture her mirror image in an attempt to get information about its family, and now he’s doing the same thing to her. Toni is about to work Mary over just as she worked Sam over. The Colt is unusable but might be made usable again. And Cas is doing the whole Godstiel thing again.

But the thing I can’t get past, to no one’s surprise I assume, is Sam. That was such a weird little bit at the end. Like, if nothing’s wrong with him, and he was just slow to wake up, they hit it way too hard. And if something is wrong with him, they didn’t hit it hard enough. It’s driving me crazy.

Anyway. This episode had a lot more packed into it than I expected. It didn’t have enough Sam (what episode does?) but, according to the Twitter of the actress who played Tasha, Jared’s latest baby was born during or right before filming, so I assume he had some time off. And I’m cool with that. But I need you back next week, Jared. (Do we only have two episodes left? Is this a 22-ep season? Or are there three?)

Please please please help me stay unspoiled for anything past 12.20. Thank you!

[joshuazev]

On double digits:

Today was one of those days where the all of the little things get remembered.  Maybe it’s because there were few big things to speak of, in the sense that it really felt like all I did today was wake up, make too elaborate of a breakfast (which ended up being very time consuming), go to work, work, and then return home.  It was one of those days where you might try to make a post-it note of all the things you need to take care of, where you might leave all the tabs open on your phone’s internet because you don’t want to forget anything, but you return home somewhat silently dejected because none of the “to-do’s” were crossed out and none of the internet reminders could even be utilized to remind.  It’s cold season, it is.  I’ve been pretty surprised that I haven’t gotten sick until now, to be perfectly honest.  The funny thing is, everyone I’ve spoken too about being sick has all said the same thing; they all should have been sick a long time ago.  I know why I’m sick, at least.  No sleep.  That’ll get you.  The cold.  That’ll get you too.  Colds have a weird habit of really affecting me at two very specific parts of the day.  Right when I wake up (when my throat is dry and my nose is stuffed) and right before I go to bed (when all of the morning symptoms seem to return).  Hopefully I can get over it sooner rather than later.  Gotta get more sleep to accomplish a feat like that because it’s only gonna get colder for the foreseeable future.  

I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I could eat breakfast for every meal of the day if, of course, I was fortunate enough to eat three meals in a day.  I’m so inexperienced at cooking in general (I’m learning though, I swear!) that what probably takes real cooks about 15 minutes takes me about 35-40.  I’m still at the point where I have to do everything individually.  I’ve never been too good a multi tasker and cooking is no different.  For example, today I put the potatoes in the oven super early because I knew that they would take the longest to cook, but I didn’t take into account the amount of time the oven takes to preheat to 425, which caused everything else to delay.  I cooked the sausage by itself because I didn’t really anticipate the fact that I would need to throw it back in the pan when I made the scramble and I did the beans separately because i haven’t really tried cooking beans with any other foods in the same pan.  So, all that being said, because I didn’t consolidate I spent the better portion of my free time before the “get ready for work stage” cooking what ended up being a damn good breakfast.  I only brag because there aren’t many other things I can brag about in the kitchen, but the spread of eggs, peppers, garlic, mushrooms, tomatoes, italian sausage, mozzarella with some beans on top along with avocado and some potatoes on the side?  Then to make enough to avoid eating the same old catering spread of sandwiches and what not was a blessing in more ways than one.  I love making breakfast.  I have no idea why.  My dad and I used to go “The Dish” in Fremont on most Sundays when we were both available to do so.  For years I’d get the french toast.  Just like for years I would only eat coffee yogurt for breakfast.  I began to get so spoiled eating the same thing that it never occurred to me—especially with respect to The Dish that I could make French Toast, too.  Yeah, I can make French Toast now.  Is it as good as the Dish?  No.  Not really.  Not even close.  The fact that I can make it now though means so much to me.  Makes me less dependent.  There was a period of time where I stopped eating French Toast and started to get a combination scramble of everything under the sun that could go in a scramble and taste good.  One day I was walking and thought to myself, “You know what, I can make that too” and I’m happy to say it’s becoming one of my favorite things to do during the day—making my own awesome breakfast.  Side note: you can literally put anything in a scramble.  

I was thinking about my cold again and it made me think of medical insurance and how I need to purchase one of the available plans.  On the subway there are all these advertisements for Oscar, which is one of the more popular health insurance companies out here.  The advertising campaign is actually pretty genius: they have all of these pictures of different parts of the body with a band-aid covering the affected part and a tagline that reads, “I’m covered.”  On some of their other smaller posters it has a laundry list of potential incidents including physicals and drunk trips, etc. but the tagline always stays the same.  I did some preliminary research and the plan seemed a little expensive, but then again so is everything when you’re used to not paying anything at all.  It’s like the first time you move out of your parents’ house and pay rent.  That rent check seems a helluva lot bigger than the number might suggest (even though nowadays that number is indeed a helluva lot bigger).  I know that getting medical insurance is a necessity, but what are the odds some truly horrific shit will go down?  Am I aware that’s a stupid and rather unsafe question to ask?  Yeah, probably.  And everyone knows I’m not a good gambler.  I wonder how many people aren’t medically insured in the US.  I know I’ve said this before, but it’s kind of crazy when you go through all of these years hearing the same thing (in this case “Obamacare”) and then one day you realize why you’ve been hearing it all the time because finally it affects you.  

Today I wore a beanie and a gator as well as several layers under my jacket because it was freezing.  Everything was covered except for my eyes.  There are many Muslim women who dawn an article of clothing called a niqab, which is a veil that covers the face but has an opening for the eyes.  I used to do the same thing in college when it would get really cold at UW and even though people knew I was doing it because I was cold, it was always interesting to see people’s faces.  Some would look at me with such obvious suspicion like I was fleeing the scene of a crime or something.  Maybe it was because they could only see my eyes.  Eyes can be telling.  They can be revealing.  They can also be deceiving.  Can you look at someone’s eyes and know what they’re thinking if it is only the eyes you see?  Can you tell if they’re happy or sad?  Frowning or smiling?  There was a part of the walk to work where I was thinking of a small idea for a short film or a short piece.  A man dressed for the cold with only his eyes exposed comes across a woman in a niqab, who also has only her eyes exposed.  It follows the moment that they first see each other, from many feet away and how their gaze connects and lingers, speaking to each other silently and what might transpire after that moment.  To be honest, it doesn’t need to be anything, but I can see it now and I  think it could be a really cool visual to see.  

I feel like I should take the opportunity to vent a little bit about the work environment today.  I catered a Viacom holiday party in a huge warehouse on the water.  I don’t need to remind you again that it was extremely cold, but I feel obligated to say that the work uniform was a—and pardon my french—motherfucking t-shirt.  Mind you, all of our work stations were right by the entrance, and it was about 30 degrees outside.  I got goosebumps within moments of taking my jacket off.  It kind of seemed like a health violation right?  A liability?  A serious error in judgement?  You remember when I mentioned that exposure to “the cold” is a surefire way to…um, getting a cold?  What the fuck!  Now the sick people are gonna get sicker.  I heard body heat was one of their excuses.  3500 people was supposed to keep us warm.  Get.  The.  Fuck.  Outta.  Here.  I don’t think so.  There might have been 3500 people in that warehouse, but they couldn’t have lit a campfire.  And somehow, someway, this is all a segue to the kicker.  One of my first jokes that I ever wrote about in my notebook was a joke that I like to call “double digits.”  It was a joke revolving around shoe size and how meaningful it is to make it to double digits.  For me, a size 10.  I remember vividly the first time I got a pair of size 10 shoes.  It was a joyous occasion and every subsequent purchase of a size 10 was just as great as the previous one.  One day my sister and I (fairly positive it was us two) were at Nordstroms because I wanted to try on some Timberlands.  Before we knew it, there was someone coming over to help us try on some shoes.  He asked me what size I was and I proudly told him a 10.  This wasn’t some regular worker though.  He must have thought I was lying because he made me put my foot into one of those sizing things and he had the nerve to tell me I wasn’t a size 10 because the faulty sizing device he had was obviously giving him the wrong feedback.  So he comes back later with a 9 or 9.5 or a 10 and I reluctantly tried all of them on, not willing to admit which one felt better.  Everyone knows that Timberlands fit big.  He went on and on and tried to prove his point but I wasn’t having it, so I left without Timberlands.  The point is��I was a size 10.  About a year and a half ago I bought some air forces for the primary reason of being my everyday shoes that were gonna get beat up.  They were size 10.  They started creasing pretty quickly.  Everyone knows some Nikes run big.  You know?  So today, right as we were packing some of the last stuff in to the truck, the lift that was being used to haul some of the heavier items was coming down and I was standing in the wrong place.  My foot was sitting underneath the lift and slowly I felt the lift lowering onto my foot and as the seconds past my toe was getting crushed by the lift.  Everybody recognized it when they saw I couldn’t get from under it and they quickly stopped the lift and raised it, so I could get my foot out.  I was in shock.  I thought I was done for…but I also felt nothing.  That’s because the lift didn’t get my toe.  It almost did, but it missed it by about a half a size…maybe less.  You get the picture?  If you’re a size 10, then you’re a size 10.  Don’t let anyone else try to tell you different.  And who knows…it might just save your life.

[localsadghoul]

vent post

This is full of abuse and drug triggers. I’ve tagged them all, but I really want to put that warning up first just in case. This is a really long, bleak, and overly complicated post. If you stick with me, thanks. If not, I understand. I just need to put this out on paper. I’ve been gaslit about my abuse my entire life, and if I don’t start putting it in words, eventually my abusers’ will win and these terrible memories will be erased and I will never feel valid in my suffering because of it. That’s somehow worse than the suffering itself.

I had a panic attack at school today. Nevermind this is my first semester back after five years, nevermind this brand new city i’m still adjusting to, nevermind my 50+ hour weeks at my new job; the point is I set expectations for myself that I wasn’t meeting, and it was killing me, and I had to leave before a mandatory attendance class. Often, when people post about their mental illnesses, specifically anxiety and depression, someone will comment on their thread “call your mother!” Call your mother. One of those go-to, “drink water” “exercise” “feel the sunshine” type pieces of advice to self-medicate. I know these are legitimate to some and that’s awesome. But to people like me, it’s bullshit.

And not because I’m some expert or elitist when it comes with medicating mental illnesses. I’m self-diagnosed, uninsured, and self-medicating. But, I do know my brain is not well, serotonin is missing, and my chemical balances would probably resemble the layout to a winning rollercoaster attraction if you mapped it out. Anyway, the reason is why it’s bullshit is because I can’t call my mother. Not because she’s dead, not because she doesn’t love me, but because I have to choose to not have a relationship with my mother.

There’s an entire history of emotional, mental, and on rare occasions physical abuse I could go into to describe what my mom, and her branch of family, has put me through. For a long time, I excused it. I really did. She was also not mentally well, dozens of doctors and series of medications had proved that to me. She’d spend days in her bedroom with all the lights off some weeks, others her abuse would intensify and it somehow always fell on me (or at least that’s how it felt). I was the youngest, which means as her mental illness progressed, I was the one receiving the worst of it.

A short background to my family; I have no full blooded brothers or sisters. I was raised in a nice, new house with five brothers and sisters from a few different combinations of parents. Despite us all coming from broken households, we had the recipe for a happy childhood. We were “housepoor”, and I later in life learned a lot of christmases happened thanks to various loan companies, but we were still happy. We all benefited from appearing middle class, white privilege, and regardless of blood, we had two parents. Kind of. My step dad is one of the greatest people on the planet. I call him Jerry and he’s just as much my dad as my biological dad is. So, further on, I won’t refer to him as my step dad, only as Jerry, because that’s who he is.

So, anyway, times passes, my siblings get older and start moving in and out of the house, my mom’s mental illnesses are winning as a result of her changing her medications, or doctors when hers wouldn’t prescribe the drugs she really wanted, or when she’d start a job and decide she didn’t like it and had a mental breakdown that would put her out of work or on disability or whatever; this caused inevitable unemployment and Jerry’s salary as a GM of a restaurant to support all six kids, my mother’s lifestyle, my siblings’ various unplanned babies, stints in rehab, evictions, divorces, incarcerations, etc. We were losing the house. Our house. I was the only kid left, and the only home my memory could remember was disappearing before my eyes. My aunt’s boyfriend was a realtor and by the time I was 13, my house was on the market and we were looking for two or three bedroom houses for rent for my mom, Jerry, and me.

At 13, I had been removed from all gifted programs as a result of my ADHD (which, to a 13 year old with no understanding of mental illnesses translated into me being too stupid to continue these programs I had loved and held pride in since I was 7, my only real accomplishment in my life at this point), I recently had come back to a trip from my home state, where my late father got arrested for a DUI, forcing my step mom to make the seven hour drive to get her kids’ (but because I was not biologically hers she felt no need to include me; i had to be transported to the Columbus airport to fly on a plane for the first time alone back home to Tennessee), and I was also losing my home; something I didn’t even really understand at the time was a monumental thing. 

At this point our house had been on the market for months, which caused a lot of conflict between Jerry and my mom and my aunt and her boyfriend, all of which put my grandparents, the only members of our family with any “money” (mostly just credit card debt) in a weird position. (Again, later in life I learned that a lot of my mother’s mental illnesses and abuse was passed down from her parents, my grandmother who is also addicted to all sorts of fun pills and my grandfather, who I never really learned much about but I think it has been alluded that he was a serial cheater and abusive towards my grandmother. Just a big cycle of poverty and abuse that stemmed from rural Ohio). My grandparents were at the house, everyone was really stressed out and tensions were high, and I was mad. I can’t remember why. At the time, and consistently my entire life into adulthood, I couldn’t keep a clean room. Ever. It’s a pretty common symptom of attention deficit disorders, but it infuriated my mother who was a very appearance based person. While we had store brand everything, she had a beautiful wardrobe, hundreds of dollars worth of makeup, and if you didn’t know any better, you’d assume she was the wife of a wealthy man and her only job in life was to look approachably beautiful. So, if I had to guess why I was mad at them and they were mad at me, it’s probably because while we were trying to stage the house in order to sell it, my room was probably a mess and they wouldn’t let me leave the house until it looked as nice as we pretended our family was. 

Jerry wasn’t home at the time. I think my sister, Devin, was, because she recalled some of this. Anyway, we got into a fight, I was a mad 13 year old who was dealing with hormones, feeling stupid, with the thought process that my beloved father was a deadbeat alcoholic, etc rinse repeat, right? I stormed upstairs to my room, but God, did I know better than to slam my door. I closed it behind me (also knowing better than to lock it behind me), but I was mad, and I felt it in my fingertips, and I wanted to slam that door but it was already closed and impulsive thoughts took over and I did the only thing my brain wanted me to do; which was simply to grunt and push my door with enough force to make a small thud sound. Imagine throwing a shoe at a closed door; enough to rattle it against the frame, but not enough to cause any actual damage to the structure itself. I was mad and my body wouldn’t hold it. I wanted to respect my mom and grandparents enough to not let the anger slip from my body but it did and it came out as a 120 pound teenager pushing her hands against a door.

But, a part of me knew better. Before the sounds of their feet racing up the stairs to my room even began, I curled into a defensive position on the floor. I knew what was going to happen. I challenged their egos, in whatever small way I did, I challenged them and they were going to win. A family of narcissists, and I dared demonstrate any amount of teenage angst. Within a matter of seconds, my bedroom door flung open, and before their swinging hands and legs (all three of them, my grandfather, grandmother, and mother) made contact with my body, I was already yelping and screaming for them to stop.

I don’t remember if the occurrence lasted five seconds or five minutes. I don’t remember if any of it left bruises. I don’t remember what was yelled at me, I think a combination of “don’t you ever disrespect us again” or something along those lines. I don’t remember what happened afterwards. Probably apologies, but whatever happened, it was enough for me to still love, adore, and look up to these people, my family, for almost another decade. 

Of course it didn’t stop there, and the older I got and the wider sense I had revealed a lot of my mother and her parents’ manipulation, drug addictions (including pill trading with my oldest sister and second oldest brother, who were both addicts as well). My mother threatened me with suicide, her self inflictions were rubbed into my face because it was “my fault”. Her relationship with Jerry declined and by the time I was seventeen, they were separated, and I was signing a lease on an apartment with no experience or knowledge of how to support myself.

Still, I tried. My mom got worse. She started dating men she met on the internet, including an ex-boyfriend of my oldest sister. She moved back to Ohio for a bit, back in with my grandparents. Social media was alive and well in my family, so anytime I would show signs of resentment towards my mom, I would get an instant message from my grandmother calling me a selfish, ungrateful brat, or sometimes she’d approach it with more kindness than that, more of a “it would really help your mom if you would just call her and tell her you love her.” My grandmother is not a cruel woman. Yeah, it occasionally reared its head out, but she saw herself as a provider, and wanted to mother us when our own mom couldn’t do it. Or that’s what I told myself at the time. She also threatened to shoot Jerry with a shotgun she claimed she was going to buy just for the occasion, but still I had to believe my grandmother at least was good. (She did profusely apologize for her threats, which doesn’t excuse it).

 God, if you looked at my family, you would never guess any of this. We look like a normal, middle class, diverse family. (Just a random observation, not really important to any of this.)

Between the ages of 17-21, it was a cycle of trying to love my mother, trying to grow our relationship, her disappointing me, me trying to care for myself and remove her from my life, and my grandparents forcing me back in. They’d occasionally send me $20 here and there for groceries, so out of survival I’d almost always did what they’d tell me.

It wasn’t until my dad died and my mother selfishly made it about her that I finally, FINALLY, drew the line. (Laughing at myself that it was protecting my dead dad, not caring for myself, that finally cut the cord.) In a rage, I finally typed out the longest, most brutal message I could really laying out all the damage she had done to me, including pleads to never contact me again, and hit send. Of course, what did we learn when I got my ass beat at thirteen for pushing a closed door? You never challenge narcissists. This is when the gaslighting really comes into play. She claimed all of the abuse never happened, my grandmother and grandfather start messaging me with “how dare you”s etc. Except, I wasn’t a dependent teenager anymore, I was a twenty two year old woman with a job, a purpose, and my own doors to slam and my own house to scream and yell in. The only thing I had to do to silence them was block all of them. And I did.

And it’s been nearly two years. Sure, they try and contact me occasionally, still gaslighting me that I was never actually abused, but also with apologies for having to experience /some/ level of unpleasantry because of the way they handled their mental illnesses. My life since then has been all about self-preservation in the biggest way. Of course, I am not free of their tendancies or behaviors, but I am conscious of them and I have a level of self control and education to stop myself before it causes the amount of pain they caused me and my siblings (I’m not the only one who faced the abuse, I’m just the only one willing to admit it because I don’t get my drugs from my mom or I choose to remain willfully ignorant with evil my family is capable of). But I’m struggling. I’m struggling through gen eds at a community college. I’m struggling to be a good partner, a good fried, a good ally. I’m struggling to exist with myself. I know mental illness is hereditary, but I also can’t stop myself from wondering nearly daily if I could be the kind of person I want to be without ever experiencing their fucked up version of “love”. Isn’t that what every kid of abuse ponders? Would I even hold myself up to the often unreachable standards that I do had I not endured them? 

I don’t know. All I know is, I’m an anxious, manic depressive “spaz” (as my family referred to me for years), and I won’t call my mother. It won’t make me feel better. The only love I need to learn to receive is self-love, because I’ve spent a lifetime neglecting it.

And if you can’t call your mom, if you can’t call your dad, if you can’t call a single family member because of their abuse; it’s not because you failed as a child. They failed you. I’ve got to remember that. We all do.