Dead America theory? Gonna be ghost towns across the countryside at this rate. Expensive gas, rural hospital closures, food deserts, I’m sure there’s more. At least it’ll compliment all the abandoned malls in cities I guess.

The next generation will resurrect Blockbuster, mark my words

There’s some big big stores around me that are now indoor storage rentals. It’s actually a great repurposing of space.

I lack the ability to truly describe how this photo makes me feel. Some of it’s good, some of it’s sad.

Looking back, the death of the video store seems like it happened so quickly. Early 2000s Friday or Saturday nights at the video store were pure chaos. A decade later, almost every video store was closed down.

In the early 2010s, I randomly discovered that there was a Blockbuster still in business, walking distance from the apartment I’d been living in for the past 2 years by that point. Superficially, the store certainly looked like a Blockbuster from years past, but most of the time when I’d go in, I would be the only customer and I think I only ever saw one employee working at a time. Hey, at least it was guaranteed that they’d have whatever new release I was looking for in stock!

Along the same lines, I took a trip last month and ran across a store called Big Lots – something I have not seen in quite awhile. It’s a discount retail chain that was basically my mom’s favorite place to go for retail therapy back in the day. I had some time to kill and curiosity got the best of me, so I went into the store.

Similar experience as with Blockbuster. Superficially, it all looked right for a Big Lots. But, it was eerie because it’s a giant store (not quite Walmart size, but still large) and I was one of three customers. I was walking through the aisles just kind of imagining the joy it used to bring my mom, and made me wish I could go back and time and experience a shopping trip at Big Lots with her once again. She never really bought a lot, but she loved window shopping there.

So anyway, now that I’m thoroughly depressed…

We live in the mausoleum of history. We inherit the legacy of ghosts who haunt these ruins. The elders call us “the lost generation.”

I remember stories of a glorious civilization. Of cities with spires that reached the sun. Of a blue planet with vast seas. Of people with myths of humanity everlasting. Of children who saw in the embers of dying stars the destiny of their race.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

I sorta think this is says more about American rot then it does about history.

If the country was thriving something would have replaced that.

Machu Picchu, Angkor Wat, Doggerland, Blockbuster Video.

There are so many forgotten cultures that we know so little about. It’s humbling to just think about how much human history was lived that nobody alive remembers.

Ghostbuster video 👻

I like that someone cut out the ticket logo

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Now I’m thinking of the South Park episode where Randy buys a video store.

I still find it wild that blockbusting has all but fallen out of memory, and blockbuster, a company that would probably have had to rebrand if not for atrophy, escaped an extremely expensive name change by dying.

Pretty sure this is Shopped.