.	"Not that crowded," I said to the clerk. "I thought the joint would packed today. Especially with prices like these." "I know!" she said. "It’s the first time we put ornaments on half-price before Christmas." "Been slow all day?" "Yes," she said, scanning a plate that said SANTA’S COOKIES. It had a matching glass for milk. "It’s the terrorist alert." "What? Really?" "Mm-hmm. The other stores around down aren’t down, but we are. Because of the name, you know." She gestured to the Mall beyond, the great roaring thing outside the store's doors. "Would you like to open an account and get ten percent off?" When they built the Mall of America and gave it that chest-thumping name, no one ever thought that would make it a likely target. No one would have understood what you meant if you suggested the name might make the place a tempting target. In 1993 they scanned the horizon for hostiles, and the verdict was unanimous: history is history. Let's make some money! The MOA was quiet. I’d expected it to be packed, but traffic was sparse. The mood wasn’t tense, which you can take as a sign of Indominable American Resoluteness or the general cluelessness of the patrons, the majority of which seemed to be Modern Youts. It is every generation’s duty to ridicule the music and fashion of the generations that follow, but I am happy to live in an age when I know my judgments are not colored by creeping codgerism but empirical truth. Today, for example, I saw a kid I went to junior high school with – and by that I mean I saw a note-for-note version of the nightmare styles of 1973. Leather choker. Big mop of curly untamed hair. Burnt-umber T-shirt hanging over baggy jeans. Unkempt and goofy. We had an excuse for looking like that back then; we were part of the general decline of the culture as a whole, and fashion and style in particular. It wasn’t a race to the bottom; more like a shuffle. We’ve had 30 years to study these fashions, and the results are conclusive: they suck. They don’t make anyone look good. They are particularly injurious to someone whose face is dotted with the Vesuvian boils of adolescence. I know it’s a played out meme, but please: we need "80s Eye for the 70s guy. Someone shave these mutts and put ‘em in Ray-bans and Izod just so they realize there are alternatives to looking like a roadie for the Foghat “Fool For the City” tour. It’s odd how this look meshes with the other modern requirement - a jacket bulky enough to be the pelt of the Michelin Man. It's all so unconvincing. The baseball cap with the brim turned to the popular position, the slit-eyed glance, the vulpine lope – weak and comical creatures. And the Van Dyke moustaches! Guys. Look. There are two mods available to the Van Dyke wearer: Mephistopheles, or the tart-tongued epicure. The Van Dyke does not go with a knit cap pulled down to one’s eyebrows anymore than a handlebar moustache goes with a yarmulke. That’s how it is. Sorry. Anyway. I bought a Barbie. Gnat has wanted one for some time now. So down to FAO Schwartz to the giant Barbie room . . . hello, no FAO Schwartz. They left the mall as part of their “hurtling headfirst into bankruptcy” program, and I’m not entirely sad. The store had a big clock that sang the Official FAO Schwartz song over and over and over again; a year after my last visit I can still recall it. Welcome to our world! Welcome to our world! Welcome to our world of TOYS! I asked the clerk how they keep from killing themselves, or one another. “You get used to it,” the clerk said. I didn’t know if she meant the song or the knifings in the breakroom. So, up to KB Toys, which is also poised on the cusp of corporate dissolution. Not that many Barbies, but enough. I was going to get Gnat the Malibu Barbie, since it was a reissue of the 1971 original. I we are to accept her into our home I’d like one with some sort of retro cachet. Unfortunately this one was not a real Barbie, but a collectible Barbie for 14 and up. You there! Do not play with the toy! Step away from the original packaging! I considered a Barbie with a Magic Castle (Disclaimer: playset is not magical, and Mattel is not responsible for any attempts by your child to engage in necromancy) but we have a My Little Pony castle coming on Christmas Eve, so we’re pretty well castled up for the season. There was a Barbie Fashion Closet kit, with 3498452 pieces of small plastic, but I knew who’d clean that up every day: Me. As it is we fight the daily battle to get all the Pocket Polly stuff back in the box, and the idea of introducing another scale to this mix seemed misguided. Oh, I could decree that Barbie isthe upstairs doll, and the Pocket Pollys are the basement playroom dolls, but one would migrate to the other in a week. So I got her Barbie on a Real Working Jetski, partly because Barbie’s wearing a neoprene wetsuit that doesn’t look as stupid as the other fashions. At least she hasn’t gone totally crack-whore like the Bratz line. I pray that toy burns out before Gnat gets close to tweenery. Then something for me: a Krispy Kreme coffee mug. I tell you, the world is a better place for Krispy Kreme. Never mind the perfection of the doughnut itself – no mean feat, although they have spoiled me; having eaten one fresh I can never buy one that’s sold in a C-store or a Target. Sitting in a KK store with fresh coffee and a fresh glazed: the American secular sacrament. But they’ve nailed the retro style like no other franchise – probably because they have a 30s vibe, which is unexplored territory. If there had never been any 50s nostalgia, and suddenly a new company called McDonald’s started building stores that looked like their original outlets (Complete with Spee-Dee, the early mascot) all the clever trend-whores would be flocking to McDs and exalting the product’s unique American virtues, etc. Related case in point: Johnny Rockets. There used to be one in my neighborhood in Uptown, and I ate there once a week. I liked it. They think they’re a 50s joint, but they’re not. It’s all white enamel and red stools. Late 20s, mid thirties. It looks like the old White Tower / White Castle chains, where the whiteness meant purity, and “purity” meant you wouldn’t heave up your burger in an hour because it was made of Tijuana nag-meat. There’s a Johnny Rockets on the uppermost level of the Mall of America. I had supper there tonight. It was good. When I was done I turned around and finished my coffee looking out over Camp Snoopy, the theme park in the center of the Mall. It was dim; they hadn’t turned the big lights on yet. Seemed odd. It didn’t look like a good target, really. It lacks the closed spaces that appeal to suicide bombers. Idle thoughts on an Orange Christmas. They don’t even feel odd anymore. But I have to admit that this Christmas feels more nervous than the last, for obvious reasons. The Christmas of 01 had a throbbing undercurrent of dread; last year we were waiting for the big Iraqi Boot to drop, but there hadn’t been any attacks along the lines of 9/11, and the Afghan campaign wasn’t as hot as it had been as the year began. We weren’t totally unclenched, but no one really expected to come across a guy in the foodcourt bespeckled with smallpox lesions coughing on everyone. It was a limbo year. Now We Are Orange, as Mr. Milne might have put it, and it’s unnerving. And we’re guaranteed dissatisfaction – if something happens, well, who knows where that leads. Like it or not, know it or not, we’ve always been about five days from a complete bout of transglobal nastiness since 9/11. It all depends on the provocation. But if nothing happens we may never learn what they stopped. Who knows. Either we look back at the days of Orange with the same remote interest we have today when we see ration stickers in a Bugs Bunny commercial – or the idea of gradiations of concern will strike us a luxury, a contrivance, a flimsy thing that marked the interregnum between the day the war began and the day it flared hot coast to coast. I’m betting on the former. The worst rarely happens. Something just as bad often comes along, but it’s not what we foresaw or worried about. Then we learn that a short period of coping can be preferable to a long period of fearing. It will end, one way or another. But there won’t be any signing of papers on carrier decks; nothing that tidy. No Times Square parties. It began as a long slow subterranean process where the murderers gather and bond, and the end will be slow and constant and maddeningly indistinct. Imagine boxing gloves unraveling the strands of a thick wet rope; that’s the next ten years. It won’t make sense all the time. The narrative will drift. In 2031 the BBC will put out a 22 hour documentary on the War, and our children will think we all lived in an age of constant peril and heroism. We will have to remind them that peril and heroism was reserved for those volunteered for a full ration of both. Most of us saw the war on TV. If we felt it at all, it was the pang we got when consulted our 401(k) statements. The stores were full of things; meat and sugar for everyone. The vast majority of Americans hardly felt the war at all – and while that may have been a blessing, it didn’t feel altogether right. There was something about Orange that said we should do something, and we had no idea what that might be. Me, I went shopping. There aren’t any tin drives. No one’s collecting scrap rubber. We’re just waiting to see what happens, and if nothing happens then we ease down from Orange and move along. When I left the Mall tonight I saw one TV in Nordstrom’s tuned to CNN: uh oh . . . but I could tell from a distance that nothing had happened; there would have been some angry red graphic element to indicate Breaking News. Be still my throbbing heart. I got in the car and drove home, thinking: don’t think so much. Go home. Put a log on the fire. Scratch the dog. Hide the presents. Wrap the Barbie. Prep the dough for Santa’s reward. Channel 806 on the dish plays Christmas music; fire it up. Last year you bought those mulling spices and an infusion ball with a candy cane handle at Williams-Sonoma; half price! Use them. Light the candles you bought as decorative geegaws; they have wicks for a reason, you know. What happens, happens. It’s not like Gnat will notice. Santa she expects; Santa she’ll get. Whatever happens won’t stop us from going to church or going to the party afterwards or throwing open the door to greet Grandpa on Christmas day. It’s going to be a good Christmas. It’ll be her best Christmas ever, as all the saccharine specials have it. Proof? I’ll supply it tomorrow. Until then, Merry Christmas to all! Peace; crossed fingers, good will, and hope. See you Christmas day. The MOA was quiet. I’d expected it to be packed, but traffic was sparse. The mood wasn’t tense, which you can take as a sign of Indominable American Resoluteness or the general cluelessness of the patrons, the majority of which seemed to be Modern Youts. It is every generation’s duty to ridicule the music and fashion of the generations that follow, but I am happy to live in an age when I know my judgments are not colored by creeping codgerism but empirical truth. Today, for example, I saw a kid I went to junior high school with – and by that I mean I saw a note-for-note version of the nightmare styles of 1973. Leather choker. Big mop of curly untamed hair. Burnt-umber T-shirt hanging over baggy jeans. Unkempt and goofy. We had an excuse for looking like that back then; we were part of the general decline of the culture as a whole, and fashion and style in particular. It wasn’t a race to the bottom; more like a shuffle. We’ve had 30 years to study these fashions, and the results are conclusive: they suck. They don’t make anyone look good. They are particularly injurious to someone whose face is dotted with the Vesuvian boils of adolescence. I know it’s a played out meme, but please: we need "80s Eye for the 70s guy. Someone shave these mutts and put ‘em in Ray-bans and Izod just so they realize there are alternatives to looking like a roadie for the Foghat “Fool For the City” tour. It’s odd how this look meshes with the other modern requirement - a jacket bulky enough to be the pelt of the Michelin Man. It's all so unconvincing. The baseball cap with the brim turned to the popular position, the slit-eyed glance, the vulpine lope – weak and comical creatures. And the Van Dyke moustaches! Guys. Look. There are two mods available to the Van Dyke wearer: Mephistopheles, or the tart-tongued epicure. The Van Dyke does not go with a knit cap pulled down to one’s eyebrows anymore than a handlebar moustache goes with a yarmulke. That’s how it is. Sorry. Anyway. I bought a Barbie. Gnat has wanted one for some time now. So down to FAO Schwartz to the giant Barbie room . . . hello, no FAO Schwartz. They left the mall as part of their “hurtling headfirst into bankruptcy” program, and I’m not entirely sad. The store had a big clock that sang the Official FAO Schwartz song over and over and over again; a year after my last visit I can still recall it. Welcome to our world! Welcome to our world! Welcome to our world of TOYS! I asked the clerk how they keep from killing themselves, or one another. “You get used to it,” the clerk said. I didn’t know if she meant the song or the knifings in the breakroom. So, up to KB Toys, which is also poised on the cusp of corporate dissolution. Not that many Barbies, but enough. I was going to get Gnat the Malibu Barbie, since it was a reissue of the 1971 original. I we are to accept her into our home I’d like one with some sort of retro cachet. Unfortunately this one was not a real Barbie, but a collectible Barbie for 14 and up. You there! Do not play with the toy! Step away from the original packaging! I considered a Barbie with a Magic Castle (Disclaimer: playset is not magical, and Mattel is not responsible for any attempts by your child to engage in necromancy) but we have a My Little Pony castle coming on Christmas Eve, so we’re pretty well castled up for the season. There was a Barbie Fashion Closet kit, with 3498452 pieces of small plastic, but I knew who’d clean that up every day: Me. As it is we fight the daily battle to get all the Pocket Polly stuff back in the box, and the idea of introducing another scale to this mix seemed misguided. Oh, I could decree that Barbie isthe upstairs doll, and the Pocket Pollys are the basement playroom dolls, but one would migrate to the other in a week. So I got her Barbie on a Real Working Jetski, partly because Barbie’s wearing a neoprene wetsuit that doesn’t look as stupid as the other fashions. At least she hasn’t gone totally crack-whore like the Bratz line. I pray that toy burns out before Gnat gets close to tweenery. Then something for me: a Krispy Kreme coffee mug. I tell you, the world is a better place for Krispy Kreme. Never mind the perfection of the doughnut itself – no mean feat, although they have spoiled me; having eaten one fresh I can never buy one that’s sold in a C-store or a Target. Sitting in a KK store with fresh coffee and a fresh glazed: the American secular sacrament. But they’ve nailed the retro style like no other franchise – probably because they have a 30s vibe, which is unexplored territory. If there had never been any 50s nostalgia, and suddenly a new company called McDonald’s started building stores that looked like their original outlets (Complete with Spee-Dee, the early mascot) all the clever trend-whores would be flocking to McDs and exalting the product’s unique American virtues, etc. Related case in point: Johnny Rockets. There used to be one in my neighborhood in Uptown, and I ate there once a week. I liked it. They think they’re a 50s joint, but they’re not. It’s all white enamel and red stools. Late 20s, mid thirties. It looks like the old White Tower / White Castle chains, where the whiteness meant purity, and “purity” meant you wouldn’t heave up your burger in an hour because it was made of Tijuana nag-meat. There’s a Johnny Rockets on the uppermost level of the Mall of America. I had supper there tonight. It was good. When I was done I turned around and finished my coffee looking out over Camp Snoopy, the theme park in the center of the Mall. It was dim; they hadn’t turned the big lights on yet. Seemed odd. It didn’t look like a good target, really. It lacks the closed spaces that appeal to suicide bombers. Idle thoughts on an Orange Christmas. They don’t even feel odd anymore. But I have to admit that this Christmas feels more nervous than the last, for obvious reasons. The Christmas of 01 had a throbbing undercurrent of dread; last year we were waiting for the big Iraqi Boot to drop, but there hadn’t been any attacks along the lines of 9/11, and the Afghan campaign wasn’t as hot as it had been as the year began. We weren’t totally unclenched, but no one really expected to come across a guy in the foodcourt bespeckled with smallpox lesions coughing on everyone. It was a limbo year. Now We Are Orange, as Mr. Milne might have put it, and it’s unnerving. And we’re guaranteed dissatisfaction – if something happens, well, who knows where that leads. Like it or not, know it or not, we’ve always been about five days from a complete bout of transglobal nastiness since 9/11. It all depends on the provocation. But if nothing happens we may never learn what they stopped. Who knows. Either we look back at the days of Orange with the same remote interest we have today when we see ration stickers in a Bugs Bunny commercial – or the idea of gradiations of concern will strike us a luxury, a contrivance, a flimsy thing that marked the interregnum between the day the war began and the day it flared hot coast to coast. I’m betting on the former. The worst rarely happens. Something just as bad often comes along, but it’s not what we foresaw or worried about. Then we learn that a short period of coping can be preferable to a long period of fearing. It will end, one way or another. But there won’t be any signing of papers on carrier decks; nothing that tidy. No Times Square parties. It began as a long slow subterranean process where the murderers gather and bond, and the end will be slow and constant and maddeningly indistinct. Imagine boxing gloves unraveling the strands of a thick wet rope; that’s the next ten years. It won’t make sense all the time. The narrative will drift. In 2031 the BBC will put out a 22 hour documentary on the War, and our children will think we all lived in an age of constant peril and heroism. We will have to remind them that peril and heroism was reserved for those volunteered for a full ration of both. Most of us saw the war on TV. If we felt it at all, it was the pang we got when consulted our 401(k) statements. The stores were full of things; meat and sugar for everyone. The vast majority of Americans hardly felt the war at all – and while that may have been a blessing, it didn’t feel altogether right. There was something about Orange that said we should do something, and we had no idea what that might be. Me, I went shopping. There aren’t any tin drives. No one’s collecting scrap rubber. We’re just waiting to see what happens, and if nothing happens then we ease down from Orange and move along. When I left the Mall tonight I saw one TV in Nordstrom’s tuned to CNN: uh oh . . . but I could tell from a distance that nothing had happened; there would have been some angry red graphic element to indicate Breaking News. Be still my throbbing heart. I got in the car and drove home, thinking: don’t think so much. Go home. Put a log on the fire. Scratch the dog. Hide the presents. Wrap the Barbie. Prep the dough for Santa’s reward. Channel 806 on the dish plays Christmas music; fire it up. Last year you bought those mulling spices and an infusion ball with a candy cane handle at Williams-Sonoma; half price! Use them. Light the candles you bought as decorative geegaws; they have wicks for a reason, you know. What happens, happens. It’s not like Gnat will notice. Santa she expects; Santa she’ll get. Whatever happens won’t stop us from going to church or going to the party afterwards or throwing open the door to greet Grandpa on Christmas day. It’s going to be a good Christmas. It’ll be her best Christmas ever, as all the saccharine specials have it. Proof? I’ll supply it tomorrow. Until then, Merry Christmas to all! Peace; crossed fingers, good will, and hope. See you Christmas day.
	.