Buttered Brownies

I am STARVING today. My wife and I usually have breakfast together due to the combined effort it takes to get the baby to daycare.
I hated oatmeal all my life. I'm a texture guy and couldn't stand it served as cereal. I could eat all the oatmeal cookies you put down in front of me, though. Texture.
Anyway, when we started living together, I started tasting the instant oatmeal she'd sometimes have, and would eat it on occasion, but could never get through a full serving. Recently, I discovered Irish oatmeal. It has more texture and it doesn't have the shit that instand does to give it flavor. It's naked, so you add what you want. Our favorite is blueberries and brown sugar, though my wife takes a touch of margarine and pours milk over hers. Yuck.
Anyway, Miette's been eating baby oatmeal of late, and while I was boiling ours up, something about it smacked of her recent diaper bounty. I was grossed out and couldn't finish it. I had a granola bar on the train 'cause I was already hungry.
When I got off the train, I was hit with a very common loop smell: Brownies. I don't know where it is, but somewhere along the river there's apparently a bakery or cocoa factory. Some woman walking over the bridge next to me was blabbing loudly into her cell phone about it.
(incidentally, unless your phone is a piece of shit, you don't have to shout to be heard. Try it sometime.) She may have been talking to herself but holding the phone so as not to seem crazy. More on this later. ANYWAY, you can smell baking chocolate in some incarnation on the Adams St. bridge and on the State St. bridge, so it's pervasive. It always smells like fresh-baked brownies. It drives me nuts. Luckily, the corporate smell of the Leo Burnett building cleans your nose as soon as you go through the revolving doors.
I was reminded of a story of a good friend of mine who returned from wrestling practice to find a cooling pan of brownies his mom had just made. He cut out one and ate it. It was still warm, so he BUTTERED the entire pan and finished it. Though he was known for doing shit like this, and his food dare resume includes eating a stick of butter, drinking a large gravy from KFC, and inventing the Oreo cookie Power Hour (one cookie per minute for an hour), he remains built like an adonis and strong as an ox.

I am also reminded that there could be worse things to live by, like the sewage plant by our fraternity house, the garbage incinerators by my college dorm...
And better things. The house I used to live in was within an egg's throw of the Country House, a tavern known for their magnificent cheeseburgers. Where we live now is downwind of the Pepperidge Farm bakery. Most mornings it smells like toast or cinnamon toast.
I'd eat a whole pan of buttered brownies right now.