This is the time of year when the population of the United States appears to suddenly multiply tenfold, and you can't make simple plans without considering the millions of people suddenly milling about and clogging everything up with their bothersome three-dimensionality. We were at a mall and I was stunned anew at how little thought most people give to the composition of their faces. It seems people under 20 in particular haven't yet learned that one's face must be arranged for public consumption at least as thoughtfully as one chooses one's clothes or grooms oneself. Faces don't just happen. What's the point of a teenage girl troweling on an inch-thick layer of whorish makeup presumably for the purpose of sexual attractiveness if she's then going to shuffle listlessly around the mall bearing the dullard look of having just that moment woken up from a decade-long coma? Are there Karen Ann Quinlan fetishists lurking outside Hot Topic? People shambled by me wearing the slackjawed, glassy expressions that suggest extremely recent, extremely ordinary orgasms, the lethargic blankness that is the aftermath of rote task-like masturbation. Not even the reverberations of euphoria, simply the mild relief of having scratched a tediously predictable itch.