The Red Hoodied Manatee
So, if you've been following this site at all, you know my obsession with the Summit Park Mall. There's a story behind it.
I wasn't paying much attention when the mall closed in 2009. That was a complicated year, I had much more to occupy my attention. I really didn't pay much attention until it made the news in 2013 for flooding. I really started paying attention to it in 2014 when Zoran Cocov bought it. Since 2014, I've had the occasional dream about the mall reopening. By last year, there were becoming a regular occurrence. They had various iterations: fancy upgrades, elaborate constructions: not really the mall, but still had the malls name. Sometimes I walked it in my dreams abandoned: it still held its mystique.
The most recent one was actually mentioned on this site . That one held the mall closest to its original setup, complete with goofy sports stores and food court. It is in this dream where the red hoodied manatee came into being. In the dream, the sports store was selling stuffed manatees wearing college football hoodies. Now, mind you, I know absolutely nothing about college football, but I could still successfully name the logo on the manatee I picked up: a white "A" on a red hoodie it was wearing. My fried Ron (Hall of Fame inductee) couldn't quite figure out the color scheme, which is weird since he's a sports nut, but I knew it was Alabama for some reason. This led to quite an interesting back and forth where I had to explain to him that I knew that Alabama's mascot was not a manatee, and the point that it was a dream.
What's so weird is that I brought up the story of the manatee to Ron two weeks ago. It was at the point where I was positive that the mall project had stalled, and had given up on it ever opening. Well, a week later the news showed progress, and I ate my words. Now, there's no way I'm finding a manatee wearing an Alabama hoodie, but I might just find a manatee. At this point, the manatee is officially becoming my sign of progress. My hope is to walk into that mall with a stuffed manatee, and get dirty looks because nobody knows why this crazy guy is carrying a stuffed manatee to a dead mall.
I'll update this blog with all my summer adventures: trust me.
-In search of a dead-mall manatee
I wasn't paying much attention when the mall closed in 2009. That was a complicated year, I had much more to occupy my attention. I really didn't pay much attention until it made the news in 2013 for flooding. I really started paying attention to it in 2014 when Zoran Cocov bought it. Since 2014, I've had the occasional dream about the mall reopening. By last year, there were becoming a regular occurrence. They had various iterations: fancy upgrades, elaborate constructions: not really the mall, but still had the malls name. Sometimes I walked it in my dreams abandoned: it still held its mystique.
The most recent one was actually mentioned on this site . That one held the mall closest to its original setup, complete with goofy sports stores and food court. It is in this dream where the red hoodied manatee came into being. In the dream, the sports store was selling stuffed manatees wearing college football hoodies. Now, mind you, I know absolutely nothing about college football, but I could still successfully name the logo on the manatee I picked up: a white "A" on a red hoodie it was wearing. My fried Ron (Hall of Fame inductee) couldn't quite figure out the color scheme, which is weird since he's a sports nut, but I knew it was Alabama for some reason. This led to quite an interesting back and forth where I had to explain to him that I knew that Alabama's mascot was not a manatee, and the point that it was a dream.
What's so weird is that I brought up the story of the manatee to Ron two weeks ago. It was at the point where I was positive that the mall project had stalled, and had given up on it ever opening. Well, a week later the news showed progress, and I ate my words. Now, there's no way I'm finding a manatee wearing an Alabama hoodie, but I might just find a manatee. At this point, the manatee is officially becoming my sign of progress. My hope is to walk into that mall with a stuffed manatee, and get dirty looks because nobody knows why this crazy guy is carrying a stuffed manatee to a dead mall.
I'll update this blog with all my summer adventures: trust me.
-In search of a dead-mall manatee
[…] now, welcome to RED HOODED MANATEE! Named after that one story I told way back when. It’s also attached to my twitter, and has its own Facebook […]
ReplyDelete[…] if you’ve been paying attention at all to this blog (which nobody has), you’d remember this little post where I mentioned one of the Summit Mall dreams I had. Y’know, the one with the stuffed […]
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