Oh fun times Plinky... Describe the community you live in, as if it were the setting for a book. I wouldn't call myself a very good writer most of the time but I have often written a beginning... Though I have never contemplated setting a book here. It isn't really the environment for a romance.
Concrete building after concrete building. Each as bland as the next. For an outsider the only distinguishing marks the name on the sign outside each of the buildings identical stairways. Reading those signs, somebody must have had a sorry sense of humour. Best House, Little House, Cobby House names which emphasised the dullness of the buildings rather than providing any sense of character.
Every person confined to the weather worn concrete creation was lured there under false pretences. Most want to leave, few do. Few escape the prison of concrete. Here is a place of boredom masked with descriptions of professionalism, debauchery justified by the desire to relax and frustration created by the requirement to excel.
The place has all the facilities a human should desire. A large mess hall serving three warm meals a day, television to be watched freely, sporting fields by the dozen and a well stocked gymnasium. There is nothing openly missing, nothing which has been designated as off-limits or confiscated. Yet nobody lives there without a sense of loss. All acknowledge that the place has let them keep their humanity, keep their luxuries but that it all has come at a very great cost.
The weather is bad, though on a good day the grass invites the trees paint a beautiful picture against the blue, blue sky. Nobody notices. Nature is a background, a foil for making the place appear more bearable to outsiders. The grass is beautiful because it is untouched, to sit or to walk upon it would be sacrilege.
The rules of this place may seem strange to one not part of this place. Requesting to another person simply to be allowed to go into town is standard. To drink alcohol within the buildings or to leave your room untidy has similiar outcomes. Rarely a week goes without persons charged and punished to sweep the open-air car parks, polish brass flagpoles and photocopy pointless documents.
This is a place of indoctrination. People come to it everyday fresh-faced kids and they don't even know when it happens. The place which they learn to hate becomes everything. Every decision they make, every conversation they have, every plan that they make becomes based around the place. What of these people? What of the people who call this place home?
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