The Pleasure Of Limited Focus in anticlimatic

I just saw the last full size K-Mart in the US closed recently.

I assumed that happened a long time ago. All of the K-Marts within 1000 miles of here shuttered five years ago or more. I can’t quite remember when, exactly, but I remember the K-Mart in my town very well. I remember the first one, in the “modern” outdoor shopping center that had been added to a hill and field just outside of town. The front of that building was pea stone, and about all I can remember of the interior were those coin-toy machines by the exits (25 cents for a sticker/gumball/gag toy etc), the yellowing halogen lights above, and my mother being young and preoccupied with raising a kid.

I remember the second K-Mart, when it moved in the early 90s. The cheap wares from over seas were really starting to pour in then, and they needed more space to sell to an eager population of young boomers with young kids. In another field, just up the road from the first, they built a “90s modern” shopping center, with the K-Mart as the flagship. That one, I remember more clearly, as I was an adolescent and teenager during its run. It was my go to department store for most of my pre-adulthood life. Socks, underwear, Nintendo games, box fans, etc. I recall the snack shack at the entrance with their nachos on display that I was never allowed to eat, a photo studio built into the western wall that I believe my family used for some portraits once or twice. I remember looking for jewelry there for my girlfriend Rachel in 10th grade. I have memories of running into people there that I actually wanted to see. Ghosts of the prior chapters of my life.

When Wal-Mart showed up I was college age, and it wasn’t until a decade or so later, after resettling here after my travels, that I learned it was shutting it’s doors for good. I shopped the empty shelves during those last few EVERYTHING MUST GO weeks. I watched them cart away the mechanical penny horse sitting out front. And then, as the years passed, I watched the building sit there empty as weeds began to fill the parking lot through cracks.
Once in a while a business would briefly occupy one of the other empty retail spaces in the almost entirely empty shopping center, then close.

Last year Big Lots announced it was moving back into the old K-Mart building, and I was kind of excited about the prospect of the department store’s glorious return- despite looking like they used the main building, they erected walls just inside the door and only occupied maybe a quarter of the space. And as of last month, they too filed for bankruptcy and closed.

And while that is a whole lot of reminiscing about fucking K-Mart of all things, it does stir in me a style of “being” that I have difficulty naming. I used to call it Existentialism, but there are actual definitions for that word that someone else very much had in mind. I have a bad habit of assuming words that I haven’t bothered to look up can be simply defined by their roots. Existentialism, to me, was always just the “ism” of “Exist.” A word to describe my preferred style of living, directly in the moment, with just enough information coming in through my senses to observe and interact with that moment before drifting through it to the next.

Dreams follow this observational logic. A blanket acceptance of whatever rolls in front of us, and some type of drive or inertia moving us forward through that space. Before the internet, back in the department store days of small towns and dark city webs, with no major window to the outside world beyond the nightly news on cable or satellite television, this style of living felt significantly more real. The stakes were local. The style was pajama/casual.

The more I can narrow my focus, and keep myself tethered to the ground and away from macro concerns, the more I enjoy whatever it is I’m doing.