A Surreal, Existential Moment in the Movie Section at Menard’s

Liz and I were running an errand in the suburbs, and had stopped at Menard’s to pick up some garden supplies.

As we passed by a small display of movies, it gradually dawned on me that I… didn’t recognize anything at all for sale.

The longer I stared, the more I felt like I had found myself in some other dimension. These may all be “Blockbuster movies,” but they were all just alien to me.

I immediately had a flashback to 2002, when I encountered a movie poster I’d never seen before.

Ethan Hawke had a movie called “Adopt a Highway?” There was a movie called “The man who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot?” And that movie starred Sam Elliott?

Liz and I mostly just watch Netflix or Amazon Prime videos. We have a subscription to HBO, but tend to just watch the main movies that appear there.

We don’t see a lot of commercials, and very little of “regular” TV. Were these all really popular movies? Did they pass us by somehow?

I could maybe think that they didn’t do well at the box office. But these movie titles are just bringing about a huge blank space in my head. This really weirded me out a lot.

So now that I’m back home, of course I had to look up these movie trailers:

Ok, I thought watching those would make me feel better. But seeing these brings about the whole “I have no idea what this is” feeling tenfold. I’m even more weirded out now.

Related:
A Weird Sci-Fi Moment