Photo License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en
Sound by OurMedia: http://archive.org/details/Legend_of_Zelda_a_Link_to_the_Past__Kakariko_Village
Sound License: http://archive.org/about/terms.php
It's always a challenge to find an opening statement for a post that contains so much nostalgia for me. Embedding the picture and sound using HTML wasn't a challenge in the slightest for me, it just took a couple of re-edits, because I had my HTML confused, and after finding the proper code, it was a mere 'plug and chug' method to get everything to work properly. Originally, I wanted to use the song "Corridors of Time" off of the video game Chrono Trigger, but I was unable to due to copyright restrictions. I highly recommend looking up that song and listening to it while viewing this picture."Corridors of Time" definitely would have worked well, but the theme that I found does this picture just as much justice.
Over the years, I have come to appreciate urban decay. I really see it as a form of art. It's especially fun to find buildings with old posters and merchandise in it from the era it was abandoned, then it appears to be eternally frozen in that time period while the rest of the world moves on. After I found a picture of this dying mall, a wave of nostalgia and sadness hit me. It immediately took me back to 1996 when I was a kid in Columbus, Indiana.
Malls were a large part of my childhood growing up. Every time it rained, snowed, or otherwise wasn't a nice day, odds are my mother would end up throwing my brother and I in our '94 Caravan and take us to the mall in order to keep us from destroying the house out of boredom. Back when I was a kid, the Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 dominated the gaming industry along with the Sony Playstation. I remember all of this like it happened yesterday. So whenever I would visit a mall, it was highly likely that I would be playing a demo video game on one of the video game consoles listed above.
The song that I used was off of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. It was a video game for the Super Nintendo, released in the early 90's. When I hear this theme, the sound of falling rain on the glass slanted roofs of a mall enters my mind. I'm taken back to The Commons Mall in Columbus, Indiana, before it was shut down. I'm also taken back to the adventure filled, cold autumn air Saturdays at Fair Oaks Mall, back when it was the place to be on the weekend.
I'll never forget the smell of incense, plastic, and cheap pizza dough as I would enter the mall, scouring the place for an electronics store in order to droll over what the newest form of technology was at the time. There are still malls around of course. The area that I am living in now happens to have one. Unfortunately, the 'magic' of the mall appears to be wearing off for me. As a kid, I found malls to be a wondrous place full of cultural phenomenons just waiting to be discovered. Now, they just feel like big warehouses full of fake, plastic storefronts, containing employees with an equally fake enthusiasm for their company and products, all trying to swindle people out of their money.
Perhaps it's because I worked in one for a number of months that I no longer care for them as much as I used to. Perhaps it's because malls just aren't what they used to be. They used to be a social haven, back when people would go out and mingle in the evening. Anyone here remember that word? Back before facebook ruled our lives, back when we would make friends not by sending a virtual request by the click of a button, but by physically asking with our mouths, "Wanna be friends?"
Anyway, I digress, I'm going way too off topic. I think what happened is I grew up, and things don't seem as trivial anymore. As malls all over America (or I guess in my case, the Midwest), slowly diminish and are replaced with other forms of entertainment, I feel as though a part of me has diminished a little inside too. Malls are a link to my past, and I will always be able to cherish the fun times I had as a kid in them.
