Tag: gross

#REVIEW: You Weren’t Meant to be Human, by Andrew Joseph White

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews3 Comments

I three-starred this. But keep reading.

Every so often, when you are in the habit of reviewing things, you encounter something that sort of breaks your review system. Most of the books I read get rated four or five stars, because I have been reading books for my entire life and I have gotten pretty good at picking books that I am going to like. Five stars is a book I really enjoyed and will recommend to people. Four stars is a book that I enjoyed but had some flaws or for whatever reason I feel less likely to talk about. Three stars is a book that was just kind of there; two stars, a lot of the time, was a DNF, and one star was a book I actively loathed and wish to punish.

You tell me: how do I star-rate a book that I personally really did not enjoy reading, but nonetheless recognize as a well-written book that may very well be appealing to other people? Because I have no damn idea, really. You Weren’t Meant to be Human is body horror. It’s about a trans man who gets pregnant. That’s already a body horror situation well before we get to the variety of mental issues that the protagonist, Crane, has. And to avoid being misunderstood, by “mental issues,” I do not mean the fact that Crane is autistic and very nearly nonverbal. No, I’m talking about the rape fantasies (as in fantasizing about being raped) and the degrading sex and the self-mutilation. If you’ve ever needed to read trigger warnings, go nowhere near this book. There are warnings at the beginning of the book, and they are extensive.

It floated through my head at one point that this is the book that TJ Klune would write if TJ Klune was KM Szpara, but I’m not convinced that makes any sense.

In addition to … all that, see those worms on the cover? Crane is part of (kidnapped and forcibly inducted into? Maybe.) a cult that worships, or at least … cares for? this possibly-alien hive mind intelligence that exists in our world mostly as a horrifying conglomeration of bugs and flies and worms and other grotesqueries. Crane knows who the (other) father of his baby is, but at the same time he spends most of the book convinced that he’s about to give birth to a giant slug or perhaps just a giant knot of maggots. The cult does a lot of murdering so that the hive has stuff to eat, and for most of the book Crane is protected/guarded/imprisoned by what is effectively a Frankenstein’s monster cobbled together from the people they’ve fed to the thing. The Frankenstein is named Stagger. Crane occasionally fantasizes about fucking it and there’s at least one sequence where he at least comes close. I’m not going to go back and reread to clarify my memory here.

Y’all, I’m okay with it if I never read another body horror again. I’m good. I’m happy with naming this book the pinnacle of the genre and then never touching it again. This is one of the most brutal and harrowing books I’ve ever read and has one of the most shocking and grotesque endings I’ve ever seen (which, now that I think about it, did get a bit of foreshadowing) and I did not enjoy one single second of reading it.

I’m not sure this book is supposed to be “enjoyed,” is the thing, which is why I’m not comfortable with panning it and why I more or less devoured the fucking thing in one sitting rather than putting it in the freezer and forgetting I ever saw it. A lot of the reviews I’m seeing for it are positively rapturous and the thing is I don’t necessarily disagree with them. I just …

*shiver*

Yeah. No more, thank you. That’s enough of that. But if you feel like you might be into this? I’m not mad about it.

Okay, look, Marvel …

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, moviesLeave a comment

You’ve got me, you bastards. I’m in. The last of your fucking movies I saw in a theater was I don’t even remember but it might have been Endgame, weeks after it came out. I also don’t remember which of your movies was the last I saw at all. Maybe Black Widow.

I am going to see Fantastic Four: First Steps in a theater. I am not back and I have no plans to see any other forthcoming Marvel movies. I’m gonna see Superman, but that’s not you. That’s two superhero movies in a month which will be more than I’ve seen in the last several years.

Please don’t fuck this up.

Anybody know anything about flies? We have a mystery infestation in about a room and a half in the house. Our dining room has a big glass sliding door leading to a screened-in back porch. I have killed, and I swear I’m not shitting you, well over a hundred house flies crawling around on that screen door in the last two days. Well over a hundred of them. I have absolutely no idea where they’re coming from. There is no obvious source of flies in my dining room. There is a vent right in front of the sliding door; I have pulled the grille out of it and vacuumed inside it extensively, and it’s not big enough to be hiding a dead animal or something, plus if there was something in there we’d be able to smell it. Plus, if they were coming from the vents, they’d be in every room in the house, not concentrated by the back porch.

They are not on the outside of the sliding doors. Plus, again, there’s no source of flies out there and it’s screened in. They have to be coming from inside the house and they also have to be coming from somewhere very close to that sliding door, and there just isn’t anything. Flies don’t just spontaneously generate! That would mean that there’s something in my dining room that is rotting and was covered in maggots and zero of the four humans and three cats in the house noticed it?

I’ve sat and watched and waited to see if I could spot them crawling from somewhere, and of course, because they’re flies and flies have turning invisible as a class ability, I’ve had no luck on that. If I leave the room for half an hour there will be between five and seventeen (the current record) on the sliding door when I come back. I’ve been using the vacuum cleaner to kill them because it’s faster and more effective than a Goddamn flyswatter.

Somebody help me out, this is gross and I’m tired of it.

(Oh, and I made a flytrap with a Sprite bottle, some apple cider vinegar and a few drops of dish soap because the Internet told me it was an effective cheap flytrap. Pff. It has not caught a single fucking fly. There’s an indoor zapper coming Friday.)

Eew gross

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, life2 Comments

Here is a thing that one ought not to do:  Sneeze, abruptly, profusely and wetly, while driving to work in the morning.  Because the horrifying glob of gross that fires from your  mouthparts will hit your windshield at the farthest possible location from your face, and you won’t even find it for a few minutes, and then you’ll notice, and by the time you get to work it will have frozen to the windshield as well as to the dash underneath, and you will discover that cleaning it off with what you have on hand is impossible, and then your car will spend twelve hours outside and you will realize that you are stuck with a smeary blob of gross on your windshield until your car has time to warm up in your garage for a bit before you try to clean again.

The end.

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Bad housekeeping/good geography

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography8 Comments

I thought the cat was just sick. No, he’s making a map of Scandinavia.

Also, I need to rip out this carpet.

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In which I mostly talk about gross stuff

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, idiocy, Teaching4 Comments

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First things first, a question for the WordPress folks: are you seeing a new big “Go Premium” button showing up constantly when you go to your dashboard?  Or am I just special?  I’ve hit a few traffic/followers/number of posts milestones recently, right around when I started noticing it, and the timing seems suspicious.  I’m wondering if they figure I’m a good target for the advertising.  (They’re right, and I’m probably doing it soon.)

Today featured projectile vomit.

That sentence originally had a comma and some follow-up afterwards, but really, whenever I can start a description of my day using the phrase “projectile vomit,” I probably really don’t need to elaborate a whole lot further.  It also featured a case conference for one of my massively autistic students (as opposed to my mildly autistic ones) that took place while the student in question went AWOL from class and spent the entire conference merrily roaming the halls and fleeing from security.  Which, honestly, ended up being rather convenient, as Mom was in the midst of proclaiming that she didn’t believe he really did that when I walked into the conference and let everyone know that I had no idea where the hell he was.  He’d fled the room when my back was turned.  He’s done it two or three times this week.  We thought we’d gotten the behavior under control over the last couple of months but it’s returned with a vengeance over the last couple of weeks for some reason.

I’ve already inflicted this on both Facebook and Twitter, so you may as well see it too:  PornMD has decided for some reason to give the world a webpage that does nothing but display a constant live-scrolling list of all the searches their website gets, which is twenty times more horrifying and engrossing than it sounds.  Especially great are the misspellings:  my favorite is “amiture deapthrought.”  Which was right before “grandpa fuck young guy” and “Italian feet,” which are spelled right but startlingly specific.  I saw a search yesterday for “Salieri”– just that word– which led me down a mental road where I was trying to figure out how classical music porn might work before discovering that both Mario and Kitty Salieri (no idea if they’re related) are porn stars.  I’ll, uh, leave it to you guys to Google that.

(Also, hilariously, PornMD’s Twitter account favorited and RT’ed my tweet about the site.)

But, yeah, right.  I was talking about projectile vomit.

(I’ve never typed that sentence before.)

It’s actually not much of a story, but one of my kids was being sluggish and sleepy all through class, which caused me to go over and make him sit up a few times.  To my detriment, I didn’t remember that his little brother, who is in my first and second hour class, was out sick today.  In my favor, the dummy coulda told me he was sick at any point during class and I’d have remembered his brother was out and I’d have sent him to the nurse immediately.  He got up at one point and got the trash can and brought it over next to his desk; I told him to take a walk, which is generally understood by my kids to mean “keep the damn trash can and head for the bathroom.”  For some reason he chose not to do that, instead going out into the hallway, without the trash can, which he set down by the door, waiting for me to have a perfect moment of attention and silence from my class, and then noisily and spectacularly upchucking in the hallway outside my room.  Go home, foolish boy, and if you come back tomorrow I’m going to be terribly annoyed with you.

Also, Jihad’s expelled again, for good this time, I believe.  He will not be missed.

In which TMI for serious

On By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking, idiocy7 Comments

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Do not read this post.

I repeat: do not read this post.  You don’t want to know anything I’m going to talk about in this post.

I’m not kidding.

Seriously.

You’re still reading.  You understand that I’m not kidding and you’ve been warned four fucking times now if I don’t count this warning which is technically the fifth if I’m allowed to count the word “seriously” as a warning which I can because this is my blog and I make the rules.  Plus, like, the title of the post.  And the picture.

Stop.

Here, I’ll put a line so that you can have a place to stop:

So I was a vegetarian for a week, right?  One of the unexpected awesome things about being a vegetarian was the awesome bowel movements.

WHAT GODDAMMIT DON’T YOU DARE GET ALL SKEEVED OUT NOW I TOLD YOU THIS WAS GOING TO HAPPEN LIKE EIGHT TIMES SHUT UP YOU HAVE TO READ THE WHOLE THING NOW AND LIKE IT.

Seriously.  Pooing as a vegetarian is the absolute best kind of pooing.  I’ve never been this damn regular in my life, and some of the stuff that was coming out of me was the kind of bowel movement that you want to take a picture of so that you can reflect on how proud of it you were later.  (Shut up; you all know EXACTLY what I’m talking about.) And, like, high enough in quantity that you feel pleasantly emptied-out after each bowel movement, as opposed to pooing and then feeling like you still need to poo five minutes later, which I believe is known as the “Chinese food poo” across most of the Western world.

For a week, I was a poo king.  Like, Count Poo of Happyshit Mountain, the Grand Regent of Poo, the Magnate of Meconium (you clicked, didn’t you?), His Majesty the Lord Superior of the Seven Heavenly Principalities of Poo.  It was amazing.  This ought to be in the vegetarian brochure, people.

(Mental note: write the vegetarian brochure.  Make millions of both brochures and dollars.)

I had three meals today, and all three involved meat.  This was intentional, obviously; I usually don’t eat meat at every meal but I missed it.  Breakfast involved sausage, there were hot dogs and some beef soup at lunch, and dinner was a Triple Coronary with a side of clogged arteries at Culver’s.  Delicious.

And I’m gonna have to sleep on the fucking couch tonight because of the beef farts.  My nose hairs are singed. Jesus.  My wife’s gonna kill me if I hotbox the comforter tonight.

And by “if” I mean “when.”

If I never post again, you know why.

Some odds and ends

On By Luther M. SilerIn CookingLeave a comment

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Day Four of the Great Vegetarian Experiment:  risotto!  Mushroom risotto, to be precise.  I didn’t know what risotto was until I started watching Gordon Ramsay shows, and now that I’ve made it I can never stop.  Soooo goddamn good.  Tomorrow will be some sort of pasta, I think, and then I just have to make it through Friday and Saturday and I can have an entire pig for breakfast on Sunday if I want.

I’ll admit I cheated a tiiiny bit on this one, because the risotto was made with chicken stock, although there isn’t any actual meat in there.  However, I said in the ground rules that I wasn’t going to worry about chicken stock, and the people at Slate say chicken stock isn’t meat anyway, so nyah.  (Sidenote:  I’m entertained to note that the guy in the article is also using chicken stock to make mushroom risotto.  That’s a coincidence, I swear.)

Today was the first day where I really missed meat, to be honest– which manifested itself in three different ways:  first, whatever the kids were having for lunch in the cafeteria smelled really good.  Second, I hit the vending machine for a snack during my prep period (my lunch is really early in the day, so this happens probably more often than it should, since my prep is last hour) and was halfway toward getting vending machine jerky before it hit me that a) vending machine jerky is meat, and b) are you kidding?  Vending machine jerky?  Like hell I’m eating vending machine jerky.  Then on the way home I drove past Arby’s, which is still prominently advertising their Arby’s Smokehouse Brisket Sandwich, and… I’m not gonna lie, there might have been some drooling.  No buying, no eating, but drooling.

I promised “odds and ends” in the title of the post, but the two other things I was going to talk about– the bullying movie the whole building had to watch today and the release of Bill Ayers’ Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident both kinda feel like full-sized posts now that I’m thinking about them.  So maybe I’ll overpost for the next couple of days if I get them written.  Many of you are probably tired of hearing about food by now anyway, I imagine.