There is a small business near the house that still advertises itself as a copy shop, but what’s going on? It sells newspapers, postcards, stationery, desperate gifts, headshots, and in this reinvent or die, it also serves as a collection point for endless parcel companies. While they have opened a colorful franchise alongside my portal with ‘photocopies’ on ‘Everything Back to School’ banners, I remain true to my principles of doing my part to make sure the resilient gentleman and his bustling locals hold out. And my granite is so small that when bureaucracies push, I barely go with a USB loaded to print one on each side or do this and this and this and this and this and this twice and after a couple of trips and a lottery draw from Amazon and Zalando. The computer and the copier ask me for thirty cents, and I pay shyly.
A few months ago, while I was waiting for my turn, hypnotized by Tetris, I discovered a poster on the shelves announcing that they were switching VHS to DVD, among which personalized mugs or subscriptions were kept. Of course! Where else? So, back home, I began ordering a lifetime of negatives as they were abandoned, in the bottommost boxes that I never removed, until I stumbled upon a treasure trove of videotapes with handwritten titles. : “Wedding”, “Birthday”, “Travel”. And before my muscles went cold from nostalgia, I went back to the copy shop, VHS in my hand, I swear, I even had mold. The one-man group looked at them with obvious disgust, almost without judgment, and told me that he was in quite a bit of trouble—definitely—and didn’t know when he was going to experience it. After all these years in the drawer, I was going to come for a few weeks! And I paid him. The Treasury, or who knows what bureaucracy, asks for the tapes whenever he goes to the photocopying or printing house, apologized for the delay and the troubles he had experienced until the last day, and finally gave the DVDs to me.
Coming home should be the closest thing to crashing your high school dance to ride a DeLorean.
In my defense I can say very little about the plot of the films, other than that it was another time, and the person who didn’t have a creative brother-in-law who recorded everything at dinner threw the first stone. Interrupting the shift journey because someone overwhelms Son Goku is a secondary damage that goes into plan. Summary: An unchewable toast to anyone unfamiliar with that life so far away, but it was my life.
And irrefutable proof that everything has already been invented, and videotapes already existed before Instagram. All these movies are people smiling at happy times. There are no funerals or afternoons in the ER, but there are birthday parties, year-end festivities, or Christmas dinners at grandparents’ house. We dance, we pull out a new car, we go on safari or inland for the first time. It’s the wonder of a kid yelling at your mom from the top of the slide or running until he grabs her legs. I know myself in that mother as I do not in that married woman who resigned from her position more than twenty years ago. And while all that was recorded was rosy, now all the triggers to get us divorced from the couch at home are glaring. It is not possible otherwise. With nothing we can say or do to avoid our fate. And that’s fine.
Following the guidelines of the well-divorced, he married another woman after a while, but this time blonde. I stood up, for God’s sake, I was already a repeat offender. And following the letter’s guide, he was now dating teenage girls and me assholes after his next divorce because it turned out to be a lot of trial and error.
Millions of years later he came to visit me this week and I couldn’t resist. I took out the DVDs for dessert. Every time he sees someone very young and hairy, he shouts “hey!” with a mobile camera. He was re-recording! And many “oh!” Every time she finds someone who’s not there anymore, she finally drops her goddamn cell phone and I see her giving up on the couch, just watching. There was uh, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, much more noise in their silence as the muscles of nostalgia worked their full force. And that was good. And I didn’t ask him anything because it seemed to me that nostalgia was never non-profit and there was nothing more private than what one misses; more than whether the person knows himself or not.
And on the way to the airport, I stopped at a copy shop, just in case there was an option to reproduce them, so that he could not only take them with him, but also distribute them among all his contemporaries of that life. it was once ours too, and this broad wave has given us all a splash of nostalgia, but the one-man group said that they were barely peeking from behind a trench of AliExpress boxes with too much clutter. And I believe this is true. And maybe this is the best. So I put the DVDs back where they belong, along with the videotapes: I’ll never get out of the bottom boxes.