I need to go back. I can get it right this time.

As it has happened five times prior, I felt my body, or soul, or whatever being yanked through the emptiness of death. It’s as if someone has lassoed me along my midsection with a roped tied to a comically oversized anvil and then pushed said anvil into a bottomless abyss.

After a considerable amount of time hearing a loud whooshing sound rippling past me, the depths of the purest of darkness inverts upon itself. My surroundings suddenly blast my vision with a level of brightness just shy of eyeball exploding. The whooshing sound is replaced with the noise of billions of conversations happening at the same time. It grows more intense in both volume and speed, but only for a few seconds. After that, I’m back where I was a few minutes prior, staring down the barrel of a gun.

The man pointing said gun is Bradjamin or at least that’s what I think he said it was when I tried to introduce myself to him. It turns out that my new friend is not much of a conversationalist and was not interested in learning about the most recent additions to our “New Release” wall. That’s pretty disappointing as I spent most of the morning sorting all of the movies by the number of Wilhelm screams used in each one.

I didn’t have much time. Pointy Gun McGee always does a little speech before he pulls the trigger. I’ve almost got it memorized after the five times I’ve experienced this moment. There’s a lot about the Y2K computer apocalypse, Surge soda, and the REAL reason we get so many AOL discs in the mail.

Maybe, after I find my way out of this dilemma, I can hit up the library and search the internet about that last topic as it sounded especially bonkers.

Seconds were being burned as I wasted some of my time on some possible future living plans which wasn’t going to help me reach my first goal which was to survive. Quickly I recalled what happened the last five deaths.

The first one was a total surprise and my only learning was that somehow I had the ability to travel back in time and relive the moment.

In the second I thought I’d try to Jackie Chan my way out of the problem with a flurry of kicks and punches. But that approach didn’t work as I was not only incredibly clumsy but also didn’t know any actual kung fu.

Round three went a little longer than the first two as I was able to talk the guy into lowering the gun to tell me more about his “why the computers are all going to go nuts at midnight in a week and every microchip on Earth will explode” theory. He went on for a few minutes but eventually the conversation came back to how he was there to smash every computer in the store before it could scheme against humanity. With some sort of subconscious and impulsive instinct that was likely programmed into my head by corporate training videos, I threw myself in front of the big tan box and was obliterated along with it.

For the fourth round, I just gave up. He’d blather on with his demands to destroy all technology and I let him have at it. He wailed on the machinery and was about to leave when he turned around and looked me right in the eyes.

It was a stare down. We were locked and he wasn’t happy as he had just seen the flashing blue and red lights of the many police cruisers now in the video store’s parking lot. He hadn’t noticed that while he was busy sending our little store back into the Bronze Age that I had flipped over one of the phones and called 911.

But it wasn’t his gun that got me that time. One of the computers that he had almost completely destroyed had its clock battery rupture and cause a cascade of explosions that were only amplified in strength by the nearby oily bags of overpriced and most likely expired unpopped popcorn. That particular chemical reaction was so intense that I was immediately vaporized.

This last time, the fifth, I didn’t know what to do. It seemed like my doom was sealed no matter what I did. If Bradjamin didn’t take me out, something else would do it. So I decided to talk my way into joining him on his anti-computer crusade. We spend the next hour laughing and smashing anything with a microchip.

I hated every moment of it. A lot of my favorite things had microchips in them. I was only doing this to survive long enough to escape. But it felt terrible and soon the reality of my actions would hit me just as we were speeding down the freeway in his old Geo Storm sedan. We got in an argument as I tried to explain to him that this car itself probably has a microchip in it.

He didn’t like that and promptly drove us into a river.

This was it. Dennis the “Video Rental Guy” vs Bradjamin, a man who thinks that watching the leaves change color in the middle of summer sounds like a fun use of one’s time.

This time I’ll get it right.