mall guys

I bought the most adorable pair of sandals on the weekend [don't worry, the shopping part of this story ends here] while at the mall with a friend of mine who was in town from San Francisco. We had met up earlier for coffee and then had to get some spending in, as she loves to get clothes at the Canadian dollar price when she can.

We walked, we shopped, we talked. We were watched. Repeatedly, I kept running into a set of guys that had previously been either absent or un-noticed: rocker-Jesus.

[oh, all right. requisite caveats: yes, I was raised in a protestant-Christian church for the first few years of my life. no, I do not believe in god in the Christian sense of things. yes, there probably was some guy named Jesus. no, I do not know exactly what he looked like, but use the name here to refer to the rather popular form of his supposed appearance.]

There appeared to be, on this given Saturday, a significant number of guys with shoulder length brown hair, scraggly facial hair and grunge-esque clothing. Some were with girlfriends, some were solo, but they were everywhere. And, apparently, they were interested in what a pallid caucasian and her Indian friend were up to. Now, yes, my friend is striking and, yes, I had a zit the size of Kansas on my chin and a little bit of lunch on my shirt [but only if you looked really really closely] but I wouldn't have thought either of us so terribly out of the ordinary as to raise a previously hidden segment of the population.

More disturbing than the fact that these rocker-Jesus' were watching us have our coffee, was simply the fact that they were there. Where, in god's name [no pun intended], did these guys come from? It's not like I never go to the mall on Saturday afternoon. I was not in a new place at a different time or even in different stores. So, how did a portion of the population grow their hair out, grow sort-of beards and unify their decade-old clothing -all in the last couple of weeks?

Maybe it's me. Maybe in order to see everyone who is really out there, I just need to get out more [that's a distinct possibility], maybe I just need to go out more with my single friends or maybe I just need to open my eyes more.

Or...maybe the moon's aligned again in such a way as to mess with my poor little brain...I'm almost certain that really happens more often than you might think. [about as likely as me really knowing what Jesus really looked like, anyway.]