Instead of getting dinner, I decided to write instead. Now, it's almost too late to eat anything, but I did buy soup cans from the grocery store a few hours ago...Mmm, chicken noodle with less sodium content! Oh boy!
The neighbourhood Blockbuster Video store near my house is closing. A large part of my teenage to young adult life is ending just when I consider finding a new place to live. When I asked the cashier about the closing I inserted that I was one of the first people to enter the Blockbuster store when it opened in 1995. There were many clerks, who came in went, but I was one of the constant customers that came for the candy...most of the time.
For a school project, I rented a video about the 1972 Summit Series, and when I got home I rigged two VCRs to the television, and did a half-decent editing job for my French language project about the classic series. When I rented the tape again to do some final editing, I glanced on the screen and the computer said the tape was "traced". I always wondered what that meant, and if I should look out the front window to see if men in trench coats would come to the door, haul me away into their black limousine, and take me for a ride around the city o_O Gulp...I never bothered to know what "traced" meant, and the trench coat men never came to the house.
I did rent videos from there, though...specific videos: Godzilla movies. Mind you, whenever the monster came on the screen, I dove under the couch to get away from the 'scary monsters'. With my bare feet sticking out from under the couch, my Dad would enter the room and yell for me to "stop pulling the fabric off from under there, and get out from under the couch". Years later, I noticed the GIANT zipper coming from down the back of the monsters, and since then my fear of Godzilla subsided to that of amusement at the special effects of the mid-twentieth century. I liked how grown human beings could go crazy and stomp little replicas of buildings from Tokyo, Sasebo, and Nagoya. I imagine someone put endless hours into those buildings, and railway cars, and bridges, and I can also imagine that same person crying as some transfer student from the local university in a big green bag stomped and kicked his work.
I was always a HUGE kid going to the Blockbuster store to get candy, or to play video games. I did ask the manager why MORTAL KOMBAT, which was rated M at the time, was in the video game console. She blinked, and asked "MORTAL KOMBAT is in the video game console?!" When I lost the excess weight, I went back to buy a Diet Pepsi, and another clerk asked me if I work out at the gym at the end of the strip mall. If the clerk wasn't a guy, I would probably come up with a tall, dark, and disgustingly handsome answer, but instead I told him the truth: "There is a gym at the end of this strip mall? I thought it was a dance hall!"
I'm going to miss Blockbuster, but not for any particular video, but for the people. Now, Netflix, Youtube, and other streaming sites reduce the contact customers have with the vendors who sell the films. A product of the digital immigrant age, video stores all over the continent are going out of business as digital natives stay in their caves and watch videos sent straight to their PVR or PS3 via a couple of clicks of their mouse. My experience at the Blockbuster on the corner of Mavis & Eglinton is one I will take with me for the rest of my life...or at least until I have to return it.
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