Baltimore
March 26, 2006

Somewhere across the bay from this hill floats the ship I nearly slept on.   The ship I may sleep on sometime in the near future.   Instead I slept in a house two miles out east from here (in the direction I'm supposed to go to catch the bus back to lower Manhattan later today.   Our host called me a 'whisky drinker.'   Me and my companion, Jesika, who I've visited this weekend for no particular reason but to ride around a new city and catch up with an old friend.   I have to admit that I've been missing Brooklyn the whole time.   When I first got out of the bus and started riding into town I was really wigged out.   I started to miss the Archive and their coffee, and their muffins, and their soup, and the beer I would have later next to my sun-filled window at my desk.

But it's gotten better.   This morning, in my hangover, I found a kind of absurd joy in rolling around this city, this strange city of tourism and turbulent decay; of depressed brick and old Latin churches, outside of which camp dirty black men and women, in tents.   Just a few blocks away is an array of old industrial buildings newly branded with international icons of commerce, through with tourists from god knows where thread on foot, pushing strollers, wearing hats I have to call grotesque, and their depressed, resigned grins are common to shopping mall visitors.   To ride a bike through this, past the aquarium with the fancy outdoor PA system that amps noises of birds throughout the pier, is an absurd joy to one who is mildly hung over.  

Baltimore is colonial, like any other eastern seaboard town.   There is brick everywhere, and art galleries, and there are tourists.   Somewhere along a route called the Heritage Walk was a very tall smokestack-esque erection, which turned out to be a former shot house.   It was hundreds of feet tall.   Allegedly, molten steel was poured through the top, then shaped and hardened, and stored in the brick structure.   I thought of the door opening to unleash buckets of shiny pellets all over the city, to trip the tourists and put a glean in the eye, for a moment, of the people who live here.  

In one sense Baltimore is like Brooklyn:   Across two blocks one may cross a dramatic (and scary) divide.   But it's on a much more drastic scale, and within a much smaller area.  

Across the bay, here on Federal Hill:   There's a coffee shop manned by a short, nerdy-ish guy in a black t-shirt with a 45-holder logo and this slogan: "CHECK OUT MY SEVEN INCHES."   Very funny.   I was recommended this place by a cyclist standing at a bus stop.   It seems unbelievable that I'm allowed to sit here, in one of the classier places of this city that I've been to thus far, and pour my own refills.   I can only be thankful.   I could be like one of the more awkward out-of-towners, told on his way out to "have a good Sunday" (because I'm certainly not, she's saying).   I've just noticed that they put the pancake syrup in wine bottles, w/ pourers.   It's a little queer, though charming nonetheless.  

Baltimore top five:

There are so many bars that it's actually kind of sad.

All of the tourists look vaguely sad.

There are no attractive women, anywhere.

There is a significant GLBT community, but all of whom I saw were quite ugly.

The homeless are permitted to sleep in tents outside of churches.

-Dave

 

Schlitz & Giggles: February 25, 2006
Monster Track: March 4, 2006