Blockbuster

I got stuck at the office late on Friday and had to go back in early on Saturday, so the logical option for Friday night was Chinese food and a movie. I’m fairly infrequent with my movie watching, so I still appreciate the flexibility of going to Blockbuster to browse. A lot of Blockbusters have closed, but I have a good one down in El Segundo that has friendly, knowledgeable guys working there. I called ahead to make sure they had Reality Bites in stock.

“We don’t rent it anymore. We only sell it. We’re going out of business,” they told me.

When I arrived, I looked at the faces of the two Blockbuster guys behind the counter. You would have thought their hometown just had an A-bomb dropped on it. We stood there in silence for a moment.

“So this is pretty much it?” I said.

“Yeah, that’s pretty much it.”

“I think I pushed it about as far as I could," I sighed, deflated.

“Yeah, us too.”

“Sorry guys.”

“It’s ok, thanks man.”

This was about more than a Blockbuster closing; this was a chapter of life closing. Me and those Blockbuster guys had been holding on to our way of of life, but our way of life died out. If the El Segundo Blockbuster can’t make it, there is no video store in the world that can survive. And if no video store in the world can survive, then that means there are a lot of things in our lives that are going to become extinct in the upcoming years. And that makes me sad.

I’m not a believer that everything gets better. There are a lot of aspects of our culture right now that really worry me, and I find myself thinking a lot about the way things used to be, and how much better they were, just 5 or 10 years ago. And I’m only 28. I can’t imagine what my Dad must think about today’s world, a world in which you can't even rent a movie at a video store anymore.

And now I can relate again to Mike Ness:

"And I went down to my old neighborhood
The faces have all changed, there's no one there left to talk to
And the pool hall I loved as a kid... is now a seven eleven"