This week is a wash. Might as well blog.

I typically start my work morning checking my two email boxes (one for Chamber, one for Tourism). Then I check my friends' blogs, then sometimes Slate, the Hometown newspaper's opinion page (inevitably lame) and the Hometown radio station's opinion page (more lively, but way more stupid people). And sometimes I blog. And then I get to work.

This morning I perused slate.com in search of a blog topic, and hit on this one: http://www.slate.com/id/2204599/. It's about repurposing big box stores after they move out and build a bigger store down the street.

That is exactly what is happening in Hometown. Currently, we have a small, crowded, really annoying Walmart. Down the street 1/4 mile, they are busy building a big, not-so-crowded, but probably still really annoying Super Walmart. The two locally-owned grocery stores in town are not pleased, and they are not alone, but they are countered by the people who want and maybe even need the convenience of a bigger Walmart.

Now, y'all can probably guess where I stand on Walmart. Their corporate value structure deserves its own level of hell. The race-to-the-bottom, consumption-mad, super-hideous right-wing orthodoxy, mostly anti-community, anti-beauty-and-quality values its spews should keep me not only out of the stores, but actively protesting them.

But I don't. I still hate Walmart, but sometimes I just gotta go there! I'll save that for another post.

So, anyway, down the road...there once was a stand of large trees surrounding a pond. All around this pocket of beauty there was development--grocery store, mid-sized factory, Sonic. But Walmart is building their new place there, so the big yellow machines came in, drained the lake, CHIPPED all the trees into useless mulch, completely remolded the land to flatten for building and parking and...is that a new lake?! Not sure. Why they couldn't just add on to the other, I don't know. There was room.

And now Hometown is faced with the prospect of a really big, ugly, empty store right on the edge of a big, ugly strip mall.

I have some hope after reading that Slate article. There is some really cool stuff that could be done there. But, in Hometown, we have these awesome brick Victorian buildings, most of them also empty, that used to be a military school and, frankly, I'd rather see them used first. And we have a number of potentially beautiful buildings Downtown that I would also like to see first, including a really big one that used to be a J.C.Penney's--the first generation of box store. I especially want to see them filled first because there are loud idiots around who say stupid things like 'just tear those old buildings down!'

I have made peace with a lot of stupid views, but one I just can't stand and can't get is the view that old buildings should be bulldozed and replaced...with what? Aluminum-sided shit boxes that you can find ANYWHERE? I can't take it! I just want to shove something in their mouths to shut them up. Go medieval. I mean, it makes no sense--no historical sense, no economic sense, no aesthetic sense. Shhhh...calm down.

So...what will happen to our old Walmart? Maybe it'll burn to the ground and return to pastureland. More likely it will sit empty for a good long while, or become the new unemployment office. Back to work.