Altimore City

I have grown to think of most suburbs as nowherelands, even though I live in one. They grow like mushrooms: without direction and almost always without history. Sure, there are Catonsville’s twenty-one steps and Dundalk’s orchards, but the rest are simply a pattern repeating itself, filling in all blank spaces with a semirandom spatter of bagel shops, shoe stories, Giant supermarkets. It’s impossible to navigate any of them without a map because there is no up or down there, simply more.

At least this was how I felt this morning, navigating through a series of them for a conference I dare not describe, both to keep my own job safe (oh this economy) and to keep whatever reader interest this blog has managed to scrabble together. It was early morning and I’ve run out of friends who live off 495 whose couches I could sleep on, so I took the back way, through long traffic light upon long traffic light. When I drove home, I abandoned all pretense to hypermiling, floored it up 95 until I reached the gently sloping offramp to MLK.

I have never really thought of Baltimore as beautiful, either, but it was to me as I coasted down the ramp. I saw landmarks: the Bromo-Seltzer Tower, Ravens Stadium, the cluster of modest skyscrapers in the Inner Harbor that ring the dome. At last I felt as if I was somewhere again. It was not as beautiful as a real city, a New York or even a Philly, but it really was beautiful.

Maybe I should start calling this home, I thought to myself.

I’ve lived here now five years, three with Wendy. Love (true love, even… am I allowed to call it that? is it safe?) has a way of obliterating all the small details that would bother you otherwise — that, and having to hop three jobs in six months. But I’ve only lived here. I’ve never really felt like I belonged here.

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“You bleeding,” a witch called at me this afternoon on the street. I reached my left hand to my face, felt the blood, and she started laughing at me. She had a table full of fetishes in front of her, even had an old-school gray-brimmed hat, but the malice in her laugh sounded like she knew more than just how to cure a cough. Fuck, I thought, pressed my hand against it as far as I could, made a beeline for my office. I’ve never had a bleed placed on me though I’ve obviously read about it — thing is, there’s no way to stop it because you can’t find a cut to place a bandage over. You just keep making the same trip to the bathroom over and over again to rinse the blood from your skin. It doesn’t hurt, doesn’t even make you feel woozy the way giving blood will. But…it’s something, to get stuck on the street, bleeding. Some people tried not to stare out of politeness but I could feel the fear radiating out from them anyway. By the time I got back, my hand was scarlet red. Even now, after I’ve washed it a bunch of times, it still looks a little redder than the other.

I don’t know why she did it, I certainly know how to mind my business on the street. I guess you can’t question witches. The whole rest of my day was blown.

Maybe tomorrow will be better.

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Tagged curses

Wendy and I made a trip down to Hampdenfest Saturday afternoon. This weekend she was eager to get out of the house; the start of classes has a way of doing that to teachers, I think. Anyway, we found miraculous parking on Keswick, two blocks from where the Avenue ends, and walked the length of the festival.

I have to admit I was a little bit underwhelmed, but I don’t really blame the festival per se. For the massive number of newly-minted nuclear families with babies in strollers, it must have been novel, the collection of food and arts + crafts. But I’ve had friends in Hampden for a long time now, so getting a bite to eat from the Golden West was not quite as exciting as probably it should have been. But then, it may not be that long before I’m pushing a stroller myself, God help me…

We made it to the end of the festival, where at the Squaaks were playing at the Atomic Books stage. And again, the music was credible and kind of catchy but I couldn’t really get into it. My mind kept wandering and my eyes kept scanning across the crowd, watching other people react to it instead of reacting myself. Who knows? Maybe it was the humidity.

After the set wrapped up, a man maybe a few years younger than me came up to me and asked, “Are you a musician?” For some reason he seemed like an actor in a play — his clothes were immaculate, well-tailored, seemed as though they had never been worn by a real person before.

“No,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “I’m collecting signatures for this petition–”

He held out a clipboard with a fifth-generation photocopy of the old anti-music petition from two years ago. “Sorry, man,” I said, “I can’t help you.”

The man frowned and said, “Yeah, we’ll see what you think when they’re running this country.”

And the truth is, it’s not that hard to imagine them winning the election in November — but then, I really do believe America gets the government it deserves.

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Tagged festivals, politics