Have I told you about my movie collection? I didn?t think so. And I bet you are surprised that I have a movie collection, non?

Actually, I?m not surprised that you?re surprised. If you?ll recall, I was a veritable luddite when it came to CDs. Oh wait, you can?t recall can you? So let me just give you the snapshot version.

When CDs first arrived on the scene, I was living in my baby brother?s condo in Cambridge. My baby brother (we?ll call him Mookie) spent his freshman year of college worshipping at the altar of geekdom and only left the computer lab to pursue inebriation and fornication (I?m only guessing about that second part as he and I are close but we are Yankees after all). Thing is, I think his major might?ve been history or Greek mythology but it certainly wasn?t How to Be a Hacker in two easy semesters and as a result, he failed every class he had been signed up for but failed to attend.

My dad wasn?t too pleased with Mookie and told him to shape up or ship out. So at the tender age of 18 Mookie left his pretty, liberal arts campus and found an apartment in Queens, New York. Within a day of arriving, Mookie had some kind of techie job (hey, he sucked up all the geek genes in the family, it?s not my fault I don?t know how to describe what he did) with a civil engineering/architecture firm in Manhattan. Life was good for Mookie.

That is, until about a year and a half into the job when the owner told Mookie that coming in at 4 or 5 pm and working until 2 or 3 am was no longer acceptable. The people in the office needed computer help early in the morning and Mookie needed to be there. Oh, and the motorcycle boots and grunge t-shirts weren?t cutting it either.

So, if you were Mookie, what would you do? Here you have no college degree yet by the blessed angels of fate you have landed a fabulous job pulling down the big bucks and all you have to do is splurge $10 on an alarm clock and exchange the boots for some hush puppies. No biggie, right?

Yeah. I believe the exchange went something like:

Owner: You need to be here by 9 am every day.

Mookie: I?m not seeing that movie.

Owner: You need to be here by 9am every day or I?m going to have to fire you.

Mookie: So fire me.

Those darn kids. So full of their immortality. Mookie enjoyed his city life until the money ran out and then packed his knapsack and headed to Cambridge because that?s where our big brother (we?ll call him Big Head) was living at the time.

Mookie rented a room in a house on Arlington Street and Big Head would bring Mookie food from the Harvard dining halls. Within a week, Mookie had landed a job folding shirts and ringing the cash register at Banana Republic. At least this is what I am told. As I never actually witnessed it, I find it hard to imagine any retail-clothing manager (outside of perhaps Harley-Davidson couture) hiring Mookie to sell clothes. But who am I to mess with legend?

By day, he was a mild-mannered sales guy helping people choose between kiwi linen or cantaloupe cotton khakis, but at night, his inner geek was unleashed and Mookie continued his hacking ways. (Needless to say, the parents were most concerned at this turn of events as this is before the golden age of the 90?s when geeks were cherished and revered. Yes, people this is before Al Gore invented the internet!)

One day in the check-out line of a grocery store (things had obviously progressed by this point if Mookie was actually buying his own groceries) as he stood paging through a computer magazine, a guy behind Mookie struck up a conversation about whatever the techie, geek-a-zoid cover story was. And, a great friendship was born.

Bob (I don?t have to change his name because it really was Bob and there?s only a zillion Bobs in this world so I feel pretty safe he won?t find me) was an MIT grad working at some super high-tech software company. He also had a condo with three bedrooms because his job paid that kind of money and he was the kind of guy who invested his money in real estate. He was also an incredibly boring, please-don?t-let-me-get-stuck next-to-him-at-a-dinner-party, sort-of dick, but who am I to cast aspersion on the man who set my baby brother on his path?

Cause not only did Mookie move into Bob?s amazing Cambridge condo, Bob got Mookie a job at the super high-tech software company.

And oh my god. I did it AGAIN. How is it I sit down to tell the simplest damn thing?SIMPLE, I tell you?and find myself in the never ending post?

*sigh*

The story of my movie collection will have to be continued . . .

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