Skip to main content

481


It's been just under fifteen years since I did my first three-pack of Netflix DVD rentals -- The Brown Bunny (2004), La Petite Lili (2003), and The Corporation (2003) -- and with a total of 481 titles watched, paired with the resigned understanding that I will never have the time to watch the 388 titles currently in my queue, I've come to the decision that my DVD plan at Netflix will end tomorrow.

As a film lover from a rural area, Netflix in the early 00's was a godsend, and I'm sure in many ways I was their ideal customer, even if I did dial back from the 3-at-a-time plan pretty quickly. But I will say that while some of the titles I rented were watched as soon as I got home from the post office, others sat at my house for months, earning Netflix a tidy profit on my recalcitrance and sloth.

But now that I've moved to a new house, and after unpacking box after box of physical media -- some watched or played or read, some not -- it's clear that some things in life have to be put to one side. There's no room for my recliner in the new house, and there's no room for DVD's mailed to that same house, and staring out the window thinking about "the end of an era" isn't going to sit me in that chair and watch that movie any faster.

Sure, it will be weird not seeing that red envelope pop up every now and again, but at the same time, nothing matters and I'll be dead sooner than I want to be. So why wait? After all, I have plenty of stuff on Hulu and Disney+ and HBO Max and YouTube TV and, yes, Netflix to stream. Instead of a red envelope, I'll have red eyes from all that watchin', end of an era or not.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"The Silver Gun" by Robert Palmer (1983)

I mean...Urdu? Seriously, Urdu . On an already eclectic and worldly album -- Pride , from 1983 -- "The Silver Gun" closes a chapter in Robert Palmer's career by singing a song about a horse in a language spoken daily by over 100 million people. The liquid bass line and propulsive electronics set out a bedrock for Palmer to ping phrasings rather out of place in Western music, askew astride even the peripatetic minimalism of the rest of the record. Somehow, in the middle of Michigan's Appalachia, I had this on vinyl a few years before the CD era officially commenced. It was an album of effort -- even the cover, a pointillism-and-bronze work, had Palmer's head barely above the water -- but the stitches didn't show to my pre-adolescent eyes and ears. In a career marked by zigs and zags, Pride and "The Silver Gun" were most certainly Other, and for a kid that felt like he didn't belong much of anywhere, it was nice to have those discrete feeling...
Post a Comment
Read more

"I'll Drive You Home"

Upon reflection, I’ve had a fortunate life in the area of work. As a freshly minted teenager, I would visit Evergreen Park Grocery and dream of someday working there like my father did, and at the age of 14, I got $2/hour to live out that dream, such as it was. From there, I yearned to try other occupations, from record stores to teaching, and I’d be chuffed to tell Young Erick that both of those things happened in due course. ( Oh, and Young Erick, one of them got you to meet David Bowie, and one of them got you to own houses and cars, so I’ll let you ponder on which one was better. ) I even got to DJ a bit here and there, and while it never hit the heights of a professional radio gig, it was certainly better than the summer I played preset cassettes on my boom box for a nerd camp dance while my unrequited crush stayed in her room. What I never crossed off my professional life list was acting, either regular or voice, but while I still yearn for that big breakthrough -- seriously, ask...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ready For College?

Infographic by College Scholarships.org
3 comments
Read more