Progress, they call it, but it is not a reassuring picture he sees in the mall parking lot as the day fast disappears with some blue and gray clouds (perfect for his melancholy). There are stores, restaurants, a gas station and garage already here, but they are already tearing into the nearby land for other projects. A large sign advertises future leasing space for businesses. A huge hole has been dug and a foundation started. Heavy equipment is frozen for the moment.

All over he has seen this kind of progress; it looks the same everywhere, no matter what the name says on the green highway sign you just passed. Highway nation, with all the fast food exits. Strip mall towns. The bulldozers pushing away at the land, at the “available real estate”, the shovels digging, the mixers pouring. In some busy places, mile after mile of the unbroken chain, your line of vision cluttered by the competing signs, the lights. In these places he finds himself yearning for the dark as he does here in this brightly lit parking lot. Away from all these people with loaded carts and loaded down lives. There isn’t anything these places that supposedly have everything can offer him at the moment, not even if it’s on sale.

He isn’t buying. He is not a valued customer. He is not enough of a consumer for places like this. He’d have difficulty filling a hand basket at this moment, never mind one of the carts.

He’s one of those guys for the small corner market, in and out for the quick purchase, only what he needs then. A small market in the old part of town, where all the big, well-made houses from another time are. He knows the person behind the counter, who knows him and gives him a friendly smile.

In the gleaming malls and supermarkets he drifts, seeing his reflection everywhere, seeing his unstylish clothes, and he is sometimes surprised by the sadness in the face (too late in bringing the quick smile up). Who would he be fooling anyway?

What aisle is he in? What kind of shitty music is that? Why is that employee so gung ho? Look sharp now, you’re on camera. Is it his imagination or did that serious looking security guard do more than just glance at him? It wouldn’t surprise him. Remember the reflection in that display window: a man who clearly doesn’t project the right image. Lacking in something. Is it the slumped shoulders? The looking around “lost” look? The bumbling attempts to move easily with the crowd, or a little too much nervousness showing (not enough cool)? It’s probably a comical combination of all of that, a Woody Allen Jr. wandering in what amounts to a large showroom and thinking that he’d like nothing better than to sit outside with a cocktail (his medicine) in hand and loosen up for America.