When you look at the bland, boxy, non-offensive exterior you know that it’s supposed to be a part of something. But there isn’t any signage on the building. There’s nothing to commit it to being a particular brand of mega-retail cookie-cutter retail.

Like any good modern drugstore the widows are massive sheets of polished glass punching perfect squares into the flat, crème-colored stucco walls. Each one alternates between a boring display of whatever products are currently on sale, and a widescreen view of the interior. And inside it’s lit up like the last day of Pompeii by full-spectrum fluorescents hanging down from the ceiling.

Through the glass you can see rows and rows of consumer goods, stacked up tight along the aisles. Customers in full consumer narcotic stupor stumble along the linoleum canyons , dragging their screaming kids behind them, mechanically picking up items the don’t need and placing them into their baskets so that they can claim quasi-ownership of whatever happy crap it is they think will enrich their lives, before they bring it up to the counter to purchase another box of disappointment.

It’s exactly the kind of place I’d never go into. And as it turns out, I can’t. Because when you walk around the building, it’s just window after window.  Like a whore in a chastity belt, no matter how much money you may have in your pocket there’s no way in to actually satisfy the urge. And that, I’ve got to tell you, is far more interesting to me than the stuff inside of it.

Having spent some time there, I can tell you that it opens in the morning, and closes every night, the bars rolling down over the windows when the time comes. Inside customers come and go all day long. I’ve watched and waved and even smiled at a few pretty girls and couple of handsome fellows as they wander around inside looking lost as they search for razors and condoms surrounded by the bland masses. Sometimes they wave back, but they always wander away eventually , never to be seen again.

I don’t know where they go. I’ve checked the building from every side, but there are no interior exits I can see through the windows. But they’ve got to be coming from somewhere, and going to somewhere. Right?

It all seems so normal on the surface. And almost no-one in my up-and-coming urban hamlet seem aware of this strangeness that exists in the middle of their oh-so-normal neighborhood. It’s invisible to them because they can only see what fulfills their needs and wants. Someone has built an inter-dimensional inconvenience store on a main street, and since it doesn’t have any corporate branding on it, most people don’t consider it something worth caring about.

Of course the other old timers and a few straggling hipsters have started joined me in hanging around the windows. Occasionally we mash our noses up against the glass, peering into that other universe until the manager in the old-fashioned blue vest comes up and taps on the glass to shoo us away.