17_Give It Up Boy

I'm not one to get violent.  I'm not one to lose my cool.  I have before, many times, to my detriment and I learned that losing your cool is not conducive to anything, really.  I learned this in middle school and I've been pretty chill ever since.

So, having definitively realized that over $600 has been stolen from me this past Monday, I have been impressed with my temperament.  Not gonna lie.  Because all sorts of thoughts have crossed my mind.

But that's Baltimore.  We live in a city of disappointment, a city of devastation, a city of hoping for a better tomorrow that may or may not come.  We live in a city of anger.  As I work on my novel, I can't help but think about this fact.  We live in a city trapped in a cycle of anger, a city continuously wrapping itself around its worst parts.  A city unable to look past McCullough and Preston, Butcher's Hill,  Bel Air Eddison.  And those who I hate the most, those who could possibly drive me to violence, are those who fled a long time ago, sharing strange, tacit nods with each other as they understood the need to move North, as, a block South, a black family moved in.

The people who fled.

The people whose offspring flood the city now, but only on the weekends and only in certain neighborhoods.  Because you can't go anywhere else.  It's too dangerous.

And those in the county wonder why a person like my housemate would think it OK to rob me.  They don't want to admit that they did it first, robbing the city of any chance.  They don't want to admit that the anger started with them.

That's when I get violent, these days, when I think like this.  When I really look and see the ruin of this city and how it could become great, were only people to care about it anymore.  And although it's an old song but a good one, I can't help but love Straylight Run's "Hands In The Sky (Big Shot)" in times like these.  It encompasses it all.  The anger, the violence and, most importantly, the obviousness of the problem:  "Tear it out of these open pages" indeed.  It's all there, written clearly on the streets for anyone to read.

- Kid