Several years ago I started watching “retail archeology” channels on Youtube. There’s a range of them, and one is actually called Retail Archeology, but they’re all subtly different in their subject matter and presentation. Some of them aren’t exclusive to that subject, like Brightsun Films, and some are pretty dedicated to one aspect of the genre. Today I watched a video about the liquidation of Forever 21. If you aren’t familiar with the brand it’s what’s called a “fast fashion” chain, which basically translates to cheap crap you wear. Like most physical stores the pandemic crippled them and the rise of online crap retailers, like Temu, basically put them down for good.
Forever 21 had a very particular aesthetic that was representative of the era that created it. Sort of like a reverse Hot Topic. There were other brands with a similar vibe, which have also fallen off, like Claire’s, but have survived to varying degrees of success. I was never a customer of Forever 21, but they were a mainstay of the strip mall I worked at, or around, for about a decade. The location I worked near was one of the smaller imprints they had for that style of mall, but they did brisk business for the better part of 20 years. Their management wasn’t able to navigate the changing landscape of retail and they went bankrupt last year sometime, if memory serves.
This is all germane to my story in that Megatainment would be a Barnes & Noble style location, which also underwent hard times as the rise of the internet & the pandemic took down a few similar chains. Borders might be a better parallel, although in reality my experience was with Hasting Entertainment, which was a cross between a B&N/Borders and a Blockbuster Video. I omitted the video rental aspect of my experience because even by the time I started almost 20 years ago video rental was barely hanging on. In universe Megatainment could conceivably survive the cultural shift, and continue being a location all the way to the end of the series. It doesn’t have to for the story to continue, but if I so chose it wouldn’t seem impossible.
My story is hovering around inside that era of uncertainty. Hastings Entertainment folded before the pandemic. 2016 was it’s final operational year. If it had survived pas that time the pandemic would have absolutely put it down. The leadership was barely competent enough to manage when the US was at the height of its consumerism. The pandemic would have been beyond the pale. I have to give them credit however. They outlasted a couple of competitors. I’m not 100% sure how, but they were at least wily enough to do so for a little while.
I’ve always been pretty vague about the actual years Between Failures takes place in, but the story would start somewhere around 2002 or 3. I didn’t hold to very strict rules about the timeline, but some of the earliest parts have references to things that anchor the story to a pretty specific era if not actual dates. At some point I intended to go back and make the references less specific, but on some level I can never escape the fact that Between Failures takes place in the past. A past that gets further and further away every moment.
The culture that spawned my work no longer exists. There are fewer and fewer people with living memory of it every year. On some level it’s unfortunate that I didn’t stick to a hard timeline because BF might be more valuable as a historical text if I had. I didn’t know where this was all going to go when I started. It was just a reason to keep living at a time when I very much didn’t want to anymore.
It’s also basically always been a first draft. Written in chunks, on the fly, as I outlined the overall story. Given that I feel like I’ve done pretty well stringing together pages day after day in a way that feels very natural when read all in one go. Since my sense of time doesn’t work properly I almost always feel like it’s only been a few days, and also an eternity, since I started, even though I logically know it’s really been a pretty long time in human years.
Those of you who are older than me will already know this, and those of you who are younger can’t truly understand it yet, but over time we all become relics of the times that created us. We get left behind even though we’re still here. For me I have one foot in this time period that is long gone and I have to put the other foot back there 3 times a week. So I modulate back and forth all the time, which makes me feel like I don’t really belong in either place now. I have to stay in the between times, as Jo would say. At the very least I’m glad people come to visit me here.

Posts authored by Jackie

2807 Yep, Yep, Mhmmm, Yep.