How I learned to Love My Psychic Carnage

 *content warning: drug use, the cinema of Takashi Miike, bra size. *

The woman with the blonde hair and the red dress stands facing the camera. Her head is cocked as she reads her lines off a placard which the camera captures and zooms in until the characters fill the screen. This is a bizarre world of Yakuza murder, animal-headed men, and absurdity so profound it causes a mild headache. 

This is Gozu, a film by master director, Takashi Miike.

This movie is one of my top, all-time favorite movies because it reminds me of my life. I watched Gozu around the time I was an unmedicated pothead dating a drug dealing, gun-toting alcoholic who would later be caught by undercover narcotics agents and wind up spending all his illicit drug profits on a good attorney. I think I was 19 at the time. On the surface, I was a rather boring wallflower; a cashier at a bottom-feeding pharmacy, a skinny, flat-chested teenager with a predilection for marijuana. Beneath it, I was a fan of Miike movies, not because his movies shocked me, but because they reminded me of my psychic carnage, the invisible wounds of a damaged life.

Why am I writing this? Simply because my psychiatrist will not authorize a refill of my anti-depressants and you, the poor, ensnared reader, are the one thing keeping me afloat in this lagoon of angst.

Also, I want to show off. I am no longer that skinny, flat-chested marijuana smoking, drug-dealer dating screw up. Now I’m an overweight, 34G cup sober nutcase, 4 days away from a bachelor’s degree from an accredited University. I even got accepted into a graduate program. But some things never change. That nugget of damaged nerves still thrives in the nether regions of my wounded soul. I have learned to love that damage…it is what keeps me humble and always eager to improve, as if to change my personality would somehow enable me to erase the fractures of my past.

Miike is a genius. Why have you not watched any of his movies? Pardon the illogical leaps from topic to topic, but I am a skitz and my train of thought has a lot of stop-overs.