It is of course possible, and usually probable, for one to complete a daily circuit in one's own city in which one interacts only with things entirely comfortable, familiar, and reflective of one's own world view. Case in point, me, today, or at least I had thought this was the path I was headed down, until a strange detour brought me face to face with: The Mall of Death.

It all started myopically enough, with a post-work side-trip to Trader Joe's, holy Mecca of tony yet reasonably-priced yuppie foodstuffs, a laughably likely thing for a low-rung techno cog like myself to be doing after leaving the office. It inexplicably struck me, however, as I stepped out of the car in the Trader Joe's parking lot, that for some reason, I needed to cross the street immediately, and investigate a certain ominous, one-story, block-long fortress of concrete known as the Kirkland Totem Lake Mall, a compulsion I had never previously experienced.

The motive for this dubious impulse remains a mystery. I was hungry at the time, and had a monstrous headache from my black eye, which, since Tuesday's photograph, has scope-crept its way across my entire left eye socket. Just go into Trader Joe's, I told myself, and get that six pack of summer wheat whatever breu, and some kind of high maintenance soy based pretzels anointed in wasabi dust, and get back into the god *&^%ed car, like you've done a hundred times.

But no.

Before I knew what happened, I was tractor-beamed into the crosswalk, heading toward the sprawling and bereft Totem Lake parking lot, in which wadded sale flyers blew like tumbleweeds, blown by city bus exhaust. I passed a few garden variety mall complex staples, anchor stores, they call them, until I found the actual entrance to the mall itself. It looked ordinary enough, until I opened the door, and walked inside, where here I encountered a chilling sense of instant remorse, the kind you can only feel when you enter a mall in the final throes of demise.

Words fail me as I try here to capture the tomblike breath of a dying mall, when its doors are first breached by an unsuspecting victim. To my right, a mostly full Old Country Buffet, hermetically sealed behind climate-controlled windows, was its lone hive of activity. Glowering families fed upon their heaped mélanges of beige colored fried foodstuffs as they watched my tentative steps into this dead airlock of commerce. The mall scrolled out to either side of me, entirely devoid of stores, save for a dozen gutted storefronts and the following two offerings, each displaying advanced signs of retail rigor mortis:

• The Family Christian Center, a god-themed supply warehouse, hawking the following, dust-coated 9/11 memorabilia in its grimy window display: several oversized, eagle-stamped commemorative coins, a grey, American flag-festooned t-shirt crucified upon a wire frame, and a tatty pile of stars-and-bars decals. God was merely implied.

• Ye Olde Cutesy Named Antique Junk Shop, featuring themeless piles of sickly-scented second-hand estate sale refuse, wall eyed dolls wearing crocheted dresses with dirty hems, piles of 30 year old home repair magazines with the covers torn off, and matching spice jars with toll painted chicken lids and cobwebs inside.

The cavernous mall space was bathed in a wan amber light, like a 70's Polaroid. A disheveled lone male crouched over a pay phone at the far end of the mall, looking suspiciously around himself as he muttered into the receiver, which was, I suspect, not actually connected to a call. A half a dozen brown tiled mall benches dotted the long, deserted length of the floor space, one of them occupied by another shady looking loner in a Mariners sweatshirt, staring up at a superfluous Rules of Mall Conduct sign bolted to a post. He turned to me then, and our eyes made contact. He nodded in a familiar kind of way, seeming to say, welcome home.

It was then that I fled.

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