Yesterday, as I headed to bed, my roommate, reading the paper, wanted to know what I thought about an attractive socialite—and oldest Ravens cheerleader—pleading guilty to rape for blowing a 15 year old boy!

Of course she is a skank, and I’d probably make her leave immediately after servicing me. But rape, seems to have lost its savagery if a 110 pound woman can pull it off. The equating of an inappropriate sex act with violence, just so some women can have the pleasure of seeing a better looking and more suction-friendly woman punished, is a sure sign of a society in decline. We don’t care about real rapes—just this metaphoric rape.

As I walked north to the bus stop, unaware that a shooting was just being cleaned up five blocks in the other direction, I mused over the fact that Mayor O’Mamma is currently having a tiff with the Governor over providing aid to 23 of the liquor stores that she told the BPD to let burn. She has decided that the adults of Baltimore may not drink, and that 23 merchants holding 100,000 dollar plush liquor licenses should just file for bankruptcy and unemployment.

As I boarded the bus, mulling over Harm City’s decent into Momocracy, I noticed that the bus driver was a black female. Generally speaking, a black female bus driver means that black male youth can ride for free, simply by pleading that they are broke.

Sure enough, the next person to board was a young gangbanger from the same crew who raped and murdered a 16 year old girl within a quarter mile of the bus stop almost two weeks ago. He played pathetic—as humble a shuck and jive ‘please massa’ routine as ever occurred in a plantation house. She named him, “Baby,” and he rode for free.

At the very next stop, three people boarded. One of them was a young white guy who was drunk. He was dressed in wannabe gangbanger attire and spent a great deal of time explaining that he did have bus fare, but that it was in one of his many crowded cargo shorts pockets and he was getting it. The driver scolded him like a naughty house pet.

As I observed this scene for racial nuances, I found instead, that what infuriated the black female bus driver was this fool’s insistence that he could pay, and would, where she was less interested in collecting a fare and more interested in ruling over her rolling domain with a judgmental tongue. Check your dignity at the door and you can ride for free.

She was an emasculator, conditioned to drive any whisper of manhood from the soul of a male youth.

While the bus progressed I noticed, that this bus, like the others I have been this June, is plastered with anti smoking signs, that state that any cashier caught selling cigarettes without carding, no matter the customer’ apparent age, will be prosecuted by the State of Maryland. Every cigarette customer in Maryland must produce a slave pass!

I hate smoking and smokers, and have even written a novelette about a carpenter going on a killing spree, murdering any smoker he can get his hands on! But Mother Government threatening cashiers over idiots committing stale carbon monoxide suicide?

As I neared the storefront at 11:22, Rico Suavity, a bus patron and customer well known to me for being a louse that darts onto the bus in front of the pregnant and the elderly, was bumping fists with a white trash gutter grungite, when they spied me.They had just left the store. The grungite was a wiry welterweight. Rico looks like a victim of the Battan Death March if you glazed him over with some core body fat and weakened his ligaments.

He spit—as he is ever doing—grabbed his balls under his sweat pants, scratched his crotch on the outside, and said to me, “Hey, hey buddy?

Not wanting to know what he wanted I walked on by without making eye contact, just keeping his hands and feet and the outline of his partner in my peripheral vision. As I continued past him he said, “Wait—whoa, yo, some respect?”

I kept walking and his partner yelled, “Hey motherfucker that’s why bitches like you get fucked up!”

Without turning my head I pumped my fist in the air and continued toward the door.

He continued, “Hey, bitch, how’d you like us to beat the shit outta you!”

I pumped my fist again as I continued for the door. No shadows were coming into my peripheral field as I looked off of my knee with each stride, swiveling the head low in syncopation, never turning to expose the neck, jaw or side of the head.

He continued, “You listening to me, motherfucker!”

I pumped my fist, noting that he was also moving away from me, which is when threats usually pick up.

As I walked into work he yelled, “You need your ass kicked, bitch!”

Once inside I spoke with Bubba and found out that these men—both in their late 20s, did not have I.D. When he declined to sell them cigarettes they began making threats to staff and soliciting customers to buy the smokes for them. They were headed up to the 7-11 where Abner works alone and where cops no longer stop at night, to shake him down for some cigarettes. Bubba thought that they wanted me to purchase cigarettes for them, and that they had threatened other customers and employees for not helping them.

Nothing good could have come from heeding Rico Suavity’s request to stop and speak. I would have been a stationary object of their anger rather than one moving off. Also, turning to argue would have had a negative result.

Keeping moving and keeping quite has saved me from the dozens of attacks that most other men who have lived in my shoes in Harm City have endured. It makes no friends, but in a world without friends worth making, that is an expense I’m willing to pay.

As I clocked in I noticed the poster on the counter about how serious Maryland is about punishing any clerk or cashier who does not card every person who seeks to buy cigarettes. Of course, since smokers are the most well-adjusted, level-headed segment of society, and in light of the fact that virtually all violent criminals are smokers who never respond irrationally to a refused request, this could not possibly result in violence, could it, Mother Land?