into the mouth of hell

I was in search of a Hanukkah present for my nephew, aged 7. His dad suggested a t-shirt with stuff he likes depicted on it: maps, or stars or planets. This would have been easily enough found and ordered online, but time for delivery (and assurance that it would arrive when promised, especially at this season) is what was lacking.

So I went down into the mouth of hell, the big regional indoor shopping mall. Arriving at 10:30 AM meant there were still some parking spaces. Thence followed two hours of tromping around inside. Besides the department stores, there are plenty of children's specialty stores. But as far as "graphic t-shirts" (as I learned that ones with pictures are appropriately known as) goes, they're convinced that all boys like dinosaurs, particularly t-rex. A few football players, old cars and planes, stuff like that. I'd hoped a store called "Psycho Bunny" might be a little more creative, and it was full of nothing but t-shirts and sweatshirts, but every one of them had nothing on it but the Psycho Bunny logo.

The first store I'd looked in had a shirt whose t-rex was tramping over a picture of the Earth from orbit. Well, it's sort of like a globe, and a globe is sort of like a map, and I had given up finding anything better and was on my way back when I passed The Gap's children's store. And there I found something a little better: a shirt reading something like "The Universe is yours to explore" underneath a pixelated picture of an astronaut helmet with a galaxy reflected in the visor. That'd do, I thought, if only it wasn't a size too small. I bought it anyway, along with another shirt, in the right size, commemorating Gravity Probe B, which was a satellite testing relativity effects, launched 18 years ago. That's astrophysics more than astronomy, but close enough. What the heck it was doing on a t-shirt, and that so long afterwards, I dunno.

Anyway, I returned home with my finds, numbed by the experience but surviving. In amongst my searching I had lunch, because the mall's food selection is at least as munificent as their t-shirt selection. On the second floor is a row of Asian food counter restaurants. There was a line in front of the Japanese ramen one several hundred yards long. The rest were totally deserted. I wound up with a Vietnamese rice bowl, a bit expensive but not too bad.

I hadn't been to the mall in ... [n] ... years. It's gone way upscale in the interim, filled with high-end shops for one thing or another, including a luxury car dealer. A storefront like any other, open front, and you look inside and there's a car. How they got it inside - it wouldn't fit through the mall's doors - I couldn't say. Maybe there's some hidden cargo doors.