The Mall is drawn from event in my childhood. I never knew quite how to convey all these tumultuous events and emotions, and I’ve long despised poetry, but after reading a number of poems by Billy Collins I found that you can tell a story in a stylistic manner without it having to sound like a bad song, and The Mall came to life. Each section corresponds to a store in the mall and a number of feelings experiences that relate to it, often extended far beyond just the experience I had at the mall store itself.

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The Mall itself was an outlet mall that was built beside the Kansas River in Lawrence very near the Bowersock Dam and bridge. There was a lot of controversy surrounding it when it open because it was believed it would siphon away business from the nearby downtown area that was comprised, at that time, of entirely local businesses. The mall eventually folded due to a lack of desirable merchandise and was made into a hotel, while at the same time chain retail stores snuck into the downtown.

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I constantly struggled with my weight and associated feelings of self-worth when I was younger. As a result I always enjoyed the Winter because the layers of clothing made my size less apparent. I feared summer and its swimsuits as they represented the pinnacle of feeling exposed and judged.

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Parental Advisory stickers on albums, in their best known form, were introduced when I was first really getting into music around 1994. As a kid with interest in hard rock and metal there were several albums that I wanted that had this sticker, but my parents were adamantly against me owning any offensive music. At one point my Dad went through all of my music and made me sell any he thought were inappropriate. The result was that I had to go to great lengths to hide these albums from my parents if I wanted them, and I came to believe that the albums and associated bands had a mystical level of evil surrounding them.

While in junior high I won an award for being an exceptional student, of some variety, which came with a gift certificate to a local music shop. This was back in a time when record companies produced huge volumes of free promotional material, which meant I was able to turn my $25 into something like 10 CDs/cassettes and a video. I was, and am still, enamored with White Zombie’s Astro-Creep 2000 album, which at the time featured an abnormally large PA sticker, and was one of the CD’s I bought. When the girl at the counter was ringing me up she made a point of noting my age and the PA sticker. I got really nervous and started rambling about how I hated how they put these stickers on a album for one or two swear words when the rest of the album was fine. (This album absolutely earned its PA sticker). The girl laughed and said she was just kidding, and I left with my bounty of music. When I got home I put the CD in a different case and hid the inserts. The dark fantasy nature of the album combined with this image of nefarious power that my parents attitude toward the music cultivated had my imagination running wild.

In my opinion parents erroneously believe that lyrics change or drive the behavior of their kids. There might be some who are influenced by the content of the lyrics, but I suspect it’s few and/or more easily attributable to their environment than any given song. But honestly, bless them for being so involved and caring about the well-being of their kids, but for me the music reflected how I felt as opposed to influencing it. Music was my outlet for the pain I felt. I was overweight, had few friends, was constantly picked on, never fit in well, was perpetually single, lacked many social skills, and had parents who fought a lot. The dark music gave me an outlet to feel and express that pain, slowly moving it from in me to outside me, as well as fueling my imagination and interest in different forms of story telling.

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Books really were like mystic artifacts. Part of this was because of the fantasy my books contained and my own imagination, but another large part was because my Dad had so many of them, and was on a perpetual mission to buy more. Every room, as well as the garage, the attic, my grandparent’s house, and other places were filled with books, and no matter where we traveled we would search for used book stores to stop in. I had a desire to learn that far exceeded my actual interest, skill, and attention span. Additionally, I have ADHD which makes me impulsive and exacerbated the already short attention span of youth. The result was that I would often check out all kinds of advanced science and engineering books and scan them, hoping that I would learn how to build robots or similar things, but would end up simply scanning pages without really absorbing any of it. All this sparse reading did, however, have the effect of further fueling my imagination, which was a wonderful, unintended consequence. I eventually found books that really appealed and that I actually read like Calvin & Hobbs and Conan. It just took awhile to accept that I love fantasy more than anything else, and that just because a book was a comic or fantasy and not “classic literature” it wasn’t somehow deficient or lacking merit.

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Toys are expensive, and my own personal hobby of Magic: The Gathering has always been exceptionally expensive. MTG was the very first collectible card game, and its success led to a vast number of spin-offs which hoped to cash in on this exploding market. Unfortunately, the key to long-term survival of a CCG, due to its interactive nature, is wide-spread acceptance, which turns out to be very difficult to secure. The result was there were shelves in game stores and warehouses overflowing with effectively dead CCGs. Stores like the outlet toy store in mall would buy them in bulk and sell boxes which originally retailed anywhere between $75-$100 for $3-$8. I would buy tons of these to experience the thrill of opening packs, getting powerful rare cards, and building “expensive” tournament decks that I wanted to experience through magic but couldn’t afford. A lot of these games were fun in their own right, and I could afford enough so that I had decks for anyone who wanted to play with me. Though I’ve long since parted with all of those accumulated card games, I still remember them very fondly, and despite that I can now afford MTG I still occasionally think about splurging on a bunch of discount CCGs just for fun.

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For one of my birthdays, I can’t recall which, I invited a friend of mine who was very unlike my other friends. He was straight-edge, played sports, and was very Christian. We knew each other through school and Sunday school, and had formed what I would now call an unlikely friendship. Perhaps, though, that’s unfair. I enjoyed the diversity in my friends, but the issue became that if you don’t fit into a group’s perceived notions of what it means to be a part of them, especially a conservative/republican one, you’re quickly ushered out. This happened in college when I came out to him and his fiance, both as gay and not particularly Christian, and quickly found myself having gone from best man at their wedding to uninvited and cut off from all communication with his whole family which I had cared for a great deal and known so well for so long.

This friend managed to unintentionally ruin aspect after aspect of my birthday. The tipping point was when I bought a handful of chocolate-covered cherries from the candy store in the mall, offered him one, and had it slapped from my hand because he was fooling around and didn’t see me. I’d guess I shut down emotionally and said I wanted to go home and it was time for him to leave. Once he was gone I broke down crying, explaining to my parents how he had ruined my whole birthday. They consoled me and made amends, even though it wasn’t their fault, by taking me to a local grocery store that happened to sell old, mostly worthless MTG packs for $0.50 each. It made me feel better, because so much of the rest of my life was difficult, it was really hard not feel a touch of hopelessness in that even my birthday wouldn’t make me feel better.

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My brother was three years my junior, and was four when he was diagnosed with ependymoma, a brain cancer. For a couples years our lives revolved around hospitals and doctors and painful treatments, but eventually his cancer turned terminal and he came home to die. We shared a room, and by the end he was bloated and disfigured from the radiation and chemo treatments, couldn’t move, and was mostly unresponsive. Our pastor, and family friend,  performed his last rites. He was only six.  I remember the day he died. I didn’t know it had happened. My grandfather came to take me out for breakfast and to go to garage sales. I was shocked at the news, cold adrenaline pumping alongside confusion as I was too young to understand death. My parents, who had been suffering for years, were now faced with unimaginable loss. They suffered serious depression and fought for the better part of a decade after that. At its worse, and after the fighting had begun to escalate in intensity, my parents tried a trial separation. Understandably, but painfully, they were so wrapped up in their own problems that, when combined with the focus on my brother for all the years he was sick, I suffered a form of passive neglect that really took its toll on me. At the time I was eager to move out because I wanted to escape the anger and the fighting, but a few years after I did, in my future fiance’s arms, I broke down crying realizing just how painful that neglect had felt. I’ve long since forgiven my parents and moved on, building myself a happy and fruitful life, but it’s still hard to remember those times without tears.

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Severe storms and the threat of tornadoes were a constant part of Springs growing up in Kansas. I often had, and still have, dreams that revolve around fleeing from a tornado, as well as water/rivers/large bodies of water being a ever-present aspect of my dreaming world. One particularly bad season the Kansas river was bloated and frequently flooded large portions of the surrounding area became flooded to the point were entire underpasses were underwater. In a very literal sense I was scared at the power of nature, but in addition to that this section reflects the hopelessness that I felt at times. It’s also a allegory for suicidal thoughts. Though I never had any real ones myself, two people I went to school with, one of which was a good friend, killed themselves while in junior high/high school. This is an acknowledgement to their struggles, how easy it can be to be swept away by the pain and difficulties in our lives, and how welcoming and appealing release from those pains can be. Thankfully, I was able to leave all of that pain behind me and grow from it, or in some cases in spite of it.

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The final section is phrased to be prophetic. I often dreamed of better times, and am thankful I was able to find the hope and beauty in myself – with help from others – to make that a reality. It also alludes to how none of us achieve happiness alone, and just how important other people are in our lives, and how wonderful it is to share our joy with them. Life really does get better.