They never told me that the candle-buyer rabbithole, candlehole, goes so deep. It's November. I've exhausted whatever caramel-apple-cinnamon-spice-expletive candles I had laying around and was ready to move on. The vibes! All to chase the vibes; the vibes you're supposed to feel during the fall, and now winter, and on and on, candle after candle on the shelf of TJ Maxx regurgitating the same hashtag cozy sweater weather profiles you see everywhere else. It had to get weird. I was going crazy. And like a sick animal that starts to recklessly eat things it knows are not food, I began just idly searching for "weird" candles. I wanted the booger-flavored jelly bean of candles. I wanted the Burger King Rugrats Movie scratch-n-sniff board of candles, and I thought I had found it with Video Store. That's not to say I thought Video Store would smell bad, but that it would have to be so inimitably unique that to not smell it was to never smell anything like it short of busting down the door of the old Sunset Video and taking a deep breath. I was right. This candle lives and breathes 6:30pm trips to the video store where you were allowed to pick out ONE Super Nintendo game (your brother cried if you didn't pick Primal Rage) and one movie (mom said you can't watch The Exorcist in her house) to keep you busy for the rest of the night. Maybe because you were so short, so close to the ground, you remember how the carpet smelled. Shoe sweat, spilled popcorn from the counter, something vaguely clean but also not something you'd want to touch your hand to. It's as familiar as it is strange and it charms you with the balance. I like to burn it while I play video games - no Super Nintendo this time, but the vibes are immaculate.
