11.
   I found Le Soleil and took in the fancy sign, the red carpet, the doormen holding open etched glass doors for me and only me. The logo was a stylized sun with a histrionic look on its face. Its eyes and mouth were wide open as if someone had yanked it out of the nineteen fifties and dropped it down right here in the year of our lord, 2006. I looked into its astonished mug and sighed. Weren’t we supposed to be shopping and shopping and filling our empty little lives with cheap, slave labor garbage? The great majority of us were barely scrapping by but no worry, the ruling class has given us the interest only loan, a tabloid press and the mega store.

   Ah, the mega store, that great, gray morgue. If ever there was my hell on earth it would be wandering the bottom of a giant, soul sucking cave like an ant numbed at the sight of row after towering row of identical detritus as you fill an enormous cart with the empty shells of things, corpses of merchandise all wrapped in miles and miles of plastic.
   And now they give us this, this cabaret where life is beautiful, with all the trappings of an exclusive club to make us feel like rich celebrities while we charge, charge, charge our way to heaven. What the hell? I was obsessing impotently on my fate that was completely out of my hands. I was a fly bumping against the window not knowing if I wanted in or out. I needed to be around other little people. I needed to be around a double scotch on the rocks. The doormen pulled the doors open wider. The elevator across the lobby beckoned: Le Soleil, fifth floor. I stepped in and pushed the button.