Shopping Mall Hell

It’s a typical Saturday morning, and you wake up hung over like any other weekend. You desperately need some strong coffee and gallons of water. You slowly gather the energy to get out of the bed and head into the bathroom. After you cleanse yourself, you stumble over to your closet to find an attire that would disguise your undead self whilst you enjoy your cup of coffee among the mortals. To your surprise, you have no clean clothes. Well, you do, obviously, but all the clean pieces of clothing you own look like they were worn by your grandfather. And to be honest, chicks don’t dig the war hero act no more. Looks like you need to update your wardrobe mister!

You decide you have to go shopping. Which you hate to do. However, you promise to yourself you won’t have coffee until you have bought at least one new item of clothing. It’s a motivation technique. Kind of like when your father bribed you with tons of chocolate, if you were to attend your first day at elementary school. You now remember that you never got the promised cocoa sweetness, which also makes you doubt you’ll get your coffee. Strange how your father’s betrayal makes you doubt your own honesty. Freud would surely have some interesting theories about this.

A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do, so you drive yourself to the local shopping mall in pursuit of some fine tailoring. Your first disappointment strikes you the second you turn into the mall’s garage. All the parking spots are taken, so many people honking and yelling and what not… It’s almost like they are all too eager to piss away all their money as soon as possible. You drive around a bit with an approximate speed of one meter per decade. You finally find a space. It is far from the entrance, but you don’t care. You smoke a cigarette on your way to the door.

You are finally inside. There are literally thousands of people just marching around you like these annoying ants. You walk around for a while. As soon as you enter the first store you find yourself surrounded by pinkish colours, women’s undergarments, shiny objects and the smell of a meadow on a warm spring afternoon. Clearly, you don’t belong here. So, you cruise around this maze of racks in the hope you ever find some male clothing; or a way out, whichever you come across first. You find the men’s section somewhere in the far corner, of course. The selection is modest, to say the least: a couple of »different« pairs of jeans, two sweaters, a gangster hoodie in three different colors… they have nothing you’d ever want to wear. You leave the store.

While you are searching for the next store where you might have more luck, the most terrifying thing happens. You run into an old friend. This is the stuff that nightmares are made of. It makes you sick to your stomach. Now you have to stand there in the crowd, acting all nice and polite, smiling and nodding. And the conversation always has the same outline. It’s like you are in this bizarre burlesque show, and you were handed an idiotic script to which very little improvisation in allowed.

“Hey, long time no see. What brings you here?” this guy says, sticking strictly to his lines.

“Oh, nothing much. I’m just browsing for some ageing prostitutes and a few grams of prime South American white powder. And you?”

“Oh yeah? Cool. Look, I bought this sweater,” he continues, not even noticing that I have deviated from the script a bit.

“You do realise that it’s pink and has I cry when I masturbate written on the back, right?”

“Yeah, but I got it on sale. It was like 50% off, man!”

“Wow, sweet deal, bro.”

“Anyways I’ve got to run. We need to meet for some coffee soon. I’ll call you, ok?”

“Sure. Sure you will.”

You are now officially sick of this place. You will never find anything for yourself here. You don’t belong here. Everything around you makes you physically ill. You don’t even want that cup of coffee any more. You need to go home before you get the urge to violently murder someone. Shopping mall should be eternally erased from your vocabulary. From now on you shop online!