Not sure why the screen got garbled in the first place, but the reason it went blank was because the LCD kit code is designed to read the last state of the eeprom and set the screen according to those values. When I flashed the eeprom, everything went to zero, so that's where everything stayed.
I wrote the appropriate values to eeprom, and now everything is fine.
#include <EEPROM.h>
void setup()
{
EEPROM.write(3, 1); //(SPLASH_SCREEN_ADDRESS, splashScreenEnable)
EEPROM.write(5, 16); //(COLUMNS_ADDRESS, columns)
EEPROM.write(4, 2); //(ROWS_ADDRESS, rows)
EEPROM.write(1, 128); //(LCD_BACKLIGHT_ADDRESS, backlightSetting)
EEPROM.write(2, 9600); //(BAUD_ADDRESS, baudSetting)
}
void loop()
{
}