Appeal to Pity II · 8 September 2002
So, yes, it could only be at the end of the long, long day following the night before; the day at which reason enough had piled up over the weeks to take a family trip to the mall (nothing wrong with the mall per se, I rather like malls, but this particular mall – the only one around to have reached the critical mass of concentrated convenience and brand experience required to justify driving an hour to get to it – is always, on Saturdays in particular, an exercise in people-dodging and sensory assault on three escalator-connected levels) and acquire another round of back-to-school clothes for the children and maybe pick up a few things; it could only be after gleaning, for the first time in adulthood, all that’s required in getting a ten-year-old boy a decent pair of pants, and then watching a twelve-year-old girl traipse, rapt and entranced, through that shop that appears to aim, successfully, its demographic pitch at what back in my day (hrmph) was called the skanky ho; it could only be after buckling down and buying a damned DVD player (it’s so farking irritating that advancements in culture technology seem ever more likely to exist simply to motivate the reselling of the same cultural products to the same consumer in a more expensive, value added, format); it could only be, actually and unapologetically caught up in the giddy consumer frisson of acquiring the new (‘we get to watch DVDs!’), after getting a stack of DVDs to watch because after all that’s what you get to do after such a day, that, having inserted all manner of discs into the machine, and consulted the manual several hundred times, and having plugged and unplugged and replugged, and having come at last to the conclusion that Sony herself had sold us something that did not work, that the stupid LED readout would still be saying CANNOT READ THIS DISK.
That’s all.
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