There is this mall that does not make sense.

They anyway never do, because people do not have money to spend. For the cheap and easy products are so cheap and easy that someone else has to pay for them, costy and big. In Cambodia or Guatemala or one of those places, where they eat rice and beans and sew for a life time in cellars without sunrays. Over here, nobody has money to spend apparently, even if the salaries skyrocket. Dropping coins into jars, dusty of thick glass to spend later on some gadget with smoothie and ice-crush function. Or for a holiday. Wouldn’t that be nice, by the shore of a money-drenched life watching the rays set in the surface of your fizz. Metal frames in a jar waiting to be spent. But not in this mall though. This mall makes even less sense. There are no shops. Just blue light in empty halls. And a smurf at the entrance that is not even blue. Some other cartoon characters are hidden behind glass as if they were some 80’s pop band mime cheats. They hide from nobody. Not even the tramps from the nearby underpass would bother to check whether anybody gave them a dime, or a damn for that matter. Blue hotel on a lonely highway. There is nobody here to spend anything. It is the last stop of the ever-growing, money-laundering train of the modern society. Booya, there I said it.

The smurf outside is drained of colour, lost the shine, like an art-deco doorhandle that has been sucked to its core by the Brussels spray. In the meantime the train-station, the real one, stretches in the neighbouring room, full with people waiting to get their platform announced. What a bunch of irresponsible, lazy people, victimized commuters, drained of colour, walking past miniature screens telling them what to do not. More screens hidden in their fists, keeping them hungry for information that already expired. In my understanding, this whole area does not make sense. Also Tao Lin does not understand. He is a Taiwanese writer, in Brussels for the first time. He does not like it here, but he wouldn’t say. Asian polite style. He writes without adjectives, because they are overrated, he thinks. He avoids descriptions. He wants to show what poeple feel. In which case he succeds to bring a lot of other words into the light. Annoying words. Unconnected. Correlated. Affixed. And tagged on in a fancy manner. Sentences fly and bleed colour. Blue Hotel. Life don’t work out my way. Stream of the mind. Smurf of the day. Station of your dreams. Stop this crap. Now. Yes. Done.

Oh, just one more thing, please. What do the few people that do not go shopping but pass this blue mall on their way to somewhere, actually see? Nothing, much, Sir. They just cross it.