And who lets these teenagers go out with their brains turned off? I went into Hollister, which is kind of like a clothing store, except that the first thing that you think when walking in is not, “Clothes!” Instead you think, “Must have air!,” because they have perfume all over the place stinking the store up to the point where you honestly consider buying things at Goodwill instead, because you’re sure the clothes look as bad, and that the air will smell musty instead of like the inside of a perfume bottle.  Upon departing Hollister we walked about the mall attempting to get to various places to buy things.  At one point in time two teenage girls exited the shop I was about to pass and slowed me (and all three frillion people behind me) down because they were walking in the gear right before reverse, with little gas.  I don’t know what made them think, “Lets slow this whole mall down,” but whatever it was, I’d like to have it outlawed.

Whew!  I know that sounds cranky but it was a day filled with shopping, and while I love shopping, I love shopping with efficiency even more.  I’m an efficiency nut, which is why I drink water in glasses instead of from sieves, cullenders, funnels and firehoses.  I also try to buy low emission vehicles that get good gas mileage.  And, to reduce my shopping headache I shop for the holidays now.  Which is not as good as shopping in July, except that sometimes people want to get gifts that are more recent.  If I could pre-order more of life, I think I would.

There were other funny things that took place at the mall such as watching the elevator doors nearly close on a baby stroller because the designer of the elevator figured that the moms and handicapped people who were going to ride in the elevator also were Olympic athletes in speed training.  Fortunately the mother in charge of said stroller was a veteran and shoved the stroller further into the elevator causing the doors to relent.  Relent Green is people [sorry, I just thought that since soylent and relent sounded similar…].  Once in the elevator the scary scene in the movie started.  You know the one where the deep rumbling sound starts and then higher pitched dissonant sounds kick in and you really know something bad is going to happen?  The nasty, nasty sounds from the thriller movies were coming from the mechanics of the elevator.  Yippee!  But as passengers we didn’t race out of the elevator once the rapidly opening (and don’t forget closing!) doors expanded to their open position, instead we slowly paced out so that those getting on would not know that they were getting into the scary elevator.  We should have been screaming just to freak people out 🙂

One last brilliant thing happened in the mall.  I saw a security guard pick up a pair of balloons that had lost their ‘float’ and slowly lower the ribbons from the balloons into the garbage can and then take a utility knife *cough* of the swiss variety *cough* and pop them.  In the mall.  In case you have missed out on the sound of balloons popping in your life let me gently remind you that they don’t just go, “phhhhhhhhh.”  Popping balloons go BOOM!  And since post 9/11 too much of America is still scared of being wiped out at the mall.  By terrorists.  Shame on the security guard who has the sense to get rid of the extremely dangerous “unattended items” in the mall, but in a way that scares the kaka out of a large group of trapped lemmings.  By simply cutting the balloon by the thicker rubber at the knot he could have released the air in a slow and quiet way.  But Lone Tree’s best apparently like a good laugh.

I guess I laughed, too.  Inside, because I knew that laughing at all of the brainless teenagers and mindless adults would probably get me beat up.  And I didn’t need to be beat up.  If the security guard was as dump as it appeared/sounded he probably wouldn’t know how to break up a fight anyway.  At least I might have smelled good when it was all over if the teens shopped at that one ‘clothes store.’