At the Maul

This afternoon I went to the Mall of America in pursuit of souvenirs to bring my friends in Ukraine. At Minnesota-Ah, which I believe is a single-location store, I spent so much money on Chinese-made Minnesota-themed goods that the cashier gave me a free notepad. Umm, score?

The Mall of America is one of the most garish monuments to consumerism in this country, and even before I got all persnickety about chain stores I hated going there. What I hate most about The Mall is not its insane size or its fluorescent lighting or the crush of out-of-town rubberneckers or even the nonstop shouts of terror and joy that originate at the indooor rollercoaster and echo throughout all 2.5 million square feet of Megamall. No, what I hate most about the Mall of America is how I feel when I'm there: greedy and obsessed. The desire to spend money I don't have on shit I couldn't possibly need is almost painful. Things I never knew I wanted become, suddenly, almost impossible to live without. Will buying this cable-knit sweater cape make me a happier and hipper person? YOU'RE DAMN RIGHT IT WILL.

One of my favorite books is White Noise by Don DeLillo. When I'm at The Mall, or any mall, this excerpt always comes to mind:

When times are bad, people feel compelled to overeat. Blacksmith is full of obese adults and children, baggy-pantsed, short-legged, waddling. They struggle to emerge from compact cars; they don sweatsuits and run in families across the landscape; they walk down the street with food in their faces; they eat in stores, cars, parking lots, on bus lines and movie lines, under the stately trees. Only the elderly seem exempt from the fever of eating. If they are sometimes absent from their own words, they are also slim and healthy-looking, the women carefully groomed, the men purposeful and well dressed, selecting shopping cars from the line outside the supermarket.

The fever of eating, the fever of consuming. Whatever you call it, it's a sickness.