Tag: horror

The Real American Horror Story

Whoops. Missed a day yesterday. On the anniversary of my heart-attack, no less. And by the time I’m done writing now, it will be too late to count as a Saturday post. Ah, well, sometimes life gets in the way of projects like this.

Been watching episodes of Creepshow this weekend as I laze around trying to not succumb to whatever it is my body appears to be fighting off. The first season was pretty good! There were a few episodes involving kids and teenagers and oh, how I love it when the bully gets it in the end.

Also watched Hold Your Breath. This may be the first time I don’t like something involving Sarah Paulson. There was nothing wrong with it. It just didn’t hold my interest, and when the movie ended as I was goofing off on my phone, I didn’t bother to go back and see the ending. I blame that on the writing, not Paulson. If she can’t save a thriller or horror flick, no one can. If you really want to see what she can do, check out the 2020 series Ratched. She was phenomenal in that. And it’s delicious fun to see how Nurse Ratched got started on her path before One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Vincent D’Onofrio, Cynthia Nixon, Sharon Stone, and Finn Wittrock were great in that, too. Actually, the whole cast was, but Paulson was made to play Nurse Ratched.

This is one of the few psychological thrillers set in psychiatric hospitals that I can watch, actually. I generally don’t like horror in settings like that. Same for the ghost-chaser shows. I feel it stigmatizes mental illness and casts it as evil. The vast majority of people with mental illness are not violent and do not pose a threat to other people. If they pose a risk to anyone, it’s to themselves.

Except for the red-headed buffoon running for President.

I heard that. I’m inclined to agree that there is something wrong with him, seriously, organically wrong, but I’m not a mental health professional and even if I were, there’s something called the Goldwater Rule where mental health professionals are reminded not to diagnose or discuss people they have not examined personally. For me, it’s enough that his views, behavior, temperament, and felony convictions make him unsuitable for national office of any kind, much less to lead a nation. How he’s even an option now blows my mind. The horror there is that so many people blindly worship him. Cult, indeed. And speaking of Sarah Paulson…

I didn’t have quite that reaction in 2016, but if that man gets into office again, I probably will. Pretty sure a certain subset of the American population will react like the Evan Peters character, too. They don’t call ’em Trump-humpers for nothing!

Anyway, that’s as far into politics as I want to get here. It really is an American horror story.

And now for today’s candy, Twix! It’s the one time I find the right side as palatable as the left.

BTW, the left and right sides of a Twix are the same, but in 2012 Twix came up with a great marketing campaign pitting the two against each other. Twelve years later, that campaign is still going. Whoever thought it up should get a raise.

With a Twist

Watched Oddity last night. Now THAT’S my kind of horror movie! It was mostly suspense with a handful of ghoulish jump-scares. It had been a long time since I watched a movie by peeking out over a throw pillow held up to my face, ready to stifle a scream at any moment. I’m just glad it was only an hour and 38 minutes long. I was starting to wonder if I was putting my ticker at risk, heh.

Not much more to say today, kids. After work I emptied and moved my home office furniture, put down my new rug, and moved everything back in. Now my back feels like today’s twisty-turny licorice candy, Twizzlers, so I’m going to call it a day. Anyone else use the big ones as straws when you were a kid?

Glass

One of my all-time favorite candy bars is 3 Musketeers. So light. So soothing. So delicately sweet.

And in the picture above, so absolutely fake.

Did you know that the food shown in print ads is almost never real? Real food melts, wilts, congeals, solidifies, spreads out on the plate, and otherwise reacts with its environment and the hot lights of the studio, so it’s very difficult to photograph in an appealing way.

Nowadays they probably just use Photoshop or something, but decades ago they used sculptures that were anything but edible. My father was one of the original Mad Men and one day he brought home this hefty block of clear, wavy glass that had a little slot drilled into it. I remember him putting it on the coffee table, sliding a straw into the slot, and saying “There you go.”

The sculpture was for an ad for drinking water, and in photos it did look like someone could take a long, refreshing slurp through the straw. However, on the coffee table it looked like a giant, melting ice cube. Whenever people who had never been to the house before came to visit, they would stare at it like they weren’t sure what were seeing. Then they would reach down and touch it very gently and nimbly with just their fingertips. Upon realizing it was room-temperature, they’d slowly put their whole hand over it, and invariably they’d say, “Oh, my God, I thought that was REAL!”

Sometimes they’d even pick it up. By the time the 80s rolled around, dozens of people had held it up to the light, turned it this way and that, checked its weight like they would a melon’s. It was about three-and-a half, maybe four pounds—light enough hold in one hand, but heavy enough to do some damage if swung. My parents were always spritzing it with Windex and wiping it down because it would get covered in fingerprints.

And that, friends, is why I’m still out here, twenty years later, roaming free and unpunished while the one who did me dirty is in the ground and the one he did me dirty with—my bestie, she who swore up and down that she would always be there for me and have my back, the woman I trusted like a sister—is in the clink. All I had to do was show her that sparkling clean little sculpture. All I had to say was “Check this out! My parents left it to me. It’s glass!”

She never could resist touching what was mine.