Internet Killed the Video Store

Drove by the local Hollywood Video today and like its former counterpart Blockbuster Video; it seems Hollywood has met the same fate, closure. Not the kind of closure that heals the wounds of victims haunted by some unforeseen tragedy, but the kind that puts teenagers and single parents out of work. Does this mean my outstanding overdue charges, long ago sent to those bothersome, pesky, and persistant collection agency phone services, shall be absolved in a gelatinous mass bankrupcy bile. What a boon for the working class, service sector human being who did nothing but leave old videotapes in their automobiles during the summer to melt or accidently misplace a well used pornography DVD in place of History of the World Part 1. Am I the only one with a checkered past when it comes to the retail video rental business? Who doesn't remember those days before bootlegs, torrents, and leaked promo copies which could all be downloaded from a computer from the comfort of home, or the office, or on the college T1 line in the computer science building? Ahh, those days when, I couldn't wait for Tues, maybe it was Wed, or Mon at midnight, when retarded geeks like myself would huddle around a counter to plea for the first copy of Tombstone, The Mummy, Titanic, and classics like Moulin Rouge, clammering around a few clerks of the late night shift who were only interested in getting home, going to bed, and dealing with another day in a high school environment that no longer offered them anything of genuine substance. The low paying service sector gig is like going into hibernation, slow down the heart rate with just enough resources to get by, close the eyelids, pray that the mind takes over with a library of dreams to manipulate the rest of the body into remaining in that cocoon like state, day after day, year after year, until you wake up married with two kids wondering if taking something like LSD at your 10 year high school reunion will be strong enough to deal with a vague memory of the past.

Not sure, worked for me, but I seek adventure, to twist the minds, confusion, and generate dialouge, a false idol with a reputation not even the gods of rock would want to undertake. Anyway, this Hollywood Video store is now nothing more than a gravesite for a generation that now takes its orders from a laptop or cellphone. The darkness pouring out from the building like flooded river symbolizing the closing of another American past time, another break in the chain from what use to unite this country to now what is dividing this country, fragmenting us into subgroups, subcultures, and subnormals. We now talk at comfortable distances all over the world, city, and street, sometimes no more than five feet from one another, when I will text a friend something completely juvenile and disposable, this is train station our society has arrived at for the moment and everyone is in a crunch of mass corpse stomping hysteria to be part of the phenonemon.

I can remember walking through that video store on more than one occasion looking for something new, hip, and cinematically edgy. Why go to the movie theater, sit amongst others, in front of an enormous screen with extremely powerful sound; when I could lay in bed, drink a beer, quietly, and if the movie sucked, turn over and go to sleep. Now, there is a Netflix app on my phone, so while someone is paying me to act productive, I can log on, browse the movie selections, and bide my time watching the latest releases, as the local strip malls begin to resemble Wild West ghost towns, store by store becoming more like abandoned movie sets where shadows, apparitions, and spirits still walk along the aisles scanning over movie titles like books in a library, where kids run around stuffing boxes of movie style candy into their pockets and where movie dorks like myself use to cull through all the previously viewed movies to find that rare gem of cinematic history which still resides somewhere in a moving box in my home. So say goodnight to the bad guy, cause your never gonna see one like me again.