I miss the ritual of renting movies. Netflix/Hulu/whatever are great and I use them everyday but since we’ve gone mostly digital and made the closest thing to a video store into a vending machine we’ve lost an amazing nugget of culture. Try to remember the smell and how it was always mall-hot (cold but also uncomfrotably warm somehow) and just swim in your stupid memories for a little while. 

• going to the video store and browsing just for the sake of browsing
• making fun of the off-brand knock off movies that studios made in anticipation of big blockbusters
• pretending to not care about the Disney Vault
• walking past the porn section 25 time
• spending 45 minutes going through the middle of the store (aka the non-new-release section) to find old movies
• the ease with which you could discover an obscure film you hadn’t heard of by noticing some box art that looks weird 
• walking past the giant wall that was covered in 100 copies of the hot new release like Speed or Independence Day and noticing every one of them was gone
• rewinding or not rewinding 
• going to the video store being the first half of a date
• looking at the prepackaged cotton candy and wondering who the hell buys it
• noticing the bizarrely large number of videos starring Tim Allen 
• renting a video game that there was no way you could ever buy
• taking the movie back on time
• getting letters/calls requesting your severely overdue movie
• having to find a new video store because if you go back to the old one you’ll have to pay them $15

i wore my old 38” 

twin cannon jncos and

listened to 311 today.