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Charm City
Mar. 6th, 2016 11:20 amYesterday I drove to Baltimore to go to Atomic Books, which is about a mile west of Johns Hopkins in a historic residential neighborhood called Hampden. I had been involved with an event at Atomic Books in the spring of 2013 and gotten a few drinks afterward at a nearby bar, and I remembered the area being filled with young people and looking like it was on the rise.
I don't know what happened since then, but the entire city of Baltimore is a nightmare. The roads are destroyed, with huge potholes and long runs of stripped pavement. The sidewalks are broken and melted, as if they had been firebombed. There are literal open sewers, by which I mean pits dug into the earth to expose the half-open pipes and tunnels without any safety barriers surrounding them. City utility vehicles are abandoned with broken windows and slashed tires at the ends of blocked-off streets. At least one house on every block is clearly derelict. I saw multiple dead animals, including cats and dogs. One might argue that all major cities in the northeast are like this immediately after the snow melts, but there hasn't been any snow on the ground since early February.
Atomic Books, which specializes in comics and zines, was bustling with people (perhaps some sort of brunch crowd) who seemed to be about as old as I am. They looked like me, dressed like me, talked with my accent, and probably share many of my interests... except they live in Baltimore. Like, I could go home, but they can't – that is their home.
The entire experience served as an unsettling reminder of the precarity of my own situation. I'm happy and comfortable in a beautiful apartment in a beautiful neighborhood in the beautiful city of Washington DC, but if anything goes wrong then I'm not certain that I can afford to stay here. Baltimore isn't that far away, geographically or financially, and that chills me to the bone.
I don't know what happened since then, but the entire city of Baltimore is a nightmare. The roads are destroyed, with huge potholes and long runs of stripped pavement. The sidewalks are broken and melted, as if they had been firebombed. There are literal open sewers, by which I mean pits dug into the earth to expose the half-open pipes and tunnels without any safety barriers surrounding them. City utility vehicles are abandoned with broken windows and slashed tires at the ends of blocked-off streets. At least one house on every block is clearly derelict. I saw multiple dead animals, including cats and dogs. One might argue that all major cities in the northeast are like this immediately after the snow melts, but there hasn't been any snow on the ground since early February.
Atomic Books, which specializes in comics and zines, was bustling with people (perhaps some sort of brunch crowd) who seemed to be about as old as I am. They looked like me, dressed like me, talked with my accent, and probably share many of my interests... except they live in Baltimore. Like, I could go home, but they can't – that is their home.
The entire experience served as an unsettling reminder of the precarity of my own situation. I'm happy and comfortable in a beautiful apartment in a beautiful neighborhood in the beautiful city of Washington DC, but if anything goes wrong then I'm not certain that I can afford to stay here. Baltimore isn't that far away, geographically or financially, and that chills me to the bone.
