Dregs rhymes with legs and now that ZZ Top song is stuck in my head. One would have to be an idiot to misunderstand their meaning, but the exclamatory "She's got legs! She knows how to use them!" sounds way too excited a discovery for worldly rock n rollers. As if the boys in the band had recently crash-landed here from a planet of guitar wielding beardos and stub-legged or betentacled women. Suddenly, WOW, women walking and jogging and dancing and other miraculous stuff with their legs. Like shopping at the mall.
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| DotD '78 should have been the last word on consumerism, capitalism, human nature, zombies. But no, there's money to be made, chaps, and here we are in 2023 with thousands of imitators and only a handful of decent ones at that. Snyder naturally got it exactly wrong (as he usually does, hilariously) in his remake. When you have fast undead predators, dread at the mall is replaced with something like an enthusiasm for shopping. Yay! To the mall we go! Akin to watching slobs do cardio or Tae Bo for two hours. A waste of decent actors, esp. Sarah Polley. |
This Sunday I found myself in the parking lot of an indoor mall wondering if I should go in or just get fries nearby instead. A funeral procession or a murder to my left snapped me awake. Actually a group of orthodox Jewish women headed towards the entrance. An orthodox teen wheeled by on his One Wheel vehicle, pais and tzitzit rakishly flapping in his wake, one hand securing his platchige biber, swiping his phone with the other. Sci-fi gadgets on a youth dressed in his gangster zaide's old clothes. Evidence we're experiencing the dullest dystopia ever. Made me think of 80s cyberpunk time travel stories like "Mozart in Mirrorshades" or Corrupting Dr. Nice.
I probably should have mentioned I was in the ultra-orthodox Jewish part of Chicago.
To backtrack, I was there because my wife has attained a high enough rank through her school to teach taekwondo to kids at a Jewish community center in west Rogers Park. In good weather, she bikes there with the younger kid as her assistant, but it's January dregs here. Cold, ugly, hostile. It's a short drive but long enough to warrant my staying in the vicinity to drive them back. So I shopped at the mob-owned grocery store (that's according to a buddy. Sure it's possible, but it sounds like urban legend. I mean, THE MOB? What decade are we in?) and still had about 45 minutes until pick up.
So anyway there I was, choosing between bad for the body (fries) or bad for the soul (mall), and as usual I chose soul. Who needs one anyway?
Constructed around 1990 at the border between the city and a sprawling suburb, it looks like a castle keep or fortress keeping the rabble out or maybe in. I remember passing by it during construction, even then thinking shopping malls were over and good riddance to bad rubbish and all that, nothing good ever happens at the mall anyway. It's always been a terrible place but now it's haunted. Half the storefronts were empty, there were a handful of stragglers wasting time, there's a freaking dollar store. Claire's somehow persists to this day, and you can get still your ears pierced, but there's no emergency clinic nearby for your tetanus shot. Spenser's was selling shirts at the front that say "WHO ATE ALL THE P*SSY?" and "I ♥️ MILF'S!" which you'll have to tell me what the punchlines on the back say cuz I'm sure they're really funny, but I couldn't be bothered to go in and check. The few diners in the food court and the couple dads I saw waiting for their wives and kids were all portraits of suffering when there's no one around except me, the documenter of sadness. Nobody wanted to pay $8 to ride on the wheeled stuffed animals for ten minutes so the twenty-something year old cashier was just riding a pink unicorn round and round, sidesaddle - probably because he got bored of straddling it, lazy looping on the mezzanine like a bluebottle over a puddle of melted ice cream. It is a place of purgation.
I chose to go to the car and read The Passenger in the cold instead of hanging at the mall. I think I'll take the fries next time.
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