Memory Lane

Impressions on visiting my hometown

I recently had the opportunity to visit my hometown, which I haven’t spent much time in over the last several years, what with not living there anymore and all. Wandering about my old stomping grounds was a bittersweet experience ... more bitter than sweet, which isn’t surprising these days. Everything changes in this world, nothing lasts forever, sure. But it’s Current Year Zero, and the changes are more reflective of decay than growth.

It being the high unholy month of anal Ramadan, the main street was of course festooned with pedo pennants hanging from lamp posts and bedecking the railings of sidewalk cafes. As with all things progressive, the fag flag refuses to stand still, mutating a little bit every year. You’re expected to stay current without being told, much as you’re expected to update your lexicon of acceptable terminology. Just as yesterday’s politically correct nomenclature is today’s hate speech, to use last year’s Deadliest Sin Semaphore is this year’s sin against inclusion. A continuously changing symbol that implicitly damns you if you don’t keep up is quite appropriate for an incoherent pseudo-ideology that does the same.

There was an old used bookstore I used to visit all the time. It was this dimly lit, musty little nook, smelling of the old books that crammed its overflowing shelves. The books were stacked two deep on every shelf, with additional strata of books lying flat on top; in the back were additional boxes of paperbacks. The shelves were vaguely organized by genre and subject-matter, but beyond that it was a jumble. The proprietor, a crusty, beardy old hippy, had given up on organizing them by author’s name a long time ago. When I was a kid I found a box full of 80s era Asimov’s and Analog science fiction magazines; the old hippy let me have the whole box for five bucks, and I spent the next several weeks reading them.

He stopped buying new stock many years ago. Business wasn’t great. People don’t read much anymore, and when they do read, they tend to want new books, not dog-eared old paperbacks. Nevertheless, he held on as long as he could. The store didn’t make a lot of money, but it was a landmark, a local institution. That he was able to keep the lights on as long as he did is a minor miracle. But time comes for us all. He got old. His health failed. The day came that he simply couldn’t do it anymore, and who wants to take over a business barely hanging on by the skin of its teeth?

The storefront that housed that beloved old store is now occupied by a property management company. Probably a subsidiary of BlackRock or some other asset management or private equity firm. The space has been thoroughly renovated, of course. It’s clean and gleaming and corporate and soulless, a stark contrast with the hand-painted wooden sign that used to hang over the entrance to that dark grotto of slumbering knowledge.

The whole of the downtown has gone through a similar evolution over the last decade or so. It used to be a thriving commercial district, like an open-air shopping mall with dive bars. You could buy anything you needed at a dozen locally owned and operated stores, with roots in the community going back decades if not generations. One by one, those stores closed down, cannibalized by the big box retailers out in the suburbs, which are now in the process of being cannibalized in turn by Amazon distribution centres. Most of the rest of the storefronts have been replaced by gourmet burger joints offering twenty-dollar grilled cheese sandwiches. The commercial district is just a food court servicing the local university students, now, with the occasional store selling knick-knacks to tourists. And dollar stores, of course. Lots of dollar stores, vape shops. Over the last few years cannabis dispensaries popped up. Those are everywhere now.

Even the movie theatre is gone. When I was a kid, I watched Disney movies and the various Star Trek movies, there; as a teenager, we used to drive into town on Tuesday Night Cheap Night, getting stoned in the parking lot. That was where I first saw the Matrix, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Sometimes we’d slip in to catch a second movie, for free, sneaking from one screen to the next while the ushers’ backs were turned. Once I went there with a girlfriend to see some art flick no one cared about, including us; we had the whole place to ourselves, so we smoked cigarettes and ignored the movie in favour of exploring one another. Usually it was pretty packed, though, right up until the end. There was no reason to shut the theatre down. But another company wanted to build an IMAX megaplex in the suburbs, and as a condition of their investment forced the city council to agree to force the downtown theatre to close, and to prevent any other theatres from opening. How an anti-competitive practice like that is legal is beyond me. It probably isn’t, not that it matters. They turned the old theatre into a condo.

The old military recruiting centre is shut down, too. I have no idea where the new one is, not that it matters – no one wants to join the military, and with excellent reason. In my last year of high school I did my army physical there, and took my aptitude tests. With the exception of a diagram of an engine block I had no idea how to label (being a nerd, I had never taken shop class, which was for stoners, dropouts, and trailer trash), I exceeded the requirements for infantry training by a comfortable margin, which isn’t saying much. I could easily have gone into a more intellectually demanding trade, but screw that – I wanted to run around the forest with assault rifles and light machine guns, learning the finer points of organized murder, not sit in an office futzing about with electronics or whatever. I remember being somewhat bemused by the recruitment posters, which seemed to all show uniformed women bandaging refugees, with not a single firearm to be seen in any of them. The military seemed embarrassed by itself in those days, as though it didn’t want to acknowledge that its fundamental purpose was to arm teenagers and send them to kill people. How ridiculous, I remember thinking. What young guy is going to see a picture of UN peacekeepers handing out food aid from the back of a truck and think, wow they’re wearing green, that looks like fun, sign me up? They should be showing hard men with hard eyes, wearing war paint, rappelling out of helicopters, with belts of large-calibre ammunition strapped over their chests like Rambo. If they wanted recruits, I thought, that’s what they’d show. Not this gay humanitarian aid mission stuff.

If only I’d known how much gayer things would become.

Anyhow, that recruiting centre is gone now. The space is occupied by a welcome centre for ‘new arrivals’. The place in which young men were once inducted to contribute to the defense of their country, is now dedicated to aiding and abetting the invasion of that country. It’s a perfect encapsulation of an occupied nation pursuing a national policy of national abolition.