Memoirs of a teenage metalhead.

We went to the mall on Saturday. Mall of America. The parade of different ways to be fat never fails to entertain. I don't know why I'm so obsessed with fat people, women really. I can't not look at them. It's a strange attraction and repulsion at the same time. What does it mean?

Anyway... The kids love that wacky magnets and flying airplanes and that fart-slime that makes noise as you push it back into it's jar, store so we always pause there, - across the hall is Hot Topic, and I usually walk though. I think about how this packaged darksider store must be comforting to those kids who have chosen that path - kind of like seeing some skate-punkers at a party in 1980s Duluth and feeling not so alone. When we stopped last Saturday, they were playing my favorite new album which I've been listening to nightly (Opeth Watershed) and as I closed my eyes, I was in my dark garage having a beer, nodding slightly with the groove. Of course seconds later my eyes were open and I was walking back into the MOA corridor, and the magnet store, to gather everyone up, pry the junk out of their hands and again slowly move though the sea of faces and shapes. Fairly surreal.