It's wicked to mock the afflicted

I found myself in a village outside of Edinburgh looking for a warehouse. While reconciling my hand drawn map with the unnamed streets, I noticed the buildings around me. There is a style of architecture in this country whose sole design purpose is to punish its inhabitants. They come in two shapes; rectangular and even more rectangular. They are two stories high and each residence gets four windows per side. The building is then rolled in what looks like breadcrumbs and then painted one of three shades of sputum. This kind of housing always seems to crowd the peripherals of the railroads. While you watch the countryside fly by, enjoying the beautiful landscapes and sea views, you get a sensory slap in the face as you must watch these sad little communities blur by. After traversing a few blocks of these buildings for which the exterior decorators chose ‘summer-time bile’. I found the warehouse. It was right beside a Gregg’s warehouse. For those who do not know, Gregg’s is a very cheap bakery where one can get anything they could dream of. As long as those dreams are limited to jelly donuts and sausage rolls. By order of the Queen, whenever any store closes whether it be a pub or dentist’s clinic, it is replaced by a Gregg’s. Each Gregg’s must also employ at least one teenage girl with gold hoop earrings and hickeys on her neck. The breeze told me that the warehouse was baking ‘yumyums’. My people would call these ‘bearclaws’. I played with the idea of going in and asking for a tour but I had less important but more pressing things to get done.

As I waited at the warehouse door, the sugar-sweetened breeze reminded me of a time when I lived in a similar area. For a time, my abode was a band’s practice studio located in the warehouse district of a different city in a different country. There was also an industrial bakery across the street. They made fortune cookies. Nothing but fortune cookies. Every day. At all hours. As a result, a patina of fortune cookie molecules covered everything in the immediate area. My truck’s interior carried the smell for months. Soon after, I made the decision to move to away from that city and start to live a different kind of life. Occasionally, as I fretted over the consequences of moving to a new city which held no friends or support, the waft of fortune cookie would remind me of what I was leaving behind. It reinforced that the complications and difficulties that I was facing were only niggling concerns as transitory as they were inconsequential.