You're Making Me Hate You (5 page)

I calmly looked her in the face and said, “Get off your phone then and make your order.”

She replied with, “You can’t talk to me like that!”

To which I responded with, “If you’re on your phone, then you’re not in line. Sorry.”

And the barista agreed with me. Her Majesty the Bitch left in a huff, jogging all the way.

That is just one example of a Taylor Trigger: self-righteous indignation. When people suffer under the illusion that their time and attention is more important than everyone else’s, no matter how mundane the occasion may be, I snap like a piece of dried-up driftwood, waiting to be set fire at the pyre. Some might think that, given my station in the world and what I do for a living, I would have those very same impulses to imply that my fecal contributions have no malodorous air. Guess what, fuckers? My shit does indeed stink, and even though I might have been an insufferable cunt at times in my youth, I make a concentrated effort to avoid that sort of behavior at all costs. I may be an asshole, but I am no ball bag.

At least I hope not anyway.

Getting back to the bull pucky, idiocy is tragically not relegated to the anal annals of the worldwide coffee shops. The malls of America certainly conjure up some serious reasoning for government-enforced sterilization. The funny thing is that presently there are three different
kinds
of mall in the world.
When I was growing up, there was just the local mall: each side of town had its own, and they were pretty much just a representation of the people who lived there. So basically malls were a great way to get a feel for what that side of town had to offer—the poor side, the blue-collar side, the rich side, and so forth. However, businesses evolve right alongside the animals and plants that are the denizens of Earth, 90210. The mall as I knew it began to shift and change. People started flocking to them for different reasons, in turn causing the malls themselves to cater to certain beings and a specific type of commerce. Thus began the new age of the mall and its three different specificities.

First, there is the Dirt Mall. It was once the poor mall, but as the need for money outweighed the needs of the few, the major outlets slowly moved away from this once fairly interesting place. As the big chains moved out, however, the “locals” moved in. This gave rise to what you would consider the “trinket trade.” I’ll give you an idea of what I mean. The mall I used to go to when I was a kid was a hop, skip, and a jumped ignition from my Gram’s house on the South Side of Des Moines, Iowa. It used to be a cobbled combo of the usual suspects: JC Penney, Sears, Target, and a bunch of other norms in between, like Claire’s Boutique, a record store called Disc Jockey (where I once worked), Spencer’s Gifts, Game Shop for video games, and so on. It was a regular mall with regular people—it was great fun. I was once nearly arrested for going there with no shoes on because apparently “attempted use of alleged Athlete’s Foot” is considered a misdemeanor in Des Moines. But I never held that debacle against the place, nor was I angry at the mall when I was fired from the record store for having long hair. I was cool; things were fine.

Anyway, years later we got signed; I went out on tour and didn’t go to that mall for a long time. When I did step foot back inside,
I was fairly put off by what I saw. Gone were the chain stores and other shop fronts. In their places were stores that offered Chinese throwing stars, jade statuettes, and whole professional kits for crochet. There were shops offering New Age “medical” attention, encouraging the customers to invest in “the healing power of pretty-colored stones and herbs.” Some of the spaces weren’t even occupied; they were just empty, giving the mall the feeling of being inside a mouth that was losing teeth at an alarming rate. The most high-profile places were the Animal Rescue League and a bank. There were
three
separate play areas for children, all of which had the same vibe a traveling carnival gives off when it’s the last day and the carneys desperately just want to pack up and go home. Nothing about the mall was inviting; it was like a ghost town after the gold was gone. This was the birth of the Dirt Mall in Des Moines.

As I said, though, there are three kinds of mall now, and my town has an example of them all. The Dirt Mall is on the south side. But there are two malls in town that fall under the second category: the No-Other-Alternative-Here Mall. This is the mall you go to when you can’t find what you’re looking for anywhere else. You don’t really want to, but fuck, what are you supposed to do? You
have
to have that sweater vest! It’s not even a choice at that point—it’s a fucking challenge. And if going to the No-Other-Alternative-Here Mall—or NOAH Mall—means you get that sweater vest, then by god and clean jeans, you are
going
to the NOAH Mall … and hell’s coming with you.

There are, in fact, two NOAH Malls in my hometown, and both started out on very different ends of the spectrum. One was in fact another blue-collar mall at one time and had gone through multiple fluctuations fiscally in its years of wear and tear; sometimes it would trend poor, and other times it would flex toward flush. It had steady business, however, and held as
much ground as it seemed to give. The other mall had at one time, ironically, been the rich mall. It was located on the west side and the lifeblood that ran through its veins over the years had been the wealthy of our little side of the Midwest. It was upper class, snobby, and
reeked
of Drakar cologne. Over the decades these two monoliths of money had duked it out even though each one knew who was winning the fight on any given Sunday. As they did, more land was being developed farther west, spreading the gift of suburban high jinks to the exits off the highway folks rarely traveled. Pretty soon the blank spaces of west Des Moines were colored in with families and fun.

That is when the
real
Rich Mall moved in.

Two stories high and damn near the biggest thing the city had ever experienced,
Jordan Creek had quickly put to rest the argument of where the wealthy people in town were going for their socks and signets. The other two malls really never stood a chance. At Jordan Creek, on any day of the week, you can buy—and this is true—swords, guns, pretzels, $500 tennis shoes, Yankee Candles, DVDs, lingerie, whatever the hell Bath & Body Works sells, books, coffee, and Love Sacks, which are plush bean bag chairs the size of a Honda Accord. There are more restaurants at that mall than on the south side alone and a theater that might as well be on Hollywood Boulevard. Oh, and they have a Cheesecake Factory.

Game. Set. Match.

For the poor fuckers at the NOAH Malls, all they could do was pour a little more money into décor and ambience just to keep enough of their heads above water so they weren’t choking on salt and saliva. Jordan Creek was
carpeted
, with fountains and elevators, for Christ’s sake. If Zeus himself was going to shop at the Gap, he was going to go to Jordan Creek. With Jordan Creek’s construction, the mall battles of Des Moines, Iowa, were swiftly drawn to a bloody close, shortening the war by four years. But by doing so, Jordan Creek had in fact evoked the universal sin of all sins. It had given rise to the worst of the worst: the
real
mall shoppers. People were now bopping along, paying no attention, cracking off into their cell phones and cackling at unheard shitty jokes like they were front row for the second coming of Pryor. Keys dangling from manicured fists, these sophomoric twits blazed a terrible trail through our midst with enough selfish ambiguity to place us all on the chopping block, with no turning back. These are grim times in the DSM, and there seems to be no resistance to its allure. Teenagers, both girls and boys, rummage through the psyches of the platitudes, skulking or pointing, acting like assholes on parole. We’ll talk
way
more about children later, but suffice it to say that the landscape is riddled with shit stains with too much time on their hands. And many of them aren’t buying a fucking thing.

Never mind the mall walkers … here’s the Sex Pistols.

I have put up with shit like flash mobs and Occupy Restrooms for so long you’re all lucky I haven’t climbed a fucking clock tower in recent years. In fact, why are so many of you out and about during the day? I know for a fact that most of you don’t have the kind of freewheeling schedule that I enjoy. Where are your jobs? What do you
do
for a living? And if you don’t have a fucking job, why the hell are you buying so much shit you really don’t need? Are your parents away on vacation? Did you bolt on your sitters? Did you sneak out the window of your bedroom in broad daylight like a “cast” member on
Cops
so you could peruse the streets and cul-de-sacs of the world for no real reason? I suppose I could be considered a callous cock face for this, but my question is: What do you actually
do
?

According to the commercials of the world, set annoyingly to that shitty Indy hippie garbage (we’ll talk more about that “music” later), what you people do with your time is simple: you traipse through sunlit afternoons, creating unique activities for yourselves because your generation is
so
different, you have to have different things to engage your independent and, therefore, superior attention. You have impromptu kickball games or paint things that you consider ugly and displeasing to your eyes. You gather in public places to make art consisting of multicolored cardboard cutouts that you then hold up to the sky in certain shapes while someone with a modified iPhone pretends to be Helmut fucking Newton on a roof somewhere, shooting from above in a subliminal nod to how you consider yourself looking down on the crowd because you “know it’s more dramatic.” You all dress differently and, by doing so, dress exactly the same, with your clever T-shirts of icons you have no clue about, pants that are so tight, they should technically be cutting off the blood flow to your ankles, and black horn-rimmed glasses, whether you need them or not, all tied nicely together with a seemingly inexpensive-yet-very-expensive corduroy jacket. You love fun and life and happiness and bullshit because you are all unequivocally
the
most pretentious bunch of cocksuckers I have ever seen. At least the Yuppies owned their shit. You treat everything you do as vital because if you don’t, you’d be faced with the reality that you have no fucking clue what you’re doing or what you’re supposed to do next.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re saying to yourself, “What do you mean, ‘you people’?” To which I will retort, “What do
you
mean, ‘you people’?” I warned you before: this wasn’t going to go well for you, so suck your straws until the cup is dry and shut up. Everywhere I look there are scores of cunts just moseying
through their tenure with not a care in the world. Meanwhile, people are homeless. Children are dying. Animals are mistreated. Families are torn asunder. Countries collide above our heads, and our government officials can’t even stand being in the same room with each other. Yeah, these are all great reasons to muck about and suck at life. Your “can-do” attitudes only really get as far as what you
feel
like doing for
yourselves
.

Some of you hippie types might actually be bothered to join the fight here and there where the chains show a bit of abuse, but when you do it’s always done so fucking twat-like. I saw a commercial on a relatively new network in the states where a correspondent was attending an “alternative music festival.” The shit they had at this festival was such twaddle that I couldn’t stand myself. A woman was selling poetry at a typewriter. A man was making albums at a vinyl press. An “artist” was creating “art” on an LED screen and having people stand in front of it while he took their pictures—trouble is, it was the same pair of crappy angel wings every time. But to the washed masses, this was the epicenter of art in this country. I’ve seen more thought-provoking roadkill. These same people were bragging about recycling. Yay fucking Bertha: you’re
supposed
to fucking recycle. What do you want, a cookie soaked in Nobel Prizes? Go fuck yourself, you self-important dildos. Having said that, it occurs to me that that may in fact be the only way they can experience satisfaction: by fucking themselves. So the joke’s on me.

And I’m not fucking laughing.

You could set your watch to how incredibly benign people and their ilk behave in this day and at their age. The problem is that I know this type of youthful renaissance fascinates the rest of my kind. My fellow water buffalo stop in their muddy tracks, taken in by the strange goings-on of this aberrant movement.
At this moment in history distraction is the name of the game. Don’t pay any mind to the seriousness of our places in the world. Don’t worry whether Egypt is burning, Libya is crumbling, and South America is still anathema for anyone
not
in a drug cartel. Don’t you worry your pretty little fuck faces about a goddamn thing. Just make sure those mittens you knit for yourself match the embroidered jumper you got for Christmas. Be lucky I’m not God: I would have canceled this shit-ass experiment called Man long before Jimmy Fallon got his own talk show.

I need to get outside my sweatbox and clear my head for a bit. So I’ll tell you a story that, though it gets heavy at the end, is about the joy of being yourself and the hell that is other people, to paraphrase Sartre. You see, being a geek at heart, there are certain places I have longed to make pilgrimages to since before I could sing in tongues. I have always wanted to go on a Civil War tour and visit the essential hot spots tied to that ordeal. I want to take my wife to Egypt so we can stand in front of the pyramids and gaze in wide-eyed wonder (also because I want to get to the bottom of what
Ancient Aliens
is going on about). At some point in my career I want to play the Hollywood Bowl—as much for the prestige as for the fact that my heroes, from Jim Morrison to Monty Python, have all played that beautiful place near the 101. I have places I want to go and experiences I want to cherish. So you can imagine my furious excitement when I was asked to be a part of a special signing at the San Diego Comic-Con, the Mecca for ink rats like me.