bring the noyz

That's where we found ourselves yesterday, right smack fucking dab in the middle of our personal vision of Hell.

Completely surrounded, on all sides as far as your eyes could see.

Trapped.

"Oh my fucking God, my dear Doctor Noyz (or 'OMFG MY DDN' if you are feeling more text message inclined)," you are doubtless saying (or texting) to yourself right now my dear reader, "Are you okay? For Chris'sakes man, I implore you to please relieve yourself of the burden of the tale."

I will try.

Yes, I will try, although I shudder at the thought of some memories.

Yes, I will try. I will share our story not to share our pain, but to share the triumph or Our Family over The Ordeal.

I will share our great victory and tales of our bounty.

And explain that as in the eye of every hurricane, you can find a little piece of heaven in the center of every hell (the proverbial silver lining to every dark cloud or somesuch nonsense? BLAUGCH!)

Let us begin. . .

Yesterday, as a slight chill which was perhaps a forboding of things to come, drifted in on the breeze of a slightly cloudy autumn afternoon, The Wife and I loaded The Boy and his gear into the Family Truckster and set course for the black heart and soulless void of a shallow, vapid consumer culture run amok with egotistical affluence.

We knowingly, willingly, even eagerly, journeyed about 30 minutes southwards to the greatest monument and symbol of Sprawl culture yet devised by the minds of fiendish men. It represents most all that I find most loathsome and despicable.

Yes my dear reader, you are correct. We went to the mall. But not just any mall.

Not just any ol' shopping mall, with its Dillards and its Nordstroms and its Sears at the cheap end where high school students continually flock to the food court attempting to escape and smooth the unattractive truth but the suburbs have no charms to soothe the restless dreams of youth.

Not just any ol' mega suburban strip mall with it's Home Depot, Circuit City, Bed Bath & Beyond, Petco, and Borders Books.

Not even the mega suburban strip mall right down the street from the other mega suburban strip mall with its Lowes Home Improvement, Best Buy, Linens & Things, Petsmart, and Barnes & Noble.

No, no, no, my dear reader. None of those places would be sufficient. As I'm sure you are well aware, The Good Doctor Noyz is generally not inclined to to anything half-assed. I'm going balls out full on rock out with your cock out head banging fist pumping hard drinking fast living fire both fucking barrels full fucking steam pedal to the metal ahead if I'm moving an inch.

So. . .

We went to the Mother of All Malls, a mall so grand in its shopping and massive in its scope that it ranks as the third most popular tourist destination in The Great Lone Star State, following the Alamo and Six Flags over Texas, according to a news report I saw yesterday.

It is a veritable Mecca for SUV driving soccer moms.

I hate it. Vehemently.

"So pray tell me why, my Good Doctor Noyz, for the love of all that is holy why, did you drag your family to such a hellish place?" you are thinking to yourself right now, aren't you my dear reader?

I can tell you in a single word:

shoes

But not just any shoes, the Holy Grail of Footwear: Chucks, Cons. . .

Converse, man Converse!

Yes, like you I realize their not quite the same since the company went bankrupt and shut down its American factories, reorganized and now all the shoes are made in China most likely by children who make pennies to support the grandeur of my footwear.

Like you, I will always cherish my original Cons with "MADE IN THE U.S.A." once proudly printed even if now well-worn and no longer legible on the little rubber tag at the base of the heel. I continually seek out the originals at flea markets, garage sales and second hand shops.

But really now, used tennis shoes? Ooogh, that can be nasty, not that I haven't done it, several times.

But really now, we all know it's the Bush's world and we just live in its new order. Global society, global economy, blah de fucking blah.

Converse has opened an outlet store! Converse has opened an outlet store!

I last bought a pair of shoes in December 2003. They were black leather Cons I purchased to wear when The Wife and I got married. The Wife wore silver sparkly oxford Cons. Needless to say, we both just love the shoes. I will always remember the first time I saw her. She was wearing a Led Zeppelin t-shirt, nicely fitting blue jeans, and a comfortably worn pair of red Converse All-Stars. I knew right then she was the girl for me.

The Wife and I both love them, but since they stopped being made in the U.S.A. and sold for $19.99 at discount sporting goods stores and began selling for 40 bucks and up at the trendy mall stores because the Hip Hop scene has discoved them and thus made them cool again we haven't bought any.

Not because of the Hip Hop scene thing, Like Ice Cube, I'm down with the P.E. More because of the price doubling thing. Some things just aren't right.

[In typical fashion I find myself wandering off topic. Thank you, my dear reader, for your patience and indulgence. The Red Bull and vodka I am enjoying in lieu of my Sunday morning coffee must be beginning to take effect.]

The Wife and learn through electronic correspondence from our good friends at Converse that this weekend, starting FRIDAY, they are opening a brand new outlet store in the aforementioned hellish place.

Tempting, yes. . . but not quite tempting enough.

At the end of the email, we read the following:

AS OFFICIAL FRIENDS AND FAMILY OF CONVERSE, WE'LL GIVE YOU AN ADDITIONAL 40% OFF YOUR ENTIRE PURCHASE DURING OUR GRAND OPENING. JUST PRINT OUT THIS EMAIL AND BRING IT WITH YOU

An addtional 40% off of already discounted outlet mall store prices!!!

Well le'metellya, you can do your best to take the boy out of the consumer driven culture but you can't take the consumer driven culture totally out of the boy.

Sweet merciful crap. We are so there.

And so we were.

And so we found ourselves driving around for about 45 minutes looking for a place to park. Seriously. Although when I say driving, I don't so much mean driving in the traditional sense of making continual steady forward progress. I mean it more in the inching forward slowly as another drop in an endless dammed and damned up river of traffic.

Madness, shear madness, I know, but we were nothing if not committed to our quest to obtain new cool shoes for the entire family.

So we slowly, painfully circled the giant lot seeking an opening by the blessed blue and white sign that granted us preferential parking treatment due to The Boy's use of a wheelchair.

(If I finish this ranting before the family awakes and I have another Red Bull and vodka I may find myself firing off an angrily sarcastic letter to the management of said shopping facility about the inadequacies of their parking for individuals with disabilities. As as related note, I have an idea for an aspiring documentarian or videographer: go to that blasted place and just hang out, watching the people who park in the handicapped parking, even with the proper permit. Watch them, then ask them about their "disability". We were forced to wander a great distance and I saw hundreds if not thousands of our fellow shoppers. I saw not one person with a wheelchair or walking with any visible disability, not so much as a cane or a limp! I suspect some bastards are scamming the system. They are the lowest form of scum. And I again I digress. . . )

Finally we found a place to park. While unloading The Boy and his gear we heard the following over a PA system:

I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll
No longer riding on the merry-go-round
I just had to let it go

What the fuck (WTF!)? John Lennon? Cool yes, but not right, no sir, not right at all. "No longer riding on the merry-go-round"? Hmmm, we just jumped right in the gawdamned middle of it, and it's already spinning too damned fast.

Due to problems with the aforementioned parking, we trek across the lot to the other side of the mall and move with slow yet steady progress across the sea of faces and shopping bags towards our goal. We journey from the east, like three wise kings of old following the sign of a star (or in our case, a sign with a star), to the sacred destination.

Finally, we are there: Nirvana, Mecca, and Heaven all rolled-up into one single convenient (minus the whole parking mess and moving through the crowds thing) location. . .

The Converse Outlet.

I am a both a kid in a candy store and a middle-aged woman with a new credit card waiting with growing impatience outside Dillards at five am the day after Thanksgiving.

You see, my dear reader, as I know you well recall, The Wife is full-time nursing student, and I'm a humble public school teacher. It has not been easy always making family ends meet on a teacher's salary.

Praise the Lord (PTL?) for financial aid. Yes! The Wife's financial aid check came in. As basically neither one of us have purchased clothing of any sort for ourselves since before or for our wedding, now almost a blissful two years hence (we're just not the shopping type). . .

Well, let's just say the gloves were off. . .

I don't know how long we were in there. It could have been hours, it could have been days. I felt almost instantly, if falsely, at home. If they didn't totally and instantly have me when "Welcome to the Jungle" played on the in-store system, those bastards sure as hell did by the time I heard "Your Gonna Get Yours".

I wasn't sure if I was buying shoes in the real world or San Andreas. Either way's a pretty sweet deal.

And the shoes! Oh Hallelujah and Sweet Hossanahs in the Highest! The Shoes! At substantial discounts from their original suggested manufacturer's retail price! With 40% off of that!

Can you get drunk on shoes? Had you asked me that prior to yesterday I would have thought you suffered from some mental defect or delusion. Now I'm not so sure.

We must've felt momentarily Imelda Marcos.

We left with lots for all three of us: 15, yes 15 boxes of brand new Converse All Stars, 4 t-shirts and a jacket!

When we left, we left with the record for the largest sale at that location, even with the 40% off!

(Although, in our defense, the store had only been open for a day and a half.)

And when we left, yes, we had to walk back through our personal vision of Hell and go throught the whole getting there ordeal in reverse.

Did we feel guilt for our extravagence, were we perhaps suffering a tinge of buyer's remorse?

Well dahling, remember it was Fernando who taught us that it is "better to look good than to feel good". . .

. . . and we looked mahvelous.
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