Palm Springs was a 'hundred and ten degree ghost town. Actually, the majority of the ghosts had gone back down to hell to cool off and we had the joint to ourselves. The pool was tepid, the baking shuffleboard court singed even my veteran foot-leather. There was nothing to do but draw the shades against the punitive sun, crank the AC 'till the windows iced up, eat tomatoes and fuck.

Oh yeah and go outlet shopping. Damn. My GF wanted to hit these outlet stores just outside of Palm Springs, in Cabazos. I passed through Cabazos several times as a youth, and my memories of the place are dominated these two concrete dinosaurs . I was stoked to see them still standing: sun-bleached lords of all they survey.

I was not-so-stoked to see that their domain now included an all-too-Cenozoic Morongo Indian Casino as well as the aforementioned outlet centre- a cancerous looking stucco tangle, nudging it's ugly back up against interstate 10. Those two gas-station dinosaurs used to punctuate for me the desert loneliness of the San Gorgonio pass- a sort of loneliness I appreciate. The definitive, cowboy, loneliness of the USA. Whereas the crowded Casino and outlet centre...that's a whole 'nuther school of American loneliness, and harder for me to bear. But I wasn't about to begrudge my old lady a shot at some deep discount shoe shopping.

Fortunately, the civil engineer responsible for the mall had the sensitivity and forethought to surround the property with an elaborate system of concrete drainage ditches and banks. And I, displaying an equal penchant for forethought, had packed my skateboard for the trip. I guess the Morongo kids are too busy dealin' blackjack to skate, 'cause these sweet culverts were ungraffitied and littered only with natural desert debris. Lashing some tumbleweeds together to make a primitive broom, I swept one out and sessioned until heat stroke made it impossible to continue.

So, back to the outlet centre, where I wandered tired and sweaty through the shoppers, who were on the collective cusp of thronging. Wandering, I wondered "What's up with the shopping? Why does anyone CHOOSE to come here? What is it, really, that's got these ladies all wound up?"

"The female of our species", I concluded over an unremarkable plate of food-court chinese, "is, and always has been, a hard-wired collector/gatherer. Modern women sort through shoes and skirts with the same instinctive intensity their woolly-breasted forebears brought to berry gathering and firewood scavanging. Earrings and fancy underwear are scrutinized with the same facility grandma used to spot edible greens out along the fence line".

Snapping into my egg roll with renewed ferocity, I concluded that a hard-wired hunter like myself was bound to feel out of place here.

Women garden- I kill spiders. Women go to work and buy groceries- I watch boxing and eat groceries. Women take their socks out of the dryer and match 'em up and put 'em away neatly in the drawer- I hunch, cheetah-like, two rows back at the strip club...

And thank goodness, really. For if this ancient biological imperative suddenly ceased to inspire frenzied, episodic, retail orgies in moms and girlfriends everywhere, what the hell would I have to wear?

But this revelation, like every revelation, just put me in a position to phrase a bigger question, "if you have 13 pairs of shoes, and you're in a shoe store, what are you really shopping for?"

I suspect it has something to do with identity. Prehistorically, you busted your ass to survive. Alive-ness was like, the main personality trait back then. Gathering and collecting enabled this very literal sort of existentialism to take place. But the ladies at the outlet centre ain't looking for a blanket warm enough to get their family through another winter, they want that 14th pair of shoes. They're gathering and collecting elements of identity...and that leads us down the clove-smoking, mime-shirted, path to a whole 'nuther school of existentialism.

About which I promise to write more in a few days...

PS-The skunks that live in my neighborhood make no attempt to hide their presence; and I discovered a fruit-bearing peach tree on my property about three months ago. But somehow proir knowledege of both elements failed to prepare me for the sight, just now, of a baby skunk eating a peach in the back yard...