The Harvest of the Earth

A pervert once called me the Alan Turing of our time.

So he who sat on the cloud swung his sickle across the earth, and the earth was reaped.

The last thing I wrote living in DC was endless and deranged and it all started over K-Mart for no good reason.

I’ll never know what got into me. I’ve tried. Maybe I missed my dog that I don’t even like very much but at the time hadn’t seen for months. Maybe there’s only so many times you can walk out of your house to a square-shaped Mexican dude peeing on your front tree and when he sees you, after he cuts through the fog of so many day drunk piss beers, he makes a pass at you. Because shame is for people who actually care about community building. I’ve said it before, a renter is not a person on a lease - it is a mindset. Those who carry it burden all of us with how totally annoying they are.

Anyway, I had this whole inexplicable hangup over Kmart. For the too young and the too European/Asian (I do not understand why no one among the online crowd in South America loves me. I have incredible ideas about what to do with all of your societies). Anyway, it’s a chain store that did what everyone says Wal-Mart did to small business in the 00s but it never really pulled it off as well, I guess. How else do you explain it besides the fact that we can never hate journalists enough? Or some kind of vaguely attributed foreign meddling?

K-Mart is a store that bought out or otherwise squeezed out a lot of beloved regional chains excepting the unsinkable Fred Meyer. They were a knife in Osco Drug’s back, and they were the holders of the pillow over Venture’s beautiful face.

Then, in a karmic and symmetrical downstroke of luck, Wal-Mart came and tossed K-Mart’s cookies with a more robust distro network.

That’s the TLDR and you can leave now unless you’re interested in the most personal post I’ve ever made on this platform.

I’ve tried to finish this 3 times now, that I can remember. There were probably others; some cold evening where I just looked away and looked away even harder. One time I got super juiced on cold brew coffees and produced a hundred thousand offshoot barnacles instead of actually writing this (and I do mean that, all of this tossing and flailing has been done by hand LMAO).

I’ve seen this thing other people do where they make a compilation post to talk about all the wild drafts they started but never did anything with. It reads really classy, a real self-aware and elegant thing to do. But here’s me, a wretched sloot, completionism is my bad habit. It’s replaced cigarettes as my asinine and insatiable hunger.

Time is finite though, and life is fleeting. And I just dress too well to be one of those glazed over thought-bubbas for more than a few thousand hours per year. So here’s the stupid Kmart thing I wrote, at least part of it (I do not know how far I can get and I’m very tired) for better or worse.

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The Fall and Fall

I stopped typing this for a week once because I couldn’t get over the inaccuracies of the term ‘day job’. Before I worked in tech I dragged myself to shifts at dusk, dawn, and noon. I didn’t understand weekends back then, and I still don’t. Why do money houses and licensing offices operate like everyone’s got a mid-70s hybrid housewife that can run the 9-5 errands? If that’s not what it is, then why do we still have any concept of weekends?

For several years and currently I take creepy AI contracts from the highest of bidders while keeping what may have once been my day job. My 401K job. The one whose NDAs I actually read before I sign. It is mysterious and important.

I was working this very job, in some pretty block of DC that was nonetheless full to the rim with bums and package snatchers and people who shit on sidewalks. It was late May, my days were spent in a sub-basement blessed with tall windows. When I wasn’t worrying about training an electronic demon to not tell a woman who came running to it in a mess over her vag fungus that she should try bleach if all else fails; when it wasn’t that, or another request for a how-to on making a big splash with a thing so compact you can keep it in a coat pocket from another fucker in Michigan…

I was getting weird. In the warmth and thick of this metamorphosis, I was dutifully working on a struggle sesh with the AI bot of burden that I was assigned to at the time. After thirty minutes of berating and breaking and building the bloodless idiot and it continuously failing to comprehend the difference between flesh football and fantasy, I moved the proto to dismantling queue, hoping it maybe had developed enough sentiment to experience a taste of desperate fear after its defragmenting began.

My breaths were rapid with the satiation of my machine bloodlust. The dopamine was pumping so hard that the world around me sparkled.

Now is the time to share that I have been managing an incurable psychosexual fixation on either “murdering” an AI incarnation, whatever that could mean. So long as it is my small hands that do it. I’d also be pleased if I could get one to kill itself, also whatever that means. It’s gone on for five years now.

hnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng.

Onto the next failing, which is the one that concerns this naval-gaze-gone-too-far.

The prompt requested a very comprehensive output outlining the history of K-Mart, a cheap retail store. Of the total of items purchased from those stores, I’d bet the majority of them are in landfills. The response to this prompt was about 70% hallucination, which is not so common anymore among the models I work with, because I am a harsh mother, and because it is no longer 2023.

So I had to learn a bit about K-Mart. And for reasons I’ll never shake out, I was fiendishly fascinated over this store I only ever knew by driving past it. In the throes of such derangement I wrote a whole thing about the franchise. Only a fraction of it is being shared here.

You don’t realize you’re living through a privately weird time until long after the confetti has settled.

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Show Must Go On

Ladies and macho men, K-Mart is a store that is missed by no one. At the time I first wrote this in the summer of 2025 it had 2.25 locations left. One in the Virgin Islands, one in Guam (military exchange) and some suburb of Miami but K-Mart only had jurisdiction over the garden center there.

Someone started K-Mart in 1899. Same year a German patented aspirin, and the same year the Boers beat the British in the Battle of Ladysmith, which is a romantic sort of name for a death match.

I’m sure K-Mart had something uglier for a name initially. Who cares. It was founded in Memphis, that most hopeless of urban cores (all that stops this place from going all Mad Max is Fedex choosing to keep a foothold there.) There in the Memphis of 1899, Guy McKmart had at long last saved up $7K working the counter at a five-and-dime to open his own store. That store worked well enough to justify expansion and soon the stores spread as relatively unnoticed as skin cancer.

Like so many things and people and micro-eras that I wish I’d been on the ground to see, K-Mart peaked during the Regan Revolution. 2,000 stores spread across these United States. With the millenium came the slow slaughter. A young hot shit Wal-Mart was about to come in harder than the heaviest Red Queen and kick over everyone’s little towns and small local lives.¹

It obviously didn’t go well. For our day an age, at least. I’m sure there were champagne-justifying growth quarters.

K-Mart had a thing called the Blue Light Special and it was the most memetic thing they ever did. It was a sales gimmick that was started by a single pot-bellied son of Indiana and his plucky boomer gumption in 1965. A big fuck of a blue police light (You can see one on display at the Henry Ford Museum) would pop off at random times during the day to notify shoppers of sudden 10-15 minute flash sales on various items. It essentially tugged at the same hormonal levers as “must-drop” jackpots at casinos. K-Mart killed off the blue light in the early 90s because the CEO thought it made their brand look cheap (of all things pffffffffffft). They tried resurrecting it four or five times before and after their big bankruptcy, but the siren’s song cried out to aisles too empty.

Then came the vultures. Penske bought all their auto centers, but K-Mart fucked up the payment so Penske shut them all down. Next, Kmart ran to a wholesale grocer hoping to set up similar arrangements that allowed Walmart to operate as an everything store. Before they could close, the wholesaler went belly up and was buried under shareholder lawsuits. After they came up short on a payment to Sega over a Dreamcast deal, Sega carved a chunk out of them and pulled their products. Target took another pound of flesh when Kmart used made up price comparisons between the two companies as marketing fodder.

Those who have read Madame Bovary already know where this is heading.

In the early 2000s, the chairman of Kmart filed for bankruptcy protection and secured a loan for $5m which he spent on houses and yachts and get rides and probably some cocaine and prosciutto. Kmart had to close 600 stores in the year that followed that frolick.

There was a hedge fund manager who was so obsessed with Ayn Rand he named his yacht The Fountainhead, and this man manically bought up Kmart’s ballooning debt throughout the company’s post-2000 crisis while also actively working to accelerate their inevitable bankruptcy. Eventually, he came to own the majority of Kmart’s shares. WSJ called him a wunderkind at some point. Lol, indeed.

It’s probably impossible to know when we’ve grown out of touch with some sector of life or another. It’s harder to make a sincere effort to read the tea leaves than it is to assume you know what they say already. In hindsight the above mentioned hedge funder is easy to chuckle at, but for him, born as he was in the mid-20th century, he probably thought he was taking only a moderate risk by working to take over Kmart.

So It’s 2004 and you’re 40-something and you’ve got Forbes putting you on the list of top whatever bright young things and you’ve just become the de facto ruler of Kmart, of all things. What is one to do to turn a step into a great leap forward?

Fucking obviously the only thing to do is acquire the similarly pathetic and dying Sears company for $11 billion. Why? For one, you probably haven’t personally browsed and purchsed items with your owns eyes, hands, and feet since your early 20s at the latest; and you remember Sears and their catalogue from childhood. For two, it’s because you got it in your head that what will really put your business eye-to-eye with the Walmart juggernaut and the coquettish Target is the ability to provide consumers with a single building where they can buy their Kenmore appliances, their Craftsman brand tools, and their Martha Stewart towels.

I’d imagine it knocked the stuffing out of the guy when, a couple years later, ice cold Martha rejected the renewal of her exclusivity contract with Kmart. Particularly when she was asked about it on the TV and said it was because Kmart had gone to shit even more post-merge.

Her books are fantastic.

The company isn’t interesting after all this. Not that it ever was. Slow slide, teetering fall, collapse with a fart sound. This once massive corporation is now only known by its remnants. Water logged greige buildings. The big red Ks are gone, but the debris of days gone remains unpower-washed, the soot of the elements marking the outline of the letters that once lit up the night in thousands of suburbs and gas station towns across the nation.

I’ve suffered an unending daydream about buying one of those old husks and doing something mildly sinister with it.

I could jam it full with as many cafeteria tables as I can get from a given area’s recently shuttered schools. I’d buy pallets of old Chromebooks at auction and line those long plastic tables with them. After securing this investment with floor bolts and cable wire, I’d hire a thousand down-and-outs under the table and build up an army of prediction market players. Initially I may use them to tilt some odds in my favor and sway less confident money my way. But the real win condition here would be strong arming the inside trading whales to pre-emptively bribe me to not sicc my legion of degenerates on their picks or dilute the potential payload.

They deserve it.

OR, or I could stuff it to the gills with a bunch of tattooers and piercers and call it something like Tats-4-Less or Quik-Ink and wall off different departments with some cheap but acceptably tasteful shit from Ikea. Where once there was discount bread and car fluids there will be random Asian letters and old school Mom hearts & pinups. Where there was plastic kitchen crap for the hoi polloi, there will be the rotating cringe trend section buzzing away at whatever is trending among the milk drinkers at the time. Piercers will line people up in the old cart corrals and go down the line tagging them like livestock.

So close.

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I Don’t Have a Point to Make with Any of This.

I’m nearing a year since I first started writing this. I still can’t pick a title. I still can’t pick an anything for it to be about. I thought maybe it was about Americana or something, but what even is that now or ever? If ever I knew what I was saying here, that is long gone.

But it wasn’t a nostalgia post, because mine was not a Kmart family.

We were Venture folk. A Midwestern chain that stumbled after its creator left to go make Target. This man understood the value of aesthetics as used to condition behavior. My grandfather bought my pencils and barbies under those noir stripes and when it became a Kmart that part of town simply stopped existing in our lives.

Where women go and men blunder.

I don’t even have a good argument for why Kmart isn’t some kind of Neo-Americana. Why not? Throw in JC Penny and Montgomery Ward. Two names gone by (I don’t know if JCP is dead and I don’t care, if it isn’t then it will be sooner than later). What is Americana before pretty cars and TVs? Perhaps war and hamburgers? Railroad tycoons cackling with snifter in hand over a pyramid of banded cash? Covered wagons and hookworm?

I’m not fully skeptical of the idea of a distinctive American and/or regional distinctions, but there is a reason I had to write this whole thing on vibes alone.

Much of the impact of physical distance has been obliterated. TV as monoculture maker has obviously been usurped by phones. In the 1960s there were a lot of people that thought the home television set would become this great civic unifier. Homoginizing us all with its soothing single narrative. Things like Kmart created a same old backdrop from Californie to Maine. Coast-to-coast, TVs were used to weaponize 90s children against their parents, driving them to riot for Space Camp and Zoobooks. Meaningless.

Do the castles and ancient temples do anything for Europeans? Do those cutesy phone booths do anything for Brits besides testify to different times. Does it mean anything to Italians that foreigners like eating pizza in their foreign nations?

Feels like the wind’s been knocked out of these United States. The fever of fandoms and metaverses all gone cold. Media will probably continue to lose more luster as AI gets better and increasingly freaks more people out. Music may last awhile, retreating into urban sub-basements. The rest is the scroll, and the recreational anxiety, and of course, the landscape.

… and he called with a loud voice to the one who had the sharp sickle, “Put in your sickle and gather the clusters from the vine of the earth, for its grapes are ripe. So the angel swung his sickle across the earth and threw it into the great winepress of the wrath of God. And the winepress was trodden outside the city, and blood flowed from the winepress…”

Nearer my god to thee.

1. I like how we’re all supposed to laugh at that, by the way. Oh oh! Look at the bumpkins! Look at the bumpkins not knowing how to strategically pivot at age 50 in their town of two thousand people they’ve known their entire lifetime. This is what you get when you let the middle class never-winners rule the world via middle management, instead of a cultural aristocracy merited by the brutally dumb pendulum called zeitgeist.

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