stoney321 | Sometimes you have to clean things with fire. Cleansing, healing fire.

Before I go off on the horrible, horrible living conditions (and mental state) of the people on Hoarders last night, I want to remind everyone that Southland - TNT's best show on air - comes back tonight. Check your local listings, watch watch watch. It's an outstanding drama, and it happens to be a cop drama written by/conceived by women. Awesome.

Anyway, let me tell you about how there is a booming business here in North Texas for repairing paint jobs that have been wrecked due to grackle poop. I live where the birds come for winter, so there are ridiculous flocks of noisy, poopy birds all winter long. Oh, delightful. And there's a lot of room here. A lot of birds pooping on your car hood, say, won't be pleasant, but the whole block won't stink to high heaven. You certainly wouldn't use your fingernail to chip it off your car, right? Nasty, RIGHT? We're all agreeing that bird poop is gross, gross stuff? Why, oh why don't all people think so?

I want to first put out there that hoarding is a mental disorder. As in a mental illness. It's not laziness (well, somewhat, but there are reasons for that,) it's not slight disorganization, it is a mental condition. I am no psychiatrist, but they have them on the show and they try to help these people, including offering after care for up to two years, paid for by A&E. Now that I've gotten that out of the way, I'm usually pretty sympathetic to mental disorders - to a degree. When children/innocent things are harmed, you've lost my concern and have pushed me to "GET AWAY FROM EVERYONE AND HEAL THYSELF. OR JUST GO AWAY."

So now you know my position. Sympathetic to a point.

Last night we have Hannah, a bitter harpy of a woman who was clearly abused as a person growing up who then turned her rage onto her children and livestock. [They are not her pets, she's old school farm.] That's where you lose my sympathy, old woman, the abuse. We'll call her Wampa from here out (and there's your Star Wars shout-out for the day. Jabba is too easy, I like to be slightly obscure.) Wampa has 4 acres out in rural ~~juror~~ Illinois containing an old farmstead, a barn, a trailer, and a pen. Goats left unchecked (meaning, the males are roaming freely with the females, meaning babies a-go-go) fill the pen, and next to the pen are 2 foot wire cages stuffed with ducks, geese and chickens. Some turkeys strut about looking for feed as well. The house in inhabitable as it's been literally filled completely with... well, garbage. One man's trash is another Wampa's trash, it seems.

That leaves the run down trailer with no electricity. And inside the trailer is Wampa, more garbage (there aren't any visible signs of floor in the place) and two hundred god damned chickens living in plastic buckets from the Wal-Marts with BBQ grills laid over the top, you know, for the birds to have air? The buckets haven't been cleaned out, ever. Some of the birds are pressed against the grates because there is literally a foot and change of dried bird shit inside these tubs. The air is filled with stink motes, which are crawling with hantavirus and Psittacosis, which were actually trying to hitch hike out of that place because even those bacteria were all "get me away from this...death!"

I've never seen such chlamydia-filled cloaca since Spring Break, ba dum bum HOOOOOOAAAARK.

At one point we see Wampa pushing her wheel chair that is laden with old pickle buckets of feed towards her goats, who are swarming her in hunger. Well, that's how goats are, and they didn't look skinny, so she must be giving them ample food (or enough to keep them going, I have no clue. Goats are excellent foragers, even if it's labels off of Folgers cans.) She's re-purposed a jug of laundry detergent into a scoop and is trying to spread the feed out when one goat does who knows what to piss her off. She grabs it by the collar and yells to cut it out or she's gonna spank it, then she slaps its face. Not like a bitch slap, but a bad mama in the WalMarts shopping at 11pm with a cranky baby slap. (Don't get me started. If you recognize any of that in your own life, run if you see me coming, I'll come and give you such a pinch! Lol.)

So what I'm saying is that Wampa is bat shit insane. And the worst is she's mean bat shit insane. They ask her about her family and she mentions that she gave birth to 16 babies, 10 survived, and eh, fleshy shrug. She guesses she did all right. There ain't gonna be a mother of the year award given out is what I'm saying. Two of her daughters are interviewed and they're clearly broken folk, too. One starts sobbing about all of the abuse she took as a kid, and she sees her mom still at it with her animals. And let's talk about the rest of the kids, shown at one point getting into a fist fight. They're all in their 30s or older. One son is mulleted in a Molly Hatchet t-shirt, doing the talking with a cigarette still hanging thing, picking a fight with his sister. Not the "you wet the bed until you were 12, I'm telling your boyfriend!" kind of fighting that siblings do, but the "you sunofabitch, that's my meth you done stole outta my babies mouths!" kinda fighting. The mom is looking on and shouts, "She's gonna knock him flat," kind of with a sense of pride.

These are people that shouldn't be. And yet. I'm not joking when I say I kept looking for squid selling P-nuts and Har-dos. "Boy, go brang Mama her sip." [Squidbillies, for those not in the know.]

Matt Paxton, the "extreme clean specialist" and Dr. Zasio - my two favorite people on the show, next to Standolyn and Dorothy, the organizers - are the team helping her. Well, trying to help her. Well, trying to keep her from having an heart attack when the animal specialist roll up on her property. Matt calls her a "rattlesnake." She makes a lot of noise to scare you off, but he's not having it. I dig this guy because he gets in people's faces, and he does it with the people who need it. Wampa is a big ol' bully, a big ol' mean waste of flesh that has gotten her way through intimidation, both with her rage and her size. I bet if that woman back-handed you for sassing, your unborn offspring would feel it. She'd knock the chap off your lips. She'd knock you into another family, forget new week.

I think the team quickly summed up that she wasn't going to have any kind of breakthrough - she really doesn't see anything wrong with how she's living life - and just went on damage control to get the proper authorities out there to start seizing animals, and they tried to do this in the least alarming way.

And that's where I'm seeing people getting all hot and bothered (and believe me, I'm no fan of animal cruelty. Unless they are spiders. KILL THEM ALL WITH NAPALM. Lol. Don't send me comments about your love of spiders, I'm not actually using napalm on them. I'm using my boot. And only on the ones that want to eat my face meat and lay eggs in my sweet, sweet eye juices.) People are claiming that nothing was being done about the horrendous conditions the animals lived in, and that's makes me think they didn't watch the show. The Dr. came in with a team from out of state that consisted of livestock veterinarians. They were there to evaluate the animals and determine who was going to go, they were pretty up front about that. At one point in the show the local animal rescue rolls up and everyone loses it. The Dr.s didn't call them. (And Matt mentioned that vets were out there before the show began taping, probably to get an idea of the enormity of the situation and to make sure they started some red tape slogging, and they may have gone ahead and called, or it could have been neighbors.)

The Dr. runs out to them and updates them on the situation, that they're aware of the conditions, that they have a team going through and getting an idea of the next step, that they have an ill (a very, very ill both physically and mentally) woman they're trying to keep calm while they plan their next move. Animal Control leaves. But come on, they're coming back. PEOPLE. Don't be ridiculous. One goat had a split hoof (I'm talking 8 inches) and was pregnant, couldn't walk properly and hadn't been able to for a year. That goat ain't staying. Neither were the ducks, the geese, the rest of the goats. But - because we live in a society where you have to prove guilt, not innocence, shit takes some sorting, you know? (They also mentioned at the end of the show that they were calling Animal Control's office to bring out the Big Trailer first thing in the morning.)

Anyway, this woman is a piece of shit, she's mean, she's yelling at everyone, she won't let anything go, but at this point, it just doesn't matter. She's clearly mentally unstable (no, you think?) and won't be keeping much. She did allow her to keep the healthy chickens. Amazingly, a lot of the chickens in those buckets were healthy. A lot weren't, some died, and the rest were taken, I don't know if people noticed that or not. She could keep the healthy chickens as long as she turned them out to the outdoor pens where they would have access to fresh air, feed, and water. All of the other birds were taken.

And I have to say, if you are one of those people that is beyond outrage at her being able to keep those chickens, let me ask you something seriously: do you buy chicken at the market? Is it free range, organic, lovingly sung to every day? No? Then she's actually treating her chickens better than Tyson, etc. etc. At least she didn't file their beaks down and cut off their spurs. Which... let that give you some food for thought. And let me just offer that you maybe make a point to have chicken go back to being a special dinner like it used to be, because chickens weren't eaten daily back in the day. Because chickens don't get monstrously big tittied and are consumed in three months, but that grocery store chicken is sure done up like that.

Rant over. :)

Feet of filth in that trailer. They didn't even get inside the house. Wampa was fined by the state for animal cruelty, by the way. I would have liked to see Matt just sigh, pull off his face mask, and toss a molotov cocktail over his shoulder, then everything go into slo-mo as he walked away, a huge fireball behind him and Rollin Stones' "It's just a shout away! It's just a shout away!" playing, a la Black Ops. Ha. Either that or death by Rancor, which she very much resembled.

If I may quote Perry Farrell, "some people should die, that's just unconscious knowledge."

There was also a B-plot of Gary, a controlling dirty butthole that let his bunnies do what we know bunnies do which is eat a rented house to the ground and fill it with their shit. Oh, you didn't know bunnies did that? neither did this guy. Oh my laws, they were renting a house - property that does not belong to them - and they let their rabbit shit every where, eat holes through the walls - complete remove the siding on their bath tub, nest in the walls, chew up the electrical wiring, and essentially destroy that house. And the wife, a total doormat defeated by the boxcars life rolled for her, was trapped in the hell hole with it on disability. Angry, angry, childish man who refused to look into the camera, slunk off like a naughty boy (which he was) when the landlords showed up, and was basically a passive agressive jerk. There was a layer of dust on everything in that house so thick you could literally write "you are a dirty douche nozzle who doesn't deserve the good things in life, and also, gross, haven't you heard of opening a window?" in it. And probably outline the genealogy of the Tudors under that.

A lot of dust, I'm saying.

Oh, and it wasn't dust, it was powdered rabbit poop.

BURN THE PLACE DOWN AND START OVER. That's essentially my suggestion for both places, but I guess they couldn't hear me from my bed where I huddled, the sheets covering my mouth because I didn't want it to get inside me. We had a Raiders of the Lost Arc face melting situation, it was almost better to not watch. My brain melted in this case, not my Nazi face meat. Mostly because I'm not a Nazi. I do have a sick ass map burned into my palm, but that's because I'm old school G.

I'm looking forward to them getting back to shows with loveable dandies that have a Liberace fetish and a love of "ancient Oriental decor." Translation: that shitty gong that never sells at the flea market and everything surrounding it that is black and red and glossy. You know, because that makes it "Oriental." That's a mental illness I can enjoy. This episode just makes me want the "high meat" people back.

....nope, that's no good either. GAAAAAAH.

TODAY I WILL CLEAN ALL THE THINGS. And today is tamale rolling day. Holy crow, my house smells like nothing but cumin. I think I'll need to air the house out, because I might get confused and think that's a dirty smell. GAH CLEAN ALL THE THINGS. ALL OF THEM. Lysol douches, anyone? (I just laid my head on my table and laughed at that.)

And because I'm sympathetic to those that read this, here is a palate cleanser for you. AHAHAHA, brb, laughing still. (Mar, I love your tumblr.)