Movie: The Chumscrubber; and 'Something Worth Fighting For,' a vision of something happy in movies

7:06 AM 11/16/10

I watched a movie called 'The Chumscrubber.'

It all started when I recently googled 'Less is more.' I can't remember what it was that annoyed me so much. Maybe it was because my browser wouldn't work on one of my favorite web pages, or something like that. I like basic, simple web pages where almost everything is done using plain HTML. I like web pages that are retro-friendly, pages that could be viewed in old browsers and alternative browsers like Opera. I like pages that don't use Flash. Whatever it was that annoyed me, I don't remember, but I wanted to read about the 'Less is more' philosophy of web page design.

I ended up reading a bunch of different web pages. One of them talked about the psychology of making choices. I've read about this before, so I vaguely knew about it. It said that scientific studies have shown this, and also, it's something that I personally experience.

They did a test where customers could look at six different types of fruit jams, or 24 different types of fruit jams. They found out that when there were a large number of different choices, people would look at it but not buy anything. They were more likely to actually buy something from the display that showed only 6 different kinds of jam. People feel anxiety when there are dozens of choices and they don't know which one is the 'best' one to pick, and they can only have one, or they want to buy a whole bunch of different types, but they will still feel anxiety thinking that the other remaining kinds might have been better.

I know all about this. I know because I have ADHD, and every choice and every action feels that way for me. It's especially bad when I think about long-term plans for my life that will require years of commitment. Do I want to go back to college, but also, put myself deeply in debt on borrowed money, only to find that there are no 'jobs' available for someone with my major, because I'm not the aggressive type of person who makes my own 'job?' (Yes, I feel pessimistic about college. Even if I were able to completely finish and graduate, I still might not have a 'job' automatically handed to me by magic. And then I would have a college debt to pay off.) Do I want to start my own business? If so, what business? What will I do? I could do arts and crafts, but right now, I only have beginner level skills in a variety of different things, and I'm not skillful enough to start making money at anything right away. And I'm afraid I'll start the project and abandon it after a little while because of some unexpected problem, like an attack of severe fatigue. Every long-term plan seems to have too many options and too many risks, and I'm afraid I'll be missing out on something if I close off other alternatives. Should I live in Pennsylvania, or should I go to a lower-tax country, or should I go someplace with a better climate, or should I go someplace with really rich soil for farming?

It might be easier if there were fewer choices available to me. You have to choose from a small number of things, and then, make do with it. I've thought about this with regard to marriage. I've thought that maybe I should choose to have a 'loveless practical marriage' so that I can have children before it's too late, instead of trying to find someone that I'm passionately attracted to who also meets all of my other criteria, because I'm so picky that it's hard to find people, and almost all of the men available are unattractive to me. I could take too long if I look for true love, and then I wouldn't be able to have children anymore. A loveless practical marriage would limit my choices so it would be easier to make the decision. I wouldn't have to keep looking for a man who was 'perfect' in every possible way.

Anyway, about 'The Chumscrubber.'

I felt like renting a movie last night. It was my night off. I still rent movies the old-fashioned way, by walking into a movie rental store. Mike's Video is the one I go to, in Bellefonte. The other Mike's Video stores went out of business. There used to be one in town, in State College, that I used to go to when I lived there.

So I often get overwhelmed by the number of choices at the video store. Sometimes I like to rent a movie from Lyken's gas station, because they have only a small number of movies to choose from, so I'm forced to choose something almost at random that I never really thought I wanted to see. I've found a few interesting movies that way. Not great movies, not movies that I would buy and watch over and over again, but interesting enough to watch once or twice.

Last night, the voices gave me a recommendation that would limit the number of choices. They said, 'Get a movie that contains the letter B.' It doesn't have to begin with B. It has to contain the letter B. So I randomly browsed the shelves, and I don't remember all the movie titles that I skimmed over. (I know I didn't feel like watching 'Macbeth.') That's how I picked 'The Chumscrubber.' It had a B in the title. Then I also got the new version of Alice in Wonderland, too. That didn't have a B in it. It was a spontaneous choice. I'm not sure why I got it.

By strange coincidence, both of these movies happened to have a scene where someone gets their eye poked out. How many movies can you think of that have a scene with someone getting their eye poked out? Not that it matters.

So, Chumscrubber had lots of cute teenage boys in it, so I enjoyed watching it for that reason. It actually turned out to be a good movie, not just because I liked to look at the actors, but because of the story. It was about people drugging themselves. I've been trying again to look for enneagram type eight in real life and in movies. (Supposedly, there is a strong attraction between Fours and Eights. But also, there can be a strong repulsion, too. Sometimes we look at an Eight and say, 'That represents absolute evil.' Other times, they are the ones we love more than anyone else. I was reading about this and I felt the same way.)

Eights, Fours, and Sixes are in the 'Reactive Triad' in the Harmonic Groups. (The other two groups are the Competency Group and the Positive Outlook Group.) That's something that has helped me identify Eights.

The main character in the movie, I forget his name, I would have to look at the movie again - he saw someone die, and he walked away without telling anyone. (Don't worry, this situation gets fixed very quickly. I was afraid that the whole movie would be all about that. I was afraid that he was going to get blamed for it, that they would think he was guilty of murder or something, because he was there around the time when it happened. But that's not how the movie goes.) Walking away from something horrible, without telling anyone, seemed realistic to me. I can actually imagine real people doing something like that.

It reminds me of something Peter told me recently. He said there was an accident on the road, where somebody committed suicide by walking in front of a car on purpose, and the guy who hit him fled the scene - he left and went home. He was terrified. His grandmother made him go back and talk to them so that they would know who did it. He didn't get in trouble for it. But I have heard of this kind of thing before. People get so scared and upset and they think that nobody will understand, and they think that they could get arrested, or they think that nobody will listen to them. That's how it was in the movie, he thought nobody would care.

There was something that I thought was funny in the movie. The kid's parents kept urging him to take a psychiatric drug. He was already taking the drug illegally by buying it from his friends at school. When his parents gave it to him he took it gladly. This is the opposite of my situation. My parents, and other people, have said that I need psychiatric drugs, and I've fought against them and said that I want to take as few drugs as possible, and I do take a small amount of drugs, but I'm not happy about it, and ideally, I would rather not, and I want to work towards living without them. Right now I sometimes use St. John's Wort and I take Vivarin pills for the caffeine (although they're not working very much anymore, because I've gotten a tolerance for them). So I see the situation in reverse, that I don't want to take drugs, and if anyone tries to make me do it, I fight against them.

But the kid in this movie grabbed the bottle, ripped it open with his teeth, and gulped down like three pills at once, dry, while his dad watched, after he handed him the bottle.

All of the people in the movie had that fake cheerfulness that comes from being on drugs. I saw it in almost all of them. I don't know if all the adults were on drugs. I'm assuming that they were. They were always smiling in a fake way even when they were talking about dark subjects like the kid's suicide. That's one of the reasons why I don't like being on drugs. It makes me numb and unfeeling and 'always cheerful.' When I have that reaction to St. John's Wort, I walk into McDonald's to go to work, and everybody looks at me and smiles back at me. I walk around with a permanent smirk on my face, wrinkling up the corners of my eyes, and people can't help reflecting that look. It's normal for (non-autistic) people to reflect the facial expressions of the people they look at. (And no, if you don't do that, I'm not saying you're autistic. Some people do it more obviously than other people do.)

Do I envy the people in the movie? Yes, in a way: they had energy. They achieved their goals. They had money and good jobs. They didn't suffer from constant chronic fatigue. Even without their drugs, they were able to achieve more than I can achieve.

I don't want to be 'wealthy' in an obvious way. I want to make enough money that my bank account doesn't keep getting overdrawn. I want to make enough money that I can set aside money for long-term savings. I want to make enough money that I have some set aside for accidents and disasters and problems, like a job loss, or a car accident where I need to buy a new car. Those things are unpredictable, but at the same time, you know that they are likely to happen sooner or later in the next eighty years. Sooner or later, something bad will happen to you, and you don't know exactly what it will be, but you know it will be SOMETHING. And you'll need money to survive while it's happening.

The 'dolphin' guy behaved like a Myers-Briggs 'Idealist.' He was interested in abstract ideas and meaningful connections between events. And that type happens to be symbolized by dolphins. I wonder if the movie writers have read that book? I don't remember which author it was, if it was David Keirsey or someone else, but someone writing about the Myers-Briggs types characterized the Idealists as 'dolphins.' (I can't remember what the Artisan types were.)

'Trinity' from The Matrix played a 'MILF' in this movie. Unfortunately, nothing happened with her. (Maybe I should look at the deleted scenes?)

******

I haven't seen Curtis in a few weeks. The last time I saw him, I gave him a love note with a gift in the envelope. I went looking for him a week or two ago, and I thought I might have seen him from far away, but when I got closer, the person I saw wasn't there anymore, and I didn't see him again, so I left. 'They' haven't urged me very strongly to go looking for him. However, the voices have been bugging me, and bugging me, for a couple of weeks now, and it's gotten worse in the past week.

They've been pretending that Curtis misses me and wants to see me. They've been fantasizing about me touching him, hugging him, holding hands with him, kissing him (although I always avoid kissing him on the mouth, because I want to be safe and find out about STDs first, and I mean MY possible STD's, not just his; and also, I don't want to think about having sex with him yet either, because there are some things we would need to talk about first). I always fight whenever they show me these fantasies. I don't believe that it will actually happen. In reality, I am always having a panic attack when I see him, and I visit him and then run away as quickly as possible. If I were neutral, if it didn't matter so much, if my feelings weren't so strong, then I would be able to do it more easily. If I didn't need to touch him so badly, I could do it.

Being bugged by the voices isn't the same as a strong urge to do something. They cause me to suffer, and be sad, and worry, and to be unable to stop thinking about it, but that's not the same as a control urge. When they urge me strongly in a controlled way, there is actually a manual command to get up and do each small step of the process. The voices urge me to get up out of bed, go take a shower, get dressed, and do whatever else I have to do to wake myself up in the morning. (Meanwhile, I hear voices telling me that they wish I didn't have to take a shower because they like the way that I smell. I know, but I have to, because of the transdermal drugs. If my house weren't full of transdermal drug residues, then I wouldn't have to shower every day.)

The voices actually urge me and command me for every small step, until I'm up and I have momentum. This is because of the fatigue and the 'depression.' I don't like to use the D-word, because it's a catch-all word that destroys all the subtle nuances of what I experience. For instance, I feel constant burning pain over almost all of my body, but it's a low-level pain that I forget to notice, a pain that I get used to. It's especially bad in the joints, like my elbows and shoulders. It's also bad in the muscles of my arms. That constant pain makes me not want to move or do anything. All I want to do is sleep. I can't sleep because of the insane murdering morons who zap me awake several times each night after only a couple hours.

Anyway, when I have 'constant low-level burning pain in my joints, muscles, and over all of my skin, which makes me want to lie there and sleep instead of moving,' I don't like to just label it 'depression.' Just because an antidepressant drug makes that pain go away, doesn't mean that the pain should be called 'depression.' And yes, if I take Prozac or other antidepressants, that pain DOES go away.

(Ideally, I want to cure the problem that is causing that low-level pain. What exactly IS that pain? What's causing it? And I wonder if people in primitive societies feel that pain. That's why I like the Weston Price book. He said that in the most primitive societies, everybody was much healthier than the modern people living in town. Is it environmental illness? Is it the mold in the air? Chemical poisons in the paint on the walls? Anything, something in the modern life is causing me to feel this way. I don't want to just take a drug that gets rid of the symptom. I want to fix the problem for real.)

St. John's Wort is a little different - it gives me a wide variety of drug effects depending on how fresh the pills are, which is the reason why I started growing my own fresh herb a few years ago - and it numbs the pain a little bit, but not quite as much, and not in the same way, not as completely as Prozac did.

Prozac made me into a total zombie, a robot. I felt nothing. And I felt so uncomfortable on Prozac, so unnatural, so strange, that I actually opened up the pills (which were already at the lowest dose) and took only half of the powder. Then I went to my psychiatrist, who heard that I was reacting badly to the lowest dose, and that I was taking only half of it, and he said to me, in a disappointed voice, 'Oh, I had been planning to raise your dose!' This is the same doctor who never told me about all the side effects of Prozac because he believes in the fallacy of the 'Placebo Effect,' and I've never written the blog that I've always sworn I would write, a couple of blogs where I would rip them a new one, so to speak, about the fallacy of the placebo effect. This doctor said that if he had told me about the side effects BEFORE I took the drug, then I would have 'imagined' that I was experiencing those side effects merely because he had warned me about them. That is the placebo effect fallacy. And I'd love to talk all about this sometime.

Anyway... the movie. When I read the title 'chumscrubber,' I was thinking of 'chum,' the fish food in a bucket, that they give to the dolphins living in the aquarium. It's like, fish guts or something. (The murderers thought it was funny to force me to write the word 'cum' instead of 'chum', as a typo, but that's not what I was thinking of. I really was thinking of 'chum,' a bucket of fish guts. Now I will have to look up that word on the net and remember why I know that 'chum' is a bucket of fish guts fed to dolphins. I must have read this in some book somewhere.)

But no, it means 'The Friend-Killer.' 'Chum' is 'buddy,' and 'scrub' is 'to kill.'

The only unrealistic, unbelievable thing that happened in the movie was the drugged casserole. I don't think that the people would have been laughing and having fun. They would have had some bizarre drug interaction and probably a bunch of people would have collapsed and gone to the hospital. It wouldn't have been a recreational, funny experience. There are several scenes with people taking more than one different drug at a time and not worrying about the drug interactions. When you take a bunch of different pills at once, it will do such strange and terrible things to you that you might either drop dead or go to the hospital and barely survive and be so sick you wish you were dead. An example is, two different kinds of antidepressants, taken at once, can give you serotonin syndrome, which can cause you to have extremely high blood pressure, and have a stroke. So that was the only thing that I didn't believe, in the movie. But in the movie's story, it was a sort of 'You deserve this' scene, like the karma strikes back at them. It made sense in the world of the movie.

This was a movie that I won't be watching over and over again, because I don't like to watch 'dark' movies again and again. They make me feel depressed. But it was good to watch it once. It had a happy ending, true. But I have to watch a movie where a longer time, a bigger percentage of the time, is spent doing happy things in happy places.

Let's give a couple examples. I like watching the 'Shire' time period in the Lord of the Rings movies. It's pleasant to watch the hobbits walking around living their daily lives, buying and selling in the market, in a pleasant, green, healthy place with plants and animals. In contrast, I don't feel happy watching a 'Dystopian Future' sci-fi movie, where the whole world is made of crumbling asphalt and concrete and the air is polluted with smoke and there isn't any sunlight. I don't feel happy watching the 'Real World' scene in The Matrix, when Morpheus shows Neo what's happened in the outside world, for the first time, and the sky is covered with clouds.

I like watching the 'Weasley Family' scenes in Harry Potter. It's a big group of people interacting with each other in a comfortable way. They love each other. They are doing things together as a family, eating together, going on field trips together to see the World Cup, and that kind of thing. I also like seeing Harry and friends at school, with all the other kids, in their houses, and in their classrooms, a group of people learning things together and living together and sleeping in a dorm room together. This is a pleasant place to be. It's 'Something Worth Fighting For,' as Harry says at the end of 'The Order of the Phoenix' movie. You have to have something worth fighting for. The Shire is also something worth fighting for. Some pleasant home, some healthy place to be, some memory of love and friendship and family, something to live for.

But in 'The Chumscrubber,' I see a 'dystopian' modern community filled with fake, shallow people who don't really love each other very much. I see parents who can't talk to their children and can't relate to them. I see people who can't look at truth or darkness or possibilities or anything but the mainstream world that they see around them. They can't talk about anything. It's an unpleasant place, and I wouldn't like to live there. It's not 'something worth fighting for.' So I won't watch that movie over and over again. I need to watch something pleasant and wonderful and inspiring and refreshing in the midst of something bad. I don't want to watch a movie where almost everything is bad, almost all the time. In the world of that movie, I would say that there should have been more love scenes, more relationship scenes, with the main character and the girl he liked, more scenes where they are getting to know each other and finding out how much they like each other.

I guess that's it for now. I'll post this and then get on with whatever I'm going to do today.

I have to deal with something I started recently. I posted an ad on Craigslist asking for help at home. I did this before, I did it last year, and it worked out okay, and I learned from it, and I know better what NOT to do (for instance, they must have their own transportation, and I don't want to give them rides to and from my house). So now, people are replying to my ad, and I have to answer their emails.

I had trouble posting the ad. There was a technical problem. I posted the ad, but it wouldn't appear. I need to do some more testing, but it seemed to happen if either 1. if I wrote anything in the 'pay' or 'no pay' line at the very bottom, it wouldn't work, but if I left that line blank and set on 'no pay,' it WOULD post, or 2. the ad was longer than a couple sentences long, it wouldn't post. I'm not sure which one it depended on. I didn't finish testing, because, as usual, I was overwhelmed with exhaustion, and didn't have much time, and I only worked with it for a couple of minutes. However, I finally got something to post, and now I have to fix it. And I have to answer emails and explain to people what it is that I want from them. And I have to learn from experience what it is that I want, because I already know that I'll be dissatisfied somehow. I'll work with them, only to find that I'm not able to explain all of my 'secrets' to them, that they won't believe in the existence of transdermal drug residues, that they won't believe that I really need an electro-sonic shield to block out the voices and the attacks (which is one of my failed projects that I need help with).

Being able to tell them everything on my to-do list, and getting their support to get it done, is what I want, ideally, but in reality, I will have to tell them only a couple of tiny little 'believable' mainstream things first, and get help with those, in a mainstream belief system, from a mainstream point of view. ('Waahhhh! Woe is me! I'm sick with chronic fatigue and chemical sensitivity, but we all know that it doesn't exist and it's only in my imagination, and it's actually 'depression,' and I should go to a psychiatrist and get an 'antidepressant' drug to fix it, but instead I want you to 'humor' me and help me clean up the 'imaginary' contamination that I 'believe' is making me sick! Wink, wink, we both know that I'm crazy.') That is the way that I have to work with people. That is the reason why I am antisocial and I hate everybody. But even so, they will help me get SOME of the work done, at least, the cleaning up piles of garbage, and doing laundry, and that kind of thing. For now, I have to work with that.