Materialism, the root of MCARP’s diatribe about malls over on 3:40 a.m., is about getting laid.
is in part true, I suppose. But I wasn't thinking about getting laid or not getting laid when I was sort of staggering through the mall. I almost couldn't think at all.
Most of the people I saw were, I think, wandering the same way I used to on weekend afternoons. I started out with the need for some distraction, which was then refined and guided by Esquire and GQ, which I read religiously back in the day. I kept looking for shirts (which, in those days, were ostentatiously - and, thankfully, briefly - known as 'shirtings'), ties, braces, silk pocket squares and other sartorial paraphernalia that I thought would give some sense of individual identity.
(It didn't work, I guess, because I didn't stick with it. I described my physique to someone this morning as that of a cardboard tube of unbaked buttermilk biscuits that's just been popped open with a whack on the edge of the kitchen counter. Industrial Light & Magic couldn't give me the 'GQ look,' let alone Armani.)
Eventually, though, I began going to the mall purely out of reflex. Saturday afternoon... must... go... to... mall. At that point, all I was looking for was to be anesthetized against the misery of my life. I reached the point that I was a compulsive shopper, with credit card balances totaling five figures, before I finally flamed out and cratered.
And yesterday, the place was freakin' packed with people who seemed to be headed the same way.
Maybe this all seems so bleak because I remember how utterly depressed I was when I wandered malls. And obviously I'm projecting a lot of my baggage on a bunch of strangers.
3 comments:
Hmmm. I intended that to read that the part of going to the mall as you describe it that created the feelings you describe of disgust, existential angst, etc., was your reaction to the materialism around you. If I were that deep, I'd feel the same. I know I should, but I just can't. My VANITY is deep, but I'm not. Anyway, I wasn't accusing you of going to the mall because of your materialism nor was I attempting to infer that you practice a form of materialism. I was trying to say that it was materialism to which you react with horror when going to the mall. Is that as murky as possible now?
blogblah!!!
I could have phrased my response better.
What I was trying to say is that I think a lot of people in the mall were functioning at a level that's a notch or two below materialism... sort of a 'happy zombie' state where they had not even thought about why they were there... they just went because they always go.
There's a place in San Antonio called Huebner Oaks which is an upscale open air center, ie, a long crescent of shops facing a huge parking lot, which is every bit as materialistic and superficial as any other mall... but it didn't give me that awful sense of being trapped in some sort of 'marketing cavern.'
Enclosed malls freak me out a lot more than open-air ones. And a lot of it was just the noise and crowd, and I might have had the same experience in any large airport, which I also loathe.
Maybe I've become a little agoraphobic.
Or maybe it's claustrophopbic. since the enclosed malls affect me more than the open ones.
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