The Blockbuster Chronicles: Final Thoughts and a Playlist

I miss video stores a lot. I dream about them more often than I probably should. Sometimes it is Blockbuster, and other times it is some strange combination of every video store I ever visited, with endless aisles of VHS tapes and DVDs waiting to be discovered. I wander around looking at covers, picking things up, putting them back, completely content to have nowhere else I need to be. As I've gotten older, I've realized that video stores was my third place. They weren't home and they weren't work or school. They were somewhere I could simply exist. I could wander the aisles without spending much money, talk about movies with people who shared my interests, or stumble across something I'd never heard of before. When video stores began disappearing, I found substitutes. I wandered the DVD sections at Best Buy and Walmart. I spent hours in used DVD stores and bookstores. Anywhere with shelves of movies could scratch the itch for a while. Eventually, though, those places started…