Where Are We Going Today?

Everyone knows that sense of anticipation you get when you walk in.  As you walk off of the carpet to a seat, your shoes peel off of the floor with a sticky sound.  Your hands offer two different sensations:  Cold from the icy drink in one, and warm from the bag of popcorn in the other.  The smell of said popcorn dancing in your nose as you shuffle to that perfect seat, the springs groaning as you push it down.  As you get comfortable, you look up at that white screen in front of you, knowing that soon it won’t be a screen anymore.  Oh, no.  It will be a portal to another place.  A place where you can let yourself fade into the background.  And you wonder to yourself:  “Where am I going today?”

The lights dim, the projector starts up whirring madly.  Then, a silvery light cuts through the darkness, illuminating that screen and the portal opens!  Instantly, your cares melt away as you watch the events unfold before you.  The wonder that you feel looking into a galaxy far, far way.  The sadness you feel as E.T. and Elliott lay dying on the bathroom floor.  The terror you feel as Mola Ram rips the heart out of an unwilling human sacrifice.  It doesn’t enter your mind that the alien is a latex puppet any more than the spaceships being miniature models.  It’s all real, and it’s unfolding before your eyes.

To me, those are the feelings that go through my mind when I recall going to the movies when I was much younger.  I remember that sense of awe and wonder I’d get watching these movies.  I never wanted them to end.  It was a more pure experience back then.  That’s not a knock on modern Hollywood, it’s just how it is.  Watching film through innocent eyes, letting yourself go, wrapped in that aforementioned wonder for an hour and a half at a time.  No cynicism or negative thoughts whatsoever.  Just pure enjoyment, and those memories stick with you.  I remember my mother having to apologize to the people behind us in Ghostbusters, since I covered them with popcorn when the library ghost scared the boys off.  I remember hiding under my seat when the heart ripping happened in Temple of Doom.  I don’t get that anymore.  I still love going to the movies, don’t get me wrong, it’s just that with growing older and life kicking in, you lose some of that awe.  You learn how the movies are made.  I guess, in a nutshell, you grow up.  But you can still look back on those times when you were five years old, with your family in that dark theater.  You may look sitting there in that creaky seat, but you are really in another place.

I love those memories.  They are responsible for getting me into writing.  I’d love to be able to write something that would stir inside someone those same feelings that I had.  In a way, I’m lucky.  My son Jason is getting older every day.  Soon he’ll be old enough to go to the movies and actually comprehend them.  I can already see him toddering down the aisle with his small popcorn looking huge in his hands.  Stray kernels tumbling out of the bag, bouncing off his arms to the floor.  Looking back at me, he smiles and tells me to hurry up.  He picks his seat and we scoot down the aisle to the middle and sit in our seats.  I can see the excitement in his eyes as the lights dim, and the beam from the projector illuminates his smiling face.  Then I lean over to him and whisper:

“Where are we going today?”

An Explosion Of Dust and Fear

Where the Euless Police and Courts now stand used to be a hotel called the Western Hills Inn.  It was once a hotspot for the Euless area, back when Euless only had about 1,200 residents.  Heck, even Elvis chose it as the only place he'd stay when he played the Metroplex. 

It was shuttered some time in the late eighties.

Temporarily.

The Boys and I made it our personal playground for a couple of years.  Who are the Boys?  We were a group that all met whilst attending Central Junior High.  The group consisted of:

Myself
Zac
Zac's cousin Will (Yeah, same as me.  We had separate designations, though.  He was Little, I was Big.  Obviously.)
Joe & Josh, twin brothers.

We would get into all kinds of shenanigans back in the day, crawling over every inch of Sotogrande and the surrounding area in an eight mile radius.  We enjoyed joyriding down through Mosier Valley, and going to construction sites to fire roman candles at each other.  Typical hooligan stuff.  Our favorite activity though, was urban exploring, and the Hills fit that bill.  Later, the Flagship Inn in Arlington, but that's a whole different subject.

We'd often play jokes on each other, like one of us running ahead, cutting open one of those glowing necklaces and smearing the luminescent liquid on the walls and pretend to be afraid.  Or making torches and accidentally setting a mattress on fire and trying to burn the whole place down.

It was mostly about exploring, and seeing the neat stuff that got left behind.  We'd find room registrations, newspapers, the little plastic letters for making signs.  There was a big ballroom there too that we'd make small fires on the concrete floor during the winter.

One night, we were exploring as usual.  I think it was like the second or third time we went in, and we were exploring in the "industrial" type area of the hotel.  We all went into an old office, with one doorway and glass windows.  There were two desks in the room and not much else.

Except a fairly large, old fire extinguisher on one side of the room.

I was sifting through the desk between me and the door when I hear behind me a thump, a crash, and an 'Oh shit' followed by a loud hissing.  Being the curious natured person that I am, I turned around to investigate.  And I come face to face with an approaching cloud of dust and old chemicals.

Now, a lot of things can go through your mind at a moment like this:

"Look at all that dust!"
"Huh."
"Wonder what's on T.V. right now..."
"SHITSHITSHITSHIT"

The last one there is what went through mine.  In five seconds, the visibility went from 80% to 0.  All of us feel our way to the door and barrel out into the hall, coughing like crazy.  We all went to the ballroom and built a fire and tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to get the dust out of our clothes hair eyes mouth.  The adreneline was pumping, and we were terrified out of our gourds over that minute explosion, but that passed and we realized how fun and awesome it was.

All in all a good night.

Personal Fame?

I've often toyed with the idea of starting a movie review show on Youtube.  I know, that's not anything that hasn't been done before.  But I seem to think that I have a singular wit about me that could make for compelling reviewing types stuff.

Or, it could be an absolute train wreck.

Part of it is the fact that I'm so quiet.  Those of you that have known me for a while, especially those than knew me in elementary school, may be going "HUH?"  Back then, I wasn't quiet or shy around strangers.  I think the word for it would probably be "obnoxious".  Back then I couldn't keep myself quiet, no matter how hard I tried.  I'd sit there and try to hold it in, but then I'd explode!  I'd bounce off the walls, ceiling, talk talk talk talk.  I even got an award for "Thinking Out Loud."

Nowadays, not so much.  I loathe the idea of getting in front of people to do anything, even when it's saying something in front of my collected coworkers, let alone hundreds of strangers on the internets.  I bet I'd start the camera up and just stare at it for twenty minutes quietly whimpering, until I slide to the floor in a fetal position.

Part of it is my taste in films.  It's very eclectic.  Judging by the DVD shelf, I could easily go from A Friday the 13th movie to Cannibal: The Musical to The Life Aquatic to The Phantom of the Opera.  It kinda jumps around.  Who wants to hear about that stuff, anyway?  "I think what the filmmaker was trying to say with Friday the 13th part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan" is that New York looks a lot like Vancouver, and that the toxic waste problem is WAY out of hand.  It's a metaphor for something, I just haven't figure out for what.  Dog food, maybe."

Wait.

I think I figured out the main reason that I can't seem to motivate myself on this...  The fact that the DVDs  that my wife and I own are arranged in alphabetical order, and to do this right I'd have to review all of them in order.

The first one is Across the Universe.  Screw that noise.  I'd rather go play Warhawk.

L'il Wayne killed my TV (VMAs)

Being the Award Show junkie that I am, I told my wife last night:

 “Wife!  Let’s watch the VMAs!”

She looked at me like I had just lost my mind.

“The VMAs?  But MTV doesn’t show videos.”

“That’s not the point.  There are AWARDS.”

I’m strange like that.  I watch the Oscars every years, and that makes sense because I like movies.  Same for the Globes, though there’s a lot of television thrown in there that I pay no attention to.  The Tonys?  We tried to watch the Tonys this year, but after the opening number we got distracted by More Important Things and drifted away.  But I was determined.  We would see this thing through.  This terrible, horrible thing.

Lady Gaga set the tone with her little schizophrenic drag act, coming off like a bad impersonation of Al Pacino.*  Then there were all of these acts that I had no clue who they were!  I mean, I listen to popular radio every now and then.  Sometimes the music is catchy and bores its way into my brain, other times I can’t change the station quick enough.  It gets to the point that the inconsistency just drives me to listen to the music on my phone.  Every now and then I’d see a familiar face:

That Kanye Guy!

Katy Perry’s Breasts!

Brian May?  The hell?

Britney!

Then a group will perform and the lyrics would be unintelligible.  Some band from California was stricken with this, and the lead singer was even two-fisting microphones.  But the capper on everything was the end performance by L’il Wayne.  He comes out and sings the most auto-tuned song that I’ve heard in a while, then decides to massacre Black Sabbath’s Iron Man by rapping over it but with 80% of his lyrics censored.  He then proceeds to grab a guitar and Rock the F Out with his band.

The feed froze.  Stopped dead in it’s track and never came back.  I suppose that L’il Wayne and his wholesome lyrics and masterful guitar playing were just too much for AT&T to handle.  It was a blessing though.  I had really lost any interest in the whole thing by that point, and it was time to get some sleep anyways.  I said to my wife:

“Wife!  Let us never do this again.  The VMAs and music nowadays are a wretched and evil lot.”

She agreed.  No more VMAs.

I’ll probably watch next year.

*Or, the person they replaced Pacino with.  No, really!  Watch The Godfather and Scarface in a row and try to tell me they are the same person.  Just try!