Today I walked down into Cedonia to have a look around, checking for tell-tale ground litter and other signs of dire times. I stopped at the Sunny Mart and caught a news bit about the conviction and sentencing of a handful of the pack of hoodrats who stamped an older East Baltimore man into a coma this time last year. The 15-year-old girl who stomped on his head while he was already in a coma got 15 irony-laced years. She will be out when she’s 30, a hardened murderess of some 300 pounds…

2:30 p.m.

I checked the spot where the four boys tried to blitz me late last summer at night and am now convinced that I moved further and faster than I thought I did. I had an immediate memory of darting across the intersection of Mary and Greenhill and getting my back against a working van while I pulled out my shank. It seems to me that that van was parked right on the corner. But the thing has always been parked fifty feet past the corner every time I’ve gone by since, so I think I was suffering from stress-induced spatial distortion. This bipedal lab is loads of fun. I’ll miss it when it final gets scrapped.

While I was pacing this out, a 20-year-old black fellow in a neat blue polo shirt and bare head cruised by in a blue 2014BMW, really revving the engine as if ready to peel off fast, but only rushing down the street at about 25 mph as he looked intently into yards and lots.

He circled this block three times in succession, with a one-minute interval in between each.

He then sped off.

After he was gone for 10 minutes and I began walking back to Hamilton I noticed the BPD chopper banking high over head and doing an oval pattern around me. then, as I walked down Mary, passed the white van that I seem to have much affinity for, including the fact that it is injured, with a duct-taped mirror hanging off the door frame, I noticed two cop cars have Kavon—an alley with a road’s name—at the bottom of the hill.

I do not know what that was about, or even if those three observations of activity were in any way connected. The police and fore sirens are screaming again, the chopper is banking off the southeast, and I’m wondering if there never will be another riot, another purge—if the sacred unrest is behind us and that maybe we are simply living in a new urban order now?