Ever sit down and realise/remember you had something to share with everyone but completely forgot about it and are now unsure as to whether you should cough up your pop-cultural gold or wallow forever in "too late" dejection?
It regularly happens for me, and inevitably my response takes the shape of the former: I care not for looking tardy if the nugget is golden enough.
It's particularly fraught when it comes to television-related internet ephemera.
The sheer volume of content created, especially by American television, is such that only the most dedicated (read: deranged) of scrobblers can ever find themselves on top of everything at any given time.
There are memes, and then there are things that seem to stop just short of you; the email chain grinds to a halt mere handfuls of degrees of separation away from your inbox.
Likewise, if you're not blessed with subscription television, as I haven't been for close to a decade, your exposure to the less-than-savoury (i.e. amazing) aspects of the television world is lowered considerably.
So it was with a particular 2005 episode of US reality show
Trading Spouses (effectively the same as
Wife Swap, a point of contention that ensured endless litigiousness between networks at the time).
In a recent day of aimless internetting, I ended up on YouTube, watching clips of television shows I either used to like or had always meant to watch.
Somewhere along that line of thought, I stumbled upon this:
Got all that? (Feel free to take a moment if you need one.)
Naturally I rushed to watch the full episode. In it, The God Warrior (aka Marguerite Perrin) was sent to live with a "new age humanist" family (whose "mom", in turn, moved in with the Perrins).
The Perrins are initially wary but grow to like their new mom/wife, who takes them through hypnosis meditations and the like.
Things don't go so well over at new age central, where Marguerite slowly but surely cracks the shits because of a giant pentagram nailed on the back shed. And then vomits in the garden because of Buddha:
(Skip to around the 6-minute mark for the gold.)
Eventually Marguerite can't take it anymore and returns home to leave us with her thoughts about those who spend their lives "tamperin' in dark-sided stuff".
Naturally, the internet went berserk; my personal favourite is the God Warrior game card:
The whole episode is a delightful romp through the underbelly of American weirdness (watch all the parts on YouTube if you get a chance), but the one thing that kept striking me the whole way through it was wonder at the fact that
more reality shows don't end up driving people totally nuts.
Think about it: we've all got our favourite reality show "moments", but how many of them truly featured complete and utter derangement?
I wracked my brains and all I could really come up with was Cycle 2 of
Australia's Next Top Model, when the model house turned into a better-styled
Lord Of The Flies, with someone shaving off Hiranthi's eyebrow, everyone picking on mentally unstable Jesse, and Eboni yelling at whoever crossed her (4-mins onwards):
And there was the time someone pulled a knife in a
Big Brother house (US, I seem to recall), but generally speaking the world of reality television is so mundane that it doesn't take much to rock the boat.
The wonderful irony is that, back in the day, there were plenty of pundits who were convinced that reality TV was going to be the downfall of humanity and cause for much rioting in the streets and gnashing of teeth (etc etc) but for the most part it just turned out to be one thing only:
boring.
Which, in the end, is rather wonderful when you think about it. Reality TV was meant to change the face of television as we knew it, but instead it turned out to be just what it says on the label: reality.
So thank your lucky stars for people like the God Warrior; they are to reality television as the weird, vocal drunk on the tram is to real life. A little bit of spice.