I think I’m going to stop updated on Holidays and Convention Days. There was a new story yesterday and I think it was pretty good. Hopefully the couple of people that stopped by felt the same.

I had a weird experience, I was all ready to pimp this artist I found last week and then realized that I don’t like his art anymore. It’s kind of like with writing. I generally need to bang things out because if I take a break and then get back to it – I don’t like it anymore. Same goes for other people’s work. Even with this blog – if I look at stories I wrote a month or two ago I think they suck. I guess art’s the same with me. I thought this guy was super stylish in a good way but today I went back to his page and it just sucked. I guess we’re constantly growing – our talent and our perception. I think I just have a lower threshold for suck.

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I was grew up around destruction. At the age of ten my friend James picked up a discarded golf club, threw it off of a footbridge in our neighborhood. It hit a car windshield and caused the car to swerve into a median, another car rear ending it. We ran off. At around the same age a couple of neighborhood kids found a (assumedly) discarded car that we went to work on with pipes to break the windows, our bare hands to take care of the rest. We would sometimes pull the firebox on the corner and pelt the truck with eggs when it showed. We are products of our environments and my environment was destruction.

But nothing I ever done in my youth will ever compare to the wrath my friends and I unloaded on this one abandoned building in our neighborhood.

Abandoned buildings were a treat. It’s where we practiced our graffiti, hid our pornography, booze and cigarettes, and they were the staging grounds for all of our fake “make-out” stories we told in our pre-teen years.

“Yo, I took Melanie into the building on Summit and Hicks and fingered her, son! Smell it!”

There was this one building in particular that we would occasionally visit. It was destroyed in a fire but still standing, six stories tall and pretty wide; it used to be a mid-rise apartment complex. Severe structural damage but as a kid you don’t think about shit like that. Most of the insides were burnt and rotted wood but there were still stairwells you could use to climb to the roof which is where we would usually hang out.

We were climbing down from the roof one day when this one kid, I believe it was Gieke, a neighborhood kid, fell through the stairs. It just gave out and he fell about ten feet straight down to the next landing. It was at that moment that we realized that the wood in that building was about as tough as paper. Smarter kids would have gotten the fuck out of that building but not us – it became our playground of destruction.

We started kicking through floors, putting pipes to stairwells. We’d fake kung-fu kick people through the more flimsy walls after we realized a body can fall through a wall like it was made out of tinfoil (my cousin Luis had the tendency to be a klutz, falling through walls was his specialty).

After demolishing the bottom floor (because, you know, that made the most sense) and breaking holes through almost every wall – after basically making it so that the building could collapse at any moment – we went to our firecracker reserves and busted out the blockbusters. For those that need a refresher, those were the quarter-sticks of dynamite.

We’d stand near an exit, light a blockbuster and fling it up to a higher landing. We’d then leave quickly, wait across the street for the boom. We’d go inside to see the destruction we caused (large pieces of the upper floors would occasionally come down) and then book it in case the cops showed up.

We’d repeat that several times, until we ran out of blockbusters. By the time we were done you can enter on the ground floor of that building and look-up to see nothing but splintered wood exploded walls, floors and eventually daylight. I am still to this day amazed that the building stood up. I’m equally amazed that I’m still alive.

We attacked that building like Kang the Conqueror and it was never the same again. A couple of months later they tore it down and built some low-income housing. Originally it was supposed to be an apartment for mentally challenged adults but the neighborhood fought that – we can’t have retards in our neighborhood but drug dealers and thugs are a-ok. Besides, based on the local kids’ understanding of physics, we already had plenty of retards in our neighborhood.