Around a decade ago, I worked on a screenplay about two guys who used to work at a video store. The story was a way for me to work through some of my own unresolved feelings of a life that didn't live up to my own expectations. Of course, through the story, the character learns it's not the past that he wants to revisit, it's how he felt in the past that he misses the most.

I never could land the ending. I kept trying to make it work, but the whole project really needed to be started over and I just didn't have it in me. Plus, I had no intention on making the film, I just needed a creative outlet to work through some emotions.

Recently, I decided to adapt that screenplay into a novella. I deleted it a long time ago, but I remember the key scenes, jokes, characters, and I plugged it all into AI to help me reorganize the story and begin to re-arrange things and flesh it out. It's been an absolute blast to work on, and while it's far from done, it's lead me to confront some of those same feelings that are present in my life today.

The first thing I wrote on the internet that gained any traction at all was a series of posts called The Blockbuster Chronicles. I wrote them late one night, in a depressive state, as a way for me to archive the memories of my first job, and well... the best job I ever had. Sure, I seemed to hate it at the time, but looking back, it was a wonderful experience. A time where I first discovered myself, friends, and a sense of being in the right place.

I posted this series of blog posts sometime around 2014 and they started circulating fast. It was strange, because nothing I wrote ever really had an audience, and suddenly, something that wasn't even proof-read and was more of less just brain dumped was popping up on social media. It led me to writing some guest posts on a few websites about video stores and even inspired a somewhat popular video store memory podcast.

Similar to my script, these posts were lost until about a month ago, when I stumbled upon eight of the ten posts on The Internet Archive. Reading back through them was a wonderful walk down memory, but when looking at them from a much older mindset I saw something I didn't realize the first time around. While there were stories about opening the store, strange nights (like 9/11 when I had a gun pointed at me), and the like, but almost every chapter was based on a person or persons. I had written a collection of stories about people that worked there or shopped there. I wrote about crushes, the first openly homosexual person I ever met, people who acted as like a second mother, and grumpy people who believed in me. For many of these people, I'm sure this was just a blip in their lives. Something they don't even think about anymore, but for me, it was my world and those memories and people stay ever present in my mind even to this day.

For example, I can't see The Fifth Element without thinking about Tori, the fourteen year old girl who rented it every weekend because she had a crush on my co-worker Kenny. Or Fellowship of the Ring, that we put on in the store when it was released and a fundamentalist Christian who covered her kids ears and lost her absolute mind about playing a devil movie. I can't walk by a jewelry counter at Walmart without thinking about Juan, who managed a jewelry department at a local Walmart and worked nights at Blockbuster. I can't drive by a Popeyes without thinking about all the trade outs we did, free rentals for chicken, and how much weight I gained because of that arrangement.

I could go on and on, those couple of years really impacted my life. I guess, when I've thought back on it, I usually think about the movies, and less about the people. But now I'm realizing that so much of that time was so important to me because of the memories and experiences I had with the people I worked with, not the company I worked for.

I'm taking some of these new realizations and infusing them into the story. I'm really hoping I finish it this time, because I think in some ways I need this. I need to complete this cycle and close this loop. I recently completed a short story that's been left open for over twenty years and the relief I felt was absolutely invigorating. It was enough for me to dive right into this project once I was done, but more on that in another post, maybe.