As the number one fan of the Saw franchise I thought Squid Game would be a breeze to go through, but one episode in and I decided to just scrub into the final scenes of the last episode, saving myself hours of gore and stress. Weeks into my loneliness and anxiety I am in no mood to get emotionally manipulated, and an impoverished guy with an aging mom and a kid screams emotional manipulation. It’s one thing to watch someone’s face get longitudinally cut off with a laser beam in one of Jigsaw’s traps, and yet another to see all these Takeshi castle contestants get shot to death. But the reviews are very favorable, so it’s obviously just me. My favorite scene from Saw II is when someone had to jump into a cavern full of uncapped syringes. We watched this on DVD while sitting bored during Rehab rotation in internship, with Smoketh, Mrs. T, Roxy, and Len-Len. Old age has turned me squeamish.

I find that the most relaxing things to watch when I’m in a state of chaos are whodunit detective stories. Not the modern Netflix ones where characters have issues and are morally ambivalent and the murders don’t get really solved after a full season of introspection and alcoholism. The point is to watch a neat, straightforward whodunit where the murderer is caught after 44 minutes. The murderers are also frequently nice and cooperative, narrating the entire murder plot in the final scene as they are being whisked away. File under this category of TV shows/films: Murder, She Wrote featuring Jessica Fletcher, Poirot featuring Hercule Poirot (played by David Suchet), and Columbo featuring Detective Columbo.

On a totally unrelated note, I had totally forgotten that I had ordered something from Big Bad Wolf. I was lucky to find the first book in the Patrick Melrose series in Booksale, and the rest in Big Bad Wolf. I also discovered that Roald Dahl has written a lot of non-children’s books, and I am so far enjoying his collection of stories originally written for Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, and Playboy.

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