Big Ron and I have finally gotten together after passing by each other for decades. We have many of the same friends and acquaintances in the boxing and martial arts fraternity. He has worked on building or remodeling, or has shopped in, many of the numerous supermarkets I have worked in. I live 100 yards from where he lived until a couple years ago. Most fascinatingly, Ron is the same age as my oldest son and went to the same middle school and has told me the horror stories that my son kept to himself, afraid that I would do something horrible at school and embarrass him. Big Ron and I both quit high school as abruptly as possible and went into the workforce ASAP.

This time last year, Big Ron watched me lose my next to last fight and decided to take up stick-fighting. But then, as he worked on remodeling yet another one of the many prison-like Baltimore Area schools that he ironically escaped the scaffolding collapsed beneath him and he found himself in a shock-trauma unit. Not working is grinding on Ron as he awaits his next operation, after which he is determined to get back to work. In the intervening weeks before Ron’s next nap under the knife I’ll be meeting with him to discuss his Harm City life. From our initial talk over a few beers at the Raven Inn, which produced 12 stories of violence and mayhem on my notepad once I got home, I am sure—that with his high mechanical recall rate, and his self-deprecating sense of working class perspective—that Big Ron’s Baltimore will go a long way towards my goal of illuminating the rise of the anarcho-tyranny matrix that our children and grandchildren will be challenged with as Modernity makes it’s cataclysmic course through the land of our ancestors and the lives of our descendants.

My goal is to be able to present Ron with his own memoir while he’s recovering from that next surgery.

Thanks, Ron.

James, 3/27.2017, 5:28 A.M.