Went shopping the other day not because I like shopping, but because they got a Dairy Queen inside the mall and I was wanting some ice cream, yes that was my great dream of this modern era...that’s what my dreams have been reduced to...once it was to be on top of the world...now it’s getting an ice cream...how pathetic is that?...stopped at one of the creaking dinosaur retail stores that was the center of almost everybody’s shopping existence years ago but that will be extinct before long...the asteroids are coming!...the same way they supposedly did millions of years ago when they took out the velociraptors, the tyrannosaurus’, the pachycephalosaurus’ and all the rest...looking for the clearance rack...rode the dirty, moaning escalator that Grandma must have rode a thousand times years ago back during the days of Packards and Plymouth’s and lunch counters inside the store...walked over old wavy tiles that reflected the store lights like a monochrome kaleidoscope underneath the faded fluorescent lights that hummed a tune I didn’t know...we didn’t see it at first, all we saw were forlorn looking mannequins who didn’t answer when I asked them for directions...but eventually we found it...and they had some winter coats on sale and of course it’s like 95 degrees outside so nobody in their right mind is thinking about buying a winter coat...but me being demented and not in my right mind thought it might be a good idea to get one, especially with them being on sale...not only that, but I keep my clothes forever, until they don’t fit anymore, or they fall apart and my winter coat which I had for I don’t know, 25 years or so had finally given out...so I started looking through them, different designs, different colors...saw one I liked the best (a black one of course) and put it over my arm...as I did the feeling struck me...Damn! this might be the last winter coat I ever buy...I’m no spring chicken anymore...and this could be the end of the line for this chicken when it comes to purchasing winter coats...so then I got the great idea that I could put off certain death by not buying the coat...yeah, good luck with that...my wife gave me the incentive of the ice cream but all I could think about was when you die it’s no more winter coats, no more liquor, no more sex, no more encore presentations, no sequels...I started thinking of other things...maybe I’ll never buy a car again...I might be driving the current junk I have for my last days...I may not get to trade it in for a newer junk...remembered I read about some 50th anniversary of something or other coming up in 2023...I can’t take it for granted I’ll see it...those thoughts were depressing...the new coat might last 25 years, but I’m not so sure I will...I’m just not that young anymore and as one writer once wrote; “Elvis is dead and I don’t feel so good myself”...I think the guy who wrote that is dead now...when you think about it, as you get older you start seeing more and more people in the obituaries your age or even younger...friends dying and all that...I didn’t even feel like a large DQ cone...talk about falling from a cliff and hitting bottom and being smashed and cut up by the jagged rocks waiting for you...I went home and I got a bottle and tried to forget that I was a lot closer to the finish line than the starting line...the bottle was about three quarters empty, further reminding me of my mortality...¾ gone...the totality of it...an impending fatality...the dinosaurs died, the stores are dying, the malls are dying, we’re all dying...we’re crispy autumn leaves and now November is here and the fall from the tree and death is inevitable, we’ll be raked up and bagged or burned...one of these days, I’ll have to get a new coat, and if I die soon afterwards, do me a favor and make sure I’m buried in it, no matter how hot it is...dead people don’t sweat...do this so I won’t feel like I wasted my money on it.
