Unpublished; written Nov. 17, 2000

I do not have a column this week, so this isn't a column. I don't know what it is. I have just started work at the Courier-Post in Cherry Hill, and before I can start writing anything major, we've got to work out my format and I've got to learn pagination – the technical art of laying out a page, getting text to fit in place, and apologizing profusely because you have to borrow someone else's computer to do it.

So I've spent the last week mainly just looking around my new neighborhood. And if you like anonymous highway service areas, you'll love South Jersey.

Let me describe it another way. If I tell you that I spent last Tuesday night in a mall, this actually wouldn't narrow the geography for you at all. Malls seem to stretch in an unbroken daisy chain from my apartment in Maple Shade to my job five miles away in Cherry Hill – giant stores filled with amazingly useless glitz.

I found a craft store, and among the many other crafts they would probably have room for was aircraft. It was a massive place, stocked with unfinished bird houses and shelves that didn't fit anywhere in particular and pristine acres of Christmas tinsel. Somebody must be buying this stuff, though the only people I saw there – and these are the people I usually see in craft stores and malls generally, to the point where it seems that this is a world they themselves have built – are rather plain, quiet women.

Want to know a frightening fact? I heard that the Cherry Hill Mall was not named after the town of Cherry Hill. It's the other way around.

That, in any case, was what I was told on Wednesday, when I went out for a drink with two guys from my new paper. We were discussing ideas for some major editorial series project, and we'd decided it should have something to do with the region's identity, because from what we could see, the region doesn't have one. It should, though. This is one of the original 13 colonies, the site of Revolutionary War activity. Why are they naming their cities after malls?

Thursday night I drove 100 miles each way to hang out with some friends in North Jersey, because I had nothing better to do. Friday I went to synagogue for pretty much the same reason.

My column should start next week or the week after. Maybe by then we'll know who the next president is, and I won't have to read countless letters and columns of conspiracy theories firing back and forth between the two sides. Maybe by then I'll also have phone service. Only then will the nation be secure.