It has finally dawned on me: I am old. Not “getting on in years” or “aging
gracefully” or any of those other “euphemisms designed to not blatantly call
someone a geezer”, I am just flat out old.
Now the random stranger on the street could run up to me, readjust his
homemade tinfoil helmet and breathlessly exclaim, “But you’re only in your
mid-thirties!” and then scamper off back into the alley that presumably spawned
him. This obviously aware yet rather insane
derelict would be technically correct. However,
I’m not talking about age in years actually lived, or not lived in my
case. (This is also different than cutting
me in half to examine the rings of aging that I’ve acquired. After all, my contents would be far messier
than any oak or maple tree so I wouldn’t recommend this method as a first
choice in determining my age.)
Did this thought about aging come upon me due to the fact
that I am steadily approaching 40? Or is
it because I’m married, have three kids, a mortgage, life insurance policies, a
steady 40 hour a week job, a lawn to maintain, a broken snowblower, and/or
anything else that falls into that getting older cliché? Is it because I’ve lost a step or two
compared to when I was a mere stripling?
Nah, I wasn’t that athletic or agile or even minimally coordinated in
the first place. Maybe it was a
different story when I was around 6 or 8 years old, but for the majority of us
it was all downhill after reaching double digits.
No, for me this revelation came thundering down while I was
in Best Buy, looking at CDs. I realized
then and there that this action was the equivalent of hiking my pants up to my
chin all the while demanding a senior discount for awful coffee that I wanted
as hot as lava. I was a doddering old
fart and it was irreversible. “Why then
and there?” you might ask if you were still reading this. Allow me to answer that with a question: have
you been in a Best Buy recently? And a
follow up question: were you ever in a Best Buy 5-10 years ago? Have you noticed quite a difference between
then and now? The CD and movie aisles of
the past were titans, taking up floor space like Stalin “liberating” Eastern
Europe. They also filled their acreage
with variety as well. I remember the days
when the music area had a jazz section, a comedy album section, and even an
actual box set section! Now the CDs are
thrown haphazardly onto whatever dingy gray racks were available. The only tenuous attachment to categorization
is the alphabet, but even that is barely followed. Unless of course Alice Cooper was in Pink
Floyd and that would explain why his greatest hits album is jammed in-between
the apparently bottomless supply of Dark
Side of the Moons.
Beyond that the selection is disastrous. Any band with a large back catalogue such as The
Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Metallica, AC/DC, and Black Sabbath all get the
shaft in the wide variety department. The same is also true for the Beatles. Wait a minute, the Beatles?! I’m definitely used to the Who not getting
the love at Best Buy, or anywhere for that matter, but the emmer-effing Beatles? That is a rather telling barometer. (However, this barometer might be due to some
cosmic karmic justice being served so the remaining Beatles can experience how
Pete Best must have felt back in 1962.) I
just never thought that I’d see the day that Barnes & Noble would have a
wide and varied assortment of albums and Best Buy would begrudgingly still keep
a few of those pathetic CDs around just in case someone wanted to browse
something that wasn’t a purple vacuum cleaner or a different purple vacuum
cleaner.
There isn’t even a real attempt to keep DVD/blu-rays
around. Sure, they devote some space to
them, but once again these red-headed media stepchildren are treated like their
CD brethren if not worse. The only
movies or TV shows available are the ones that purchasers must have bought at
least a decade ago and have been rereleased at least twice in the
meantime. However, stranger things have
happened and I won’t begrudge anyone getting their favorite Breaking Bad/The Walking Dead/The Sopranos/Sons of Anarchy/Whatever the Hell is a Supposedly Hip TV Show Now DVD sets. I just find it hard to believe at this point
in time that someone will come barreling in because they finally realized that Billy Madison is on DVD and they just
have to have it NOW! (Of course, the
movies that Best Buy overstocks would
be Adam Sandler related. Perhaps Sandler bought a majority of Best Buy
stock and demanded that from now on 1)
Push those clothes washer-dryer combos that no one really likes, 2) make sure that we hire more tattooed
clerks in an effort to look sort of relevant to the fickle times we live in,
and 3) only The Waterboy and maybe Little
Nicky will be prominently displayed all year. Eight
Crazy Nights will be out in force around Christmas, ironically.)
While in the CD area, I took a look at everyone else that was
in the media sections and guessed that the median age was about 36 years
old. This was an easy deduction on my
part because besides myself standing there, there was only me, so a head count
was not difficult. I also double checked
my age with my driver’s license and then called my wife to verify. So there I was amongst some lonely copies of
poorly recorded live Molly Hatchet CDs (for only $4.99!), and more blue
polo-shirted Best Buy employees milling around not selling anything than I
could record in just one sitting. To add
to my ever-increasing discernment that I was most definitely a duffer in that
store: I was also the only person in there sans piercings, not wearing tight hipster-douchebag
sperm-killing pants, and not concerned about my tablet/HD
TV/iPod/iPad/iDon’tCareAnymore. Then to
make matters worse, my eyes then fell upon a lone copy of the 20th
anniversary edition of Nirvana’s In Utero
album. I recognized then that I am aging
faster than milk left in the trunk of a car in Arizona in July that was now being
driven to Death Valley in order to be abandoned there after being set on fire.
I guess my generation would be one of the last that still
enjoyed handling media, whether it came in the form of VHS tapes, music
cassettes or CDs, DVDs or even blu-rays.
On the other hand, I think ours was also the first generation that
wanted everything downloadable and right now and why is it taking so long?! We
wanted movies to stream, music to upload, and books that involve batteries and
not pages. Come to think of it, is there
anything sadder than a Barnes & Noble employee hocking downloaded
books? Could their fake sales smile be
any more forced? Do they realize they
are being paid to make themselves obsolete?
Remember what happened to Blockbuster video stores that were pushing for
mailing DVDs and downloads instead of pushing brick and mortar stores? I guess all the Blockbusters moved next door
to the Hollywood Videos, Sam Goodys, and Borders stores…in hell apparently
because they sure ain’t around here anymore.
These up and coming uncombed whippersnappers really truly
won’t experience the thrill of discovering an album that you were hunting for
with the raw passion of a U.S. marshal going after a suspect that claims a
one-armed man killed his wife. They will
not realize that the real fun actually begins after you’ve purchased that disc.
Now you get to deal with the host of security devices that were incorporated
to obviously prevent the mass theft of Metallica’s Load and Reload albums. First, you have a go at attempting to unwrap
the plastic that clings to the CD with all the passion of a lonely aunt at a
family reunion. Then you attempt to remove
the sticker on top with a switchblade, then a chainsaw, then a bigger chainsaw,
and then you finally succeed by melting it with a barbecue lighter. Then you try to get past that holographic
sticker that looked like the satellite from Mystery
Science Theater that has welded the case shut. In the end you would get it opened just long
enough to quickly notice that the disc was loose in the jewel case from the get
go. This of course resulted in the disc getting horrendous scratches that look
like they came from a rabid bobcat that was attacking a reflection of itself in
the backside of Green Day’s Dookie
album. And this was a brand new album
you just bought. Ah, memories!
I realized in that Best Buy that I was a dinosaur and the
meteor that destroyed my way of thinking was already digitally uploaded into
the world. Apparently, I just ignored it
and moved on, thinking that the status quo would remain. I’m sure that fans of Super 8 film and
8-track players thought the same way back in the day. (Although c’mon 8-track guys…did you really
dig listening to Stairway to Heaven
and hearing that “chunka-chunk-whirr-chunka-wrank-chunk”
sound about 2/3rds of the way through as it switched tracks to finish? You didn’t, did you? You can be honest with me. We’re all here to grow together. And you’re welcome.)
The fact is I like owning stuff. Perhaps that is the capitalist American way
of thinking which some buffoonish radicals think is an outright evil attitude,
but I like holding the album I’m going to listen to, grasping the movie I’m
going to watch, and perusing shelves of books to read. Everything is right there in front of me, at
my fingertips whenever I want to use it.
I don’t feel that way about uploaded streaming nonsense. I think I’m buying nothing but air if I’m
buying from the cloud. It isn’t tangible
or tactile; it is an illusion of ownership, a theory that you actually “possess”
something.
This misconception can come crashing down suddenly and
without warning; especially if the company decides that they don’t want you to
have their media anymore. For instance look
at the following scenario and think if it looks out of the ordinary: Universal
Pictures might think that they haven’t earned enough revenue from Jaws (which is impossible to contemplate
but bear with me here). So they yank the
availability away, while eliminating it from streaming and also deleting it
from clouds. Universal could then wait
to release it later to earn more on a product that they created the demand for
in the first place. Sounds ridiculous,
right? Yet Disney does this very thing every
year with their “Cinderella IV: Citizens
on Patrol is going back into the Disney vault, so get it now before it is gone!” nonsense. Why wouldn’t the other studios follow suit? Perhaps with a movie or TV show or album you
happen to love/like/not mind/tolerate?
Books aren’t safe either.
Look at the debacle that occurred when Amazon.com simply removed George
Orwell’s 1984 from Kindle
owners. They were able to log right in
and take it away from people that had rightfully purchased and downloaded it. How’s that for Big Brother ironical irony? That little digital event cannot happen with
someone that owns a physical copy of 1984
or any book for that matter that is comprised of bound paper pages. Besides, unlike owning a Nook/Kindle, books
on your shelves at least give you the appearance of intelligence even if you
haven’t read them.
Did you know that paper books do not require those “hurtful
to the environment” batteries, if that’s a motivation for you, you supposed eco-lovers? Also as you will have a broken Nook/Kindle at
some point: they aren’t very biodegradable either, unlike those seemingly nasty
and terrible paper books. Real books are
also safer to take along for air travel.
After all, I don’t mind a terrorist reading a real book because odds are
I can survive a paper cut attack, but I get a little twitchy when they come on
board with something electronic-y with lots of buttons. Besides if you survive your plane crashing
and end up on an island, books can be used as a ready supply of fuel for your
signal fires. You can’t get that from a
Nook. (You also can’t dogear a
Nook. Well, let me clarify: you can’t
dogear a Nook easily.)
Speaking of crashes: What if your computer crashes and your
downloaded copies of Laverne &
Shirley are all gone? Now you have
to rebuy something intangible again and pray that it stays on your computer,
unless you get malware that destroys those shows and replaces them all with
episodes of Joanie Loves Chachi instead. Now you’re even more screwed. You could just have these shows on your shelf
and never have your wallet experience more than the initial purchase price. Furthermore you would not have to worry about
being inundated with a different but still crappy Happy Days spin-off to boot.
I’ve heard the argument that storage can be an issue when it
comes to physical media and that shelves need to be cleared of all this
nonsense. So you download everything you
listen to on an iPod and life is good, right?
But now what are you putting on those bare shelves? Do you have that many photos of wonderful
moments to stick around here, there, and everywhere? Are your friends and relatives attractive
enough to warrant spraying your home with images of them? Are you just going to have a Spartan
lifestyle that consists of your iPod, a bedroll, a dish, a bowl, a spoon, and
ramen noodles? Gosh, that does sound
fun!
Ah, that felt good to get off my chest! You know, I think I’m going to like getting
older…
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