Composed 3/25/16
Description: A rare prose piece from me. A description of a place in which I am forced to reside once a week for several hours…
It’s a hulking, ancient building amidst a concrete jungle. Today, gray – sky, air, rain. Inside, mud-spattered, dust accented patterned tile, arranged in ill-advised juxtaposition. The place is obviously old, without renovation since its original ribbon cutting, crafted by the wrinkled hands and bills of ancient cults of bald, spectacled men smoking cigars by the sparking fireplace. The endless faces of its patrons, a thousand eyes, stare, watch, smile blandly in their frames. Souls captured and sold – a warning, a premonition, a foreshadowing. Have they ever really left this place?
You turn and enter between gaps of cursed guardians. Perfectly square, dull tan and beige, the place boxes you in. A prison of monochrome uniformity. The metal chairs screech against the dull tile floor like demons clawing their way out of hell.
It is more a prison than any prison I know, giant concrete blocks and all. Only now the prison is a whitewashed reflection of high school nightmares, combining confinement with insecurity, awkwardness, and incurable boredom.
Not even windows give a peek into the outside world. Buzzing florescents coat the room in an aura of delusion. Reality vanishes in favor of a buttercream LSD trip. A power surge would send us scrambling into complete darkness. Not a shred of natural light filters through the cracks in slab. And the steaming heat, like the flames of hell, siphon away your desire to live, to go on…
The place sucks battery life even faster than it sucks out your soul. Technology dies rapidly as it reaches out for contact, any signal of hope, of life beyond these walls.
But no one answers. Only the drone of the establishment and the groans of your peers interrupt the silence…
Scraps of Paper 