deeplyshallow // habits feeding habits

habits feeding habits

My buddy D. drove down for the weekend with his wife and new baby, neither of whom I’d previously met. He spent most of Friday interviewing for a job at the shop that just hired me, and got a terrific offer. Before he can accept, he’s got to work out some major details (e.g. selling his home, etc). Houses here are ridiculously expensive, but he’s optimistic.

Susan and I have pretty much decided against buying in my little seaside town, because if houses in San Luis Obispo are ridiculously expensive, then house prices in Morro Bay could only be described as stroke-inducing. But we’ve agreed on one thing: when we finally buy a home, it has to have a certain number of rooms. In addition to the master bedroom, we’d both like to have office space (sharing a home office is an option), rooms for the kids we won’t be having for a little while, and even better, one room that’s entirely dedicated to movies. A home theatre that’s more than a home theatre system, I guess you could say.

This has long been one of my fantasies. Over the years I’ve doodled this room on scrap paper when bored. It used to have theatre seating, but nobody really wants that; later it evolved into a series of couches, one in front of another, with the backmost sofas on slight risers. I’ve toyed with the idea of recessed shelving for the movie collection, or the idea of running a ledge around the entire room so that you’re surrounded by movies. There will be subtle lighting (I’m a sucker for great lighting), a bar that serves up snacks, and so forth.

Lately there have been two refinements of the idea, one of which isn’t so plausible, the other of which is somewhat promising. The first idea is an alternate storage solution. Ever seen those computerized data vaults in the movies? Where at the press of a button a hydraulic arm whirrs into action, selects the item you’ve asked for, and plugs it into a drive for you? It would kick so much ass to have one of these in the home theatre, pocketed away in a glassed-in room that would light up (for ooh-and-ahh action), and dim again as the DVD roared to life. (Alternatively, a similar idea would feature a live-in movie selector — perhaps a wizened theatre usher who would nod approvingly at your selection, choose the DVD from the stacks, and even skip the menus and FBI warnings before dimming the lights and beginning the feature.) Not plausible, perhaps, but whatever.

The second idea, the one I like, is this: once the kickass home theatre has been constructed, soundproofed, furnished, equipped and decorated, it can be rented out for private movie parties. Rather than pay me for the privilege, my customers will simply purchase a movie off of my DVD wishlist. That way my obsessive movie-collecting habit will pay for itself. Of course, by the time this becomes plausible, these things might have already happened:

DVDs will be obsolete
Sadly, I will have purchased every DVD ever released (twice)
Between my compulsive movie-shopping and the construction of this home theatre, I will have driven myself into the poorhouse, losing my wife and cats and kids in the process (at which point I can make a bundle writing country songs, if country songs are still about things like that).

Speaking of which, wouldn’t it kick ass if country songs evolved with the times a little more rapidly? I mean, I know they’re all about screwed-up love affairs now, and not so much about fishing and getting hammered. (Or maybe they are.) But wouldn’t it be awesome if country singers moaned about their GPS navigation failing them and how they subsequently got lost in a bad neighborhood and got the shit kicked out of them by real cowboy types? Or if they lamented the late delivery of their MacBook from Apple? (Susan could totally write that song right now, seeing as how the MacBook I ordered for her two weeks ago has only just shipped, and according to FedEx, is still somewhere in Japan on a shelf.)