Apocalypto

I won't lie to you. The last few days have been hard on me. Again and again I strive mightily to work on ye olde outline and treatment, and each time the Forces of Darkness marshal themselves against me. What with a leaking roof marring my newly repainted interiors, a resume in need of retooling so I look less like a junior spaceman and more like a redoubtable documentalist, a revised Act I by some Thomas or other to review, a marketing side project to edit, and supply problems of every kind, you could say I've been struggling. Concerned friends have feared the worst, that I've tossed aside my whole-foods, biodynamic approach to vital living, and am now comforting myself with Chicken McNuggets, fries, and a large Coke, sittin' alone and sad on the McPlayground see-saw.* It's been that kind of week.

And now the world is ending. For the better part of a decade I've driven to work along that crazy 422 East, always stealing an appreciative sideways glance at the verdant field just beyond the guardrail. But now this lush pasture is no more. For months I've watched it wither away, incrementally stripped of its wildness as an uncannily human structure was erected in its place. For a time it appeared to be a beer outlet, all fancy and new with its aluminum siding. But then the siding was covered over with some kind of faux adobe stucco. And then, the finishing touch. The box office.

"Cool," you say. "A movie theater! Surely, Ryan, you like movie theaters. They have movies in movie theaters." True enough, dear friends, and that is why the cataclysmic awfulness of which I write is so cataclysmically awful.

You see, the building pictured above is not a movie theater. It is a church.

For nearly as long as I've been tooling along 422, the members of this outfit have banded together in the only place they were able to meet, the Regal Marketplace multiplex. All well and good, I suppose, you have to put bodies somewhere, and I have nothing against churches or Christianity per se. But this? Christ would be rolling in His grave if He hadn't risen from it.

God. Now playing in a theatre near you.

*Thank you, D, for that lovely image.