COLUMM: Season for doped up shopping has begun
Maybe it is the flu. Maybe it is the medication you are taking for the flu. Maybe it is the beer keg-sized newspaper that you find delivered on the day after Thanksgiving. The economy needs help and you wish you could, but your head is pounding in a way that makes you wish for a hangover. It’s 6 a.m. and too late to get a good spot on the bank of the trophy trout stream of shopping. So you try to go back to sleep mumbling for Ray Manzarek to stop playing that keyboard bass line to “This is the End” in your head.
Maybe this is the end when shopping is substituting for big game hunting. Sure you could have had the stuff delivered to your door; sure you could have bought it months ago at a leisurely pace, but then what kind of stories would you have to tell the kids about camping out overnight in the cold, hard parking lot and breaking trail through 200 yards of deal-driven Relief Society ladies to get that discount salad shooter. This isn’t just a trophy, it is something that will really feed the family.
So you reach for some more Robo-something, some Ibu-something and some other cold concoction that you think the label says contains titanium dioxide as an active ingredient, but that can’t be right, can it? Wasn’t one of the Terminators made out of that? But you take some of each anyway. Sleep, intoxication or some mix of the two comes quickly.
You find yourself standing in golden robes atop the alluvial fan of Christmas catalogs you’ve been receiving since July; so high you can almost look eye-to-eye with the Godzilla-sized non-Dickens ghost of Christmas Crass. This grotesque goblin is growing stronger, uglier and more omnipresent every day. You’re not sure how to stop it, but you are pretty sure you know where it lives. After accompanying it on a brief rampage of Tokyo, you and Ghostzilla are transported to the more mundane, yet vastly scarier Midwest.
You want to meditate, go to Tibet. You want to wear a big hat, go to the Vatican. If you want to see the shrine of capitalism, the den of the demon, the magnetic north of the credit card society, go to the Mall of America. This recreational shopping arena sits ironically where the Minnesota Vikings football stadium used to be. Apparently, parking for 50,000 people was the first criteria for such a mall.
The Mall of America is way beyond “more.” It is, in fact, “too much” in the same way Bette Midler used to be too much and the way Anna Nicole Smith is too much. It is Eden turned on its head, not a garden with a single temptation, but a massive arboretum of temptations with little promise of redemption. It is every catalog you’ve ever received in the mail come to life. It is enough to make Fidel Castro sell Cuba to Donald Trump. Scarier than all of that is the fact that, the ghoulish greeter tells you in that staccato tour guide voice “according to statistics compiled by the National Park Service, the Mall of America is the most visited destination for U.S. travelers.”
It’s that hazy mix of fever, sleep, cold medicine and pre-dawn NPR radio that have congealed into this nightmare. So you turn the radio alarm off at 8 a.m., swallowing the remorse of all the bargains you have missed.
“Next time,” you mutter. “Next time.”
Dennis Hinkamp is a USU employee in the Extension office. Comments can be sent to dennish@cc.usu.edu.