prompt: bob, title: be kind, rewind in misc. flash fiction

When I was just a teen, back in the Nineties, video stores shadowed the firmaments, swarmed in great thundering waves, much as the buffalo teemed the American prairie before Columbus came along and ruined everything. Ecco Videos, Videos-To-Rol, Hollywood Videos, Victory Videos, as many names as the Inuits erroneously are said to have for snow. Oh, the joys for us teenage boys, having a five to drop on rentals at Carney’s Corner Pizza and Drug-Dealing Front, an eye toward renting heavily-edited exploitation flicks from USA Up All Night in the most unedited forms. Not only did we finally get the swearing and nudity basic-cable could not abide, the plots made more sense as well. Oh, what a time to be young and alive.

I work in the last video store in town. It’s the library as well but also the only place left to borrow movies. There’s not even a Redbox anymore, no automated disc-kiosks at all, the nearest one left is a fifteen-minute drive away. Netflix gave up mailing out DVDs too. The Lackluster Videos all converted to trampoline parks and pet stores decades ago. Our public library, however, persists.

Streaming killed all the rest. Only the non-profits could possibly afford to preserve the glories of physical media. Archives you can hold in your hands and put up on a shelves. Access to a wider world that intellectual-property holders can’t just switch off from The Cloud on a whim to claim the loss for taxes. If an insane billionaire bought up and shut down the entire internet tomorrow, something more likely each passing day, we’d suddenly be your only way to watch Bill Murray in What About Bob unless you still had that disc collecting dust in your attic. There’s something unsettling about the notion of a culture (for better or for worse) only being on tenuous loan from some robber-baron in Seattle.

Because, if you think about it, that’s what we are as well. Physical media. Whatever you believe spiritually, human consciousness is currently tethered to the complications of this meat. As long as we continue to need to use the toilet, eat and sleep, you cannot stream the human soul, either. That’s why virtual-reality’s still mere novelty and will always be as long as our flesh containers have to interact with the material planes for regular maintenance. These very songs of our souls, bound to this too-too-sullied flesh, same as film to laser-engraved plate or magnetic tape. We’re all at our core physical media, that’s beautiful and so are the discs unbound from the vast cloudy stream of reckless impermanence. We shine like the noonday sun off a DVD’s silvery back-side.

I work in the last video store in town, same as my heroes did in movies when I was a child and there’s still value in things you can actually hold onto. I can still lend you Ernest Scared Stupid this Halloween. We are here and we’re holding the line, in our actual factual non-virtual hands.