Randal Graves from Clerks vs. Lindsey Graham, Whose Last Name Should Also Be Graves, Hint, Hint, Wink, Wink (Rest in Piss, Loser)

 

Food-Mindedness and Body Horror

In case it wasn’t already abundantly clear from my 300 lb. belly, I’m very food-minded. Almost everything in my life reminds me of food in some way. Hell, the word Life will conjure images of the oat square cereal swirling around in milk. The word swirling will remind me of frosted cinnamon buns, keyword being frosted, as in enough frosting to cover the whole fucking thing. At least those words make a modicum of sense, but then there are names of people that remind me of food for no reason at all. Marcus reminds me of hotdogs and mustard. Brad reminds me of French bread. Rachel reminds me of apple juice. Erick reminds me of birthday cake-flavored milkshakes. How did this happen? Was it the constant advertising? Was there some trick of the brain during childhood I wasn’t aware of?

Already, my relationship with food is off to a rocky start. But then there are the things I find disgusting in life and how they find their way into my food. Not literally, but I imagine that they do and my imagination is powerful enough to make me vomit in some cases. For example, if you’ve ever seen the movie Clerks, the View Askew Productions logo at the beginning will serve as nightmare fuel to haunt you at every stage of life. There’s nothing wrong with men dressing in fishnet pantyhose, high heels, and leather thongs…even if they do have grotesque body hair. But it’s the unwanted sexual attention and creepiness of his flirtation that makes it such a traumatic logo. After seeing that logo for the first time, I kept involuntarily picturing his hairy disgusting body in pieces of my lunch meat. Every time I take a bite of ham or turkey, I imagine I’m taking a bite out of that man’s body. My stomach is aching and my fingers are convulsing just thinking about this.

But that’s just one example. If that was the only one, then I wouldn’t have been inspired to write an entire essay on it. What about the Calcobrena Puppets from Final Fantasy IV? You know, those creepy leotard-wearing dolls with buzzed heads, bloodshot eyes, zombie movements, and murderous intentions. They look like they could be Pee-Wee Herman’s children based on their buzz-cuts alone. Pee-Wee Herman once taught his audience how to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on his show. Therefore…all of my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches will taste like the bodies of the Calcobrena Puppets. It’ll be like eating right off of their skulls, head lice, fleas, and maggots be damned. It’ll be like giving French kisses to each and every one of those dolls…while passing pre-chewed sandwiches back and forth! Again, my stomach is boiling and rotting while I’m typing this.

And what about the Simpsons from their Treehouse of Horror Episodes, particularly the ones where they turn into pale zombies. They chew flesh, they lose limbs, they groan like exhausted monsters, and did I mention that they have pale skin? You know what else is pale in color? Pasta covered in white sauce, whether it’s American cheese or Alfredo sauce. Every bite that I took of those macaroni shells made me believe I was eating pieces of the zombie Simpsons. I took a long time to swallow knowing that zombie flesh was going down my throat and was going to poison me to death. The macaroni turned to mush in my mouth, so when I finally swallowed, I gagged and brought up a little bit of bile with it.

If I rattled off every example of food-related body horror, then we’d be here forever and a day. I could talk about the faceless masks from Pink Floyd the Wall reminding me of melted cheese. I could talk about the diarrhea blasts in The Human Centipede reminding me of chocolate ice cream (that one’s too obvious, though). I could talk about dead flies reminding me of Butterfinger ice cream. How did this all happen? Why are these disgusting things finding their way into my every meal? Am I so linked up with food that every trauma will remind me of such? Suppose I was more inclined towards Legos instead of food. If I touched a Lego piece that had three holes in it, would it remind me of the Pink Floyd masks? What if I was geared towards clothing? Would the View Askew drag queen’s body hair remind me of a wool sweater that’s literally hugging my chest?

I can already hear fatphobic assholes using my food horror as motivation for me to lose weight…or is that just my schizophrenic voices? Nah, I’m pretty sure someone has thought of exploiting me at one point or another. To those fat-shamers, I say watch the Human Centipede and eat a bag of shit and then watch Pink Floyd the Wall and eat an entire McDonald’s Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese (there has to be cheese in it, no exceptions). Unlike drugs and alcohol, food is actually necessary to survive. A cheeseburger will carry you over into the next day. A pack of cigarettes will not. A pepperoni pizza will give you the nutrition you need, even if it’s bad. Alcohol will not. If I gave up all of my favorite foods due to the body horror I’ve witnessed over the years, I would die of anorexia. Imagine that: fat-shaming actually hurts people instead of helping them find motivation. It’s almost as if people are only fat-shaming to satisfy their sadistic urges and are just using motivation as a cover-up for their shitty behavior. Bullying never went away; it just adapted to the new world.

I could tell you all that I’ve found the perfect counter for body horror-induced trauma, but I haven’t. Yes, I’m still alive and eating like a pig, but that’s only because the trauma went away on its own. I eat ham sandwiches whenever I damn well please even though the View Askew drag queen lusted on me through the TV screen as a kid. I eat stuffed mushrooms despite the fact that it feels too much like I’m eating Phanto from Mario Brothers 2, the evilly-smiling little bastard. Trauma going away on its own is not a typical outcome for most people, especially if schizophrenia is a factor like it is for me. Sure, you can take away the stimulus and hope for the Law of Diminishing Returns to kick in, but it doesn’t always do that. I have no solutions for your body horror trauma. As a matter of fact, I may have given you some of that as I described examples of how they make their way into my food.

Sometimes I think I’m the only one who experiences things like this until I Google it and find entire communities full of people who share my problems. But that’s assuming I’m not too lazy on any given day to use Google. It’s such an easy thing, yet I find myself too lazy sometimes to type words into a search engine. If you’re out there and you’re as food-minded as me, I’m sorry I can’t provide solutions for you other than the occasional animal picture and some digital hugs. You know who can provide more than that? Your therapist. They can talk you through your trauma. They can encourage you to face your food-themed fears. They can be there for you when you feel like others would laugh at your plight. Yes, therapy can be expensive at times, but it’s worth every penny if it means you’ll be okay in the end. If you’re not okay, it’s not the end. Life is better alive. It’s a dumb thing to say, but the truth won’t wane away. Okay, now I’m just ripping off quotes and lyrics. I should stop doing that before I get sent to prison for copyright infringement and have my vanilla pudding remind me of my cell mate’s semen. Uh-oh! More body horror!

Clerks II

MOVIE TITLE: Clerks II
DIRECTOR: Kevin Smith
YEAR: 2006
GENRE: Comedy
RATING: R for vulgar language and bestiality
GRADE: Pass


Dante Hicks shows up for work at the Quick Stop Convenience Store only to find out it burned to the ground after a coffee pot was negligently left on overnight. Fast forward to the present where he and his best friend Randal Graves now have jobs at a fast food restaurant. Randal still takes pleasure in screwing with the customers while Dante does what he did in the first movie and “over-compensates for having what’s basically a monkey’s job”. That, and Dante has another love triangle to take care of now that Caitlin and Veronica are gone from his life.

A comedy can only be a comedy if it’s funny. When I first saw this movie with my dad when it came out in theaters, I was laughing my ass off throughout the entire thing. It’s been twelve years since the first Clerks movie and Randal Graves still has his silver tongue. He even has an alternative ending to the Lord of the Rings movies since they’re not entertaining enough due to the constant walking scenes. He also has an interesting take on how “porch monkey” shouldn’t be a racial slur, but a normal insult.

And to top the whole thing off, for a going away party for Dante, he buys him a donkey show. If you don’t know what a donkey show is, don’t ask me, because I actually want to maintain my appetite. If it seems like I’m telling instead of showing, it’s because I want you to see these crass, but funny jokes for yourself and find your own laughter. When I was a kid, my dad used to spoil jokes for me by saying what they were before they happened on TV (because I would laugh twice that way). That drove me nuts.

In addition to being a hyena laugh comedy, Clerks II also has some serious philosophical messages that should be noted. Just like in the first movie with Caitlin and Veronica, Dante finds himself in a love triangle, but with two different women. He’s scheduled to marry a woman named Emma and go to Florida with her to get his life on the right track and start a car wash business.

Meanwhile, Dante is actually in love with his boss at the fast food joint Becky, who midway through the movie tells him that she’s pregnant. Right here it seems appropriate to quote a famous Glenn Frey song: “Are you going to stay with the one who loves you or are you going back to the one you love. Someone’s going to cry when they know they’ve lost you and someone’s going to thank their stars above.”

Which brings me to the main philosophical point the movie makes: live your life the way it makes sense to you and don’t let society’s standards dictate who you should be. Randal already knows what he wants from life: to eat free food, watch movies, insult customers, and hang out with Dante all day long, just like he did when he worked at RST Video. It’s not the most glamorous way to make a living, but it’s what Randal loves and nobody’s going to tell him he’s wrong.

Dante on the other hand is so much of a conformist that he’d rather go to Florida with Emma (who he could care less about) so that he can start a new life and be a “winner” in the eyes of the public. He doesn’t realize until the end of the movie that in making this bold move, he’s abandoning his best friend of many decades Randal and tearing him apart in the process. Dante is basically trading his individuality for a piece of the pie and part of his individuality is his longtime friendship with Randal.

A lot of Kevin Smith fans, my dad included, are firm believers that the first Clerks movie can never be topped. I respectfully disagree. When I saw this movie in 2006, I needed a good laugh due to my mental illness getting the best of me. Clerks II provided constant laughs throughout the entire movie and made me believe in life again. In fact, my horse laugh made everyone else in the movie theater laugh twice. They’d laugh once at the jokes in the movie and laugh again when they heard my own laugh. If you though that was something, wait until Clerks III comes out!

　

***MOVIE QUOTE OF THE DAY***

“I really wish you would have told me this when I first met you, that one day you were going to bail on our friendship. If I would have known you were going to flake on me a couple decades later, I wouldn’t have even bothered with your ass in the first place.”

-Randal to Dante-