Soul'd Out

First, thank all of you for your good thoughts on my 500 blips. Nice to have your support.

Where to begin? We went, for the last time ever, to Washington Square Mall today to shop for the girls. The mall provided a mental and physical beat down of anything and everything walking the face of the earth. Most stores play their music at an ear-splitting level, where people are easily overwhelmed in the raucous din. It's inexcusable.

I saw the guy on the right walking through the crowd, his T-shirt with a slogan I thought appropriate: Soul'd Out. To support this kind of craziness at a mall or anywhere means we have soul'd out, and sold out. I won't have any more to do with it.

The third picture is just an old dog like me sleeping in the middle of the mall while the craziness around him goes afoot. Yes, that could be me.

Tom, mild mannered Tom, had a good response to some clerk asking for her email to receive some kind of post-purchase bonus. "Hell no, I don't want to give you my email! You people have enough of my information as it is!" Maybe that's what she just told me, but that's what we were pushed to.

Soul'd out. Is that what we've become? Soul'd out? It doesn't have to be this way.

Pretty negative view of the holidays, but the mega-push to buy, buy, buy doesn't do it for us any more. It's different from now on.