things move around

At lunchtime I went looking for a breadbin. First I went to the Bay, but their breadbins were shoddy and expensive at $79; I had been hoping to pay no more than half that. Breadbins and linen are two things which are much costlier in reality than in my imagination. Household goods in general.

To find the breadbins in the Bay I had to descend two escalators to the skytrain level. I was in the bowels of the south end of the Pacific Centre Mall, a place of mystery and confusion to me. Normally my sense of location is strong, but in Pacific Centre Mall (and malls in general, but especially this one) I’m like a migratory bird in the presence of high-voltage wires. The up escalator eluded me; I wanted to run up the down escalator but it was single-file and occupied by a string of mall-zombies. A strong argument against the veracity of the major religious texts, and for the moral authority of religions in general, is that none of them, as far as I’m aware, mentions special punishment for the souls of people who stand still on down-escalators. All around me, the displays of household goods blurred into a kaleidoscopic welter of chrome and maroon. My state of mind wasn’t helped by the psychaedelic music coming out of my headphones. I moved at random through the Bay, putting myself at the mercy of the mall, and after a while I stumbled into the food court, where the air was thick with putrid fast food fumes.

I remember emerging into the raised walkway spanning Dunsmuir street, between the north side of the mall and the south, but not how I got from the skytrain level to the second floor. I must have walked through some kind of portal, some kind of wormhole linking the different levels of the mall. Is it really that fanciful to imagine spacetime, in the Pacific Centre Mall, being warped by the intense psychic energy of the thronging consumers? And sometimes a hapless shopper walks, unaware, through such a kink, and the homogeneity of the mall interior ensures that he or she is none the wiser, except perhaps for a nagging intuition which is quickly suppressed by the rational mind.

At one point I found myself in the fitting room of a store so big I had no idea which one it was; I hastened on. I saw signs for an exit, so I followed them for a while, but they petered out like tracks in a trackless wilderness. I noticed lots of fire exits, but I didn’t want to use them in case I set off alarms and caused the evacuation of the mall. Eventually I got out, and asked a passer-by for the time, not wanting to trust my own watch which may have been subject to temporal disturbances. I had been in the mall for about half an hour. To be sure, I picked up a newspaper and checked the date.

Later I found a highly desirable breadbin in Cookworks on Hastings, but it was $89. I’m not the sort of person who can justify paying $89 for a breadbin, no matter how decadent and luxurious. $89 breadbins are the sort of thing I imagine Conrad Black spunking his allegedly ill-gotten gains on, perhaps as a romantic surpise gift for his wife. If only the jury could see Black’s breadbins (for he must have more than one), the prosecution’s job would be done. The Roman empire, in its last days of dissipation and degeneracy, would have been awash with $89 breadbins. Even the slaves would have had them.

I’d try eBay, but I’m loth to buy a breadbin from some anonymous huckster on the other side of the world. I shudder to think what could ensue.