Blasto from El Pas(t)o

My head only has a memory buffer of ten years. Any memory older than that gets written over and that sucks because nothing all that great has happened since about 1989. I have lost most all of my childhood memories from the eighties unless they are extremely memorable historic events in the course of human history, like when the space shuttle exploded in '86 or when Empire Strikes Back came out. When I was a kid these things made an enormous impression on me. Thanks to my crappy brain storage limits these memories are the only surviving remnants of my childhood so I worship them in my head and nothing else since has impressed me as much. That's probably why the Star Wars prequels didn't seem as spectacular or exciting to me, which oddly enough is also how I feel about the more recent space shuttle explosions.

I DON'T REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED FROM 1979 TO 1989, I JUST KNOW IT WAS AWESOME

I was born in El Paso, Texas in 1974, which was the time just before the first Star Warses were fought. And I grew up during the toy robots wars of the mid eighties so you would think I have a lot of great memories but I don't. My childhood was a fantastic time but my recollection of it is fuzzy at best. It was like if somebody gave you roofies but instead of raping you they took you to Disneyland, then you woke up the next day feeling like something awesome happened but you couldn't remember what exactly.

A GOOD CHILE RELLENO IS NOT AS RESILIENT AS OMEGA SUPREME

I left El Paso 13 years ago because King Zarkon needed to be defeated and those robot lions weren't going to pilot themselves. Last month I went back to El Paso for a week and I found that a lot of the old places my mom used to buy me toy robots from went out of business after I grew up. COINCIDENCE? I THINK NOT. Thankfully a bunch of the places I used to eat at are going strong. I wish a lot of those old toystores were still around today, but just because they died out didn't mean the end of toy robots. By contrast, a lot of the food I love is very much dependent on the survival of the restaurants that make it. I don't care how super rare the latest toy robot of the week is, a well made gordita is way tougher to find. The bottom line is I can buy an Optimus Prime anywhere but there ain't Whataburger in South Dakota.


Just like my brain, El Paso has been busy writing over itself in the name of economic development but I won't let a little thing like going out of business keep me from showing the internet those old toystores I used to love. Although some have died off or relocated I still have my fuzzy half remembered memories of where they used to be. So in total defiance of the march of time and progress I took a picture of the greatest of those old toystores that aren't there anymore. I don't care if I have to photoshop that picture of me standing in front of the building that used to be Lionel Playworld, I will have a picture of it as it used to look.

BREAKING THE RECORD FOR THE MOST TOY ROBOTS SHIRTS PICTURES IN ONE POST

Does this look familiar?

Unfortunately a lot of my most cherished memories are not so easily photoshopped. Although my mom kept a lot of stuff from when I was a kid, a couple of key pictures from my childhood have been lost. But while I was in El Paso my uncle assured me that he does at least have the negatives of the pictures from the time he took me to Universal Studios to meet the Transformers in '85. I hope he finds them because shaking hands with some guy in a Jazz costume was like the highlight of my life. Little by little through the acquisition of old photographs I will get some more of my past and my memories back. Thankfully my sister said the picture of me peeing myself in front of Darth Vader is still lost. Some things are better left forgotten.