I'm no lover of the mall ...

"I came down from the misty mountains,
and I got lost on the human highway." -- Rebecca Frazier.

My beloved sent me into the mall today for something, so I went, but it is not a place I love to linger.


We humans evolved to feel the contours of the earth beneath our feet -- the spongy moss, the forest humus, the ups and downs of slopes and plains, the occasional stone or thorn that reminds us to tread lightly.

We are meant to hear the song of birds, the whir and buzz of insects and the rush of the wind.

But this place -- this place is a gaudy coffin. Walking on these polished tiles will flatten your arches -- it's not what your feet were meant to do. Canned music is a poor replacement for what human ears were designed to hear.

We need food, clothing, shelter -- everything else is trinkets and toys. You can get food here, slapped on a plastic plate, served up by strangers for a price. The clothing they sell wouldn't last a day in the wilderness.

This place has no soul, though it tries through noise and ads and a cacophony of peddlers selling vapor cigarettes and bamboo pillows and other trash, to distract you from discovering that fact. It's all flash and color and fakery -- perfume on a corpse.