I need a new chair, so I decided to head to the local OfficeMax today.
This is an annual trek for me this time of year. The trip is always interesting. I worked there in the copy center in high school, and I like to take note of what’s the same, and what isn’t, every year there.
It’s still the same. As usual. OfficeMax isn’t like those department stores that change and update periodically. The store is almost identical to the one I remember from twenty years ago. The floor is the same, except for the additional small cracks. The layout is the same, with the small difference of the copy center being at the front of the store, and not the back. Even many of the products are the same. The reams of brightly colored cardstock still catch my eye like they did back then. Seeing them always brings me back, just a bit, to how I used to watch over them to make sure they were plentiful and presentable. I checked them out when I was there today. Whomever was keeping them up was doing it well.
The employees are different, of course, but they still have the same air about them as I did back then. They were high schoolers- all of them, I think, and they reminded me of myself at that age.
I didn’t find the chair I wanted, but I did use my thieving skills to snag myself some contraband. Knowing a store well has it’s advantages. This year, I swiped 2 business card holders, a wallet, a folding business card holder, and 4 tiny plastic storage boxes. I stole it all correctly; they will never know.
I have no illusions. I do feel a twinge of regret for having done that, but only a twinge. Whatever our history, OfficeMax doesn’t care about me. They’re only another corporate conglomerate out to destroy me and my way of life. So fuck them, in the end.
Nostalgia has it’s limits, I guess. I only care about those who show concern for me, and they never did, in spite of my time there. So yes, fuck them.
*sigh*.
Next door to OfficeMax is a Best Buy. I went there and checked out their 3-D printer. Cool. The wave of the future! It wasn’t operational for customers, of course, and it was much too expensive to be an impulse buy, but it was cool to see it and the assortment of premade figures and such displayed next to it. Very nice.
As I browsed the store, I took a look at other things, just for curiosity’s sake. I checked out their phones, as I’m in the market for one. Nothing controversial there. The washers and dryers were interesting; our old ones are so long in the tooth and these were new. They seemed so much more user friendly, albeit too plasticy. Would these new ones last 30 years like the ones we have now? Maybe… but probably not, I’d wager.
When I browsed through the music racks, I was struck by Ariana Grande’s CD. It was a small revelation to see it there. Here was a girl I’ve known for years… back before she was famous. I still sometimes think of her as Ariana Grande, that very young, distinctly unglamorous musical theater geek that was having trouble adjusting to her role on Nick. I remember checking up on her twitter when it had around 10,000 followers, and wondering if she would ever reach 100K. Now she’s at… let’s see… 22 million! Holy crap!
Wow.
Time goes by so quick…
I sometimes forget how important it is that I do what I do. I guided Ari into her new role as a pop star, and my doing so affected tens, no hundreds, of millions of lives across the globe. God. Wow.
Lucy Hale’s new album was there, and I spent a good 5 minutes trying to decide if I should buy it or not. I didn’t- it’s 15 whole dollars- but I really should have.
The several Taylor Swift rows were empty, save for one lonely copy of Fearless. She’s like my wife at this point, right? And she’s by far the biggest pop star in the world. They can’t keep her music on the shelves, not even in these days. Again- wow.
Afterwards, I took a short drive to the local McDonald’s. They’d changed the place a few years ago. Changed it a lot.
McDonald’s where I live used to be an institution. It was, after all, born here. My dad loved McDonald’s when he was young. I mean, the original McDonald’s. The first establishment.
To hear him tell it, him and his friends were the ones that made the original restaurant so successful. After all, they might have been McDonald’s first regular customers. They were there, at least once a week, gorging on old man Kroc’s fries and hamburgers. To them, McDonald’s was a revelation- they loved it. Eating there became their most important weekly summer ritual. They were also the first restaurant employees- the original burger flippers, cashiers, and waitresses. Yes, McDonald’s originally had waitresses. On roller skates, believe it or not. And the entire operation was a tiny building with no indoor seating- just a small hut, really, with a window for ordering and paying.
It’s jarring to compare his stories of the humble first McDonald’s with what its become. It’s McDonald’s- not just the most iconic restaurant in the world, but also, something bigger- a symbol of America’s imperial influence, and possibly a symbol for America’s entire way of life. It’s become a civilization defining historical juggernaut that has affected in some way everyone on Earth.
All from that little hut with a little window, that gave out hamburgers to my dad for a dime.
Time flies…
Anyway, I digress.
The local McDonald’s here was originally built as a monument to McDonald’s roots in this area. It even had a special name – “Nostalgia McDonald’s”. It was built as a kind of love letter from the corporate headquarters to the local fifties vibe here that birthed the franchise.
It was quite an interesting restaurant; it had a fifties layout that had old fashioned booths and seats, classic paintings on the walls, and a working jukebox that played Elvis era Rock ‘n Roll. Encased behind glass in shelves recessed into the walls were assorted McDonald’s antiques, like the earliest Happy Meal toys and other cool things.
The theme even extended to the menu- every Tuesday night, the restaurant sold plain hamburgers for a dime, like they used to. For awhile, it became a weekly ritual for the kids in the area to go there, just like the old days. It was neat.
The most interesting thing about this McDonald’s to me were the programs. The TV’s that were hung from the ceiling broadcast black and white variety shows from the fifties on a constant loop throughout the day. It was very, very cool. These were shows that have, of course, been dropped down the memory hole because the fact that they aired stands in the way of “progress”. This was old comedy, the kind that’s been outlawed in today’s “open minded” America.
For example, every once in a while, you could look up when eating and see a performer in black face, entertaining his studio audience, which I thought was fascinating and different. This was history, come alive. It was TV like I’d never seen or heard of before.
But- what am I thinking? According to the regime blackface is clearly a terrible, inhuman, monstrous thing equal to any war crime. All such old shows should be hidden from the public if not outright destroyed for the good of mankind, historical value be damned.
So all that? The TV’s, the jukebox, the cool paintings, the artifacts? Today they’re gone. See, the area is more “diverse” now, which means that everything must become boring and stale. Anything that has a hint of history- of real history- must be abolished or destroyed to avoid offending somebody. Now, the restaurant is just another McDonald’s. It has the same boring walls and features as every other McDonald’s. In other words, it fucking sucks.
And while I’m typing, I won’t get into the fact that all of this area- all of the stores I visited today- were built on top of my family’s old farmland. They were the settlers here. My family made this area. Such things don’t matter, I know; we are a society with a narrow attention span that only values what’s new or “diverse”.
But it’s still important to me, however little it is to others.
Time flies…
Too fast, maybe.