Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here

I need to stop watching American Horror Story. It’s fucking with my mind.

I didn’t even know this show existed until late last summer, when my then fourteen year old daughter, E, started talking about the upcoming season. She had spent the summer Netflix binging on past seasons in her bedroom, unbeknownst to her father and me, and fools that we are, we figured it was on television and therefore couldn’t be that bad. Chalk that up to a big parenting fail.

She was very excited about the season that started this fall, Freak Show, and decided that it could become our new show to watch together. Normally, we stick to such classy reality television shows as Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Gypsy Sisters, so for me to get hooked on a drama is really out of character. I am not one to watch regular television programming. It seems like too much of an investment of my time that could be better spent reading books from the library or looking for cat videos online. E loved the show, though, and I love E, and therefore I was willing to give it a go.

Do you know anything about the show? If you watch it, you see my point about the mind fuck. If you don’t, then here is a brief explanation. I’m not very worried about spoiling the show for you because if you aren’t familiar with it yet, chances are pretty good you won’t ever watch it, and good for you.

Every season has a different  disturbing theme and different characters but mostly the same actors. I started with the current season, which is the fourth. It’s called Freak Show, and that’s what it is, an old fashioned side show based in Jupiter, Florida, in the 1950’s. Pin heads, dwarves, giants, deformities, tattoos, hermaphrodites. If you can think of a sideshow freak, chances are, it’s in this season. This show has a little something for everyone. There’s romance, smoking, drinking, and sex, lots of sex, normal sex, deviant sex, violent sex, sexy violence, violent violence, and murder with some torture and dismemberment just for a little something extra.  The language is foul, and there is a naked butt at least once an episode. In short, it’s the perfect show to watch with your teenager.

Also, there is an evil clown. His name is Twisty. He is the reason people are scared of clowns.

E and I watch the show in the dark because it makes it scarier and also we can pretend we aren’t watching the sex scenes together. The sex and violence are gratuitous and help distract you from the holes in the plot and weak character development. Every time an episode is over, I feel a little wrong for having watched it, even more so for having watched it with my child, my sweet, innocent child. None of it can be healthy.

Some time in the last month or so, she thought it would also be a good idea to watch an old season to see how amazing the show used to be, as the current season doesn't seem to be up to the standards of past seasons. Honestly, keeping up that level of quality sex and extreme violence year after year isn’t as easy as it sounds. We started with the second season, Asylum, which is set in a Catholic run mental institution in the 1960’s. That season involved some alien abduction, demonic possession, rape, polygamy, and necrophilia. Oh, and evil nuns and a Nazi doctor who continued the medical experiments he started in the concentration camps. This was all in addition to the sex and freaky sex and violence and murder and naked butts.

We would sometimes watch two or three episodes at a time, in the dark. This show cannot be healthy, and Netflix binging on it is just not a good idea.

After we finished that season, we went back to the first one, Murder House. That season is the one that actually scared me. The other two that I’ve seen are warped and twisted and horrible and creepy, but that first season is downright frightening because it has ghosts too. Murder, sex, rape, latex masks, Columbine style school violence, a girl with Down’s syndrome, hit and run car accidents, a deformed boy hiding in the attic, accidental suicide, and death by a fireplace poker shoved up an ass. I couldn’t stop watching it, not because I liked it, but because I had to. I was almost scared not to. I would watch the show and have nightmares for a few days.

At this point, season three, Coven, is now on Netflix, and we are all caught up on season four, which has a brief hiatus until mid-January. I don’t want to get started on the third season because it’s the holidays, and it just doesn’t seem right to watch so much deviance during such a joyful time of year. Plus, I have way too much to do, and generally after an episode, I have to sit sort of catatonically for a little while until the weird feeling subsides. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

If you watch American Horror Story, you either have a high tolerance for the macabre or no soul. I don’t know which applies to my daughter and me, but everything about that damn show is wrong, just wrong. And the more you watch, the more you get desensitized to its twistedness, like cutting off an animal head and sewing it on a baby body is, you know, kind of okay. I still am not sure if it is worse than Honey Boo Boo or Gypsy Sisters, because those are almost real people.

If you haven’t started the show yet, I recommend you don’t unless you need another reason to feel badly about yourself and everyone else. You can get that same feeling from watching the news, but it has way less sex. And naked butts.

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Just when you thought reality television couldn’t get any worse, The Learning Channel?? decided to lower the bar. Last Sunday, a new series began, called “Best Funeral Ever,” which features the Golden Gate Funeral Home in Louisiana. Not only can I not believe that a funeral can be the best ever, I am also stumped that A. I watched a show about this place, and B. that the demand for themed funerals is so great in Louisiana that this place even exists.

The Learning Channel??, in case you forgot, is the network that brings you such educational programming as “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” and “Abby and Britney,” a reality show featuring conjoined twins just trying to live a normal life. If you have a show about your life, conjoined or not, on that network, you can guarantee that you and normal will not cross paths any time in the near future.

“Best Funeral Ever” showcases the Golden Gate Funeral Home’s fantastic ability to give the deceased a sendoff their loved ones will never forget. Some people might think funerals should be a solemn and respectful affair. And some people think the best way to honor someone is by dipping a rib in a barbecue sauce fountain and offering it up to Jesus. This second group of people is the one who calls upon Golden Gate Funeral Home in their hour of need.  I was half asleep when I watched the show, which I literally could not turn off because I couldn’t find the remote, so I don’t know if the staff at the funeral home come up with the wacky funeral ideas or if the family members have some cray cray in mind and the staff just finds a way to make it happen. I appreciate a good party theme, don’t get me wrong. It’s just I never really thought about funerals as being in need of a theme. They already have a theme, and that theme is death.

One of the memorial services/parties was for a disabled man who passed away. He suffered from spina bifida and was confined to a wheelchair his whole life. When he died, his family members thought the best way to honor him was to take his urn to the local county fair and ride all the rides with it, the very rides he would never have been able to enjoy while alive. Nothing helps a family heal from the loss of a loved one like cradling an ash-filled urn on the bumper cars.

The show also had a segment about a family who mourned a young family member who either loved Christmas or died right before it. I’m not quite sure about that part because I couldn’t devote that level of attention span to it, but the end result was a Christmas tree and a man dressed like Santa Claus, only without the beard, sharing the alter with Jesus and the preacher. The dead guy’s coffin came down the aisle on a big red sleigh. A man with a large gingerbread man head sat in the pew. A couple of people were dressed like elves. Was it the Christmas shop at Macy’s or an interment?

In between segments, the show featured all the tension and fighting between employees striving to top one another as they planned and executed, if you will, each and every funeral service. I don’t know if Golden Gate Funeral Home operates like an episode of “The Apprentice” or if the editing just made it look that competitive, but damn, those people were not nice to each other. They were, however, nice and respectful to the families, because really, isn’t that what it’s all about?

But back to the barbecue fountain. Much like an episode of “Fantasy Island” or “The Love Boat,” only one of the vignettes of the show was truly interesting, while the rest just took up minutes. The best of the best funerals was for the man who sang the Chili’s Baby Back Ribs song. You remember it, right? “I want my baby back, baby back, baby back…Chili’s, baby back ribs…barbecue sauce.” Well, I regret to inform you that the singer of this timeless jingle has passed away. And his funeral was on a television show. His family decided to have a big ole BBQ feast in his honor. Complete with giant fake ribs carried by pretty young things, real smoky ribs for eating, and that sauce fountain for slathering. His casket was shaped like a big smoker, and a few pigs were running around the building in case you couldn’t remember where the ribs came from. People were waving their ribs up toward heaven, singing the baby back ribs song like it was the word of God.

I’ve been to a few funerals and memorial services in my day. I’ve been to one in a Baptist church. I’ve sat shiva. I’ve had a memorial service in my home. Hell, I even have a small bag of my grandmother’s ashes hidden in my china cabinet going on eleven years now.  And in all that time, never have I seen a funeral Christmas party, carnival, or hoe down. I don’t know if those are the best funerals ever, or but they sure aren’t boring.

Nikes, Reebok, Asics, Adidas. It's Not That Hard.

I was in spin class, the room cave dark, the music night club loud. Class was crowded for a Wednesday, almost every spin bike taken except for the broken one turned backwards and the lone bike under the stereo. Class had begun, and we were all warming up and getting ready to sweat. CC, our instructor, regaled us in a funny story or two to loosen us up and let us all know that spin was work, but it was also fun.

And then he walked in, a good ten minutes after class began, and everyone turned and looked at him. Not because he was drop dead gorgeous. Not because he was so muscular and fit that we couldn’t look away.

Honestly, we had no idea what he looked like, because none of us could look past his get-up. He was a Clemson University fan, perhaps its biggest. He wore a bright orange Clemson ball cap, a white shirt with an orange paw print over the left breast, and orange shorts with Clemson scrolled on one leg. His outfit would have been fine for a football game. For a Wednesday morning spin class, it was overkill.

But that’s not the worst part.

He wore sunglasses, in the cave dark spin room. Sunglasses which he kept on for the entire class. I always wear contacts to class because just the idea of my regular glasses slipping on my sweat-drenched face could make my face chafe. Not to mention I could fog up my glasses walking up the stairs. I doubt I would be able to see through them after fifteen minutes on the spin bike. Did he have something to hide?

 But that was also not the worst part.

On his legs were tall black socks, pulled up almost to the knee. In case you haven’t noticed, the boys these days are quite fond of wearing black socks, mid-calf, with any kind of shoe. It makes them all look like elderly tourists, but whatever, who understands kids and their bizarre fashion sense anyway. This was no boy; this was a middle aged man, and these weren’t mid calf length socks, they were practically up to his thighs. If I had to put money on it, I would bet they were compression stockings, like those worn by diabetics or people with poor circulation who are prone to getting blood clots in their legs.

But that too was not the worst part.

On his feet were navy blue Crocs. That was the worst part.

I will admit, I am pretty anti Croc. If you are working in the garden, then fine, slip your feet in those duck-like plastic shoes and have at it. If you are an obese red haired man famous for your Italian cooking and you want your signature look to be bright orange plastic shoes, whatever, to each his own. But if you are at the gym, exercising, you might want to at least sport, sport being the key word, some appropriate footwear. Crocs make everyone look like an asshole. Crocs in a spin class, however, are enough to make twenty people question your sanity, your fitness level, and your ability to live independently. If you can afford a gym membership, you can afford some sneakers.

I went to a children’s museum recently, and they had a display of all the children’s Crocs that were eaten by the escalators. My ten year old is now scared to wear hers, and she only wore them to dance class for the easy on/easy off factor before she slips into her Pointe shoes. Grown men at the gym should know better, or at least have some dignity and self respect.

The Croc shod Clemson fan came in ten minutes late and clambered onto the one remaining bike, shoved his Crocs into the shoe cages, and began pedaling. He didn’t bother adjusting the seat or the handlebars. He didn’t have a refreshing bottle of water or an old towel with which to absorb his sweat. And he didn’t take off his sunglasses. He just rode. At one point in the class, our instructor made a comment about the first football game this weekend. The Croc shod Clemson fan shouted an enthusiastic yahoo, in case we had forgotten he was a Clemson fan, which we had not. A couple of other people might have hooted, but it was drowned out by his yell, which might be an indication of how obnoxious he would be to sit next to at the stadium.

I have seen my share of odd in spin class. There’s the frighteningly thin elderly woman who insists on wearing pearls and hot pink lipstick. There’s the older woman who wears her white sports bras as her top, even though every other woman at the gym wears a shirt. There’s the woman who insists on full make-up and cologne for a morning workout. Sunglasses and Crocs blew them all away.

As we all exited the room after class had ended, I commented to my spin buddies, “Well, that was different.” “What the hell?” asked one of my friends. CC, the instructor, asked, “Were those…Crocs?” And we all laughed, kind of like one of those laughs at the end of a sitcom when image freezes and the credits roll.

 If you don’t want twenty people to laugh at you, don’t wear Crocs to the gym. It might even be in the fitness club rules, and if it isn’t, it needs to be. It will be one of those rules that people will read in about five years and say, “Why is that even a rule? Oh, because some weirdo probably wore Crocs to exercise. But who would do something that stupid?”

At least twenty of us know the answer to that one.