TOWER RECORDS

I miss TOWER RECORDS... That's where I bought most of my four-thousand DVDs... I was in my thirties... I'd go and not talk to anyone... I detested the coffee-gray hipster employees who wore pins against this and for that...

They were a group of people who seemed as if they all slept together and didn't want to talk to anyone else, that is, customers like me who spent money like it was going out of style...

I didn't (and don't) have kids or a wife so that's where my money went... You know, most of the time at TOWER I was annoyed at the employees (and customers, I guess) and made zero contact with anyone...

But now TOWER is gone... There's no more big record store with a bevy of DVDs for me to browse through and buy new, and I miss it... I miss going there...

Actually there was one worker I knew... Her name was Mary... She was a mess... You can tell she did a lot of drugs in her youth (she was forty or so), and had that honestly that goes with it, very blunt but she was cool and not too obnoxious...

She'd been a waitress at the restaurant next door (or, across the parking lot) where me and friends'd go in the nineties... We always like her; thought she was amusing...

When she worked at TOWER we'd say hello and towards the middle of the nineties, things weren't going well for the place... The internet: you could buy songs online...

The store kept changing... The books and magazines were moved to a smaller section... And Mary, she told me, had a new job... "I now strategically place the magazines where people can buy them..."

It was kinda sad how excited she was; the same kinda thrill the people had walking aboard the Titanic, most likely...

The only difference being, I think she saw the iceberg coming...