eah, I always go after new media. Today on the train everyone was squintin’ and clickin’ (I, sniff-snuff, was reading Plato’s The Republic). But I bash the open changes we’ve seen, from Amazon rankings to cute media stunts to tie-ins to promotions and everything in between.

But even I change, even though I resist.

Was buying a mouse (for my computer, not my cat) at Best Buy the other night. They are hanging on by their fingertips (boooo, Amazon), which made me melancholy (for a box store – see – that’s part of it). But then I wandered through the shrinking DVD section. They had The Revenant and The Martian (both of which I enjoyed).

Didn’t buy them.

I have shelves of favorite movies. However, in the past few years I haven’t booted too many of them up. It’s convenient to loan them and to take them over to friends, but that’s really about it. On father’s day, I’ll fire up The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly as I always do. And I want to watch The Blue Max again sometime. But really, with that Roku box squatting under the TV like a troll under the Billy-goat’s-gruff bridge, I haven’t had the time nor need. We’re working on The Mindy Project, The 100, and just finished Better Call Saul. And Futurama and The irresponsible Captain Tylor fill out our list. The niece mentioned True Detective, and there are always the Game of Thrones pushers.

I did pre-order Rick and Morty Season 2 on disk, only because I’ve been waiting forever for it to be on Hulu and no joy there.

But that’s the thing that bugged me inside that echo-empty Best Buy; I dig in my heels against neo-Media and still it creeps up and snares me. I don’t buy every movie I enjoyed, not now. I’m coming to realize that the flood of visuals available are making it less likely that I’ll watch an old favorite again (like I used to). And old favorites are grand, if only that they speak to us as comforting friends and remind us of happier times. This on-demand world isn’t working for me; the slow failure of bookstores and literacy and movie-awareness. If everything we read and view is new, than we will always be amateurs rushing from media to media. And that’s a pity. A hundred years ago, readers could quote from their favorite works*. Now, we’ve got wiki.

But what gets me is that I, too, have changed, without realizing it. And that torques me.

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* …”Transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a droplet of water.” Well, I can still quote from my favorite.