My Son Thinks Blockbuster is a Dinosaur (And Other Tragedies of Middle Age)

In exactly two days, I will turn 41 years old. I know this because my lower back sent me a certified letter this morning stating that it will no longer be participating in any activity more strenuous than a mild sneeze. At 40.9 years old, my body has officially transitioned from a functional human organism into a heavily depreciated 2013 Dodge Dart. I make grinding noises when I shift gears, I leak fluids when I stand up too fast, and I require constant, expensive maintenance just to keep the check engine light from blinding me.

This physical decline is not helped by my current dietary strategy. In a desperate attempt to fend off the expanding reality of middle age, I have committed myself to the keto diet. MEDICAL FACT: The keto diet is a scientifically endorsed method of tricking your body into starvation by forcing you to eat nothing but bacon, heavy cream, and vegetables that have been tortured into shapes they were never meant to hold. Last night, I ate a "pizza" where the crust was made entirely of compressed cauliflower and despair. It tasted like a wet sponge that had been lightly dusted with parmesan cheese.

But the real DREAD of turning 41 is the creeping realization that the world has fundamentally changed, and I am no longer equipped to understand it. This hit me the hardest last Friday night, when I tried to explain the concept of a "video store" to my six-year-old son, Caleb.

Caleb is a biological anomaly. He does not require sleep, food, or oxygen. He is powered entirely by kinetic energy and an endless barrage of questions. To Caleb, watching a movie is a frictionless experience. If he wants to watch a cartoon about a talking sponge, he simply screams at a plastic cylinder sitting on the television stand. "ALEXA! PLAY THE SPONGE!" he yells, and instantly, the sponge appears. It is magic. It is witchcraft. And it completely ruins the character-building agony that my generation had to endure.

I tried to explain to him how it used to be. "Caleb," I said, crouching down and immediately pulling a hamstring. "When I was your age, if we wanted to watch a movie on a Friday night, we couldn't just yell at a robot. We had to go on a quest. We had to go to a magical, brightly lit warehouse called Blockbuster Video."

Caleb looked at me like I had just told him we used to ride dinosaurs to the grocery store.

"Blockbuster was not just a store," I explained, getting deeply, passionately fired up about the historical significance of 1990s retail. "It was an arena. It was a battlefield. It was a place where dreams were made and destroyed in the span of thirty seconds."

Let me set the scene for those of you who are too young to remember. You would walk through the double glass doors, and you were instantly hit by the smell. It was a highly specific, chemically engineered aroma composed of stale carpet cleaner, artificial butter flavoring, and the sweat of panicked parents trying to find a movie that wouldn't scar their children for life.

You didn't go to Blockbuster to browse. You went with a mission. You wanted the new release. You wanted the movie everyone at the office was talking about.

You would march to the outer perimeter of the store. The New Release Wall. It stretched on for miles. Hundreds of copies of the exact same movie, all lined up in pristine, uniform rows. But here was the trick, the psychological torture that Blockbuster perfected: just because the cardboard box was on the shelf, did not mean the movie was inside.

You had to look behind the box. If you saw a white plastic case, you were golden. You had won the lottery. You were going home a hero. But if you looked behind the box and saw nothing but empty shelf space, your heart would plummet. You would frantically scan down the row. Empty. Empty. Empty.

Suddenly, you would spot it. One single white plastic case remaining at the very end of the row. But another guy—let's call him Todd—would spot it at the exact same time. Todd is wearing pleated khakis and a polo shirt. He has the dead eyes of a man who desperately needs to watch Nicolas Cage jump out of an exploding airplane to forget his mortgage.

You and Todd would lock eyes. The tension would crackle in the air. And then, it was a footrace. A brutal, middle-aged sprint across the carpet. You would throw an elbow. You would hip-check Todd into a cardboard display of Junior Mints. You would snatch that tape like it was the Holy Grail, and you would march to the register, victorious.

Caleb stared at me blankly. "What is a tape?" he asked.

"It was a heavy, rectangular brick made of black plastic," I said. "And inside, there was a magnetic ribbon that contained the movie. And if you didn't rewind the ribbon before you gave the brick back to the store, they would charge you extra money. They called it a 'Rewind Fee.' It was extortion, Caleb. Pure extortion."

I am not making this up. Blockbuster was essentially a financial institution that occasionally let you borrow movies. They made billions of dollars purely off our collective inability to remember what day it was. You would rent a movie on a Friday, and you had exactly three days to return it. If you forgot, the late fees would start accumulating at a rate that would make a loan shark blush. I personally know people who had to take out a second mortgage just to pay off the late fees on a copy of Jumanji.

But then, the world changed. A little company called Netflix came along and said, "Hey, what if we just mailed the movies to you in red envelopes, and you never had to pay a late fee?"

Blockbuster laughed. They thought it was a joke. They had thousands of stores. They had the New Release Wall. They had the artificial butter smell. Who would want to wait two days for the mailman to deliver a movie?

Fast forward a few years, and Blockbuster was dead. Obliterated. Wiped from the face of the earth, except for one lone store in Bend, Oregon, which I assume is now treated as a historical monument, like the Alamo but with more copies of Paul Blart: Mall Cop.

At first, we thought streaming was the answer. We thought it was a utopia. But now, look at us. We are drowning. To watch a single movie today, you need to subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney+, Max, Peacock, Apple TV+, and fourteen other services that all cost $15.99 a month and require a password that must contain an uppercase letter, a number, a hieroglyph, and a drop of your own blood.

You sit down on the couch at 8:00 PM. You open an app. You scroll. You look at rows and rows of thumbnails. You spend forty-five minutes deciding what to watch, and by the time you finally pick something, your keto-friendly block of cream cheese is cold, and you are too exhausted to keep your eyes open. You end up watching exactly seven minutes of a British baking show before passing out in a position that guarantees you will need to see a chiropractor on Monday.

This was my miserable reality. Until yesterday.

Yesterday, I had a revelation. A mind-altering, life-changing discovery right here in Jacksonville, Florida, that I must share with the world.

I had to take Caleb to the public library. He needed a book about bugs. Again, MEDICAL FACT: Six-year-old boys are legally required to check out books containing high-resolution photographs of horrifying, multi-legged creatures that will give you nightmares for weeks.

So, we pile into the Dodge Dart. I turn the key, pray to the mechanical gods, and we successfully navigate the perilous journey to the library.

We walk in. I am immediately shushing Caleb, who has decided that the library acoustics are perfect for practicing his velociraptor screech. We find the bug books. We grab three volumes of pure, unadulterated insect horror.

But as we were walking to the checkout desk, I saw it. Out of the corner of my eye.

A shelf. No, not just a shelf. A massive, sprawling section of the library. It was glowing with a holy, cinematic light.

It was the DVD section.

I stopped dead in my tracks. I abandoned the bug books. I walked toward the shelves like a man possessed.

There they were. Thousands of them. Neatly organized. Alphabetized. Action. Comedy. Drama. Documentaries. They had new releases. They had obscure 90s action movies. They had entire seasons of television shows.

I also realized that the Jacksonville Public Library had a section of DVDs that defied logic. There was a copy of an aerobics workout video from 1988 starring a woman in neon spandex who looked entirely too happy about doing lunges. There was a documentary about the mating habits of the North American mud turtle. There were four different copies of the movie Waterworld, sitting there like a warning from history. It was a chaotic, beautiful museum of forgotten human endeavors.

And then, I saw the most beautiful word in the English language printed on a sign above the shelves.

FREE.

I felt my heart rate accelerate. I checked over my shoulder. Surely, this was a trap. Surely, a government agent was hiding behind the reference desk, waiting to jump out and demand my credit card information.

"Dad?" Caleb asked, tugging on my pant leg. "What are those?"

"These, my son," I whispered reverently, "are DVDs. They are the shiny, flat descendants of the VHS brick. And the library is just giving them away. For free."

It was a loophole in the matrix. It was a glitch in modern capitalism. We, the taxpayers, have been quietly funding the greatest video rental store on earth, and nobody talks about it.

I went into a frenzy. I started pulling movies off the shelves. I grabbed Die Hard. I grabbed a documentary about the history of the postal service. I grabbed a beautifully restored Criterion Collection edition of a Japanese samurai film that I will absolutely fall asleep during but will look very smart sitting on my coffee table.

I was drunk on the power of physical media. I didn't have to check if my internet connection was stable. I didn't have to remember my password. I didn't have to pay $4.99 to "rent" a digital file that doesn't actually exist.

There is a specific form of psychological torture unique to the DVD era that I had completely forgotten about, but was now excited to experience again: The Looping Menu Screen. If you fall asleep while streaming a movie, the streaming service eventually asks, 'Are you still watching?' and then quietly turns itself off. It is polite. It is respectful of your slumber.

But a DVD? A DVD has no mercy. If you fall asleep during a DVD, it returns to the main menu and plays a jaunty, thirty-second clip of theme music. And it will play that clip. Over. And over. And over again. For eight straight hours. You will incorporate that music into your dreams. You will dream that you are trapped in a carnival run by maniacs, and when you finally wake up at 4:00 AM, dehydrated and disoriented on the couch, that same thirty-second clip will still be blasting from your television, mocking your aging, exhausted body. I couldn't wait.

We marched to the checkout counter. The librarian, a very nice woman who clearly did not understand the sheer gravity of the heist I was currently pulling off, scanned my library card. She scanned the bug books. She scanned my towering stack of DVDs.

"That will be due back in seven days," she said with a smile.

"And how much?" I asked, narrowing my eyes, waiting for the catch.

"It's free," she said.

"What about late fees?" I pressed, my Blockbuster trauma flaring up. "What if I bring them back late? Do you send men to my house to break my kneecaps? Do you ruin my credit score?"

She laughed. "If you return a long-overdue item in good condition, we just waive the replacement cost. Just bring them back when you're done, please."

I was stunned. No late fees. No subscription. No algorithmic recommendations telling me "Because you watched a man bake a cake, you might enjoy this gritty true-crime documentary about a serial killer."

Just me, a plastic disc, and the pure, unadulterated joy of sticking it to the streaming monopolies.

We walked out to the Dodge Dart. I placed the DVDs carefully on the passenger seat, treating them with the respect usually reserved for organ transplants.

I had won. The modern world had tried to defeat me with its endless subscriptions and its invisible money and its keto-friendly cauliflower crusts. But I had found a refuge. I had found a place where the spirit of the Friday night video store still lives on, funded completely by municipal tax dollars.

Tonight, I am not scrolling through a menu for forty-five minutes. Tonight, I am going to heat up a terrifying amount of bacon, insert a plastic disc into a machine, and watch Nicolas Cage jump out of an airplane, exactly the way the universe intended.

And if I don't return it by next Friday? That's fine. The library isn't going to hurt me. They are just happy I showed up. Blockbuster may be dead, but the dream is alive in the public library. And that, frankly, is the best birthday present a 41-year-old man could ask for.