Hot Lava

I must caution those readers with a tender constitution to skip this essay entirely for their own good. I readily admit that I hesitate to post it and will probably rue this day for eternity.

But the blog was conceived as a way to bring light to the darkest corners of human existence and I would be shirking my duties as a reporter and sometime anthropologist if I did not lift the veil of this most bizarre behavior.

I take you of course to a website. We have discussed the new media, the worldwide web, the social networking sites and how they have exposed the most disgusting and hitherto unmasked behaviors of that strange beast, homo sapien. In that spirit I offer what might constitute the nadir of humankind as we know it. I offer up popthatzit.com.

This site is dedicated to all manners of pimples, zits, boils, pustules, cysts and the people who have made it their apparent life's work squeezing them. Videos are sent in commemorating the most horrific eruptions and comrades are cheered on at the magnitude of their conquests. People talk about the last harvest like farmers in Iowa bragging about the height of their corn crop. Strangely, women seem to make up the majority of the core audience for this site. Dermatology companies help sponsor the website and videos and pictures are organized amongst body parts, nose, back, ear, arm, acne, etc. There is even a horrible subcategory called botfly that you do not want to view, no matter how ironclad you think your stomach may be.

Now I must confess that I come from a family of pimple squeezers. If mother saw that you were sporting a wayward blackhead, she would be on you with her steely pincers like a rottweiler on a porterhouse steak. There is an admitted feeling of release when the foul emanation is banished from your offending part. Pimple, not mother.

But this website and this subculture is taking it way too far up the revulsion index. I read on the site someone giving tips on increasing the size and amplitude of the forlorn zit. (rub a hamhock on it and wait.) You are treated to videos of frat boys with beer in hand and dirty fingernails practicing minor surgery on their poor victims micro mountains, all courtesy of youtube. What amazes me is that some of these people appear to wait years to lay waste to these volcanic eruptions, and the color, consistency and amplitude of the final issue is otherworldly.

Please don't blame me for this. You have been forewarned!