This essay is yet another in the series of articles that attempt to write down and express fully the way I experience one aspect of the world around me, this time Crossgates Mall. This essay is different from Mount Pisgah and some of the other ones written on nature, as it was done in an entirely man-made environment of Crossgates Mall.

The first thing that strikes you about Crossgates is the vast sea of parking or if you hit it at the wrong time, the vast jungle of cars everywhere, fighting for that one parking spot. You are just sitting at the traffic light, watching all the cars around you spewing out a deadly mixture of hydrocarbons, nitrous oxides, and carbon dioxide. I try to avoid shopping malls during the rush season of the holidays, and whenever I go, I try to park at the far end of the mall where there is the most parking available.

Crossgates Mall inevitably reinforces the superiority of the car over all forms of transportation. Yes, you can take a bus to the mall, but it is obvious to anyone who shops there or looks around at the sea of parking, that the car is the preferred method of access. The mall is a place of great free parking, you can explore and shop without spending a cent on parking. I guess in someways that is a freedom—you can freely enter the mall and walk around for no cost to yourself, except for the gas and maintenance costs of driving it there.

Stepping inside, you see the most obvious thing on the mall: it's about shopping. It is in deed, a shopping mall. A place designed for and centered around consumerism. A short walk around the mall shows that it sells essentially no durable goods, but lots of trendy clothes, tacky-nick-nacks, disposable electronics, and entertainment in the form of movies and DVDs. It is about spending disposable cash on items that will supposedly make your life better, even if reality differs from that ugly girl with the bag they paint on the walls of Crossgates when stores are being swapped in or out.

You think to yourself, what does all this consumerism mean to me and the world around me? It most certainly leads to the debauching of individuals, who find themselves increasingly addicted to the needs of material stuff. Rarely does anybody ever criticize the gods of materialism though, as they are important to the economy—and the rape of mother earth. Somehow Crossgates and the stores there are okay, because they allow us to get cheap stuff for us to later toss.

Getting over the crass-consumerism, you see it's a place for socialization. There are many people walking around the mall, there is a constant buzz of people going by, carrying bags of merchandise, looking happy in a certain way. They have their cellphones, they have their clothes purchased from stores at the mall, and a drink purchased at the food court. Life must be good as they say.

I ponder where this happiness comes from. The food court overran by rats at night and filth out of the public eye (as my inside source says). Nobody really sees the carboard boxes the dehydrated fast food comes in, so its as if it really does not exist, and only the soggy-but-so-delicious end result exists. Nor does the garbage seem to be a problem to anyone—most of it (the hundreds of tons of it) is kept out of sight, and it's somebody else's problem and not my own. There is nothing quite like planned ignorance.

Looking around the mall, the visuals reinforce the theme. The man floors of the mall are generic mid-90's commercial tiling, so big and ugly patterned that it could make you puke. It's a white and pink in color, similar to the walls, except those also have blue highlights. Maybe to the female in the mall (which probably was the target), these colors would seem decent and reasonable, but for me they just speak cheap and ugly. Looking up higher you see not only the pink, white, blue painting on the uninspired architecture, you see the arrow shaped lights, the ugly wavey metal ceiling tiles, but also the great skylight, which runs the length of the mall.

The skylight that runs along the length of the mall is particularly interesting. It helps to save money in daytime by allowing some natural light to come in. It provides orientation for shoppers on the time of day, and what the weather is like. More importantly though, is it seems to provide a sort of bridge between the totally unnatural world and that of the commercial world. The world of the mall is too alien to the individual that without a skylight he would be alienated from it's existence.

There are probably a dozen of other things you can see and think about in Crossgates Mall. It's a big place, with many different stores. These are my initial thoughts on the subject, possibly to be modified and added to as time goes by.