Bathe Different

I was watching a slasher film the other day when something very strange happened. I realized that seeing some poor girl get hacked to pieces by a chainsaw made me feel absolutely nothing. No fear, no empathy, nothing. I began to wonder if I had finally become the psychopath I always knew I had it in me to be. Then suddenly, it dawned on me that I had just been to a video arcade prize shop the night before where I was raped in the peepers by these:


If you can't tell from the small photo, they are rubber ducks with celebrity faces on them. I thought to myself "Wow. Those are the most life-alteringly fucked up things I have seen in three decades of existence." But they weren't for long. I turned the corner and was greeted by this:


If you could cook a nightmare down to some purer form, grind it into a powder and snort it up through a large straw, you could then begin to appreciate the sheer terror I felt as this stared at me from behind the plastic. What's worse is that in order to win one of these monsters, you'd either have to be some idiot savant of gaming and beat every game in the arcade three times over or blow your entire mortgage on it. They cost roughly 180,000,000 points. I think a tiny, plastic soccer ball cost 50,000 points.

Other highly prized items included seat cushions vaguely resembling the ghosts from Pac-Man. Of course, they had to be won individually so until you complete the collection, you just have three flat ghost pillows sitting out of context in your house. There were lots of stuffed animals which would start to fall apart on contact with your skin and several nearly life size, obscure characters from very outdated Japanese video games. I didn't stick around long enough to find out, but I'm pretty sure the grand prize was a framed photo of the arcade franchise's CEO flipping the winner off with both hands whilst being blown by a hooker.

So, you see, I now no longer have feelings. I'm like one of those ghost cushions, alive but not alive, waiting to see the weirdo that won me drag another child down to his basement to "play video games" with him.