Recycling Buildings

***BEFORE I BEGIN***

The last journal was about how I went to the Pain in the Grass festival in Auburn, Washington’s White River Amphitheater. In case you were thinking of asking, it was a badass concert from top to bottom. Three Days Grace was fucking awesome. Lamb of God was REALLY fucking awesome. I’m glad to be introduced to Bullet For My Valentine. But Slipknot? They were badass on a whole different level. The masks, the pyrotechnics, the devil’s mirror background, and most importantly, the music itself was a shit ton of fun. Aside from riding the shuttle bus with a bunch of drunken fans who butchered every jingle on the planet, I had a good time last night. I even had the cute clerk at the convenience store, Chelsea, tell me that she was jealous earlier today. That’s a damn good sign. Hehehehehe!

　

***RECYCLING BUILDINGS***

Apparently, going to a heavy metal show with a bunch of kick-ass bands inspired me to have a strange, yet poignant dream. In this dream, the QFC grocery store in my town was converted to a concert hall and Pantera got back together to play there. The freezers were replaced with seats, the checkout isles were ticket scanners, and the deli was replaced with one big ass stage where Pantera played “This Love”. And then I woke up and had a topic for a Deviant Art journal in mind already: recycling buildings.

When a business becomes defunct, it would seem like such a waste of construction to demolish the building. If you’re not going to use the building for a grocery store or restaurant, why not use it for a library or a toy store? This actually has a lot of merit in today’s world. In the cop dramas The Shield and NCIS: Los Angeles, both agencies use old churches and convert them to a fully-functional headquarters. Old churches, for shit’s sake. In Texas not too long ago, a Wal-Mart was closed and the building was abandoned until someone started using it for one big-ass library, thus turning Wal-Martians into wallflowers. The old headquarters in Wisconsin where Dungeons & Dragons was born was turned into a candy shop and a hotel after Gary Gygax lost the rights to his game.

Using old buildings for bigger and better things isn’t a new idea, but it’s one that should be spread more often. It would take a shit ton of imagination to convert something like a butcher’s shop into a nightclub (which has been done on an episode of Seinfeld). It’d be a lot of work, but it could technically happen. That QFC dream isn’t far off from reality. It technically could be converted to a concert hall and we could bring some heavy metal to Port Orchard, a city not known for such things. And what about the abandoned Taco Bell building on Mile Hill? Is it just going to sit there and do nothing or can it be converted to…a gaming shop! Can you imagine holding D&D sessions and reading graphic novels in a building that used to be Taco Bell? If your creative energies and imaginative juices aren’t flowing like a raging river, I don’ t know what to say.

Maybe this is all stemming from the fact that I see artistic merit in pretty much everything around me, including reusing condemned buildings, house flipping, and home improvement in general. In this case, the artists in question are working with a tainted canvas and making something beautiful out of it. It would be the same thing if I drew my picture of Daron Campos on the page of a Disney coloring book. It would be a tainted canvas, but it could be done….and it would be creepy to think about considering what Daron Campos is capable of.

Do you have any old buildings that could be something better in your neighborhood? Can you make a college out of a Wal-Mart? Can you make a wrestling school out of a Burger King? Can you make a barbershop out of an abandoned warehouse by a dingy dock? If your imagination is big enough and you’re having a constant flow of nerd-gasms, all of those things are possible. We’ve got ears, say cheers!

　

***COMMERCIAL QUOTE OF THE DAY***

“You will howl like a happy hound dog over these hushpuppies!”

-Popeye’s Spokeswoman-

　

***POST-SCRIPT***

Actually, no, I won’t. Popeye’s food is so bland and boring that I can picture one of their restaurants being converted to a record store slash punk clothing emporium. And we’ve come full circle yet again!

Fed Up

MOVIE TITLE: Fed Up

DIRECTOR: Katie Couric

YEAR: 2014

GENRE: Documentary

RATING: PG-13 for language and politics

GRADE: Mixed

Fed Up explores the many facets of American food culture from our obsession with sugar and unhealthy chemicals to constant advertising to the end result of it all: obesity. Processed foods have been portrayed as being deadlier than drugs or alcohol since more people die from eating disorders than from lung cancer.

The eating habits of three different families across the country have been monitored by the Fed Up crew and they all are suffering the emotional and physical effects of obesity. There seems to be no immediate hope for this epidemic since politicians, both democrat and republican, are constantly being bought off by food lobbyists. Will we ever break our obsession or will future generations grow up to die at a young age?

Just like with any movie that I give a mixed grade to, there are positives and negatives that need to be explored. The positives are no-brainers. The message of the movie is well-intentioned: be good to your body and your body will be good to you in return. We will eventually come to a point in our lives when we have to pay closer attention to taking care of ourselves.

The message is further spread with the extensive research the writers of this movie did. No stone is left unturned from what chemicals different foods have to which politicians represent which food corporations. The arguments made are so convincing that the message is easy to believe no matter what the audience members’ core beliefs are. Kudos to the Fed Up crew for putting in the hard work and getting things done.

But just like with any ideology or political message, there’s a difference between sharing your views and preaching them with almost religious zeal. The big negative this documentary has falls under the latter of those two extremes. While I do commend them for acknowledging that food addiction is a real thing and not just an excuse for weakness, it still feels like they’re telling me that the next bite of Taco Bell or McDonald’s food I take will be my last.

We all have our guilty pleasures and there are times when it’s best just to respect those pleasures. Eating fresh fruit and vegetables all the time might sound like a healthy idea, but it gets boring after a while. And when you get bored with your food choices, you get depressed. And when you get depressed, you reach for that sizzling steak Quesarito and go back to the cycle of addiction.

With the feeling of impending doom on the horizon, Fed Up feels more like a sermon and less like a diet plan. If I wanted to be showered in religious zeal, I would watch God Loves Uganda. But I didn’t. I watched Fed Up because I wanted hope. I didn’t get any by the time it was all over. In fact, I felt worse about my body than I did before.

In the end, what I believe will save is all won’t be one documentary, one diet and exercise plan, or one influential voice. We need a network of different ideas and support systems. A problem shared is a problem halved. I just wish the Fed Up crew would share my problem instead of making me feel guilty for having one.

Terrato Matrix

When I was a kid watching TV, a commercial would come on for Taco Bell and their “crunchy supremes” or whatever the hell they were called. The tagline of those commercials was “Crunch so big, crunch so low, so everybody eat tacos!”

Around that same time, my brother James was playing Final Fantasy VI on the Super Nintendo and there was a monster in the game called Terrato, a giant snake who when summoned would cast a spell called Earth Aura and did a shit ton of damage to the enemies. Putting two and two together, I said, “Crunch it high, crunch it low, let’s all eat Terrato!” James, being the clever comedian he was, said in a mocking voice, “Let’s all eat a poisonous snake!”

If it hadn’t been for that small moment of childhood bliss, I wouldn’t have a fascination with the name Terrato and the character in question (Terrato Matrix) would have probably been named something else.

The Matrix part of his name was easy: he wore a black trench coat and sunglasses, just like Neo, Trinity, and Morpheus from The Matrix. Nearly a decade and a half after the moment of childhood bliss, I put two and two together once again and came up with the main character for a movie script I wrote called “Tower of Heaven”.

In “Tower of Heaven”, disgusting monsters called Intimidators took over the earth and the only safe sanctuary was an aura-protected tower named after the title of the movie. Terrato Matrix’s job was to find as many innocent people as he could and bring them safely to the Tower of Heaven until somebody could find the solution to this Intimidator apocalypse.

If anybody was qualified for the job, it was Terrato. He carried a machete everywhere he went, but he was more than a slasher. Most wizards carried wands, but when Terrato was slinging his machete, he was casting badass spells from fireballs to tidal waves to lightning bolts to shadow spikes to poison thorns. If “Tower of Heaven” didn’t end up sucking so badly and having a Deus Ex Machina ending, Terrato Matrix wouldn’t be unemployed right now.

Another job opportunity came for Terrato in the form of a dark fantasy novel called Zeromancer. He was a member of the story’s first act, though he didn’t get that much time in the limelight. He was embroiled in a rivalry with his brother Baraka over a marine chick named Jet McCammon. Terrato and Baraka both wanted her and the war between them got so heated that Jet was believed to be dead at one point. The two machete-wielding, trench coat-wearing brothers dueled it out until the fight ended in a draw and the main character of that act, Kento Bladecaptain, was left with fewer allies to fight the real threat to the world, a dragon barbarian named Atlas Venom. Way to get off track, Terrato.

That’s okay, because Zeromancer didn’t stand much of a chance either. It was written in 2011, a time where I thought it was acceptable to abuse hyperbolic comparisons and to write paragraphs a full 8.5 x 11 page long. To say Zeromancer was beyond repair would be putting it mildly. To say it was a fucking mess would be vulgar, but more accurate.

To show you how much Terrato meant to me during both 2008 (Tower of Heaven) and 2011 (Zeromancer), listen to this. He wasn’t just another character I could throw away willy-nilly. He was slated to be the next Deus Shadowheart when it came to popularity.

When I first introduced Deus in 2002, everybody at the Final Fantasy-themed MSN community he was a part of was excited to see him (except for a few douche bags who thought I was stealing from Starcraft, but that’s beside the point). Deus is still fresh in the minds of guys like James Howell, Kenny Flynn, Robert Hatfield, and many others who were old enough to remember. While Terrato didn’t reach that level of popularity, I was at least hoping he would. Don’t worry, Terrato: your turn for fame will eventually come. I hope.

　

***MOVIE QUOTE OF THE DAY***

“We’ve had our eye on you for quite sometime, Mr. Anderson. It appears you’re living two lives. In one of these lives, you’re Thomas Anderson. You’re a program writer for a respectable software company. You have a social security number. You pay taxes. You even take out your landlady’s garbage. In the other life, you’re alias hacker Neo. You’re guilty of virtually every computer crime we have a law for. One of these lives has a future. The other does not.”

-Agent Smith from “The Matrix”-