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Friday, November 27, 2009

What Makes A Divine Exploitation Person?

Being the one responsible first for the zine and then this blog, I feel that I might be most qualified to respond to this question. Who asked it? Why I did of course!
So, there are people who use certain things as road marks in their travels through life. Some use pictures, sensations, smells, people they have met. The list could go on and on forever. For me it has always been movies and television.
Ask me about Night Of The Living Dead and I will remember watching it at my mother's house when I was twelve. I remember having to get up to go use the bathroom and when I was headed back to the living room one of my mother's friends thought it would be fun to scare me. I did a standing front jump of at least twelve feet. Not too bad for a twelve year old.
But, while this is a remembrance that I will likely carry with me for all of my days, it goes farther than that. It's when the fascination for the bizarre and weird of cinema and television overrides your natural sense of survival.
Let me give you the best example I have.
See we lived in Scotts, Michigan when I was a kid out on East TS Avenue. The only other house was our neighbors across the street, The Cooks'. Our living room was this huge, wood floored place with a giant picture window that faced out at a field with the railroad tracks behind it. There were cornfields next to use, behind us and three different sets of railroad tracks out in the middle of nowhere.
You want creeped out? Try living here while watching Shock Theater as an impressionable child. Nothing compares to the isolation of rural life like this.
Anyway, we were having one of many tornado warnings and it was close enough that Mom and Dad decided to move the four Waltz kids down into the basement. The basement wasn't all that creepy. It wasn't finished, but it was huge. So, here we are, down in the basement, no cell phones, no television, the radio didn't work all that well. No real communication just the howling of the wind outside.
My father decided that enough was enough. He was going to go up and see what the weather on the television would tell him. Me, being the oldest, decided to go along for the ride. We checked the normal stations and there was nothing.
Then my dad started fiddling with the UHF dial. That was when the ABC affiliate WUHQ out of nearby Battle Creek flared into life for the first time in the Waltz household. And what was on the channel? Land Of The Giants. I was fascinated by the program. I think my father was more impressed that he found a new channel on the television. Either way here we were the two oldest males of the Scotts Michigan contingent of The Waltz Clan and we were watching television while Old Testament/Wrath Of God weather roared in defiance outside. It took a while before my mother and the three other kids came up to see if we had been carried off. I'm pretty sure that my mother wanted to kill my father for that one.
So, even the threat of total obliteration by one of the most powerful forces on Earth couldn't dissuade me from watching this cool television program.
Of course now I would be in the basement with an emergency radio that powers up with a few turns of a crank and there would be no chance that I would venture from the safety of our basement.
Or I might just take the flee option that a lot of people have been spouting about. See, the good thing about tornadoes is that they follow a certain path. The idea is to put as many miles as possible between you and this things path. Maybe. I'm not sure.
So, while many people call themselves movie buffs and television experts, I wonder how many of them would brave a tornado just to catch the newest episode of (insert name of show here). Not many I would wager.
And that's what makes a Divine Exploitation Person.
Here's a little treat for those of you that plunged through my little tale;

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