Since the quality of comments was so high for this book, originally serialized online, I have retained them as footnotes, except when they are limited to simple compliments.

The first section of the book constitutes the small amount of writing I have done on H. L. Mencken, whose infamous quote about our native city has been appropriated for the title.

The second portion of the book is nothing more than my impressions of and musings about the City of my birth, Baltimore Maryland, founded by refugee Catholics from Anglican England at the dawn of the Modern Age, as religious wars of a terribly medieval character rent Europe asunder and catholic refugees of means landed on the shores of the Chesapeake [Algonquin, for, “shell-fish-water.”] Here, in June 1634, came the Calverts [Leonard Calvert being the first Governor of Maryland], the Talbots, and at least one Jesuit chronicler, aboard the Ark and the Dove. Having escaped the dreaded waters of the Irish Sea, where Muslim slave catchers prowled in slant-rigged galleys, these plantation-founders landed on these shores with their human chattel in tow—all white, some English, some Scottish and at least one Irishman, a certain ancestor of mine, who was no doubt an obedient slave, for his descendents remained in and around Baltimore for lo these 380-odd years. Having fallen from medieval serfdom to outright livestock, my family would persist among this city as it rose, rising with it and eventually evacuating when it fell from grace. As the city on the Shellfish-water—peacefully purchased from beleaguered tribesmen wilting before aggressive northern tribes—struggled as a tobacco plantation, thrived as a port into the industrial age, declined, and now, as it dies from a deep, festering rot as the per capita heroin hub of the Western Hemisphere, I, with a Lilliputian sense of the arrogant, attempt to write its autopsy as it yet wheezes under a breezy June sky.

It is a pleasure to write of my dubious geographical heritage.

James LaFond, Sunday, June 12, 2016