Black Thursday Sales!

As we drove home from my mother's, when we reached the urban areas, the traffic was as heavy at 8:30 pm yesterday as it usually is at about 4:30 on a work day, a time just before the maximum rush hour, but a time when all the lanes are full and we move along stiffly from a drive to a brake, from a forward to a standstill; the movement is punctuated and monotonously regular, like a regiment of soldiers goose-stepping in Pyongyang in Kim Il Sung Square in honor of one or another descendants of Kim Il Sung himself.
Drive, stop; drive, stop; we lumbered down the roads brightly lit. We drove over the river, which was hidden in a large culvert and was out of sight, and through the long-cut-down woods.

The stores were packed.
The parking lots were more crowded than we had ever seen before, as the John Q Consumers registered each and every one of their individual votes on the issue of "Shopping on Thanksgiving Day: Good or Bad?" with gusto.

The streets around Lakeside Mall were Blade-Runner-ish brilliant - future Los Angeles neon streets.
The great and festive gobs of electric light plasmafied the sky and the streets. The black asphalt glowed deep silvery-jet with the lightning of pulsating commerce.

When we reached Utica (Michigan) on Hall Road, things began to settle down, but there were large groups of people standing about, staring at the glare and rumble that came from the Lakeside Mall area.
Hall Road bridged over the Van Dyke expressway, so the lights and clamor were bounced up over the hump formed by the bridge, and it looked like false dawn suddenly illuminating a dark, shadowy mountain.

I looked into my rear view mirror, and I saw the dark rise of the bridge and the Sun of artifice dawning over it, making this time of black winter night at least as bright as dusk just after sunset.....

Oh, Brave New World, my soul sang!

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