I have not been online, even to check emails for a couple of weeks. Posting is done in large prescheduled blocks [0] which means that nothing on this site is timely, unless it is. The timeless quality of urban blight is something I now plumb for science fiction writing and the odd survival article. However, a new scholar on the scene, a certain Decrease Matter, is investigating the uprising of the heathen in the elder, eastern regions of the nation. For analysis I have recommended him to a scholar of noted gravity and now prodigious antiquity.
The transcript of the meetings of these two minds are reproduced below courtesy of Mister Matter. Footnotes are mine.
James LaFond, Portland, Oregon, 11/30/21
…
Matter: Thank you for seeing me, Sir. I read your book, The Truth about Black Folks, and liked it very much.
Slickens: Well, thank you. I see Mister By and Flighty sent his big city man—must be some news needing analysis, which ain’t easy when you a bum. Well tell the great man of letters—whad?
Matter: Oh, I brought you a four-pack of Bittberger—here—and this fifth of Dickels sour mash...I mean its not Ralph Mayes, but I didn’t figure you for a rye man.
Slickens: Jimmy who? Shieeed, his shanty ass would of brought PBR and cheap rum. Mister Matter, or might I call you Decrease, the janitorial closet is always open to you and your timely inquiries! [1]
Matter: Thank you, Mister Slickens. I have some recent figures here if you do not mind, let’s say, advancing a causal supposition. As you well know, a man in my delicate demographic position is not free to opine on such things.
Slickens: Negroes with guns—here we go!
Matter: The murder rate in NYC went from a pre-2019 norm of about 200 to, this year, in a mere 11 months, 427.
Slickens: Well, the Irish can’t run shit. The Eye-Talians got old and fat—so you got what you have here, money going to the chump-ass Disease problem rather than to the dumb-ass deese problem. I suppose the Atlanta strip clubs are loosing some bidness ‘bout now and a bitch might as well sell her ass up in New York. If you gonna pimp, go to the Big Cracker Barrel.
Matter: Chicago is at 649.
Slickens: Shoot, okay. If I remember from my army days, taking into account Chicago windage—figuring the 49 odd dead as white folks, Asians and Latinos—if you got 600 dead hoods and hoes, den you got a need for some 1800 wheel chairs. Invest in wheel chair manufacture...I’d suggest Burlington, Iowa, right across the river, won’t have to pay dem crackas shit.
Next.
Matter: The murder rate in Philadelphia, as with NYC, has doubled since 2020 and is holding, with 503.
Slickens: Germans sure know how to brew…
[Smacks lips.]
Well, considering congested streets, density of melination, and such, you’d be lucky to sell 250 wheel chairs in Philly next year. I would be interested to see if the number of nasty white heroin addicts in that city who die of overdose is not close to the same as this black-on-black morticians bill. The racket you wanna get into in Philly, is heroin.
Matter: Reading, Pennsylvania has had 19 killed.
Slickens: Yes, quite a number for such a small place. Sounds like 20 Dominicans and but one with a gun. This is what happens when New York gets rid of a problem—you don’t wanna be down stream from the cleanup. So rather then fret about NYC becoming more deadly, I’d count my lucky stars if I lived anywhere off I-95 or within 200 miles of that bomb crater of morality.
Matter: Of course, your home of Baltimore, with a fraction of the population of Philly or Chicago already has 307 killed!
Slickens: That should round out to about 324 by year’s end. There are less shooters then beforetimes, but, since 2015, they are doing half or more of their work in broad daylight, which makes for more accuracy, further depressing the wheel chair and scooter chair market. And you got MS-13 kickin’ into gear on the Eastside, so we in for a long hard ride. Might I suggest rebooting the powder cocaine market in Baltimore, what with all these DeeCee types bed-rooming up here and working down in that pit of despair?
Matter: Now the surrounding Baltimore County has over 50 homeycides. How do you frame that?
Slickens: That is mostly Essex where Spanish have pushed blacks, and Catonsville, where blacks have pushed blacks, fighting over that suburban-white-junky-with-money business. Again powder cocaine suggests itself to the astute investor. Note that the City has only 550-thousand and the County more like 650-thousand, and further note that the killings in the County are being done by people who look like they grew up in the City, and that the population of the County is almost entirely descended from people who fled the City. Taking those factors into account then you understand that there was a reason why neither the scientists of Egypt or of Wakanda invented guns—cause it would have been straight up suicide! Spears and such give a body time to contemplate his stupidity, where the gun hastens the expedition of said dumb-assedness.
Matter: Thank you for that. I never thought of technology as a driver.
Slickens: Well, my folks and technology do not often inhabit the same sentence, which is shame, in that we invented beer—stole by the Germans—and whiskey—stole by the Irish—and overpopulation, which was stole by everybody and was the very foundation of the Industrial revolution. Yep, and just like that damned disease, the Chinese made guns and white folks spread it.
[Smacks lips, sighs.]
Damn, this Dickels fella must be mixed, Scottish and Lumbee, I bet.
Matter: What about the case of Saint Louis, with 171, but less population than Baltimore—the city at least? They consider Saint Louis a metro area with a county.
Slickens: Sadly, the great Civilization of Cahokia, from which the Indian side of my family were descended from that job the Mormons did bringing down shit on us some two thousand years ago, perished halfway between Chicago and Saint Louis.
Matter: What?
Slickens: Drink up, son—it ‘ill make more sense to your young ears.
Matter: Oak-kay.
Slickens: So, little do people know that the New Madrid Fault that runs through that area is ready to explode, but for a hundred years before it blows, and lifts the Mighty Miss out of her accustomed bed, it drives folks crazy with the vibration of it all—the tension rattling what they used to call the firmament. I opined this to Shanty-ass Hobo History himself and he didn’t even report it, but used it as the back story for some racist novel about the last seven white boys on earth whoopin’ shit out of strapping Negroes and brave Latinos.
Matter: Reverent Chandler?
Slickens: Yes—anyhow. That shit is commin’ due and the Mississippi watershed is a seductress where many a civilization has gone to his untimely grave. That is how I see Saint Louis—cause doze Negroes ain’t breeding up to pace—and living among all that corn! There would be a million big fat baby mamma’s just dropping babies like hens do eggs I June.
Matter: I think I follow you.
Slickens: Come on, son. There is something mix-genic in the water out there. Least ways a hood in Baltimore, abides by the metaphysics of it all, and when he guns down some young hopper for no good reason, he sires a chyle out a season. We predacious en s’posed to breed not in season like some wretched ungulate abiding by the law of the rut, but for a reason, to replace what we done kilt for no good reason.
Matter: I… see.
Slickens: You got any mo a dis licker? I could explain African-American metaphysics better ova a good game of dominoes. [1]
[Gargles briefly with the last swig, swallows, smacks lips and then sighs.] [2]
…
Notes
-0. Posts that are not tagged “persicope” can be regarded, in general, as having been written 2-to-3 months ahead of the posting date and scheduled 1-to-2 months ahead of time.
-1. The janitorial closet where T. Spoone Slickens has held court over truant orphans since 1981, is located in the Hamilton area of Northeast Baltimore, in the basement of the church at Harford and Evergreen and is the building that serves as the Police Hostel in the novel serialized in part on this site, titled Last Whiteman.
-2. In defense of the scholar, the above transcript is a compression of a two-hour interview.
