The Mall and the Bookstore

Today I went Christmas shopping at the mall, even though I went to the same mall -- and, more importantly, the bike shop and the bookstore -- yesterday and bought all of the gifts that I am going to buy for anyone. So I suppose that it is not right to say that I went Christmas shopping at the mall, but rather that I went to the mall in the company of people who were Christmas shopping. I don't know exactly what it was that I was doing, then.

The mall in Amherst, NY, particularly around Christmastime, is a danger zone for people who do not want to run into whom they know without an awful lot of advance notice. I suppose that that is the case for most malls for most people who go home for Christmas. Or "home" -- this has gotten confusing, to the point that I will say things like "Yeah, I'll be home until the weekend after New Year's, but I'm coming home that Monday". Home is a detached signifier, floating from one end of New York state to the other one. Anyway, here I am at home-ish, and I am exactly the sort of person who needs a lot of warning before he sees anyone that I know. If I go to see a movie at the movie theater, I have to have known that I was going to the movie from the time I woke up that day; if I am going to see people I know, I find it is best, for comfort reasons, to know I am going to see them at least from the time I leave the house. It's a thing. Anyway, going to the mall when I have no real reason to and without mapping out all of the possible people I might see is, on paper, a really foolish thing for me to do. But I did it anyway.

Malls and bookstores are my two favorite places to go and wander around, narrowly edging out the park, and widely edging out the park when, as now, it is really cold out. I don't ever want anything at the mall, usually; and especially, I didn't want anything when I went there today. What I suppose I wanted to do was to be at the bookstore, where I always want things, and where even more than that I enjoy just handling the merchandise. But for some reason, I was content to just wander around the mall: and I think it was because I was happy to enjoy, for a little while, the complete opposite of my attitude at the bookstore. The bookstore means plenitude: here is all that you could ever want to read, here is the whole of your reading life stretched out before you with more or less competent people on hand, usually, to give you whatever guidance you need. No one is around to show where the things are in the mall. They have people in the stores, but no mall guides. And, as I have said, they usually have nothing I want. The mall does not mean a plenitude for me; it means that by going there, with my one book I've brought to read while walking around, which I already had, that I am my own plenitude, there. Even accosted by people I know and for whom I am not ready, I remain my own little unit: the mall does not impinge on me, which is exactly what I want from it.