Mallsterbating

Photo is of Destiny USA, a shopping mall in Syracuse, New York formerly known as Carousel Center.

My childhood was spent in small towns across Western New York in the 1990s, during a time of seeming economic prosperity. The shining beacon of consumerism in that period was the all-holy shopping mall, the veritable consumer church.

Raised in a middle-class American family with a mother and father, two siblings, a cat, two cars, a three-bedroom house, a pool, two incomes, and a healthy dose of suburban teenage angst, there were only two escape hatches ever given to an apprehensive adolescent: drugs & the mall. As a teenager, I never indulged drugs and they would not find their way into my life until adulthood. But the mall offered emancipation from parents I didn’t know I was lucky to have, the town square for new recruits of the consumer class.

I remember sitting on mall benches opening the latest computer games, meeting my family for fast food dinner at the food court, and making out in the back of a matinee screening of The Crocodile Hunter movie. Other generations feel nostaglic for Sunday mass, but our reminscience is for the mall.

In college, I experimented with marijuana. One notable effect of the drug was the gentle euphoria I’d enjoy when recollecting a pleasant memory.

Fast forward to 2008. I’d been living in Portland, Oregon for a few months and needed clothes. I went to the Lloyd Center mall near the city center. Before I walked in, I took a few hits off my small pipe. The smell of the mall hit my olfactory receptors, nostalgic euphoria overcame me, and I was imbued with a childish wistfulness. I toured the stores I frequented in my youth: Spencer Gifts, Hot Topic, EB Games. I walked into Barnes & Noble and recounted past experiences of shopping for books with friends in high school, of sipping my first Starbucks coffee in the cafe, of loitering because there was nothing else to do.

The act of rekindling that feeling became a mild addiction. I’d go “mallsterbating” at least once a month. I’d bring my laptop so I could sit in the food court and work on projects stoned out of my mind. I’d people-watch. I’d eat shitty Chinese food and loiter on benches. I’d seek out new malls; mallsterbating in new cities was my favorite way. And, aside from the occasional coffee or lunch, I never spend a dime. Who shops in malls anymore, anyway?

I gave up my mallsterbating habit, but I’ll always remember how it served me. That I could trigger profound reminiscience of my youth with a couple tokes and a walk through a shopping mall is a testament to the virtue of simple pleasures.