Replacements

I’m all for techno-gluttony (really), but who wants to rebuild their movie collection yet again? I was lucky enough to be little more than a scrawny, uneducated youth when I got my first DVD player, and I only had to replace about 40 VHS films (admittedly still somewhat of a big deal on a middle class college students’ budget). Now there’s all this blather about HD and Blu-Ray (which sounds like lower tier mutant from one of the X-Men spinoffs) and maybe I’ll have to buy an Xbox 360 or a PS3 just to watch movies.

(Fortunately, a PS3 makes an excellent substitute for a girlfriend—convenient since, after buying two new game consoles, an appropriately elephantine flat panel television and several hundred super-quality replacement disks, there’s no way you’ll be able to properly wine and dine any of the brilliant and attractive young female urbanites you pine for as you bop down the street. The solution to this, of course, is to buy an iPod video to cage your wandering eyes. I can see a crowd of pro-natalists cringing in fear.)

I already own three copies of Reservoir Dogs (VHS, original edition, special edition). I’m about to buy the original Star Wars trilogy again. My DVD rack is full, and I don’t have much room left on top of my speakers either.

Who needs media immersion pods? In America, we build our own. And then dip out of reality for two days to binge on a full season of tricky television. We’re all little Sawyers, storing up useless stuff in desperate hopes that one day we’ll get off this insane island. But J.J. Abrams doesn’t actually know what’s going on, and neither do we.