on saturday. on purpose.

“Still punk as fuck,” I whisper to myself, as I slide new Orthotic insoles into my Converse. As long as I’m down there, I get them on my feet and tie them. I use this double loop thing my kid taught me when he was in middle school. I’m sure there’s an easier way to keep my shoes tied, but this way has never failed me. And it keeps me connected to my kid, every day.

I exhaled, and stood up with a sort of braying grunt that I have taken to calling My Old¹.

“Still punk as fuck.”

Shoes on, laces tied, standing at my full height, I head out to take a walk. When I’m up around the corner and about halfway down the block, I realize that I can really — I mean really — feel everything under my feet. Almost immediately, I can feel a familiar discomfort in my left calf and then my right hip. For the rest of my abruptly abbreviated walk, I think about something on the Orthotic insole package about how the fancy Orthotic inserts can only do so much, so take good care of your shoes like a good consumer.

I’m sorry. I struggle to take care of myself, and you want me to take care of my shoes? How about you bring me a Pepsi instead?“

I scowl a lot more than I usually do, as a limp home.

“That was fast,” Anne says when I come into the house.

I tell her about how I hurt my Old², and how I have been forced to accept that it’s time to buy new shoes. After I work out the cramp with my good friends the foam roller and the lacrosse ball, I spend the next quarter of an hour looking for the least worst way to get some new shoes. After a number of false starts online and a refusal to order from Amazon if there is any alternative, I conclude that the least worst way is to go to the mall. On Saturday. On purpose.

I ask Anne. “Hey, want to go to the mall?”

“On Saturday? On purpose?”

“It’s the least worst way for me to get new shoes.”

“But the mall? On Saturday? On purpose? You need new shoes that urgently?”

I fold my arms.”You ask a lotta questions. What are you, a cop? You have to tell me if you’re a cop.”

She smirks. “Okay. Come with me when I run some errands and we can go to the mall on the way home.”

“Awesome.”

Montage!

“I think I’m going to wait in the car while you go get your shoes,” Anne says in the tired voice we’ve both been using more often than not, lately.

“Yeah, that was a hell of a montage.”

“Seriously. Get off your goddamn phone, dude.”

“That’s what I’m saying. I’ll be right back. Love you.”

“Love you too.”

I walk down the ramp, past the future pop-up Backrooms installation that was Sears for as long as I could remember, until it wasn’t, and finally into the mall.

I’m striding down an empty corridor and past the bathrooms, toward the main shopping spur, next to Macy’s. When was I last here? I try to do the math, but I’ve never been good at doing the math. I settle on: I haven’t been here in a long time. I’m not even sure I’ve been here this year. There’s been no reason to come here.

But back in the 20th century, this place was real close to a second home for me and a lot of my friends. We saw movies here, we had Mongolian Barbecue here, we spent hours in the quiet safety of the bookstore. I bought my first dishwasher at the Sears.

Sometime in the last two decades, the Burbank Town Center began its audition for a small but impactful role in the touring company of Abandoned Malls of America. It nearly succeeded. During the callbacks and producer sessions, it was home to two different Halloween stores. In a moment of desperation during early eliminations, it added a caviar vending machine on the second floor, suspiciously close to the Victoria’s Secret, around Valentine’s Day. The lower level spent several years as a race track for those weird fur-covered animal driving things. Remember them? They’re still around, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

I’m about halfway down the corridor when I notice the faint white noise of … it can’t be. No. This mall is dead.

…Isn’t it?

It is not. I know, before I turn the corner, that this mall is full of people. And holy shit is it full of people. Rumors of this mall’s death have been greatly exaggerated. No wonder it didn’t make the tour. I pat my pockets for my phone, so I can share this unexpected news with Anne. I find out that I left my phone in the car. Aw, shit.

No! Wait! Hey, cool. I left my phone in the car, so now I can be, like, fully present here and take in all of this … life and business and activity and … mall-y goodness. Maybe I’ll write about it in my blog, like I did in the Before Times. When it felt like it mattered.

So I look around me and, yeah, there aren’t nearly as many stores as there used to be, but the stores I see are legit. They are not the Teemu version of a Wish.com version of a stall at an indoor swap meet, like last time I was here. I see lots of stores I recognize, and just tons of people.

“Hey! Hey! Mister! Hey! DUDE!”

I look back toward the source of this tiny voice, and see that I am between a kid who is riding one of those fur-covered animal driving things and his destination. I briefly wonder why he doesn’t just go around me, but there are so many shoppers, he can’t.

“Sorry, buddy,” I step back and feel bad for this kid, who was probably looking forward to a breakneck, 5 mile-per-hour tear around the mall, but has instead found himself in stop-and-go human-to-fur-covered-animal-driving-thing traffic. He creeps past me and I suppress a laugh when he gives me the stinkeye. I think but do not say, “Someday you’ll outgrow it, kid! Someday you’ll want to drive your fur-covered animal driving thing, and the teenager at the kiosk will tell you that you’re too tall. Or too old. Or maybe they got a crisp fiver from an old man with a grudge you foolishly gave the stinkeye in ought ’26. I don’t know what or when it will be, kid, but it’s coming for you. It comes for us all.”

There are two stores in the mall that might have the shoes I’m looking for. Against everything I believe in, I look at the mall directory to find out where they are located. I could do it my way, but Anne’s waiting for me and she doesn’t deserve that.

Through the food court, inhaling the melange of fryer oil, spices, frozen mysteries. The flip book of memories: frozen yogurt and hot dog on a stick and lemonade and so many bad choices. That glorious time when bad choices didn’t matter, time that ended as abruptly and unexpectedly as the last time you got to drive the fur-covered animal driving thing.

Up the escalator and past the movie theater.⁴ Past a trading card shop, the Bath and Body Works that must be whatever the retail incarnation of a lich is at this point, and into shoe store number one.

There is a person at the register, having an issue with the payment thing. I pick a spot at a distance that is respectful of their space while unmistakably saying I’m in line so don’t even motherfucker because I will cut you.

I don’t have my phone, and I love that. I love that I am deliberately and enthusiastically gulping and devouring every detail I possibly can, choosing to be present in that moment, in that place. I look around so I can paint the picture later (which is now) in a series of observations:

There are a lot of socks that you buy one or two pair at a time. I don’t see any whimsical nylon socks with dinosaurs and puns, but it looks like tubesocks with rings are making a comeback.

Checkered Vans never go out of style, and that gives me comfort.

I will never understand Crocs. I will never understand spending real money to carry a backpack that looks like a novelty-sized Croc, thus announcing to the world HEY EVERYONE I LOVE CROCS.

I look at the Doc Martens and cry out internally for the two dozen pair of vintage leather Docs I gave away twenty years ago. I hope, as I always do when encountering this painful memory, that they went to a good home. I like to imagine a baby punk grabbing them for ten bucks at a thrift shop, and not a bougie trust fund poser paying 500 for them at Buffalo Exchange.

The girl ahead of me completes her transaction and walks past me. I’m too lost in thought about my old Docs to capture a single detail of her existence. This will be weird to me when I write it down, later.

“Can I help you?” The woman at the registeris giving the quiet competence and existential exhaustion of Manager of this store in this mall in this year of 2026.

“Yeah, I’m looking for black Converse low tops, men’s size 10. Please.”

“Let me look.”

“Thank you.”

She taps a few keys, frowns. Taps a few more. I notice that the store soundtrack has begun playing Back to Life.

“Wow, I don’t think I’ve heard this since the 90s,” I say.

She does not look up. “I think this was the 80s.”

“Yeah, 1988, right?” I say⁵.

“Mmm-hmmmm.”

Before I can stop it, something taps the well of sadness I carry around these days. I mutter, “1988. That was such a good year. Damn. I am very old.”

At this, she looks up at me. For just a second, we stand there and look at each other in Generation X.

“I feel you,” she says. She goes back to the computer. “Yes. Let me get them for you.” She walks into the back.

I think about the mall. There’s a feeling that I only get in a mall that I can’t quantify or describe but I know that other Olds will understand what “being in the mall” feels like. The smells and sounds of the water features and indoor plants. This is a time that is never coming back, even if every mall suddenly burst back into life. Because it’s not the stores or the band performances in the center court or the celebrity appearing this afternoon at J.C. Penny’s from 2-4pm. It’s about that moment in time when we were young and this place allowed us to be who we were, while we were all figuring out what that meant. It was a place to try out our ideas of being an adult, a place to be free of our parents and teachers, where we really were allowed to run free. I enjoy telling jokes about getting older, but to be totally honest, I really do think it’s great. I love my life and the people in it, even though it is all happening in this chamber of horrors none of us can escape. I’ve worked hard to earn this, and I’m working even harder to protect it. I guess, in a metaphorical way, this mall experience reflects some of that.

While all of this runs through my head, simultaneously nostalgic and solastalgic, I bop my head and quietly sing along. “however do you want me …. however do you need me…”

A pair of kids walk into the store and I try to become invisible.

Before I can find out if I am successful or not, she comes back with my shoes and I pay with my watch on the first try, for the first time ever⁶. I walk back through the mall and exit through Macy’s. I’m pretty sure at least some of the perfume and cologne cloud I swam through is still in my hair and my raccoon wounds.

Down the stairs and across the aisle, up the ramp … shit. I need to go down one level.

Down the ramp to the other stairs, down those stairs, wait for the Prius to back out hello, sir, I am a pedestrian standing right here and I thought you had a backup camera no worries let me step out of your way. Wouldn’t it be an hilarious callback if the kid from the fur-covered animal driving thing was in a car seat in the back, and I gave him the stinkeye this time? It wasn’t, but we could pretend it happened if we wanted to inject a little more humor and maybe pay off what seemed like maybe an unimportant encounter earlier in our story.

I hop into the car.

“Hey! You got your shoes?”

I hold up my bag. “Yep. Guess who paid with his watch on the first try, for the first time ever?”

She starts the car and puts it in reverse. “The guy ahead of you?”

“Ha. Actually, it was a girl and — AND — she was probably in her 30s (or maybe a teenager I don’t know everyone under 40 looks like they are a baby to me and why would I even ask in the first place like a creep) and she couldn’t get it to work at all. So.”

“Wow.”

“I know, right?”

I take my phone out of the cup holder where I left it. I turn it over and look at the Misfits sticker on the back, then flip it around and catch my reflection in the unlit screen. I hold that for a second, then put it into my pocket without waking it up.

“And I think … I think I may have found something to write. It isn’t really about anything, I don’t think, so it can’t be a story, but it can probably be a blog post.”

She turns on her left signal and pulls out of the garage. “Hey, that’s awesome!”

“Yeah,” I say, “It isn’t anything important, but I think it will be fun to write, and I think that’s a kind of self-care.”

“I’m really happy for you,” she says.

“Yeah. I’m happy for me, too.”

A postscript for the reader: I did have a lot of fun writing this. And it was self-care. I split it up over a couple of days, when I wasn’t working. I’m glad I made the time to do it. I’m glad I remembered, “write it badly or it won’t be written”, so I would keep going. Not that it’s bad writing (maybe it is, I don’t know), but I gave myself permission to write badly (in this case, not clearly about one thing, at least not on purpose), so that I could write, well, something.

---

I’m glad you’re here. If you’d like to get my posts delivered to your email, here’s the thingy:

1. Not to be confused with my Old, as in “ow, I hurt my Old”. ↩︎
2. See? Different, but still applicable. ↩︎
3. Yes, fuck the Confederacy-normalizing Dukes of Hazzard. Fuck it all forever. It is deeply problematic. It’s also a huge part of my childhood that I’m not willing to Eternal Sunshine out of my memories. ↩︎
4. I’m still pretty sure my TV is bigger than their average screen, and I’m not saying that to brag about my TV. ↩︎
5. Like, I know that it was released in 1988 but what I meant was, I’m pretty sure the last time I heard it was in the 90s but she doesn’t care and I can just be quiet. ↩︎
6. I never feel as stupid, incompetent, and Old Man Wheaton as I do when I try to use my watch or my phone to pay for things. I swear to god, every point of sale is different, on purpose, to make me — yes, me specifically — feel dumb. ↩︎