By the mid-1980s, VHS tapes had become a vast new medium for distributing movies and TV shows. Imagine, if you can, a time before reruns. Sifting through the wreckage tells so much about the freakish speed with which the very act of consumption in our modern age is evolving. The very last of its line, situated in Bend, Oregon, has been the source of many paeans in the press and, as we recently reported, has apparently inspired its own beer. Half a lifetime later, Blockbuster Video is a punchline. Promising your kids a trip there was like dangling a carrot on a stick in front of a horse, the bargaining chip that must have seen hours of chores to completion. (They did not-you have to do the Facility all over again.) A Saturday night shift would see me behind that complicated register system checking out any number of my high school classmates and silently judging their pedestrian viewing choices. Legions of suburban parents brought the kids along to rent newfangled DVDs and the N64 cartridges they desperately hoped still had their GoldenEye progress. As a lad of 17 (you needed to be old enough to see R-rated movies in order to rent them out, you see), I donned the blue-and-yellow polo. I realized, with mounting terror, that it’s 2018, that the fetuses being carried to term by some of the rudest customers during my short-lived tenure working for Blockbuster as a teenager in 2001 are now human beings who are mailing in their Selective Service paperwork. When Captain Marvel crashed to Earth in her latest trailer, her impact crater needed the proper era-appropriate sight gag to make me think, “Oh, it’s the ’90s!” and also “I know that thing! That’s a thing I know!” Yet I feel twice my age, because every new announcement in the entertainment industry that is transparently conspiring to make me feel nostalgic just ends up making me feel ancient.

I am not that old, okay? I’ll be 35 this year.

Death by consumption