DESTROYING MY YOUTH

The other day I was on my way to work. I take the bus because gas is way too expensive and would eat into my comic book and movie money. Anyway, there was, for the longest time, a Burger King in downtown  Kalamazoo.
Yeah, it's leveled.

This is the Burger King where someone spotted Elvis many years after his death. Kind of a big deal, but the guy who owned the franchise died and no one wanted to take it over. They have another one over off I-94 and it is creepy looking with all the furnishings still inside and the big piece of sheet metal that was under the Burger King sign shakes and makes the worst noises on a windy day.
Yeah it's by the bus stop where I get to work.
But, that wasn't too bad.
Martha and I were driving down Gull Road from Meijer when I spotted the huge pile of rubble that had been the East Towne Mall.
That one hurt.

I spent a lot of time at that mall. They had a 5 plex theater where I watched a majority of my movies. The mall had an arcade. They had a Tom Sawyer's Book Raft where I bought my first Doctor Who novelizations. There was a restaurant called The Final Curtain where they made the best French Dip sandwich and I even worked there for a while when I was younger.
This was my mall.
It has one of my favorite Dad stories. My dad would come and get us four kids and take us out on weekend
adventures afetr he and my mom got a divorce. We saw a lot of movies.
A lot of movies.
Anyway, we were walking down the mall and I had spotted something I wanted at the book store or some such thing. I ran up behind my dad and asked him for a dollar.
He said, 'A Dollar!' and clutched his chest and fell to the ground.
Priceless!
My family seems to find faking a cardiac arrest one of the funniest things in the world.
Now they have torn that down.
This sucks.