This morning I was out and about stretching the legs. This is never about just stretching my legs. Occasionally it is about urban scouting. Yesterday I walked this area before it got dark. This morning, I walked it before it got busy, checking the ground for litter that might bespeak lurid events that occurred under cover of night. Honestly, after yesterday’s depressing news that our murder rate is not quite 1 per day [only 22 in the 31 days of January], I decided to bury my sorrow over the deteriorating standards of Harm City hood-rat marksmanship with a little low down investigating of my own. What happened around here last night anyhow? What did I find on this morning trip that was not on the sidewalks of this area yesterday afternoon?
1. A pair of men’s briefs on the sidewalk of a side-street
2. A bra and a pair of panties in an alley off of the main drag
3. Three smashed crack vials
4. A vodka bottle
5. A whiskey bottle
6. Some vodka miniatures
7. A broken beer bottle
8. A chunk of stone wall knocked loose
9. A wig
10. A pair of false eye-lashes
11. An entire cigarette, which means the vagrants were not out in force ground scrounging this morning
12. A dead rat
13. A syringe
14. Three paper towels covered in blood and bunched up, along with two facial tissues that had been twisted up and used to plug a bloody nose, on a secondary street just around the corner from the main drag
15. A condom wrapper
As I completed the circuit of the area I heard music, and it was not Southern Baptist gospel music, but old pop. I turned the corner to see that the local ghetto food market was packed with cars [before food stamps] and was having a pregame Super Bowl party. To crown off my enlightening morning I was dished a dose of ironic Harm City humor. As crowds of black customers made their way across the sidewalk to the store, around a karaoke key board, the small white man operating the musical device was singing an old Elton John song with the chorus of , “get back honky cat" and an older black man with a bible in his hand was patting him on the back.
That’s Baltimore.
