WHERE DOES OLD STUFF GO WHEN IT DIES?

there used to be an infinite stock of pinball machines in the united states of america.

now only a handful of the originals exist, sprinkled across the country 

as though salted to taste.

many are housed in a museum in seattle, and other pockets exist in the homes of collectors,

those world-weary souls who have chosen to harbor these valiant old machine-games,

take their responsibility very seriously and cherish it above all else.

but every day, statistically speaking, one pinball machine succumbs to the years, 

the grubby kid hand prints, the power outages that surge its circuits, the spills and bumps,

and sputters out, unable to launch the pinball up its slight incline any longer.

what happens then? when the nations three certified pinball repairmen can't breathe life back into it?

is it tossed off the dock into the swells of the ocean to provide the skeletal framework for a new reef?

or is it dismantled for parts then reconfigured into a new machine, pinball or otherwise?

there used to be a pinball machine for every manwomanandchild across this great land.

that's a fact.

but they slowly are vanishing. theorists maintain there ought to be hidden mass burial sites.

none have been found.

pundits debate this hotly, and experts tracing the trajectory of fallen machine,

takes them to dead ends routinely.

the fact is nobody knows where old stuff goes when it dies.