Sunday. Century City Mall, Century City, Los Angeles, California. After a couple of hours at the Cheviot Hills kid’s park, the next step in my day off was to meet up at the Century City Mall, most notably, the shoe section at Nordstrom’s, which broke my vow last year of never, ever, going to said mall ever again in my life.

Sometimes we make false promises to ourselves.

Funny too because on the younger side of my teenage years, it was all I did. It was all anyone did. There was nowhere else to go. In the interims before sports got serious in the middle school days, the mall was where we all hung out. I’m not sure if teenagers still do this. We would walk around for hours and steal shit. Yeah. Me, my buddy Dave and my other buddy, Mike all became expert thieves. We ran distractions like wolves at prey, my pal, Dave, even sewed large pouches to the insides of his coat and cut the bottom out of his pockets. There were times he would steal something and I never even saw him do it. We were hoodlums.

Maybe this is on my mind because I watched Mallrats the other day. A mid nineties movie revolving around two young men attempting to woo their ex-girlfriends back. It reminded me of the old days when malls were a thing. I mean, it’s different out here than it is in east coast suburbia where the old malls are now empty…At least I think they are. People don’t go to malls anymore do they?

The Century City Mall is outdoors and vast, a labyrinth of ramps and multiple levels mostly full of shops I’ve never heard of. It’s a science fiction, ultra capitalist version of my own personal hell if Pinhead and his crew of cenobites were not weird goths but millennial teenage gossip junkies blasting trash such as Katie Perry, Britney Spears, and Taylor Swift over the speakers and punctuated by the occasional Christmas jingle.

Like I said, it was a Sunday and teeming with people of all ages. Lots of exhausted parents like myself. I found the eyes of more than a few dads and we shared that look that said “Yeah this blows.”

Up on the third deck, on our way to the food court to pump our guts full of mediocrity, I noticed a temporary holiday bar that seemed to have its shit together somewhat. I came very close to going in and asking for a Deshler, but thought better of it. I walked by a couple of times trying to see if they had Dubonnet on the backbar but it was pretty sparse. Despite it being a place where they probably didn’t have the technology to make a Vieux Carre or La Louisiane, it still had some gravity pulling on me. Hey, it was a bar in the middle of the ninth circle of hell which means it was the best thing I saw all day.

The biggest problem with Blitzen’s Bar is you have to drink your beverage within the confines of the bar itself. Laws and such prevent a person from buying a beverage and quaffing it while being forced to walk around. This is the largest drawback of any bar of this type. My suggestion and advice if this happens to you is three fold: 1. Never go to this type of place unless you’re desperate. 2. Bring another beverage into the bar, such as a coffee, purchase a drink, and sneak the drink into the coffee or drink the coffee and put the drink into the empty cup. 3. Bypass the bar altogether and bring a hip flask.

Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on Cupid! on, Donder and Blitzen!