Modify

Dear Santa,

Hey man! What's up? I trust this reaches you in good health. Hope you and the missus and the reindeer are all doing well. Sorry this is reaching you so late, if it reaches you at all, but I only just got what I wished for last year. I was starting to think you'd forgotten me! But hey, I figure you've got a lot of eager young 'un's to attend to first, so I'm cool with waiting a few extra months. It's not like you're gettin' paid for this job, amirite?

Just to refresh your memory, last year I wished for a documentary that showed the nitty-gritty of cock-splitting. I'm sure you get requests for that all the time, alongside the usual shit like bikes and Playstations and Samsung Galaxy 4's. As I wrote in my letter, I'd just seen a pretty cool doco called No Body Is Perfect, which covered a good sector of the body modification community. It's a fascinating subject for me and it's all the rage down here in the non-snowy lands. I bet the trend has even drifted up your way and you've got quite a few elves showing up to work in the factories with nose piercings and tramp stamps. A symptom of the modern age. But my major disappointment with the doco is how it suggested cock-splitting but didn't have the cojones to show it. That's why I wished for something a little more graphic.

Lo and behold, you sent this baby my way - the 2005 work entitled Modify. I accidentally stumbled across it on a torrent site, but I know it was you, Santa, who pushed me in the right direction.

Modify is a great documentary that comprehensively covers all bases of extreme bodily modification - tattoos, piercings, brandings, scarification, implants, plastic surgery, sex changes, etc. And it doesn't pull any punches in showing the real gore. Dicks, clits, lips, tits, cunts, butts, septums and rectums - if there's any sensitive body part, then this doc shows it being sliced, diced, pierced or punctured. I've seen my fair share of real gore in my time. I've seen mondos and addios; autopsies and biopsies; homicides, suicides, genocides and even a few episodes of Ironside. But I ain't seen nothin' that made me squirm quite like the sight of a man putting plastic implants under the skin of his own penis, using a scalpel and a pair of needle-nosed pliers. Such precise, self-inflicted invasions of the flesh slice into the psyche at a more personal level than any Taliban televised beheading.

What's more interesting is how this doco unwittingly explores the line between hobby and lifestyle, between want and need. A simple nipple piercing, like I have, doesn't impact on my life in any way. But when you get 70 piercings in your face, it defines who you are, whether you want it to or not. First impressions make all the difference. When you've got a buttload of steel bars rammed through your facial flesh, any initial impression immediately impacts on how anyone, whether friend or acqaintance or passerby, is going to view you. Not to mention how it narrows your potential career path.

Even milder cases are covered in the doco, like extreme, 'roid-free bodybuilders, intent on making themselves into muscular works of body-art. Such dedication toward a strict dietary and iron-pumping regimen means there's no such thing as a day off to relax. Unlike you Santa, what with you getting 364 days off for every 1 night of work you do, right? Haha, I'm just kiddin' with you. I know you work hard, keeping the elves in line and the reindeer well-fed.

The downside to watching those dedicated to body modification is that tattoo and piercing needles often hit what I like to call the "pretentious twat gland". Thus you inevitably end up with a few folk talking bollocks about how some cranial studs or an eyeball branding is an amazing spiritual experience. There's a dude in this doco who states, "The decision to get my face tattooed was the greatest challenge I've faced in my entire existence". Fuck that douchebag and fuck everyone like him. There's little challenge here and piss-all in the way of spiritual experience. Body modification is mere imitation of tribal ritual, removed from its original context. Modern primitivism is pure luxury; an expensive middle-class pastime for those privileged enough to be bored with their own meat. So cram all that spiritual hogwash up your tattooed anuses, you self-important fuckwits.

Anyway, I've talked enough about the flick.It's worth a watch and it totally gave me the graphic cock-splitting footage that I asked for. I don't know what your internet connection is like up in the North Pole (you're probably still on dialup, haha!), but here's a link to the trailer. I'd have liked to send you the full movie, but some fuckfaced cuntswab took it down from youtube -

 I have to confess at this point, I watched this to ease my own pain and curb my own urges, but it only provided temporary relief. I long for a catharsis that never seems to arrive. I'm no longer cutting myself, but the voice is always there, impelling me to do so. My nightmares persist on a nightly basis and I sometimes awake with explosive rage when I can't remember them. I try to grasp onto anything concrete, but all I feel is sands slipping through my fingers, until I'm once again left empty-handed. The only thing I hope for is a single day better than the one that preceded it, but even this humble dream is always denied. Last week, I was on the bus home from work and I started crying uncontrollably. I don't know why and I couldn't stop, even when the paramedics were carrying me away. I wish this was an isolated occurrence, but, truth is, I'm a 30 year old baby.

Since my mother died, I have not a single person left in this world who loves me now or ever will again. I've accepted that and learned to deal with it. But what's so much worse is the prospect of never having another friend, noone that even likes me. Every future relationship I have will be built on a foundation of pity. There's nothing about me left to like. I feel like I have a black hole inside my ribcage, sucking in entire universes of emptiness. Everytime I think my body can no longer contain so much anti-matter, another blast of nothing gushes in to prove me wrong. Carving a hole doesn't let any of my pain out, it just creates another vent to let more in. The doctors keep telling me that none of this is my fault, bludgeoning me down further with their textbook psychologies. The fact that I didn't ask for this and don't deserve it, that noone deserves this yet it happens regardless, only serves to make me feel more helpless and hopeless and empty and alone.

The thing is, Santa, we can modify our flesh in so many ways, but we're forever stuck with the mind we were born with. I wish I could carve my brain into a fresh mould, create a new architecture of synapses with strength and stability. Pierce every bit of neural tissue that brings me pain. Use a branding iron on my memory centres and burn the whole lot into oblivion. Tattoo over my misery with sunshine and beauty and wanky little tribal designs that don't mean anything. Take a scalpel to my cerebral cortex and split it like a cock, letting all the hurt bleed out through my eyelids.

I'm falling apart here, Santa. It's been nearly 20 years since you last visited me. I used to look forward to Christmas Eve, when you'd sneak into my room and into my bed. Snuggling me from behind, your big beard tickling the back of my neck, filling me up with the Christmas spirit. These are my happiest memories. Even though it would sometimes hurt a little, I felt warm and safe in your arms. Then my parents started arguing real bad and my father committed suicide and I never saw you again. I know you have your own life to worry about, but it felt like you abandoned me right when I needed you most.

I've kept our secret safe for all this time, just like you told me to. I never let slip a word of it to anyone, not even the doctors when they kept prying. But now I have to break my silence. I'm desperate. I need to see you. The post office keeps returning my letters, so I'm putting this one publicly on the internet, in the hope that someone who knows you will read it and pass it on. It'll be the last letter I write. Hope to see you on Christmas Eve. I'll leave milk and cookies, as usual.


Forever and always,
Your special boy



PS. Remember a few years ago, I asked you to get Choi Min-Sik back into film? I'm so glad you managed to pull that off. I Saw The Devil was awesome! Thanks a bunch for that, man.