I Wrote This While Standing In The Apple Store At 2pm On A Sunday

There is something ethereal about the state of technology commerce today. There is an overwhelming sense of being, a sense of an ecosystem that is all-encompassing, engulfing the volume of our attention and will. The Apple Store, much like the Microsoft Store, like Tesla and Samsung, is both the inviting harbinger of our happiness and our destruction.

The Apple Store employees flutter around me, content to ignore the middle aged man typing on an Asus laptop covered with Steven Universe stickers. They do offer glances in my direction while servicing customers, perhaps entertaining a slight curiosity about my function beyond just taking up a small percentage of the ample space available in the store.

It is within that space that the concept of Apple thrives. Sure, iPhones and iPads and AirPods are revolutionary in their own right, a shining example of the advances of technology, but the store is the temple in which this technology can thrive. It is the pinnacle of commerce, something that every retailer dreams of reproducing. The customers are unaware of the mind-numbing magic that seeps between the nerves in their brains.

There, a man about my age but appearing as if he was born of the unholy union of a couch and a bag of corn chips furrows his brow as an Apple Store employee explains something about iOS updates and the importance of such. There, a mother, holding her child that is too old to be held is shown a current model iPad, but told that new ones will be hitting the store soon and her child would greatly enjoy the iPad Mini. The child, unimpressed, is clearly hungry.

The store employees slowly rush between customers waiting, leaning on some portion along the wooden, family-style tables displaying the numerous Apple devices. This is a sort of ballet, something with kindness and precision that can only be found in a store in a mall, not at the updated Walmart electronics section and certainly not online. But there is darkness here. It hangs in the air, a tension that cannot be defined but scrapes some of the luster from the perfectly lit space.

Under the smiles of the employees, beyond the polite replies of the customers, there is frustration. While some customers are here to purchase new products, most are here to browse while the rest are here for repairs. I watch as customers grind their teeth at the cost of a new screen, employees scoff at another customer "just looking" and the manager eyes me with growing suspicion. I suspect an overdue "how can I help you today" is coming, so I pretend to be interested in something very far away.

The guardian of the entrance, an Apple Store employee with a healthy man bun and trendy tattoos that disappear under his worn black shirt, happily warns newcomers that the wait for repair attention could be an hour. Meanwhile, around the corner, a store called iFixandRepair sits empty, waiting for the scraps of customers too disillusioned to maintain a semblance of patience for Apple attention.

And I am. I am interested in Radio Shack and Circuit City. I am interested in Montgomery Ward and Sears. I am interested in a VCR repair shop I once visited before realizing it would be cheaper to just buy a new VCR. I am interested in my friend John, who still collects Laser-Discs and Laser-Disc players. I am interested in the first time I purchased a cell phone, from a GTE kiosk inside Walmart in the late 1990s. This new shrine of technology is a furniture showroom, just with less tie-enhanced aging white men asking you to "go ahead and sit on it".

We make so many of our purchases online, yet the Apple Store is routinely filled with persons. Perhaps customers, perhaps just killing time before the infinite darkness we were promised, perhaps just looking for the T-Mobile store. This space, this space creates more space. It creates a divide from reality, an emptiness of which we fill with our desires and technology knowledge and habits. We throw our batteries and texting into it, our Twitter , Facebook , SnapChat, Tinder, iTunes usage stats are plastered on the walls like blood splatter. That is our soul, violently disemboweled and spread across the paint.

The store is silent now. Everyone is staring at me. I am pointing at the wall, saying something about apps and blood and our souls. Praise the Apple Store, a testament to the new gods, a holy place of divine giving and screen repairing. But I must be going now. Every year it gets harder and harder to out-run mall security.