Youtube Nation: Spricket24 Self-Cannibalizes

Every job has its compulsory moments. For instance, if a police officer, whether on duty or not, witnesses a person attempting to rob a store he is obligated to protect and serve his community. "I was off the clock" isn't a good enough excuse for letting the Gas-n-Go get knocked over by a meth head. Similarly when I log on to Youtube and see a video titled "Drink My Breastmilk?" it is my sworn duty to click that link, to watch the video in its entirety and then go drink myself uncouth in a vain attempt to erase the sheer stupidity from my mind. Since no amount of glorious, holy vodka can turn back my experiential clock to the moment before I watched Spricket24's video, I suppose I'll just have to perform some Internet jujitsu and redirect its aggressive energy into an elegant blog-throw.

Spricket24 isn't a particularly celeb-tastic vlogger, but she's still pretty prolific. She's been bringing her unfiltered crazy to Youtube for three years now, though the majority of her videos are from the first year. This isn't to say she's been absent from the site recently. Spricket24 has uploaded 68 videos in the past year, but this recent bombardment hasn't upped her viewership much. Her average is about 25,000 give or take. This isn't paltry, but it also isn't impressive. Her most-viewed video got a million and some change by piggy-backing on the 2012 hysteria that Youtube loves like Mardi Gras girls love being bare-chested. Other than that, most of Spricket24's videos top out just north of 100,000.

Spricket24's real name is Karen Alloy and like most people named Karen she's a freaking whackjob, or at least she desperately wants the world to think so. Her introduction to vlogging involved the phrase "I... like... cheese... please...", the first of many attempts to attract that unfortunate subset of people who just can't get enough of kooky redheads. But all those masochistic fantasists will have to go back to getting their kicks from Isla Fisher's character from Wedding Crashers because fiery Miz Alloy is one taken slice of bacon. More to the point, she's a mom these days. The mother of a creature called Lulu.

All moms are irreparably broken in their minds, but I imagine that living nine months with a tiny version of yourself growing ever-larger inside of your own body only to watch it burst forth from you in a moment of psychosexual spectacle would do a number on anyone. But Spricket24 is one of those moms who was crazy to begin with. Lulu never had a snowball's chance even before the unfortunate name. Watching her mother's most recent video fills me with agonizing sympathy for Lulu. I only had to endure her screeching, edit-happy progenitor for a couple minutes. She's stuck with the woman for potentially decades.

One thing I will say for Spricket24 is that she used her craziness powers to go all the way with her milk-drinking demonstration. She didn't just take a little sip, she chugged the whole damn bottle. Now, I'm not grossed out by the idea of human milk. I mean, it's the one substance we can be entirely certain exists for consumption by human beings. But there's more to it than that. Human milk has an extremely high fat content compared to pasteurized cow's milk and, as Spricket24 points out, it retains the flavors of whatever its producer eats. So, if you'd like a mouthful of greasy cream that tastes like hamburgers, jelly beans and bananas, go buy a breast pump and get to harvesting.

As with all things on Youtube, Spricket24's videos are an unsettling reminder that people like her actually exist in the real world. Sure, social conformity negates a fraction of the grating behavioral ticks that make the redheaded Karens out there unbearable, but just like the guy who fathered poor Lulu, some of us are forced to endure them behind closed doors where no rules of propriety have dominion. Godspeed, Lulu. Escape at age 18.