Mallhopping

Should this be classified as child abuse?

Which sane five-year old is going to go to sleep after an afternoon at the Infiniti mall, emerging shaken and stirred from the raucous music, clashings, sound effects and flashing, pulsing lights of the kids' section and coming face-to-face with this - all of ten feet tall - and not wake up with the screaming nightmares?

Psychologically scarred for life.

---

Saw a guy in the movies section wearing giant wraparound black shades.

R: Why's he wearing shades indoors?

Me: He's probably looking at The Shining.

At this point R suddenly and inexplicably launched into a violent assault upon me, screaming abuse.

---

Are they remaking Omen II as well and is there an audition for the role of Damien in progress at Inorbit? Saw more shrieking, screaming, struggling, yelping, running-from-parents, kicking-random-strangers children there in an afternoon than I would ever want to in a lifetime. This is proof positive, as far as I'm concerned, of the presence of demonic infestation in Malls. It doesn't affect adults because they already have the local trains to deal with (a level of hell that's used to threaten demons, imps and lesser devils by the arch-dukes of Hell during Appraisals) but children, I suppose, are fairly receptive.

---

Escaped with my life this afternoon when a small gremlin-like creature scampered past me, and I spotted her, coming behind, with the corner of my eye, like Alan Quartermain espying a charging rhinocerous upon the veldt.

I leapt aside!

Just in time. A five-ton Mother, dangerously pink in the face with high BP and embarassment, charged through where I had been standing a bare fraction of a second ago, in dead silence but for a faint wheezing, in hot pursuit. The floor vibrated for several minutes afterwards.

---

The height of embarassment: offering to hold your (female) family members' stuff while they go to the loo, and realizing you need to go yourself. Saw a guy in the Infiniti loo gritting his teeth and ignoring the world at one of the stalls, an elegant black leather purse with gold buttons slung over one shoulder, and a small pink nylon backpack with a pair of bears clad in blue bows on the other.