Watching the low-resolution movies at home was fine, but the real experience was going to the store. We'd all pile into our cars from the rural exurbs and the close-in burbs and we'd drive to the corner of suburbia where they kept the media.

I can still remember the smell. Stale popcorn, industrial carpet, plastic. Did they pipe in the popcorn smell or just make it in a dingy microwave at the back out of plundered bags of Orville Redenbachers from the point-of-sale?

It was the best during the summertime, when you hadn't seen your friends from school, and you could bet that if you went to the video store at a certain time in the evening, you'd see someone you knew.

What relief from the crushing boredom of '90s adolescence?! The planned serendipity was intoxicating, addictive. Maybe you'd see your crush, or someone you hated, or someone from another school that you met one time at a basketball game. You just didn't know.

The strangest thing about the video store was how they made it seem like a movie theater with just the barest of theater like trappings. Hollywood, Blockbuster. Some fonts. The words popcorn. New releases (that were rarely new). It was like an emoticon, or an emoji: a few little details could suggest a lot. Because movies were still glamorous, still are glamorous now, actually. Everyone still thinks of Marilyn Monroe, even if they couldn't come up with her stagename. We were huffing the nostalgia of the '50s, even as everything that generation had built fell apart, institutions, infrastructure, ways of thinking. Our forefathers invented a term for the feeling, fin de siècle, and it seemed to apply, even if the creepy and creeping newness of the dot-com era provided a welcome distraction for all.

Mallrats. That's how we lived. Office Space. That's where we'd end up. Austin Powers. That's how groovy it had been. Titanic. That's how we used to love. The Matrix. Sort of a best-case scenario for one's future. Fight Club. Same.

This was our version of the great communal gatherings of the theater! This was our attenuated version of public space! We didn't even browse the objects themselves, but avatars of the cassettes. Remember? All the tapes were stored behind the counter, and you'd carry this empty box that represented the movie up to the front register and they'd pull it out of their archival cabinet and load it into a clear plastic container for you. Josh Greenberg wrote a book about the creation of the home movie industry, From Betamax to Blockbuster, and he highlights how strange that was, "In the video store, customers browsed movies, represented by boxes that contained nothing more tangible than the experience of watching a movie itself." For the industry, it was a way of helping you forget you weren't watching on the silver screen, but the 22" TV your parents bought at Walgreen's.

flickr/fanofretail

The tape-return ritual was one of life's great subroutines. It structured time because there were fees associated with being late. It put you on a schedule the second you walked out the door.