Scream of the Video Junkie

Well, being anxious about starting over at a new college and sad about a bunch of other assorted crap I won't even go into, I've decided to channel all this awfulness into something more constructive - a good-old fashioned live journal rant! Today's rant will be about something that may be bothering only me alone, but I might as well make others read about it: the death of the American video store. Most people don't seem to care, what with netflix and DVD-rentals being so much more convenient, but as someone who has spent a majority of their life in video stores it's an important issue to me, the way political issues are to people who have lives. The best video stores used to be jam-packed with all sorts of titles, from new-releases to classics, from A-list mega budget to B-grade cheese. It used to be you could walk into your favorite video store, even if you were looking for a rare, seldom-heard-of, out-of-print video (as I often was) you could most likely find it sitting proudly in it's place on a carefully arranged shelf. My favorite video store in Houston used to boast that they had every movie ever released on video to rent. They, in fact, had so many that rather than have display cases, they had to save space and print up the movie posters on cardboard cards, organized alphabetically within their genre with a call number written at the top. You would write down the numbers on a card and take it to an eager clerk who would then disappear into a vast warehouse/maze of videos and return with your selections. With DVDs the video stores that I used to love seem to be gone. Most stores, rather than keeping their old video collection and simply adding DVDs seem to chuck out their old selection completely. Rather than just simply replace the old video editions with the new DVD editions, they simply stock five million copies of the same ten or fifteen DVDs. Gone are the good ol' days when you could drive down to your favorite video store and pick up a copy of "Frankenhooker" or "From Beyond." Instead, you'll mostly be staring at five or six copies of some direct-to-video Paris Hilton movie (no, not "A Night in Paris"). Now, that may not matter much to people who have things in their lives to hang onto like religion and loved ones, but it means a lot to me, dammit! I have so little, can't I at least have a video store that promises to have a copy of "Slaughter High?" I don't care that no one except me actually rents it goddammit! I HAVE SO LITTLE AT LEAST GIVE THAT ONE THING TO ME YOU BASTARDS!!! AAAAH! OK, sorry about that. Just a minor psychotic episode. I'm fine I swear! Well, sort of. But just remember, as a dysfunctional person I'm driven by anger, I thrive in anger. Anger is what pushes me to succeed. Although once I achieve that success, I'll finally just have to...be happy. That's almost to frightening to think about. Well, until tomorrow!