Bleeding Fiction

Although most of my worldly possessions are still missing somewhere between New Jersey and here, I do have my car and, now, the insurance to legally drive it. So drive it I did.

It was an errand day today, but I took the long way around everywhere I went, to try to get a feel of the place I now live. The streets are laid out in numerical order, but they don't necessarily parallel each other. In fact, I suspect that the lines of the streets cross each other at various points in space and, as most of us will know from our youths, crossing lines like that is bad.

Even still, I managed to discover that the thing that passes for a local shopping mall is a ten minute drive from my house if I take the direct route. They call it a shopping mall, but outside of the department stores, it only has one floor! And the food court is located at one end, rather than in the center. Who built this mall? Hitler? I saw malls in Romania that were larger than this.

And, to be honest, size is the primary appeal of a mall for me these days. I do most of my serious shopping online, so I do a mall visit really more for the atmosphere and the impulse-buy than anything else. As far as atmosphere goes, the larger and more complex the place is, the easier it is to lose yourself in and the closer I can come to living the mallrat life. Impulse shopping, well, size counts there, too; the larger the mall, the more likely it is to have stores that compete with each other for a better stock and the more likely it is to have something strange.

(Of course, there are three used bookstores within spitting distance of where I live and the local comic shop is effectively my back-yard neighbor. If I had X-Ray vision, I'd be looking at their racks right now. Oh! A pun! Fuckin' shoot me.)

That said, I did get a lot done today. The regular old Athlete's Foot carried my shoes, so that's a serious plus, I got a much-needed umbrella and I single-handedly kept the Best Buy running for another day. I wouldn't say that I went crazy per se. I only bought the things I needed to buy; a VCR, a microwave, a telephone and a stereo that would put polyphonic Tibetan monks to shame. It's been more than half a decade since I had even a semi-decent stereo system, so I thought I'd splurge a little.

I felt like a bomb technician when I got home and assembled this stuff, stringing wires from one device to another and from there to a third. It's the blue wire! No, the green! Watch it... watch it... DON'T DROP THE RED!!! But in the end nothing exploded and all is now ready for my viewing or listening pleasure. If only I had something to watch or listen to...