Video Tapes

"Jailbait", 1976, the big X-rated movie, just one of many classics available for free at Motherless. Such availability is making me think more about tossing out the bulk of my old, antiquated collection of video tapes. They take up so much closet space, and I never watch them anymore. The truth is that I do not even have a Video-Cassette Recorder to watch those tapes on. My old machine busted some time ago, but I'm not missing it. All those video cassettes cluttering up my closet are also always a potential embarrassment for anyone to see; there is not a convenience that is analogous to simply deleting your browser-history on your computer: your only option is to throw them away or not. The problem is that once those tapes are dumped in the trash, there is no getting them back. And, really, there is so much magic on those tapes. The collection was not easily put together with my meager allowance money. All of my 90s went into it.

Imagine, if you will, no longer having access to the Internet, but being able to pick up another VCR cheaply, and then having all those video tapes on hand: it would be wondrous, miraculous. It is not easy for me to throw them away. Those tapes were my sex life in the 90s, along with those old dirty paperbacks filled with the sadism and rape that one could not readily get on video in those years. No, I don't think I can let them go. I can see myself, in ten years, picking up, say, "Too Naughty to Say No" and smiling over my old revelatory experience of first watching the actress Angel when I was still a twenty-something. It means something to me. Lord knows I don't have much else that does.