Malls really haven't changed too much since I last visited them periodically, over fifteen years ago. They're even more skewed toward a pimply demographic, brazenly so, but that's just the continuation of a trend already firmly established. To be older than, say, fifty is to basically not exist, in terms of marketing value. In this society, to age from forty to whenever you croak is to enact a series of grim rehearsals of nonexistence, culminating in that final, somewhat anticlimactic act of disappearance we call death. At each step you fade a little more, become a little less visible. American culture is ruled by aimlessly wandering groups of three to seven baggy-pantsed teenagers, who might not spend as much as their parents but whose spending patterns are analyzed and dissected with microscopic attention for indications of where the next dollar-sucking vortex of vapid consumerism is going to appear.

At the so-called international food court I drifted into a momentary fantasy of harvesting a lithe young man from the tables in front of Cinnabon for some quickie action in the last men's room stall, but then it occured to me that I'd rather have the cinnabon.

Whoever said that life is a smorgasbord either didn't realize that nobody likes smorgasbords or was being bitterly sardonic.