disney raze they've got marketing down to a fine art. they take these classic movies everyone loves, the ones that helped shape your childhood, and they deny you access to them for years. decades, even. then they make a big show of releasing one of them on home media, letting you know it's only going to be a limited release before the movie goes "back in the vault". it allows them to charge a ridiculous amount of money for something people will be glad to shell out for, given its scarcity and sentimental value. and if the movie you're after is out of print by the time you show up, well, you can always find someone generous enough to sell you their used copy for a week's pay. one unexpected bit of common ground i shared with her was a still-strong affection for these animated films we loved as kids. we watched "oliver & company" and "the aristocats" while she leaned back on me and ashed her cigarette in a coffee mug. i felt like i was five years old again, only now i was a five-year-old in a grownup body with my hands cupping someone's breasts through the thin fabric of a thing they called a shirt. all five-year-olds in grownup bodies should be so lucky. the one she wanted most but couldn't find was "the lion king". disney had put it back in the vault. i wanted to surprise her. i found someone selling it on dvd for a pretty decent price and bought it. with a perverse sense of timing the best fiction couldn't invent, it showed up in my mailbox the day after we broke up. i chucked it in a dresser drawer and forgot about it. six years later, i'm doing some long-overdue cleaning and reorganizing when i dig "the lion king" out of the bottom of its wooden tomb, still in the bubble bag that has my address written on the front. now it's nothing but a relic from a few weeks spent trying to pry love or something like it from the mouth of indifferent animal instinct. now it's a little bit funny. it's good when you get to a place where you can laugh about the things that used to sting. 170615 ... gja Gee you can write the right things at just the right time raze. Thanks. 170616 ... raze hey, you're welcome! and thank you for the kind words. i needed to write some things that had a little more substance to them than, "here's a snapshot from a dream i had last night." sometimes it's just hard to find the things worth spinning some words around. maybe it's healthy to give the old batteries a rest and a recharge once in a while, though... 170616 what's it to you? who go blather from