Things done changed (nostalgia related)

pjl2000xl

So ive been hanging out in my hometown in NJ the last few days. Im here for the week on business/family reasons. There was nothing to do last night so i decided to take a nice long ride with a dutch. I headed up towards an area i havent been in almost ten years, this old strip mall where i worked. Man it was incredible. The second i rolled into the parking lot floods of memories just came rushing back to me. So many good experinces were had here and this was a great time in my life when i was working there. I was 16 with a car, just started to get high, cutting class to goto the shore, just new exciting fun shit popping off every night. I started remembering all these inexperiences and people from my past and it really touched a nerve. But then i saw it. Starbucks came into the complex with a panera bread strapped to the side of it. All hooptie right in the middle of what once was a empty parking lot. I was like "okay its a nice area, of course they would throw these companies up.) didnt really phase me. I decided to keep going on my road trip.I drive for half an hour up to this one place where my best friend, who I had a pretty bad falling out with a few years agos place. He long has moved out and i just wanted to see the house. This dude was like my brother from when we were little kids up till i was in my early 20s so a lot of time was spent here. It was out in a pretty rural boonie area with an acre of land with woods to ourselves. His mom died of cancer here when we were young and the dad wasnt really around a lot so we had full run of this place. A lot of first experiences in a variety of things happened here. Great times and some really bad times with drugs and other shit. But this is where I came from. We were either here or my place for a great amount of time. So i get to the top of the hill about to roll up on this house and I see it. They bulldozed the whole fucking place down and put up a Starbucks. I went crazy. I just could not believe it. It infuriated me. This fucking place came in and gentrified my fucking childhood. It was disgusting. So many memories were shattered and replaced with a dumpster and handicapped parking. I mean wtf? Also by putting this place up they also crushed the local deli where we also hung out a lot and got candy and soda when we were real young. It was just sad. I understand its a business but just isn't enough enough? They threw this place up in a spot that there were dunkin donuts, delis, everything already was there. No reason for it to be in that location at all, except to fuck with my childhood. This shit really bummed me out. It sucks, things change, k.i.m. but damn... just fucked up. Like i wont be able to take my kids to places that were real important to me and show them where i came from and all that. This scares me. Without seeing that old place i worked i wouldnt have remembered so much of what happened there. Are these corporations just infesting everything where they just saturate a whole community and eat it alive from the inside? Its never really had an impact of me till this day and it blows. The same thing is happening in harlem and all over the country. Even the city by my old house, plainfield, nj, is going through a huge transition. They put up a whole little complex with the ususal suspects in it and are pushing the residents out. Its just sad cause in turn they are erasing a whole generations history and replacing it with profit margins and quotas. I dunno this shit just pissed me off like a motherfucker today.