Sublunar Photography

After breaking the hell out of my collarbone earlier this year and subsequently being on the disabled list for the entirety of summer 2022 (wearing a sling and going through physical therapy) I'm FINALLY off the DL and cleared to return to normal activities. And with this post, months of boring, stupid inactivity on the blog has come to a glorious end; BACKSTREET'S BACK, SON!

Click here for the video.

Welcome to the return of boring, stupid activity on the blog! I can tell you're excited, but PLEASE CALM DOWN. As a bonus, this post comes with a little backstory and a couple extra sections with helpful tips and incoherent rambling!

Back when the Millenial Motel closed, it was the most sought after new rooftop/conquest around. According to at least 5 people. Personally, I never cared much about it, or rooftops in general for that matter. I like cool old stuff, architecture, history and stuff that doesn't suck. And this place has none of those qualities going for it. The building itself is an ugly, modern and generally "average as hell" abomination with the one exception being the top floor. The view from the top is the only thing remotely interesting about this place and even that gets boring after about 10 minutes. It's not tall enough to have a commanding presence in the area nor can it even see above most of its neighbors. You'd have roughly the same view by being a rich asshole or corporate cubicle jockey in just about any of the surrounding buildings. Hell, you can go to the top of the arch and see the whole city if you want. And from up there, this place isn't even a notable feature of the landscape. But what I *do* like is a challenge. I enjoy the satisfaction of cracking a difficult location. I knew plenty of people who wanted to get inside, since it was still fresh and as far as we knew nobody had done it yet. So I regularly kept eyes on it. And sure, it seemed fairly difficult at first glance. But it didn't take very long and next thing I knew... woops! I must've tripped on the sidewalk and (allegedly) fell inside the building! "How'd I end up in here?" I wondered to myself. And then I promptly never went back because this place can suck it. Regardless of my lack of personal interest in it, however, I never talked about it pubicly because I knew that a lot of people wanted to see it for themselves and I wasn't gonna be the one to blow it for them. Believe me or don't, it doesn't matter. That was seven years ago.

At some point in the semi-recent past, I had heard from some comrades that not only were they going to be in town, but that I was fortunate enough to be invited to join them. Having awesome friends is awesome. They had eyes on the Millenial Motel, among other stuff. I loaded up my gear and made preparations to spend a couple days testing limits of both my newly repaired body and of the world around us. I wasn't sure how well I would hold up to jumping right back into things with a hardcore two-day exploring marathon after enduring months of restrictions that limited my physical activities which meant that I was out of practice and out of shape. Messing up your body enough that you need physical therapy in order to use it again is no joke. On top of all that, there was all the usual pre-game anxiety when your senses become all tingly and electrified with excitement and stress as your mind goes over all the possible ways in which everything could go horribly wrong. But nobody ever did anything worthwhile that was risk-free, you know? You just have to get over your stupid anxieties and take that highway to the danger zone. As the song says "You'll never know what you can do until you get it up as high as you can go". Yeah.. Life should be lived as hard as you can for as long as you can until you can't get it up anymore at which point I assume you just die. Sure, I admit that I lived "a little too hard" this year and I paid for it, but like the other most important song ever written says: "I get knocked down but I get up again. You're never gonna keep me down".

There's an intense and very addictive feeling you experience when you've just gone out into the world and done whatever the hell you wanted to, staring into the void, only stopping at the point of exhaustion where you hit that last and highest point of the night and you're standing on a rooftop high above, and invisible to, the traffic below and, as the cold wind carries the sounds and smells from life on the ground all the way up to your illegal vantage point, it feels like, at least for this tiny insignificant blip of time in which you were alive right here on this spot, you owned this place. It feels good, man. I don't know how else to describe it and, as you and I both just realized, it sounds pretty stupid when I try putting it into words. As it turned out, my body held up fine and we had an awesome time filled with one success after another. We (allegedly) got into locations that have undergone major renovations since the last time I stepped into them-some of which I hadn't personally revisited in almost ten years. Damn that makes me feel old. Despite the passage of time and the installation of new security features, we bypassed everything that attempted to prevent us from doing so and we (allegedly) had a damn good time.

-Disclaimer-

So the first time I and/or we got in here was way back in 2015 (allegedly) and I never posted about it until now. The day I got in (allegedly), I shared my success with someone I knew who immediately went inside using my advice and subsequently posted their video to youtube (on November 6 2015) where it remains viewable today. To give them credit, however, they didn't publicly ID the location by name but still it was super fresh and a little questionable to have posted it so soon but eh whatever. What's the chance the small handful of people associated with the building are gonna see the vid? Pretty low and besides I'm not trying to be the location police. There's been the usual flow of social media posts from here over the past several years including one that was posted on a very public reddit subforum named after this city for all to see. Definitely questionable discretion but hey it's been doable since 2015, so it's not the end of the world. Anyone who wanted to see it by now has probably asked enough other people how to get in that they too have seen it by now. But what's worse than any of that stuff and causes far more problems IRL is the fact that people have been vandalizing/spraypainting their names inside of here... in literally the most visible spots possible. If it sounds like I'm trying to justify posting this to the blog, it's because I am, and, I just did.

-Helpful Tips-

I've been portraying certain activities in this blog for a long time now. I've made mistakes but I've learned a lot over the years. So I realize that it's not fair to assume everyone knows how everything works when they're just starting out or even on their first few attempts. Sometimes I see things that people do on-site or post online that just make me think "why?". I've come to the realization that some of y'all could use some help (no judgement) so I thought I'd offer some helpful tips for anyone new to this sport or for anyone who aspires to do the types of things shown here ("urban exploration" or rooftopping or whatever). And no, obviously nothing on this blog has ever been questionable, so shut up.

Helpful tip #1. Don't blow the spot. Actions have consequences in real life that can last long after you go home. But there is a huge variety in terms of spots, actions..and therefore consequences which means there's a lot of grey area and personal judgement calls that come into play. Some spots have active security on-site, while others don't. Some still have the electricity kept on, while others don't. Let's use a real world example to make things easy: this location right here. "The Millenial Motel" has security/maintenance personnel and full electricity throughout. Recall that security guards are literally paid to keep us out. So, what do you think happens when their boss finds out they're not entirely "effective" at keeping us out and they now have some edgy but very deep/meaningful artwork spraypainted all up in their property? At best: they have uncomfortable conversations about it and how to prevent it. At worst: those specific security guards lose their jobs/income and automated security systems get installed rendering the spot "blown" aka "found out/sealed-up/alarmed/inaccessible". In a place like this, it literally couldn't be easier to prevent further unauthorized access. Anyone who manages to get inside in the meantime clearly sees who was responsible for bringing the heat down since they, you know, spraypainted their names all over the fucking place. Having said that, there are other ways to blow a spot, though they're not nearly as effective as vandalism. The next quickest way to blow a spot is by publicly identifying it online. So I guess helpful tip #2 is to simply use made up/generic names and, where necessary, avoid including exterior photos that can be used to ID a location.

At this point I imagine the one person out there besides me (and my mom--hi mom!) who still looks at this blog and might not be great at reading comprehension is now asking: "But, bro, isn't this blog post also blowing the spot?!" And to that I politely remind you of the above, excessive, walls of text that you must not have read wherein I pointed out the fact that it's been blown already. Go yell at everyone else whose videos and pictures are still up before you cry at me. Besides, now that there's paint going up everywhere, it's only a matter of time before they clamp down on this shit. For all I know, they already have. Regardless if they seal it now or not: if you don't give a shit about the spot anymore then neither do I.

-Rambling Incoherence-

Here's the point: Anyone else before you could have blown this spot seven years ago by spraypainting our names in it or publicly identifying it online but we chose not to.. so.. on behalf of "all of us": you're welcome for not being an asshole and thus giving you the opportunity to experience it.

Had the individual(s) who got in before you not made an effort to maintain access/keep it on the down-low, it would have been fucked over long before you had the chance to fuck it over. That's just how things work.

Now.. I know how remarkably sensitive some people's egos are so don't go getting all butthurt-I didn't even call anyone out by name. It's cool. We all start somewhere and we all make mistakes. I'll just assume that was your first time doing this and you're still figuring things out. Besides, like I said, I don't really have strong feelings for this location. Until the unidentified time that this blog post occurred, I only went inside here one actual time before this. Been there, done that, moved on.

Anyway.. Those were just some "helpful tips", not rules. I'm not telling anybody how to act, I'm just offering advice that you are free to ignore. If it helps one person out there to realize when it might be a good idea to maybe not paint their name, or create other edgy/deep/meaningful artwork inside a location then that's cool too. Places like this with security and electricity and other stuff inside still actively being used by nearby businesses... these are not the kinds of places you'd want to spraypaint or publicly ID online unless you're like.. intentionally trying to blow the spot and ruin it for everyone. In which case... damn, son. We're not mad, just disappointed.

*Note: My comrades and I have never been proven to actually exist. It's entirely possible that "my comrades" are just voices in my head and it's also possible that I only exist inside of a weird fever dream you keep having. You've never met me, after all. Nobody has. This blog is just a bunch of computer generated words and images which could all be digitally manipulated to seem real.

If you actually read all that, I'm honestly impressed. Here's some additional photos.

This place has the smallest rooms ever. This was essentially the whole room right here and they were all like this.