Best Buy

 I have told this story before: Back when I was co-managing a book warehouse, some hippies from the great Northwest came by to tour our warehouse. They were hoping to pick up some tips on how to pack and ship books. At the time, we scoffed at their notion that books could be sold over this newfangled thing called Al Gore's Internet. A few years later, I did not scoff when I received an Amazon shipment shrink-wrapped to a carboard flat, just like we had showed them. At this point, our funky Berkeley-bred employee-owned book distributor had gone out of business. 

Another story I have told here before: In keeping with a tradition of April Fool's pranks on my mother I hacked into her Netflix queue and put a number of odd films in, including a couple in Russian. I waited a month or so before asking how she was enjoying her latest flurry of movies. She responded with a slightly agitated confession that she could not remember putting any of those titles on her list. We laughed at the funny joke I had played on her, or at least that's how I want to remember it. Then I helped her piece together the list she had before I started messing it up. 

All of this dropped me into the Crimson Permanent Assurance featurette at the beginning of Monty Python's Meaning of Life. An executive from the Very Big Corporation of America reminds his minions, "Which brings us once again to the urgent realization of just how much there is still left to own." This was my way of distilling my feelings regarding Netflix engulfing and devouring HBO and Warner Brothers. 

My mother no longer receives envelopes with DVDs in them, whether by her own choosing or through machinations of her troublesome son. Amazon continues to sell books, but their shipping methods have evolved slightly since I gave them the heads-up. A world that once cast off the idea of giant monopolies is fast becoming one enormous corporation run by people ever further removed from the actual product that they provide. The goofy hippies who showed up at our warehouse not so very long ago are certainly now vested in the beast I unwittingly supported, and though I cancelled my Netflix subscription, I still have an account with HBO Max. Or not Max. I can't keep track.  

All I know is that one more hotel on Park Place and I won't be able to afford to watch TV or read a book anymore.