A Morbid Daydream

Recently, it has been snowing here. Which is entirely unusual. Generally speaking, it might snow, at most, once a year here. And when I say that recently it has been snowing, that is to say that there have been several snow events with lots of ice and no complete melt in between. I officially live in a white winter land (for now anyway), and the cold bites my more exposed bits to the bone – my Californian’s-wardrobe-clad ankles, for example.

I have about an eight block walk from the bus stop to the office every morning. And in the middle of that walk there is a mall which, miraculously, at twenty to eight, is already partially open. Of late, I’ve taken to cheating by walking through the mall to the opposite corner, effectively cutting through a whole block while soaking in some heat.

One morning last week, I heaved open the heavy and grand glass door and was met with a blast of warmth. I skirted around the hoard of caffeine junkies, red-nosed and impatiently queued in front of the Starbucks kiosk, which seems to be the only thing open at this hour. The rest of the halls are almost disturbingly quiet, save for a few resourceful homeless men taking advantage of a free heated room. They shuffle around the shiny marble floors with unlit cigarettes hanging limply out of their mouths and tired, crinkly eyes passively surveying the palace.

As my footsteps echoed in the deserted hall, I listened to the cheery piano renditions of Christmas songs playing over the PA, watched the forty-foot red and gold ribbons flutter in the atrium at the whim of the industrial strength heat vents, and thought about the costs that must be incurred in running the operation. Surely at a later hour shoppers would abound, but at that time there was naught but a Starbucks to offset the undoubtedly huge sum of resources required to maintain this scientifically controlled shopping environment. I thought about the economic crisis of late, and of the environmental crisis of late, and how endless growth is impossible. We must, unless physics as we know it is to be overturned, bow to the truth of finite resources, and one day plateau in our growth. We can either do this voluntarily and gracefully (if we are careful) or fall like the Roman Empire. How the growth halts is our choice, that it halts is not.

And so I started to imagine what this consumer haven will look like when all is said and done. When we realize (or are forced to realize) that we can no longer support our voracious appetites for Stuff.

Will it be like Water World? Will someone one day stumble upon this mall in a deep sea diving suit, the once smooth floors rough and encrusted with barnacles? Will this mall meet the same fate as the daintily ornamented Titanic, becoming a home to ghoulish fish?

Or will the halls be dark and dank and damp, home to gargantuan spider webs and mold colonies. Dust turned to grime and the luster gone from all that once shone with a million sale stickers. Will the progeny of this man enter as explorer, with a headlamp casting a cone of dusted light into the oppressively thick air? Will bugs scuttle and a lone bat flap its wings to evade the blinding incandescence, evoking the Foley track of a mummy film?

I wonder…