It’s a mall. Christmas, almost. Busy. This is middle December. This isn’t a good time for contemplation. You have to spend here. You can’t be calm here. There is adrenaline here and the air smells like money.

Like money, and things wrapped in plastic, store-bought things, cheap and expensive perfume. Three different songs play from three different stores: some Britneyesque pop, a gravel-throated man singing Christmas carols and a sort of electronic thrum.

Every now and then a man dressed as Woody from Toy Story yells YEE-HAW at unsuspecting passerby, startling some of them into screams.

There is the clip-clop of boots and the click of heels hidden within the shuffle of the less fashion-conscious. All the sounds have melted together to create a kind of painful, aching heartbeat. Commercial song, expensive shoes, various languages, whiny and now questioning, a cough.

Here is the setting: a bench. A mall. December, a month where no sane being should be anywhere near a mall. Shoes squeak across the glistening tile, an unnatural sound to which no one pays the slightest bit of attention. Everyone seems very busy and very full of their own importance. Women are in jackets, in pink, in heels, in army-green zip-ups and backpacks.

A man- goatee, blond hair, leather jacket, pale face, hands in pockets, eyes on me, seems uncertain, vaguely threatening, the child molester from a TV show.

Guy- big, an overgrown toddler, seems the type who’d go for a steak and a beer. Great meaty hands like clubs. Ruddy, All-American face. Lost. The expression of an overwhelmed little boy. Like it’s his first Christmas.

Guy- blue toque, backpack, kindly-looking, wearing a fleece sweater in electric blue. Something about his face pleads, ‘I mean well.” I think that he may have failed a lot in life, to be so apologetic.

A young woman, 17, maybe, walks towards me, taking broad steps. She could be 18 in certain types of light. She’s a bit overweight. Rebellious-teen attitude is written all over her face. The girl has brown hair with the highlights growing out, all plain mousy brown to her chin, where the tips end in honey. She is plainly dressed, jeans and white shirt. You can see the outline of her belly button pressing through the fabric. She walks in a slouch. She’s bored, completely unsatisfied with thought.

I don’t like malls, there’s one physical gut response. I don’t like the consumer attitude; I don’t like people, always. But I like sitting here, I like watching. Hearing that YEE HAW.