Ponderings

I was really tired last night so I forgot to mention something that happened in the mall in Chattanooga.

I was walking around, killing time, when around the corner a very familiar façade came into view: A Disney Store. I got a little excited inside becuase while I left Walt Disney World because I was sick of the politics, I still like shopping for Disney stuff. Yay!

Only it’s not a Disney Store anymore. Once I got around the corner I could see that the sign was gone, and it was some sort of puzzle and game shop now. They haven’t even changed the decorations or layout inside. Well, anything that was copyrighted (characters and stuff) has been removed but you could still tell, even if the façade had been changed, that it used to be a Disney Store. It really shook me. It was almost like I was in one of those post-apocalyptic movies where things are happening in places they "normally" wouldn’t be but due to expediency or not knowing any better you’ve got a church or a mayor’s office or something else like that in what used to be a Chuck E. Cheese’s dining room, and the animatronics are still there. It was creepy to say the least. It kind of messed up the rest of my time in the mall. Even my stuffed sausage & pepperoni pizza from Sbarro couldn’t make me shake the feeling that there was something fundamentally *wrong* with a place that could allow that to happen. I left the mall shortly after I ate and went over to Barnes & Noble, one of the best bookstores ever, and even the super-awesome selection of books couldn’t overcome the weird feeling that the abandoned Disney Store had left me with.

I did still manage to buy myself a couple of books though. Thumper asked in our conversation on Saturday if she had gotten me started on reading Heinlein books, and I told her yes, Space Cadet and Starship Troopers were two of my favorite books. She told me those were good starts but I really needed to read every book the man had written, and it would help me out in my current predicament – having to make my own way and rules in the world to make myself happy, because clearly following everyone else’s rules is not working for me. So I picked up The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, which is more than a little strange, to say the least, since I’m 2/3 through with the book and there aren’t any actual cats in the story yet.

I also picked up one of Cathy Reichs’ Temperance Brennan books. They are the ones that inspired the Fox series Bones. I haven’t started that one yet but I’ll be on a plane for five or six hours (absolute time that is, when you figure time zones into it I’ll lose eight or nine clock hours) on Sunday so I’m sure I’ll get a good start on it if not finish it completely.

We might be going whale watching on Saturday. That should be fun assuming we actually see in any whales. I’ll definitely post pics of that if I see any.

Done now. I have to get dressed and make myself presentable. It is almost noon over here you know…