Larry—the grocery manager I occasionally toss under the bus—asked me how things were this morning, and apologized for forgetting to order something for my section after he gave me an extra day off this weekend.

"I really am sorry. But I was so stressed. The owner is on vacation so the other managers all skated and left me holding the bag. Come on! Saturday is the busiest day of the week and the management team is almost entirely absent? That's going to change when Mister C. gets back. I tried to keep it together but the front end was just insane. It's hard to remember to cross all of the Ts and dot all of the Is when the world goes to Hell.

"It was Saturday afternoon and I was paged upfront because a man was threatening a cashier. Surprise—he was black. He had come in with a white guy and when he began screaming obscenities at the lottery machines one of the cashiers [a white woman] asked him to stop because there were children around. He then goes after her, screaming about racism and keeping a black man down. Now, his friend did interpose himself between the raging idiot and the woman. By the time I get up there he has been ranting and raging and threatening for minutes. I'm a little old white guy and he's a big young black guy. How is this going to play out? I'm no fighter. I simply asked him if he could stop screaming, hoping that he wouldn't haul off and floor me and he began screaming about me picking on him for being black, 'Oh, you're racist—this is all because I'm Black!.

I suppose I was not respecting his dialect—was suppressing his cultural expression.

I could not even get in a word in edgewise and had no way of resolving the situation, so I called someone that could and they were here in one minute. I was impressed with the Baltimore County Police Department. When the cops rolled he was singing a different tune, calmed down and claimed it was all a misunderstanding. How did you ever survive at Bel Garden? The last time I was there I did not see a single face of European descent. Why do they act like this?

I answered, "Their mothers use them as a meal ticket and beat the shit out of them—full on face punches in public from age three—and then use all of the EBT cash and food stamps to feed their boyfriends, except for the all meat hotdogs and ramen noodles they throw at the kids, who begin cooking at around five. When the kid morphs into a youth and nears adulthood, he will no longer bring in money—unless she was lucky enough to have lived in a unit with peeling lead paint and she can sue for his brain damage. So, she trains him to argue and rage at authority figures in hopes that he gets maimed or killed by the cops or some white guy defending himself, and then sues for all she is worth. There are lawyers that specialize in making windfall cases for welfare mammas whose abused boys become statistics. Freddie Gray basically gave his life so his mamma could get a new house and SUV."

Larry responded, "Thanks, now I'm absolutely certain that I woke up in Hell this morning."

I did give Larry and his two assistants a briefing on how to diffuse such situations non-violently, which will be featured as an article, soon.