Malls are Walkways of Perversity

Besides the bigger benefit of not having to drive,
I am so grateful that I live in a city

(actually, when I say "a city" I am really referring to "the city" meaning Manhattan,
which when said or written that way, excludes all other, as they are termed, "outer" boroughs, -

besides excluding in many instances many of the other cities in the rest of the world -
which have many of these aforementioned walkways)


in which there is really only one mall.


It is called Manhattan Mall (of course),
and it is only a few blocks from where I work, near (as I like to think of it)
the eponymously (for me) named Herald Square.

So I could frequent it, but I went to the food court once
and had a bad bowl of noodles with hideous strips of meat and salty tepid broth,
and although at the time I was angered, that one disgusting

drop-five-dollars-to-slop-a-more-than-three-quarters-full-stryofoam-noodle-bowl-
in-a-plastic-lined-metal-garbage-can- experience

saved me.

I suppose also because I worked in several malls in Phoenix and in Los Angeles
for so many years, I have little desire to risk recreating or even inadvertently
encouraging any misguided or undirected loneliness-induced behavioral tendencies

because the adverse psychological effect of going back in an environment
that brings up my late teens outweighs any latent manipulative marketing
through psychological product programming that's there.

After surmising a story a friend of mine wrote on her blog about having gone to a mall
in Los Angeles and being drawn (as she claims by the devil) into a Cinnabon,

I do wonder now though (dough!) if there is a Cinnabon in Manhattan Mall.
I know there is a Mrs. Field's connected to some brand of soft pretzels.

Oh, spending dough on dough. (Dough!)
And icing. She said it had cream cheese icing.
I never heard of cream cheese icing.
Frosting, yes. Cream cheese frosting, like on carrot cake.

I thought icing was water, confectioner' sugar and
maybe a little butter and vanilla,
but that which is frosting is something more substantial.

You would drizzle icing on a Cinnabon, wouldn't you?
- rather than spread it with frosting?
Frosting is too refined for fast food.

And Cinnastix?

There can't be much cream cheese content in the icing,
especially now that they've extended their marketing genius
to giving you an alternate
(or in exceptional circumstances, and in my friend's case)
additional opportunity for dipping your stick.

See! lots of fine opportunity for perversity of all sorts
just reading a blog about a mall with a dough-and-icing outlet.

They have something like Cinnabon in IKEA, which I have been to more times than Manhattan Mall, even though it's in New Jersey, which overall has a lonely mall-like sense to me even though you take a bus from Port Authority through an industrial wasteland to get there.

You get lost in IKEA and can't get out without going all the way downstairs through what they term the Marketplace which distinguishes it from what's called the Showplace which is where the furniture is. Not a nice thing for someone who smokes to have to deal with going downstairs through a marketplace to get out and then have to follow the arrows back through the maze of weirdly Norwegian-named wood filler furniture-held-together-with-ingenious-screws showplace to find your friend.

I suppose there are some people now living in Barbados who made fortunes off maze-like mall designs to keep people physically as well as psychologically trapped in those structures. It's actually the most perverse thing about those shopping experiences, and that they add foodstuffs to the mix makes it all the more insidious.

I wrote her later after reading her blog,

"I take it you didn't go to the mall specifically for a dough and icing distraction - or did you? It's okay if you did. You got a good story out of it. What did you do with the leftover? Is there icing on your keyboard?"

I got chocolate from a Dunkin' Donuts Boston Cream on the keypad of my Blackberry yesterday, between the letters N (which doubles as a comma) and M (which doubles as a period). I was disgusted with myself, but since the glaze (there's another form distinct from frosting or icing because it becomes hardened and shiny, and in my case brittle) kind of fell off the donut in a little hunk, I refrained, or was spared from any licking off of letters at least.

I didn't even set the device or my donut down, much less take the time to wipe my hands with a napkin emboldened with double D's (one D forward and the other D in reverse as if they are back to back fat-bellied friends) - oh, the genius of all aspects of branding!

The glaze (I guess) didn't stick - it kind of unthinkingly dropped off the donut (I am now personifying magically-marketed foodstuffs) and on to my device (which I have been saying to people is my new BFF Blackberry). I completed my chew and then blew between the N and M, but had to do so several times because the keypad is tight!

That period and comma are Best Friends Forever too! America runs on Dunkin'.

What's the cream-cheesy tagline for Cinnabon?

That is probably what prompted her mall run, although I bet it was a psychological embedding that she has no consciousness of.

I bet if they had hypnotists on the outskirts of malls, Cinnabon would be out of business,
because people are sadly hypnotized into those shopping with bad-for-you,

lucifer-conjuring- (really, don't blame him !)
not-taking-any-responsibility-for-
after-the-fact-using-of-the-notion-of-it
-being-satan-induced
food experiences.

Those of us (including you fellow Aquarian)
who are archetypal magical children

would be manning anti-marketing stands
saving the ozone from styrofoam overload,
and raking it in
because people would be giving us their dough

(we'd give a new nuance to the figurative phrase
'rolling in the dough'
by our guerrilla counteracting of the evil effects
of those who were once making money rolling it out!).

We would perform healthy hypnotics
in which people really know they were being led
into an altered as opposed to the semi-altered state
we are in when responding unwittingly to
marketing messages ingrained in our brains
that make us but for no reason why.

We would lead them into deep, but upwardly-spiraling exploratory evolutions
of their psychic realms as opposed to them getting a
downwardly-spiraling experience from
slightly-cinnamony-gooey-sugary overload
disguised into an inwardly-spiraling roll of baked dough.

We'd save them from risking their wrists from carpal tunnel,
dumping heavy (for the metacarpals) loads of half-eaten

(from latent guilt as well as salivary disgust -
much more having been spent on marketing and presentation -
to make those rolls look and smell good rather than making them
really worthwhile to finish)

sweet rolls and noodle bowls.

Yes, mall designers, IKEA planners, and Cinnabon branding specialists
are on the beach together in Barbados while I am here at 6:30 AM on a Sunday,
(still in bed at least)
fingering my BFF Blackberry,
honing my writing craft through a device connected to the
whirl'd wide web (another snare)
the N comma and M period working without fail.

I am about to Make a ruN on DuNkiN' like, because I aM AMericaN.

It's all set up perfectly -
the psychological walkway from my apartment door
to the door with a hot pink handle shaped like a big D
is pre-paved for me with psychic perversion.