I have ducked into Harm City for three days and am soon gone. But first, a story of urban blight before I meet this young motorcyclist for coffee.

Yesterday I was walking to meet Sensei Steve for lunch in Northeast Baltimore when a Baltimore City Fire Department pumper truck came roaring past me blaring it's siren. It then pulled over in front of a convenience store and stopped diagonally across the four lanes. Two fire fighters of heavenly hue leapt out and unwound the hose and reeled it out about forty feet, and then began arguing as to the address. The more aggressive one claimed it was the correct address and then got on his radio and argued with the dispatcher and I walked on by. More Heroic first Responders gathered behind the pumper truck behind me as traffic backed up.

A few blocks up the street towards the County Line I began to smell burning grease from the Greek sandwich shop up to the left.

Then a torrent of vehicles roared up the road behind me, the first pumper truck, a hook and ladder, three more pumper truck, a fire chief and various cop cars, blaring their sirens and rolling up Harford Road and all making a right into the parking lot of the shopping center there. The small grease fire in the kitchen of the eatery was on the left, but the trucks were circling in the large parking lot to the right. Then the hook and ladder and a pumper crossed the street to the eatery and the other three pumpers roared back down the road past me.

As I made it to the scene of the fire and five cops cars and their blew suited heroes cordoned off the scene, which I walked through and they thought me invisible, I had to stop and wait. The athletic mulatto driver at the back of the truck was arguing with the Big Bantu supervisor standing in the street as they disagreed as to how to turn the thing. Eventually the lean hawkish ghost man driving the front of the truck settled the argument and the thing moved out of my way so I could continue oppressing as yet untrodden virgin sidewalk.

Then, as I passed Racers bar at the City-County Line, at Harford and Taylor, I noticed a cute little thing in blew standing in the street barely able to look over the roof of her police cruiser at the angry motorists impatiently backed up. She was little but had some shape, discernable despite the bucket-like body armor she was wearing. A likely top girl I thought. I stopped and loitered, admiring her and she glanced my way and shivered and then turned and looked back down the street. I felt kind of creepy behind my one examining eye and gave up the rating process, accounting her either a 6.5 or 8 depending on what the upper half looked like without the body armor. My assessment of God's dainty creation tragically incomplete, I crossed Taylor in time to hold the door for two old ladies at Jerry D's, where Sensei Steve and I would discuss many unfixable things...

Holding the door for the old ladies and having found the little blonde pigess an acceptable candidate for the seraglio, and editing my cop hatred by one account as I decided that in this one specific case, I could back the blew, but trying to imagine her breaking up a fight between the two firemen, I thought back to the day before...

After having a few beers with Big Ron at the Raven Inn a couple miles to the northwest over in the County, I came by two caramel queans arguing in the street in front of the low rise apartment complex at Loch Raven and Putty Hill. This was such a world-shattering event, that the Homeric declarations of noble lineage prior to combat between the contending creatures summoned no less than five Baltimore County police cars and SUVs, like slaves gathering to pull their mistresses apart. It is astounding that the civic immune system of this shithole city issues so many more antibodies to battle chaos than required.

So, today, as the birds gather in their song an hour before dawn, this old hobo wonders what shit show will rise from the gutters to entertain a wayfaring soul in the city whose knightly class guzzle civic services like Vikings once quaffed ale.

It is 5:01 and I hear the first police siren of the day, some five blocks away...

Here is my riding channel in case you are interested:

-Slim Purse Ready Blade