"Life is great. Without it, you'd be dead."

This is a movie I really need to talk about. If there's any piece of media that can palpably emulate the emotions of a certain experience I've had, It's Gummo. Growing up in the middle of nowhere, embedded in a rotting culture so invisible that alienation and this survivalistic self-indulgence are the only things you carry with you--among what few things you know--Gummo is the image of the experience at its most dismal, the dark place shown in everything that I had no other choice but to exist in.

Exagerrated, hyperbolized, definitely, though these are the images memories convey. Rotten, burnt yellow stains all over the basement's checkered tile; furniture that made you want to wash your hands after touching; cardboard burning in the backyard; perpetual aroma of alcohol from many empty beer cans; the violent anxiety of too many animals' lives wasted; people without a drive other than to escape themselves and let their homes collapse around them; some kids that don't know any better; my Gummo, growing up.

It makes you feel less alone, watching something like this. You aren't the only one facing paternal neglect. You aren't the only member of the lower-middle class. You aren't the only one with confusing, vulgar apathy. You aren't wrong for feeling that way. Going from the white-trash experience into something more sustainable has made me feel like an outsider in many social circumstances, but Gummo holds a side-ways sense of empathy, something that makes me feel seen, even if it can't offer any reassurance--that all my concerns are negligable, that there isn't some separation and lack of understanding from those who haven't had their own similar, psychic shit.