Mall Mauled

I don't do malls or shopping centres well. They assault my senses and what little sensibility this poor artist has going for him. The excess of the StupourStore, no longer a simpler grocery store, is often enough to do me in. Subjecting or submitting myself to consumer abuse is worse.


Last Thursday, because I already had the excess of a rented car in the parting lot behind the apartment building, I made myself go to the mall. Really, I was going for an even rarer thing for me, to see a movie in a movie theatre. But that not what I'm writing about today.

I feel as freak-alien as an Amish person or member of some other closed group [and I am a near-impoverished poet-artist-creator] when I'm in a shopping centre's excess of products and dazzle and conspicuous acquisition and consumption. I don't recognize the people, their shapes and sizes, the wheeled carts of mostly branded plastic crap and shinies cast-offs, knock-offs, rip-offs. Fashion, marketing of consumption-driven trends, greed, lust, envy, coveting [I sound like a bible-addict ranting this stuff]—what is it that makes all this necessary?

I can see that I am clearly not of that world, their world, even if there is some congruency. I'm not aspiring to adopt their lifestyle or to acquire those dry goods and sundries, those excesses. I don't want to acquire them and their stuff. I don't even like seeing that it's been created. But I do have to admit that PlayStation, stretch denim, remainder bins, double doubles and much more are all human creations as much as church and state, poetry and prostitution, ICBMs and drift-nets.

I am always more inclined to walk by a store than to enter. Am I a loner [a one wolf] or sociopath? I don't think so. I just don't have that type of desire. I don't want those things. I have too much art stuff already. My (mostly Canadian) literature shelved over the past quarter-century would augment most any university library collection [especially in theses days of acquisition restraint perverted by academic and scientific publications rates].

A mall is so much worse for me than storefronts along a street. The mall is dictator to it's paying tenants. The mall wants/needs as many of us as it can spiderweb catch as badly as any televangelist. Cnsumption is a faith. Not mine.

shirt(s): faded lavender T, dk blue knit
loc: conCtr
temp: -5 C
sound: CHSR, Hatchet to the Head