Last night's episode of My Strange Addiction was the show's fourth-season finale (I'm already mourning) and boy it was a doozy. The entire half hour was devoted to Michelle, a 29-year-old resident of Lancaster, Calif., with a Jane Child ear-to-nose chain situation and an affinity for drinking animal blood and human blood. Michelle is a tattoo artist but not a vampire. She prefers pig's blood to beef blood because it's gamier. She reports that every human's blood tastes different, there is a difference between men and women's blood (men's is thicker) and that she generally extracts it from the upper arm, elbow area, upper back or inner thigh. "I try to avoid the neck 'cause that's way too cliché," says Michelle. And here I thought that Shoshanna telling Ray on Girls that "Sometimes I love you like I feel sorry for a monkey" would be the best thing I heard anyone say on TV this week.
When it comes to gore in general and this show in particular, I tend to have an iron-clad stomach, but I felt a little queasy as Michelle went on and on about the right temperature (if blood is too warm, it gets gelatinous), her bloody Mary recipe (guess the secret ingredient!) and blood's general "ambiance." That said, I did find myself, midway through watching, fixing myself chips and salsa. The salsa was highly blended, way more smooth than chunky. I think I know what Michelle means about "ambiance."
The clip reel above will be something of an endurance test for people who don't enjoy the non-gelatinous ambiance of blood, but I would implore you to at least skip to the very end when Michelle comes out to her mother and her mother tells her that drinking blood is "weird...even for you it's weird."