Yet Another Refugee from Livejournal

It's been nearly a month since I returned from The Trip.  I'm ready to write about something else.

How about the end of an era?  Specifically, the 25-year era of Netflix DVDs.

As you may have heard, Netflix is shutting down that part of their business.   This coming Friday, 09-29, they will ship their last DVDs.  After that, the streaming service will be the only way to get your Netflix on.

I'm one of the (only one million) last holdouts: I've kept my DVD service going until the end.  It's a sad occasion for me.  I realized weeks ago that I felt the need to grieve it in some way, and I've devised a small ritual that will be my way of doing that.

You may scoff, not thinking such an event to be a big enough deal to grieve about.  I'll postpone saying why I'm doing it anyway.  First let me tell you about the ritual itself.

Background: Netflix has also announced that for any single subscriber, the last DVD that one receives need not be returned: you get to keep it.  This was the springboard for my plan: my ritual will be watching that last DVD.

Or actually, the ritual began with choosing that last DVD.  This became a non-trivial process; I considered many candidates.

It needed to be something I would want to watch more than once.  To be sure of that, it should probably be something I've seen before.

But there was another criterion, specific to the ritual per se.  To set the right tone, it needed to be a sad movie.  (Sad, not depressing.  To me, these words are very far from meaning the same thing.  If something is sad, then it isn't depressing.)

I chose Dead Man (1995), directed by Jim Jarmusch, with Johnny Depp in the title role.  (Okay, clarification: his character is not really dead, not in our white-people sense ... until the very end.)  If you're not familiar with this film, there's a pretty good plot summary at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Man.

Reading about the movie--or, better yet, seeing it--should give you some idea of the kind of "sad" I had in mind.  In turn, this hints at why I'm not perturbed by the scoffer's saying that the end of the Netflix DVD era is not a big enough deal to grieve about.

You see, as the idea took shape, I realized that I would not be grieving only the DVD business.  To some extent, yes, but it would also stand in for other things that, in my universe, need grieving.

By the way, I'm pretty sure that this idea (that a ritual can be explicitly about one thing, but also about other things, which may not be named out loud) is nothing new; it might even be quite familiar.  To those in the ritual biz, anyway.

I don't even think that I could explicitly name all the things that I feel the need to grieve about.  But here's a hint ....

Nothing lasts forever.