Rainy Summer Day
I felt like walking around town. It was all I knew how to do when I felt trapped in the flat. I had gotten up early and decided to take my books up in my bag and sit in my usual place at the book shop, where they gave you coffee for free and you could sit at a little dainty oak table and read. It had been a string of reluctantly warm days for Scotland, people flooded the city and most of all the meadows to get pissed with their friends. I walked past them sneering, I was mad at them for only taking advantage of the atmosphere of the town when they could get drunk. They dangled their legs like they were hanging off a cliff and used each other as crutches. But Scotland was sick of these people taking her for granted, she fought back the day before with a vicious storm keeping me inside and today the sky was covered by her grey mist.

It made me nostalgic, in a way at first. I remembered when it was always grey and damp and you had to find something to distract yourself in. A shop. A comedy show. But there weren’t  any festivals on this year and soon it started pounding down with rain. I was on the bus up when it came down, only in shorts and a sweater, and I waited until the last stop I could get off before the book shop hoping it would die down. But it didn’t, and I was thrust out into the street. “Cheers” I said and lit a cigarette. It barely got wet and I felt protected. I got some sympathetic stares from people walking by with umbrellas and jackets. I didn’t care except for the fact I was embarrassed for being so stupid. Way to treat your son Mother Nature. I only had to walk 5 minutes downhill until I reached it.

The staff recognised me now, I’d come by every other day just for something to do and stuck around window shopping for a bit then reading for a few hours. There was the American guy with the soft polite voice all Americans in Scotland seemed to have, I assumed he ran the place or something because he was the one constant person there. A few others seemed to work there every time I came in too. There was a guy resembling the American but with even less hair and slightly tanned skin who was always the one to offer me coffee.  He looked like Micheal Mando.

So, I thought, I’ll stay here and wait out the rain. I was swift and jittery because of the rain and swerved up the stairs to the last book I’d read there. A biography about Grayson Perry. I sat down and waited for someone to come offer me some. I could have asked but I almost always waited. It took a lot longer than normal, probably because I’d planted myself on the furthest table away from people. Architecture and Design section, I thought, I’d love to pick up an Architecture and Design book and learn about it all, just to know, to expand my world a bit. But my attention wouldn’t hold and it’d be an embarrassing excercise that would last about 30 seconds before I put it back down in shame.

It took longer than normal for them to finally ask me. I saw him coming up out of my eye and shot up ready to accept his polite request. Except he was standing looking at the books with two other men instead.
“Cinematography...Architecture, Design, no Cinematography though, sorry guys.”
Oh. Well, I guess maybe I should ask. But just before leaving he did a double take, raised one eyebrow and smirked.
“Hello. Would you like some tea or coffee?” He asked invitingly
“Yes, coffee please!” I said, glad he’d finally caught on.

It took a long time for him to come with it too. I looked out the window at the roundabout and a little Italian restaurant’s outside seats empty. I was waiting for the rain to die but it never did. Not even after my coffee came, or when I finished it or two hours later when I suckled on it’s cold sugary remains. Bleh. It would go down for a bit then hit back even harder. I distracted myself with my book and little snippets of conversations. Two blurs stepped into the side of my eye. “That’s just how society works..” a young man says.
“If you were ever at a bar, would you buy a girl a drink...and then expect something out of it?” A young girl says
“No no no no...”
I didn’t know what to do. To be fair, it wasn’t as bad as it looked. The air at least was always still warm. It just made me depressed though, thinking of global warming slowly creeping in this beautiful, dripping city. Soon we’d just be Spain, and I’ll be an old man complaining about how cold it used to be in the good old days. When Ocean Centre is 50 feet under water and King Street is a thing of the past. The junkies are going to have to migrate, or get a submarine to deal.