So today I went to my local mall in an attempt to visit the few open stores that are left and get something for the Secret Santa thing we’re doing at work. The fancy lotion & candle store there is one of the few viable businesses left in what’s basically the mall in Dawn of the Dead. A group of elderly people (people I’m almost old enough to join–almost!) meets there to get their walking exercise and a JC Penney employee actually called them “walkers” unironically.
Well I shouldn’t have gone. I keep forgetting that something always happens at this mall to make me angry. Usually it’s trying to find the fat women section — ahem, “Curvy” — at Belk’s. I swear they move it around every week to troll us fatties. This time is was the fact that despite it’s three or whatever shopping days before Christmas the mall itself wasn’t open, only the two endcap department stores and a store that sold used books (garbage–“best sellers” and Christian romance and cookbooks and crap like that, I’d been in), though apparently I could go through the main entrance–which I couldn’t find, I tried one set of doors (locked) and the next set of doors led me into some new church setup (the eventual fate of all dying malls, a church outfit, usually some evangelical or Pentecostal one with a name like “New Church of the Unity in Christ”, moves into a section of it). By that time I was sick of the place and I drove all the way to Waynesboro to the shopping center near my job, where another branch of the fancy lotion & candle place was. Then I forced myself to go grocery shopping and now I’m forcing myself to do laundry.
It’s the time of the year when just about everything is brown except evergreen plants, and they turn a sort of dull olive green. It’s beautiful in its own way, I wish there were places I could pull off the road and take proper photos, but all the roads here are designed to get you moving along to your business or home, no place for gawpers or anyone who wants to look at nature. Why do I want to take photos of that empty field with the picturesque collapsed shed and doleful beaten-up wood-post fence, what’s the matter with me, let the professionals do it, buy a Thomas Kinkaid poster if I want pretty pictures. It’s really something to feel so rejected by the landscape.