Today Georgia and Megan and I took Luke, the grandson of one and the nephew of the other, out of the northernmost neighborhoods of East Baltimore, Colgate and Berkshire, through Greektown and east across Oldham Street to Canton. Canton is the area between Eastern Avenue and the Baltimore Harbor, north of Fells Point and south of Ponca and Hollabird.

We sallied here at noon, the heat rising from the pavement, every third row house door behind bars. No trash was visible on the street, indicating that only ghosts and Latinos lived here and that the few individual Bantus were visiting.

The margins are patrolled by a couple individual Bantu warriors, seeking their grift by day before evenfall when the Latino militia men will drive them forth to their haunts just west of Patterson Park, south of the Edison Highway Bridge.

The new hipster hive construction for the bugman and bugwoman legions is astounding as it rises ugly and post industrial like housing for American media ambassadors of The Lie in some forbidding Middle Eastern city. This is made possible by two factors. Bantus have been ousted from half of their former range in East Baltimore by the stick of Latino hate and the carrot of white guilt. For Johns Hopkins hires the anachronistically martyred black women on one hand and buys her section eight rental for doctor and nurse housing and ships her and her brood further west. Meanwhile, the hardworking Latinos and their hardcase criminal cadres drive the hoodrat drug dealers and street thugs northeast into Essex, in Baltimore County, two miles past where I sit and write this at Eastpoint Mall.

The new construction is cheap, stark, and bears a facade of emptiness, with nary a tree in sight, rising in a concrete wilderness against the dirty water of the harbor, its sissy inhabitants shielded from the Bantu hordes by a mile-deep and four-mile long cordon of Mestizo resolve.

The National Bohemian beer “one-eyed man” logo rises from the old brewery, making for the single most beautiful and natural sight in this ghastly paved expanse.

We shop at the BJs food club. The door is guarded by an armed security guard, a private cop like the one who gunned down two hoodrats at the West Baltimore Giant earlier this week.

The customers are divided 3 ways: empty nest Boomer ghost couples, middle class black families and sterile Gen-X justice breeders putting on the wan feedbag to keep 20th century political ideologies nearly alive. This means that thirty years from now, this waterfront enclave is going to be inhabited by ¼ elderly guilt ghosts, ¼ Asian technoserfs and ½ government employees of local color, protected from their feral cousins by a colony of Mestizos.

Masks are everywhere, at about 40% frequency, inside and outside in the 101 degree July heat. It is low tide in Maskland.

Upon returning home Luke, a tough little Yeti child, waited for me to bring in the groceries. Then, when I was done loading the freezer in the basement for his granny, he lurked at the top of the stairs and said, “Play? Play? Ball? Play ball?”

He is late talking. But he fears nothing and was braver in the yard playing soccer with me last week than his much older female cousins.

We lined up in the living room with a partially deflated beach ball and went at it. Ball in the face? No problem—he kept rolling. It occurred to me then that Luke is just the kind of boy capable of becoming just the kind of ivory ape capable of negotiating a very bleak but ultimately weak future.