Menlo Park Mall 5/17/08

This pretty little place is dead for a Friday, not quite vacuous but unseasonably emptied of the groomed loathing droves grumbling all by their loan sums. Reader I ask you: where does a buttressed institution fall on a scale from irreproachable to retro-ironically permissible? Let's all agree that the coastal Chattering Classes anoint soothsayers to finesse the zeitgeist-est, most frequently updated hive mind in history. This clandestine straight-legged electoral college is my most sacred scapegoat. I live right and exact in a composed, beatific shade apart from their harrowing gaze, fresh for less than $99.95. You might catch me perusing middlebrow boutiques without so much as a viable wish list, then I'm sinking into a jingo-jangle popcorn shoot 'em up film festival at the tacky-floored cineplex odeon.

Unsinged by glaring plasma telescreens and their phoned-in sanctimony, I do my thing. To the cursedly un-chic firstborn son of famously charitable parents, the shopping mall was a revolting, stirring  idea. I had to get there, I had to, just to pull skeezers and freakazoids because I didn't know any better. I really didn't -- ages before the city built an oddly divisive off-ramp for the torrid garden of outlets abutting IKEA and oozing UEZ wiles to ensnare winterwear lusting New Yorkers, Eastwick's commercial district was the same old tragicomic bombed out shithole you forgot was there, or anywhere. Livingston, Short Hills, and Paramus  lined up to sucker punch Elizabeth right in the solar plexus where Broad and Morris stuck it to the the train tracks so from the 70s on, anyone asking about shopping in Midtown might as well have hailed from Neptune.

Sorry, Ira, but you and I will never commiserate over the loss of the openly discriminatory Howard Johnson's! What's that Nunzio, you pray for the day Bamberger's is roused from its dirt nap? Fellas, I can't tell you jack about brave Local 41 or the superiority of dovetailed furniture. The fuck I know about the hardiness of  Singer sewing machines or the genteel charms of the Belcher-Ogden mansion? I'm always talking about skins all the time. Brand new bitches in lip-smacking flavors, citrus els and Ballantine Ale for the road, boosting 'Lo in faded imitation of our Brooklyn-based betters, and what else? A whole lot of looking and not touching, getting cussed out by dropout security, racking cassingles as if shit mattered, and mostly silent wishing for invisibility and gluttony to cross paths on the same day and stay there (never happened).

Which brings me to here and now. Chase your space age polymer science fair special improvement block grant renewal initiatives amusement sparks back into the rotten core if you think it'll make a difference. Menlo Park is where the real wizardry been happened, though. I'm wounded -- both of my folks went back to the essence within a year of each other -- but I'm holding a piece of the rock that they scrambled plus I got a chip on my shoulder now. In their absence an impulse buy seems like a perfectly permissible dose of self-medication, so here's to the have-knots. The headlines today are banshees of subpriminal minded slasher gore, white collars soaking wet, misappropriate behaviors exposed across the boards. I'm not trying to live large amidst anyone's misfortune but this big barren holodeck better be my oyster today.

If only it were all so simple. The cash burns upon re-entry into the plastic money clip but the decision is stuck in two decades of retrograde window shopping. Nothing to show for it and now I can't get a witness to the bragging rights. I could snag every quasi-vibrator in Brookstone for my girl plus a few sprockets at the Sony Store and still titillate the Armenian housewives lounging in the food court in their dimmer-switch equipped pink and purple nylon jogging ensembles, but to what end? A Puerto Rock in a Lake Placid top (kids used to shoot each other over that shit) salutes me before ducking into Build-A-Bear with his Dippin Dots addicted daughter; I can only wonder where his lootcakes are coming from. I'm the sole patron in the goddamned As Seen On TV Store aside from an Abercrombie pinoy in scuffed Timbs but the solar-powered Jupiter Jacks and fishing rod pens  just aren't the panaceas they're made out to be.

So I buy some batteries from a sales rep that sat next to me at graduation, gently shoot down his attempt to sell me a Blackberry, and bounce.