Shopping Malls Have a Severe Case of the Sucks

Several nights ago, I received another in a long line of marketing research phone calls. Way back when, I worked in the research department of a marketing group, so chirpy voices reading the scripted questions of a telephone survey are nothing new, but I have to admit that, depending on my mood at the moment, sometimes I respond to the questions simply in an effort to mess with their heads. One person out of however many they sample with the chutzpah to tell them their questions could have been developed by five year olds who then gives them off the wall answers that don’t fit their profile. It all meshes with my perverted sense of fun at the expense of commerce.

This survey was local, however, and concerned one of the many things on my list of ‘despicable’ things – shopping malls. Now, let there be no doubt, I absolute loathe and despise mall shopping. It comes in second only to walking barefoot on crushed glass. As Ronald Reagan once said about redwood trees, thus losing any hope he had for my vote, “If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.” In my life and my sojourn across the land, of either necessity or momentary stupidity, I’ve been in many malls – and they all look the same, smell the same, contain the same mindless people, host the same tired stores, and have the same demolition derby constantly running in their parking lots.

To every question asking a ranking for enjoyable, good stores, pleasant atmosphere or whatever on a scale where ten is highest and one is lowest, I ranked every item in the negative category and suggested the guy simply imprint the legend “Malls Suck” in wide red letters across the questionnaire. When he asked which mall I preferred in my area, I couldn’t even remember the names of local malls, but I could name one on Long Island, another in New Jersey and a third in Puerto Rico which were all duplicates of each other excepting for the quantity of Spanish spoken in the Caribbean.

Only one local mall deserved mention and got a ranking of four because I visit one store there more than once a month - it contains a Barnes & Noble. The question wasn’t included, but the other thing reasonably pleasant about ‘The Summit’ is that the parking lot is in the center, with three or four side by side stores per section surrounding that lot. It means you actually walk outside to go from store to store!! The arrangement is far superior to the usual fully enclosed, stale air and all, shopping area.

See, I got spoiled. In my formative years, malls were still an idea on the drawing board, so the primary shopping foray was a visit downtown to go from store to store, depending on what one was looking for. There were about five really big department stores in the same centralized area with smaller specialty shops interspersed along the street. I remember how wonderful it was to shop the area especially at Christmas time – to come out into the cold air, and package laden, walk to the next spot on the list, often with soft snow coming down as you listened to carols and bell ringers.

Then, there were all those years I lived in New York City. There is nothing like shopping in Manhattan, be it uptown in the 60’s and 50’s or midtown with the original Macy’s, or downtown in Greenwich Village with all the artsy and esoteric shops with special appeal. No one in their right mind can equate mall shopping with shopping along Fifth Avenue, or at Bloomies, on downtown at Barney’s. Who could be satisfied with the stilted atmosphere of a mall after that?

Too bad when people decry obsesty in today’s world they don’t mention malls, those centers for kids hanging out amid fast food shops and cookie factories. Some folks can spend a half day or more wandering a Mall, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out why. Even the ‘walking clubs’ and their metered pathways are a joke, excepting for those days when the monsoon hits or you have a blizzard. The internal air clogs your nose and lungs, the sameness rots your brain, the snack food increases your butt, and the shopping wastes your money.

May as well indulge a computer addiction and buy everything on line than to waste the gas driving to a shopping mall, cruising the parking to find a slot near a door, and try force feeding yourself a phony concept fun while buying the same thing that everyone else buys because originality is a thing of the past.

Discombobulation in 3/4 time....Cha Cha Cha

Freaky-Deaky
Helter-Skelter
“The Madness of King George”
Lost in the shadows of your own mind
The inmates are in charge of the asylum
Hoist on one’s own petard

Strange to think of a couple books, a movie, and a few old adages when thoughts of our lives today rear their heads, but there it is. We’ve grown very strange, existing in a weird twilight where vampire-like, disturbed and diseased blood calls us witness the disturbing diseases of our times. There is a sad madness loose in this world and it’s being induced by our political leaders and people who should know better.

There is no sane or valid reason for us to seek perfection in anything. We are, after all, only human with age old limitations to our hearts and our brains, yet too many people today think they know best for everyone else. Too many people see themselves as authorities or ‘deciders’ on the most critical issues of living in this world, yet at the same time they deal only with the most frivolous and emotion-driven inanities of existence. Where survival of our species and our planet should be the primary deciding factors in any decision, humans get hung up on the tiny accoutrements, the unimportant and silly details, the non-essentials and the ridiculous.

First, humans create unnatural rules for all living things, and then become flummoxed, angry or confused when everything can’t fit nice and tidy into those little pigeon holes they dictate. Unable to admit there are things in this world that defy logic or easy answers, they nudge, mould, shave edges, push and frantically fight to fit square pegs into round holes, ignoring the waste of their energy and emotions on childish things.

We have a world filled with pain, the chronic excruciating pain associated with severe illness, yet when medical experts recommend something to soothe that pain, like marijuana, it is disallowed by the self-righteous who are against most things, but particularly ‘illegal’ drugs. There are medical groups specializing in pain management who can legally prescribe drugs such as oxycontin to help, but the DEA thinks such prescribing heralds drug kingpins, and thus, such clinics and the doctors involved are taken to court and convicted on drug charges. Let Anyone in Pain Suffer seems to be the name of their song – cha, cha, cha.

We have funding for stem cell research languishing. In May 2005, the House passed a bill providing such needed funding, a far wiser use of our money than is usually the case with any politician, but single handedly, Bill Frist has kept that bill off the Senate floor where passage is guaranteed because he prefers massaging the fundamentalist vote in his desire to run for President. And the man is supposedly a doctor. If it Quacks Like a Quack, It’s a Quack is the name of his song – cha, cha, cha.
Just in the last couple days, Republicans in the House have been ranting and threatening because the FBI conducted a search of Rep. William Jefferson’s (D) office in a bribery case. Their excuse for such righteous anger is that the Executive branch can’t be allowed to disregard the Constitution in any way that infringes of their rights. Ironic that it took a direct threat to their egotism to complain about something the public has been complaining about for a couple years – and that the Executive branch has been doing for about five years. The name of their song is Trample the Common Man, But Don’t Tread on Me – cha, cha, cha.

The world is in crisis. The immediate threat of environmental disaster due to warming seems to pass over most people’s heads so quickly and quietly that it doesn’t even ruffle their hair, but they know how many times Brittany Spears has mishandled her baby. The on-going threat of nuclear proliferation grows daily, especially with Iran and North Korea, yet that fades in magnitude next to the nail biting tension of who will be the next “American Idol.” Ho hum, it’s Just Another Day in Paradise. cha, cha, cha.

How long does the list need to be before most of us realize that the band is playing on? When will the bill for the piper come due? Put on your dancin’ shoes, little mamma, then grab your partner and – cha, cha, cha. We’re suckers for loud music and may soon be dancing on our own graves.

What's in a Profile? Inquiring minds want to know.

Surfing blog postings earlier today, I inadvertently clicked on the link to the writer’s profile. Accidental clicks are not new to me…I’ve accidentally been many places on the Internet, some of them fun and interesting, a few disgusting, and one a truly black nothingness (that was the night the cat got on the keyboard). Anyway, it was surprising news to me that Blogger was running a count on the number of times a profile had been viewed. Naturally, I tuned into my own immediately.

I’ve been posting my little-read blog for about eight months now, so it was shocking to see that my profile – nothing more than an inconsequential paragraph – had been viewed 109 times! “Good grief,” I mused to my self, “Why would anyone be interested? And what do they expect to see?”

That profile, or completing it, has never held much interest for me. After all, I know very well who I am and how I got to be that way. Considering that most of my readers are cyber friends who already know me rather well, I can’t imagine their curiosity causing them to click on that link, but then I started wondering what strangers would want to know and why they would think anyone would be willing to provide them with a truthful thumbnail sketch about themselves.

If any of you would be willing to provide me with clues about what you’d want to know about someone’s whose musings you’ve read, I would certainly be interested in knowing. Just leave a message in the comments section; after all, it’s free, you know. Make up a name and a password or use your own if you’re also a blogger. Elucidation is always valuable, especially to someone who is constantly curious - like me.

Unplug Your Cluttered Life and Imagine Your Dreams

We seem to have a vast number of very disgruntled people in this country. Granted, there are many very good reasons to be disgruntled: we’ve embarrassed ourselves in a fiasco built on lies in Iraq; we’re talking nonsense, rattling sabers, and convincing Russian we want another cold war over Iran; we daily assure former allies that they are correct in their assessment that we’ve lost our mind; when compared to children in other advanced countries, our kid’s test scores say they are over indulged, under educated, and disinterested brats; the cost of gasoline is as obscene as the retirement package Exxon-Mobil’s Board of Directors authorized for their CEO after their greed and shenanigans brought them the highest profits in history – at the expense of more rational people in our vanishing middle class; the powerful farm lobby, General Motors, and self-interested governmental officials are slyly pushing Ethanol as the best alternate fuel source, ignoring the fact that the energy cost needed to turn corn into fuel is the same as our present use of gasoline and not nearly as good over the long haul as sugar cane would be.

Along with the discontent, we have a vast number of people wrinkling their brows and wondering what happened to turn us into a third rate banana republic when the last time we looked we were the envy and saving grace of other places in the world. Where, they ask, did we go so wrong? How did we get in this basket that is bumping and careening so fast down this dangerous slope?

There is no question but that we are in serious trouble. There is also no question but that our situation didn’t begin overnight, but was building gradually until our apathy and stupidity helped put a group of nasty and incompetent egotists in charge of regulating our existence onto the knife edge of destruction. We may have wandered into this no-man’s land with our eyes open, but we were like somnambulists on steroids, flexing muscles, striking poses, and letting the ‘roids’ atrophy our brains while we masturbated ourselves to the tune of electronic technology and media run amok.

This nation has become a shining example of a loss of imagination.

Imagination is key to the thought process. It is also key to innovation, ingenuity, and creativity. Imagination is extremely important to the growth of children into aware and cognizant adults capable of projecting ideals, solutions, and repercussions to any actions they support or personally take. When imagination fails, complacency sets in, self-reliance disappears, and we exist in a cold, dark nothingness, easily led and manipulated by the lazy, the unscrupulous, and the fanatical.

The first and most imperative step to regaining a sense of ourselves is unplugging our television sets. The next necessary step is erasing our dependence on cell phones, i-pods music, and personal computers. All these items are not only symptoms of addiction, but are also symptomatic of a fear of being alone, self-reliant, and responsible. We must learn to admit that much of the busy-ness of our lives and the lives of our children is only that – a utilization of time better spent in other life affirming pursuits. Electronic substitutes for living camouflage the important aspects of our world – appreciation of real life friends, time to reflect, the quietude to think and analyze what happens around us. By turning off the electronic and self-created static of our lives, we can reacquaint ourselves with imagination and concentrate on our individual dreams rather than on the dreams we adopt through other people with their own agendas.

The electronic media - television - could have been a formidable source of knowledge. Instead, it became a marketing specialist’s wet dream. Commerce and commercialism are Tweedledumb and Tweedledee in the Wonderland of our unhappiness – crafty, bloated, and moronic examples of our current mentality. We have made television our babysitter of choice, allowing the illusions and slight-of-hand serial shows and soap operas to substitute for reality, many of us are addicted to ‘reality’ shows that bear no resemblance to the real world, and extreme shows exploiting and ridiculing the inane fears of adolescence to define heroism and courage. The talking heads of the electronic shell game of news dictate the lowest common denominator of interest as serious news or propaganda and repeat such empty messages ad nauseum twenty-four hours a day every day of each week. Television has become another person in the room, the elephant in the corner, the irresistible décor of the current millennium. It’s no wonder we appear to be dumber that ever before in our history, because when sprawled in front of that gigantic box, we first relinquish our taste, then we turn our brains into sponges to absorb the narcotic and phony companionship of idiocy in full color and surround sound.

We allow far too much noise in our lives. Television, i-pods, and car CD systems blare and scream while a mega bass drums and thumps, rocking even other cars waiting nearby at an intersection. Originally the word dumb meant mute. Now dumb means stupid and goes even more appropriately with the word deaf because the volume of every day noise can make ears bleed. Music, once touted as soothing the savage breast, now exerts only a primitive response, be it separation from the world or a desire to punch out or strangle other denizens in that world. We have so amplified up the sounds of our lives that we’re existing on white noise, nonsense lyrics, false messages and dissonance.

A few years ago, several well regarded musicians recorded albums that were ‘unplugged.’ It was somewhat surprising how many people suddenly recognized what sublime sounds simple instruments like a guitar and a human voice could make. If we would all unplug ourselves from electronic addictions, we might be equally surprised at how well our brains could function, at how interesting a civil conversation could be, how much we learned about our own desires and the accomplishments and dreams of our kids.

Without courage and conscious thought, we will never get out of this maze, this morass, this cage of mistrust and discontent we’ve allowed to dull and control our perceptions. It is imperative that we unplug ourselves from reliance on outside sources for all forms of entertainment and information. It is crucial that we curtail extraneous busy activities and find time to analyze the barriers we’ve erected to avoid seeing what we’ve become.

Turn off that TV. Turn off your cell phone. Lose your i-pod. Listen to the sounds of silence and reacquaint yourself with your own unique imagination. Let your mind run free and leisurely swim in the stream of consciousness that brings everything together. Unplug and discover yourself, your balance, and how much wiser your life decisions can be.