The Blockbuster Chronicles: Final Thoughts and a Playlist
πΌ The Blockbuster ChroniclesI miss video stores a lot. I dream about them more often than I probably should. Sometimes it is Blockbuster, and other times it is some strange combination of every video store I ever visited, with endless aisles of VHS tapes and DVDs waiting to be discovered. I wander around looking at covers, picking things up, putting them back, completely content to have nowhere else I need to be.
As I've gotten older, I've realized that video stores was my third place. They weren't home and they weren't work or school. They were somewhere I could simply exist. I could wander the aisles without spending much money, talk about movies with people who shared my interests, or stumble across something I'd never heard of before. When video stores began disappearing, I found substitutes. I wandered the DVD sections at Best Buy and Walmart. I spent hours in used DVD stores and bookstores. Anywhere with shelves of movies could scratch the itch for a while. Eventually, though, those places started disappearing too. The shelves got smaller, stores closed, and physical media became something you ordered online instead of something you went somewhere to discover. I don't think I realized how much that bothered me.
Blockbuster certainly wasn't perfect. I've spent much of this book writing about the good memories and the things I learned while working there, but I wasn't always happy standing behind that counter. The constant focus on profits could be exhausting, customers could be rude, and there were plenty of nights when I watched the clock and couldn't wait to go home. Yet today, I'd give almost anything to put on that blue polo and work one more shift. That's the strange thing about memory. Time sands down the sharp edges. The angry customers disappear, the boring shifts get compressed into a few seconds, and what remains are the conversations, the friendships, the rows of movies stretching across the store, and that particular feeling of being young with absolutely no idea what was coming next.
For a long time, I misunderstood what I was nostalgic for. I surrounded myself with VHS tapes and DVDs. I bought old Blockbuster signs and random pieces of memorabilia on eBay. I collected things that reminded me of the 90s and early 2000s, and somewhere in the back of my mind I think I believed they might work like some sort of time machine. If I could recreate the room, find the right movie, or hold the right piece of plastic in my hands, maybe I could briefly step back into that world and become that person again.
Eventually, I realized I wasn't mourning a particular year as much as I was mourning the way I felt during it. Sure, I prefer a lot of the movies, music, and television from that period, but I don't actually want to return to 2001. There were problems then too. I was insecure, lonely at times, and still trying to figure out relationships and where I fit into the world. I worried about money, my future, and plenty of things that memory conveniently leaves out.
What I really miss is the sense of possibility I had back then. I was young enough that almost everything still seemed open to me. My life hadn't taken shape yet. There were countless versions of myself I might become, countless people I hadn't met, and countless places I hadn't gone. My biggest concern during some Blockbuster shifts was figuring out where I was going to eat on my break if the girls at Popeyes weren't doing a trade-out that night. I was still trying to figure out my place in the world when it came to girls, as you've already read, and I certainly didn't have anything resembling a long-term plan. Underneath all of that uncertainty, though, was hope. The future felt enormous.
I think that's the feeling I've been chasing all these years. The VHS tapes and Blockbuster signs were never really about movies. They were reminders of a time when every new friendship might change my life, every job felt temporary, and I could still imagine myself becoming almost anyone. Getting older changes your relationship with the future. Some possibilities disappear simply because you've chosen others. Years that once seemed endless begin moving frighteningly fast. You become more aware of what you've lost, what you didn't do, and how finite all of this really is. It becomes very easy to look backward and mistake that awareness for evidence that the best part of your life has already happened.
I don't think that's true, though. I can't go back to that Blockbuster, and even if someone rebuilt it perfectly, stocked every shelf with the same movies, and handed me a freshly washed blue polo, I wouldn't be twenty years old again when I walked through the doors. The thing I was trying to recover was never really the store. It was the person I was inside of it.
Maybe that's the lesson in all of this. I don't need to become that person again, and I don't need to recreate 2001 in my living room. What I can do is remember what that younger version of me carried with him. He was curious. He was excited by discovery. He had no idea where his life was going, but he believed there was something worth finding ahead of him.
The future may not feel as wide open as it did back then, but it isn't closed either. Maybe growing older isn't about endlessly trying to recreate the places where we once felt alive. Maybe it's about understanding what those places gave us and finding new ways to create that feeling again.
I still miss video stores, and I probably always will. I just think I'm finally beginning to understand what I've really been missing.
The Blockbuster Chronicles Playlist
Here is a playlist I put together featuring songs from this era. I can't imagine it will be of much interest to anyone who wasn't around my age at the time, but these are the songs I remember hearing while working at Blockbuster. Some were played on the tapes we had running inside the store, while others were popular songs we burned onto CDs and passed around to one another.
Listening to these songs now brings back surprisingly specific memories. Almost every one of them seems attached to a person, a shift, a car ride, or some random moment that probably didn't seem important at the time. I won't bore you with the story behind every song, but a few of them are worth mentioning:
Complicated by Avril Lavigne - The first time I heard this song was when Chelsie won Avril's CD on a local radio station call in. She was late to work that day because she had to swing by the station to pick it up. When she got there, we popped it in and jammed out to it in the store all night.
Man of Constant Sorrow by The Soggy Bottom Boys - Living in a ruralish suburb of Memphis meant we had a diverse population. Blockbuster, underestimated the demand for O Brother Where Are Thou, which was only made worse when the company got into a financial spat with Universal. New VHS tapes were often $100+ dollars, but Blockbuster bought them in bulk so they were given steeper discounts. This financial wrangling saw Universal jack the price of the VHS up to $150 and Blockbuster refused to buy more. We ended up with only three VHS tapes and it was rented out for MONTHS. Never did I experience the demand for a movie as high as that. It was pure chaos. I was offered bribes to hold the movie for people who promised to drop everything and swing by the store as soon as it came in. (No, I didn't take the bribe, but probably should have. Ha!)
Astounded by Tantric - I heard this song on the radio and could only remember the chorus. I asked all my co-workers if they knew who sung it, because I wanted to download it off Napster/Kazaa or whatever peer-to-peer I was using at the time. Megan was the one who taught me to put the lyrics into Google and usually the song will pop up which was truly revolutionary at the time. Back then, you were forced to rely on other people, the radio announcer or MTV to help you identify the song.
Soak Up the Sun by Sheryl Crow - I mentioned this in the a previous entry because this song will forever be associated with a very long weekend. I worked day shift with Deloris and that meant turning down the volume or changing out the VHS tape or it may have been DVD at that point, that featured trailers and ads was not something I could do. So for eight hours, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, Sheryl Crowe belted about Soaking up the Sun about every ten minutes. Needless to say, this is not a song I like to hear, but it has a home on this playlist.
Party Hard by Andrew WK - Andrew WK was a one hit wonder, but I'll never forget swinging by Walmart, the night the CD was released and picking up a copy while it was still in the box. Back then Walmart was open twenty-four hours, and often I'd stop after the store closed on a Monday night, so I could buy the new releases coming out that Tuesday. I was such a regular, they started cutting open the boxes, so I could reach in and grab whatever I wanted, rather it be a CD or Scarface finally released on DVD.
Sleeping in the Fire by WASP - While working at Blockbuster, Kazaa became a big deal. Suddenly, I had access not only to mp3s, but also videos. One of the videos I found on Kazaa was the music video for Sleeping in the Fire, an 80s ballad by the band WASP. I burned this music video along with a few more onto a DVD and occasionally I'd pop it in late a night during my Blockbuster shift to jam out to.