…My routine after work and after supper with my sister and her partner never really varied that much. After a very long walk in the rain, I would hit a local fast food outlet and gorge myself on the standard acceptable food groups of the day: hamburger buns… carbs, hamburger patty… protein; cheese…dairy; fried onions… vegetables, french fries…carbs and starch; topped with mayo…egg whites; relish and mustard…sodium, sugar. It was always the same routine. Livin the life.
I never met anyone other than family and Sandy the whole time I was out there. I just remember being very lonely while walking up and down those downtown streets at night and in the rain, the mist, the drizzle, the light rain, the light mist and the light drizzle amid the high rise apartments and sky high business skyscrapers, alone with my thoughts and a weird habit of conversing with myself while walking to keep myself company. It didn’t really matter being considered a nut-zo in a city such as this as the streets were almost always deserted. During the day the mice came out to play in the liquid sunshine of course, scurrying about as the city seemed to come to life but at night the place resembled a ghoulish, grey coloured morgue: eerily dark as only Hades himself could appreciate except for the glint of the dull yellow or faint orange glow of its street lights. The inhabitants seemed to be nearly dead and laid up, one on top of the other, in their individually marked trays or cocoons called apartment blocks.
After a couple of months I had had enough. I quit my job and returned home.
The west end of that city appears much the same today as it did 55 years ago.
It still rains. A lot!