Gas hit $2.45 at my local station today. A little over two weeks ago it was $1.87. Where are the stories about gouging? Obscene profits? Peak oil? I still recall a local columnist expressing amazement that gas stations could raise the price on the stuff they already had in the tank. If you didn’t need any more proof of their perfidy, well, you were probably one of those people who worked for the Gas Combine, and hence met every other Tuesday in a suburban Perkins’ backroom to plot the ruin of civilization under the guise of a Rotarian meeting.

(He’s not a local columnist anymore.)

I was driving to get ice, because my wife had Bunco at the house. “Bunco” is an Italian word that means “hen party,” and once or twice a year it’s here at Jasperwood. This means great irritation for the dog, who now has 10 plates to check for scraps, and just as many people to command to GIVE. A few years ago the Bunco gig meant I took Natalie to Chuck E. Cheese’s, but that’s over. I’m not sure why, and I regret it. Not the pizza – that stuff is still vile – but we had fun there, and somehow it slipped off the list of things we do. Before I go into boo-hoo laments about My Baby Growing Up, she wanted to go tonight, but it was already too late. Bunco was in motion.

So I’ve been upstairs all night doing this and that. I slip downstairs and hear words bobbing up from the fugue of conversation – Fishnet, Cloth Diaper, Husband, Personal Trainer, Tequila, iPhone. Some day someone will invent a machine that records every word spoken in a room, then threads them together into a master narrative, a story that arises from the individual, disconnected conversations. At that point the short story will be dead.

Natalie was also upstairs. In the old days she would want to hang around mommy and be with mommy and make mommy’s sole night of peer-bonding impossible, which is why we went to CEC; tonight she was content to lounge in bed and design a logo for a candy company based on a Webkinz plush. Me, I’m trying to keep my head from hitting the keyboard. I did do one very cruel thing, the sort of move I should have thought about before, since I was putting the shiv to husbands I’ve never met. I went downstairs to forage through the leftovers, and there were a few plates and pans that needed washing up, so I did them.

Without being asked.

Oh, I’m a right bastard, I am.

Put daughter to bed. She was whistling the Surprise Symphony by Haydn, but couldn’t remember the name. “Russian Sailor’s Dance?” No. “Oh right that’s this.” And they she whistled the Russian Sailor’s Dance. Lest you think she marinates in a tea-and-crumpets cultural broth, she mostly listens to songs on Warrior Cats tribute vids on YouTube, so Haydn is an improvement.

“I moved stuff in my room,” she said. “I moved the dolls. They were creeping me out.”

I could understand why – they were American Girl knockoffs, and she was never ever into that.

“Too girly girl,” she explained.

“You were never a girly girl,” I said. “Although you liked Barbies. And My Little Ponies.”

“I still do. They’re cute.”

Always do; please, just a part of you, always do. “I never thought you were going to be a girly girl. But what does that mean?”

She squealed: “I like pink and lollipops and clothes and pink! Tee hee!” Then she looked around her room. Her pink-accented room. “It’s kinda girly girl.”

“It’s you,” I said. “It has good graphics.”

“Yeah.” Then she looked at her nightshirt. “But I don’t want to be a tomgirl. I have a black nightgown. But you gave it to me. And it’s a Mac T-shirt. So.”

“So. So don’t worry. Do what you want to do and never mind if it’s one thing or the other.”

She seemed to like that. I adjusted my fishnet and tugged on my diaper, and kissed her goodnight.

This article in the WSJ is fascinating & depressing – if you’re a traditionalist, perhaps, and if you define “tradition” with such elasticity that it encompasses the mall-culture of the 70s and 80s. Malls are closing. Malls are dying. Part of the problem is the Current Difficulties, of course, but there are other factors less alarming. One: neighborhoods change. As neighborhoods decline, the malls go down. To quote 10 eminent economists: duh. Two: the alternative is more attractive. Online has chipped into their sales, of course, but the “lifestyle centers” – to use the vacuous pre-crash term – are often more appealing than the sterile mall halls. I spent a night in a Phoenix-area “Lifestyle Center,” and it had all the mall stores, but it had something else: surprise. It meandered, it had corners, nooks, piazzas, neighborhoods. It was open to the elements. You may say: well, that works in Phoenix, but as it happens it was a cold rainy night in December, and it was thus the clammiest night in a mall I’d ever had. But they had a huge gas fire in one of the plazas, and I sat under an awning with a cup of coffee, more or less content. I preferred it to Fashion City, which was the architectural equivalent of the Sanitary Meat-Wrapping machine we discussed a few days ago.

I like my mall, but I have every right to do so: it’s the first. Southdale is a cultural artifact, and its current travails are a perfect reflection of the trend it begat. I don’t like the Mall of America. I like small-town enclosed malls, but only in a disinterested sense: you can stand in the middle, chart the refurbs and retrofits, find an ancient piece left over from its original incarnation, find a few local stores that decamped from downtown to be where the money was going. It’s your chance to be a sociological empath.

In the end, however, you usually end up with nothing more profound than “the Gap’s near the Sears here, but it’s by the Penneys in the other mall.” We love the malls we visited as kids and teens, and that had more to do with what we did and who we did it with than the type of structure. Kids who grow up around “Lifestyle Centers” will have the same nostalgia, and someone will make a “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” movie about them. Without the escalators. For those of us in a cold clime, we’ll always have a mall. But the paradigm established in the 70s has truly peaked and cracked, and that represents the revenge of the thing the mall replaced. The first malls were intended to be urban centers of a new sort, all the old nuisances and noises walled off. Clean, modern, climate-controlled, rational – everything cities weren’t. Now some end up as empty as the downtowns they replaced. Live long enough, and you’re guaranteed to see the next new thing arrive, thrive, and die. And then comes the next new thing, heralded by those who believe the world began yesterday.

He said, cross-eyed with exhaustion. Long day – up early for TV, no nap, this, that, and the other thing. I leave you with something I found while looking through old comics.

IRRITATED BEAR.

 

 

Later today: MORE IRRITATED BEAR. Also “100 Mysteries.” And there’s a Startribune.com column waiting for you, as well. See you soon.

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