Tag: nostalgia

Tears don’t come easy for this cowboy

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When I was in the midst of one of my low points of my latest funk, I was sitting there in my room feeling crappy and alone and helpless and that my life was shit and going nowhere, and there was a part of me the felt like perhaps some tears were necessary.  I was by myself and there would be no shame in shedding tears in front of nobody, and frankly I thought that it might be therapeutic or something like that.  So I’m sitting there, and trying to manipulate my emotions to where I’d be sad enough for the faucets to start dripping.

They didn’t.  They never came.

A long time ago, when I was like 14 or 15, I was pretty involved with my church.  Obviously it all changed when I got my driver’s license, became disenchanted with the bullshit hypocrisy of the people I went to church with, and grew tired of how superficial and petty people were in a place where acceptance was quite literally preached.

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The day the joke died

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In the grand spectrum of the wrestling industry, Nelson Frazier, Jr. was nothing substantial.  Most people have no idea who Nelson Frazier, Jr. was, including myself, because we remembered him as names such as “(King) Mabel,” “Viscera,” or “Big Daddy V.”  Some might even classify him as a glorified jobber, since he never held a major world championship, or even a mid-tier championship, and frankly, did his fair share of jobs throughout the majority of his career.

In spite of his marginally accomplished career, the news of Viscera’s passing still prompts me to write something about it, because the existence of Viscera was always something of a positive note in my life, and to actually lose him now is somewhat of a sour note worth sharing a few words about.

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The childhood fear

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A few days ago, I was driving past the airport.  It was night time, and the sky was filled with the lights of airplanes that were either descending into Atlanta Hartsfield, or circling and awaiting their turn to begin touchdown of their aircraft.  Seeing all these blinking lights cutting through the dark night sky made me think about my childhood, and how when I was a kid, such a sight would have been more than sufficient at giving me nightmares for a week.

When I was like 9-10 years old, I remember watching television, and seeing a commercial for either Unsolved Mysteries or Sightings; that part I can’t recollect specifically, but the advertised episode was one that of UFOs and alien abductions.  I vaguely recall the commercial having all sorts of amateur footage of people filming lights in the sky, unorthodox flight patterns of lights floating around in the sky, lots of people gasping and exclaiming their surprise at seeing clearly an alien spacecraft, and the kind of phenomenon that would be more ridiculed and laughed at today, than it would have back in like 1991.

That commercial itself didn’t necessarily scare me as much as it kind of fascinated me, but that night, I had the mother of nightmares involving invading UFOs and alien abductions from little green creatures that were closer to Mars Attacks! than Aliens, and my life was not the same for about the next two years.

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The obligatory reflecting on the year post

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Favorite musical discovery: Postmodern Jukebox

I know that we as people like to encapsulate chunks of time into nice round denominations, like years, but I have to say that with each passing year, I feel like time just seems to fly by, and it’s harder to encapsulate everything as easily as it once may have seemed. However, that doesn’t mean that I’m not really going to try.

Perhaps the difficulty is in the fact that at least in my case, 2013 was a pretty ordinary year. By no means does that automatically imply that 2013 was a bad year by any stretch of the imagination, it just wasn’t one that particularly stands out in my opinion. Otherwise, I think I’d be in the situation of where I couldn’t wait to reflect on the year as a whole, so it would be a convenient excuse for me to get to relive and revisit thing(s) that were exceptionally good.

It’s a good and a bad thing that I’m such a dedicated and consistent brogger when it comes to being able to look back in time. It’s particularly good when I’m capable of finding anything that was particularly good that happened in a year’s time, because I’m a fairly open person, and I’m definitely sure to write about anything that’s made me happy or put me in a good mood. Contrarily, it works both ways, because I’m just as apt to write about the things that upset me or make me unhappy, to varying degrees of clarity and vagueness.

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How much the HWARDO bullshit has snowballed in a decade

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I was having a Facebook discussion about the term “Orientals” as an inappropriate descriptor for human beings, but eventually things went awry as they often tend to, and then before we knew it, it was hijacked by the topic of martial arts Zubaz pants, and jokes about Rex Kwon Do. And whenever I hear about Rex Kwon Do, it makes me think about the farcical business model of overnight Tae Kwon Do schools that emerge out of nowhere, with oft-debatable credentials of those who run them.

I like to call them McDojos. Gimme money, and I’ll feed you bullshit and a black belt after you’ve paid enough.

I’ve endured my share of McDojos as a kid, and I’m fairly confident that two of the three places in which I “learned” martial arts were McDojos in their own right, with the third one actually having a very legit headmaster, although he taught in all of maybe a handful of classes while I was there. So maybe all three were McDojos, after all. Well shit.

Anyway, when I was still living up in Virginia, and still working for the newspaper where I started my graphic design career, I remember this one ad I made for a McDojo that stood out in particular, because out of all the McDojos I’ve ever seen in my life, none had, well, marketed in the paper in the first place, but had boasted as much bullshit as I’d ever seen in my entire life like this one did.

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Dying K-Marts and nostalgia

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So I was reading this article about how K-Mart is dying, that’s also overflowing with a bunch of depressing pictures of an unfortunate store, and I can’t help but feel a little bit sad for the once prominent giant in the world of commerce.

Given the general popularity of Target, it’s no surprise that K-Marts are getting destroyed by them, but what really has to suck for the K is that they’re also getting dominated by Wal-Mart, which basically has the reputation of like, herpes or something not necessarily fatal, but kind of an embarrassment and a thing that people don’t really want to talk about.  A lot of people really, really dislike Wal-Mart, and personally I don’t really hate them or anything, I just don’t like the fact that a trip to Wal-Mart guarantees you to be there for at least 30 minutes, if for any reason at all, is that there’s never anyone working the cash registers and the one open line is six customers deep, all of whom are buying 50 items.  Wal-Mart is a place synonymous with wasting time, and I do not like to waste time if possible.

But yeah, K-Mart is losing to them too.  Typically I often accuse articles like the aforementioned one of utilizing a bit too much hyperbole in their objective, but it’s hard to argue the points being made in this one, that are backed up in both statistical and photographic evidence.  K-Mart really is dying before our very eyes, and it kind of makes me sad.  It’s not so much the unfortunate demise of a gigantic, long-standing, well-known brand, or the countless people that will undoubtedly be losing their jobs if/when they go under.  No, I’m far too self-centered to really concern myself about that kind of collateral damage, although it would no doubt suck for all of them too.  But it’s the fact that K-Mart is kind of a symbol of nostalgia for me, and to see it crumble and collapse is somewhat a metaphor of the demise of a facet of my childhood.

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Reconsideration of Final Fantasy rankings

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s widely perceived that Final Fantasy III/VI (which I will refer to as “6” from here on out) is the most popular Final Fantasy in the series. In fact, although I can’t find the source off the top of my head, but it was widely shared over the span of last year, that 6 won a fan-vote tournament of which FF was the most popular of the series.

Me, being the contrarian type that typically pushes the brakes and tends to lean away from things that are popular after over-analysis and trite reasoning sometimes, kind of scoffed at the notion. It was kind of a no-brainer, since it really was going to be either 6 or 7, but for what it’s worth, I’m simply glad that 7 didn’t win. Personally, my favorite has always been 4, with my rationale being a level of challenge that seemed to be missing in every FF afterward, and the fact that it really was one the first FF I ever had, when it was released for the SNES as Final Fantasy II.

For whatever reason, I was having an emo-ey morning where I was thinking about how much of a loner I am, and then I began to hear the theme of Shadow from 6 in my head, because he’s also a loner, and well the spaghetti-western style of his theme ruled. From there, I began to think about Shadow’s character, and then the mental snowball began rolling and now I have seven Final Fantasy Wikia tabs open in my browser reminiscing about 6 outright.

But it got me thinking about a lot of little things about the story of 6, and then I began to conclude that the story itself really wasn’t that deep, but when it came to the myriad of individuals available in the game, 6 really had a wealth of quality in character development. Suddenly, I’m prioritizing mentally, if 6 really might be the best Final Fantasy of them all.

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