Hoarders

I mean, nobody can get drunk and chase slatterns every night. Even in my 20's, even in environments suited to excess like Bangkok, a person just can't go out EVERY night. You end up in an early grave that way. I think there was a time in my mid-30's in Russia we were going out 3 and sometimes 4 nights a week; that took a heavy toll on everybody. (Blackouts, constant shakes, and tons of lost money being the least of it.)

So, what do I do in my free time otherwise?

Well, I like movies. I guess you could say I'm kind of a film geek. I could tell you more about zombies and Michael Meyers than you probably want to know.

When I lived in Bangkok, in the mid nineties, it was easy, because there were plenty of cheap cafes that tried to lure in customers by playing recent (and occasionally classic) movies on video. In addition, the movie theaters played movies in English fairly often, with Thai subtitles.

Korea actually has a lively cinema culture, with some great cinemas, and always played movies with subtitles. And there was the Armed Forces Korea Network, a TV channel that both played classic and recent American films and allowed me to catch up with some TV shows I liked (at that time, X-FILES, NYPD BLUE, and, uh, PARTY OF FIVE. I enjoyed watching the family of hipster doofus orphans suffer, so sue me.)

Arriving in Russia in 2000, I found my options severely curtailed. They played plenty of American films, both in the cinemas and on TV, but they were ALL dubbed badly into Russian, usually by one voice reciting everything said by men, women and children. You could kind of hear the English, though, so I suffered through it.

In 2003 I bought my first DVD player, and the price of pirated DVDs fell from $20 to $10 to $5 to about $1 - $3 by 2005. English was usually an option on most DVD's menu, and many was the Saturday or Sunday afternoon we spent drinking beer and wandering around the "book market," a parking lot full of kiosks that sold school books, old Soviet stuff, and pirated DVDs and software. Search long enough, and you could find anything -- I was always amazed at the stuff that would turn up, oddities from my childhood like TRON and CONVOY.

Alas, it closed in 2007, replaced by a huge shopping mall with a electronics and CD shop full of soulless pop music and flashing TV screen.

But that was about the time I got broadband internet and discovered that the Internet itself is kind of like the book market. . . seek and ye shall find.

Sad that the social element of going out and walking around is removed from the equation; but no matter. I filled up one 500 GB hard drive with downloaded movies, TV shows, audio books, e-books and comic books before I arrived; I've been filling up others as quickly as the poor connection here allows. My connection is not quick enough to watch movies streamed online, and things like Hulu and Netflix are blocked here, anyway. I fear, like the good old disc market in Samara, the days of downloading may be drawing to an end.

But I'll be ready, baby. I'll have everything I need already, snatched right out of the Matrix.

Sometimes I just sit and stare at all the stuff downloading; the numbers click-clocking away, the percentage moving towards 100, cheering when the speed goes up as if it were a favored stock or a good race-hose. . .