MasaoHF

I’m sure most people listening to this have seen the TV show Hoarders. What if, instead of trying to clean up those hoarder’s houses, you instead just gave them a camera and asked them to cook some of their favorite dishes? Well, you may end up with the type of video you see from MasaoHF’s YouTube Channel.

Masao may be a little different from your usual YouTube cooks, and your usual hoarders. He’s either completely insane or a brilliant performance artist, or maybe a little of both.

This is a man who cooks a hot dog over a candle. He tries to cook a steak by balancing it precariously on top of some toilet paper on the rim of a toilet, and lighting the toilet paper on fire. It works about as well as you would expect.

While preparing for his show, he’ll frequently make trips to his bathroom to grab various dishes or push various garbage aside on the oven. He’ll dump out some ingredients into the toilet and use the water from his bathroom sink rather than the kitchen sink.

The dishes he creates aren’t something anyone would ever want to try. He makes what he calls “peanut juice” by mixing boiling water, cashews, peanut butter, orange juice, coffee and pepper. His fruit punch mix is just a banana, kiwi and ice.

It’d be really easy to chalk this guy up as a hoarder with some mental problems, but he does show signs of great intellect occasionally, like when he’s waiting for water to boil and breaks out his favorite book, The City in History.

Later in the episode, he waxes intellectual about gay nazis.

I think my favorite part of his videos are waiting for the inevitable fire. In his video where he tried to grill a steak without a grill, he balances a wire rack delicately on top of his electric stove. The grease dripped down and caught his stove on fire. In another instance, he just put olive oil in a bowl and placed it on the oven until it caught fire. He put it out by running the flaming pot through his entire apartment, opened the door and scooped up snow in the flaming pot.

So let’s get into a bit about who Masao is. His username is MasaoHF, and the HF is for a website called HFBoards, which is a hockey forum. He’s French Canadian. He seems to keep up with US politics, at one point talking about global warming and going through the temperature changes of the earth through US candidates. He celebrates Obama’s inauguration by cooking an omelet.

There’s rumors of him being some sort of international lawyer, and in fact in one of his more recent videos he talks about making frequent trips to the United States. People online talk about him owning multiple houses and apartments and making trips between different countries.

His profile on the hockey forums may provide some insight. This is what he had to say about himself:

I don't really have a sense of humor

In my life there were times when I tried to be funny but it never worked. Yet I've had a strange childhood and a messed up family life, which made me a bit isolated from the world and a bit eccentric. Because of that the more I try to be myself, the more everyone makes fun of me. My friends and in-laws and whatever somehow find me so funny that at some point they made songs about me

The weird posts I've made on this side are sort of an experiment... when I write something about myself, the more honest I am, the more people find it funny. I don't know if I should be depressed about it or what, but whatever. It tells me that I'm one big eccentric loser unable to fit in, which makes me sad... but at the same time it tells me that some people find me interesting. So I'm not sure what to think. But whatever... life is life.

So just as with other internet troll mysteries, we have to ask ourselves if this guy is a brilliant performance artist, an antisocial weirdo, or maybe he has a legitimate medical condition. Of course, we see on other hoarding TV shows that these people aren’t just messy or lazy people. They have mental disorders, treated sometimes with medication, sometimes with just traditional mental health therapy. It feels wrong to laugh at these videos knowing this poor guy may be suffering from mental health issues, but it’s difficult not to find it a little funny when he gags and spits out his creations into the toilet, then follows it up with, “it’s not that bad”.

These videos were mostly produced around 10 years ago, and when the videos started to catch on and become “viral” as the kids say, Masao deleted his videos. He did not appreciate the attention and seemed confused by most of it. Thankfully, these videos were published, with permission, by a user from the Something Awful forums with a username I cannot pronounce.

These videos do have a happy ending. After a very long absence, Masao returned Christmas Day of 2014 with a new video. His apartment was sparkling clean. His previous old, disgusting oven was replaced with a brand new stainless steel model. Everything look very clean and organized. He made a simple sandwich by frying up a couple eggs and putting it on a couple pieces of bread. Unlike his previous videos, this was a meal that was edible and… normal. At one point, however, he did take a spatula and after realizing it was too dirty to use on his egg sandwich, he cleaned it by spraying it with a bleach cleaner, rinsing it off, and drying it on his pajama pants. This was the only strange part of an otherwise normal video that showed off making a normal meal in a very clean, nice apartment.

One weird takeaway was the tile that appeared in both his old, disgusting hoarder apartment and his brand new, sparkling clean one. It’s blue with a diamond print on it. It isn’t really a common tile, I wouldn’t think, and it does appear in each apartment. I’m not sure of what to take away from this fact, but I find it interesting.

Whether he was just trolling and performing before, or whether he’s been treated and is recovering, I guess it doesn’t matter at this point. I’d prefer to believe he was just putting on an act in earlier videos, because it makes me feel far to guilty to think I laughed so hard at a man’s mental health issues. But I’m happy for Masao and the joy he’s brought to this freaky internet of ours, and for whatever happened that got him into a liveable apartment.

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