Mind the Gap

In Baltimore, the trains are generally more punctual than the buses.  Outside peak commuter hours, however, both display a part of the city carefully obscured from gentrifying areas like Federal Hill.  Somnolent junkies repose a hair’s breadth from never waking; other poor, disheveled souls sit in their seats and stare into space.

There is the occasional mishap to travelers.  Some time ago, the Maryland Transit Administration began reminding its patrons to keep their iPhones and tablets hidden away, lest marauding Apple-pickers relieve them of their property.  There were announcements at the stations, and sandwich-board signs, but the average commuter nonetheless remained content to obliviously gaze into a diminutive screen.

There are transit police, of course, who ride the rails checking tickets.  But they are not everywhere, and it is common for people to jump the turnstiles at the Metro, or ride the Light Rail without a fare.  Once, I saw a man arrested for skipping out on a warrant; he had brought himself to the attention of the police for drinking a soda on the train.  Another morning, I helped pull a drunk off the Metro tracks; he had stumbled past a constable and off the platform with a brown-bagged tallboy.

In the circus that is the City of Optimistic Benches, fights on public transit are undeterred by the baleful gaze of the Panopticon.  Every bus, train, and station is watched over by unblinking eyes, but young men with little thought for the future and hair-trigger tempers do not care.

Recently, two teens tried to push a man off a moving train.  Had they succeeded, their victim would have almost certainly died.  The video of their attempt shows how little care the denizens of Baltimore have for the welfare of their fellow man.  One bystander calls out “Worldstar!” as she starts filming.  As the man is pushed at the doors of the car, no one does more to intervene than yelling “no.”

Odds are, the young men responsible will face no consequences for their attempted murder.  According to the MTA, the incident was not reported to police, and was discovered after the video was posted on Facebook.

The Tiniest Gangsters

The schools in Baltimore are a cruel joke. In a group of ten children, one, perhaps, is bright and studious enough that he can focus on his work even when his classmates are slinging racial epithets or punching his shoulder. Five more are capable enough, but give in to distraction easily. One is a plodder who tries in earnest and so gets by well. Another is clever, but was held back for nebulous behavioral issues; he will not learn anything novel this year.

The last is the troublemaker. By middle school, he will have joined a gang.  By high school, he will very probably be in prison or dead. Like a crab in a bucket, he will try mightily to keep his peers from rising above the illiterate and hostile lowest common denominator of Baltimore’s predominantly black youth.

Often, he will kick, bite, scratch, and choke his fellow students. Sometimes, he will assault his teachers. The city schools payout many thousands of dollars each year to employees who are seriously injured by such students.

This type of student will threaten to bring a gun to school, and not infrequently follow through. In the county, this would be grounds for immediate expulsion, and possibly criminal charges; in the city, consequences are minimal, so long as no students are directly threatened or hurt.

A friend teaches first grade in one of the worst neighborhoods in Baltimore. One of his students claimed to have brought a gun to school in his backpack. Mercifully, it was only a cheap airsoft pistol from Walmart.

It is little wonder that the city has trouble retaining qualified and competent teachers.

The Abyss Looks Back

She looks like a squirrel. Slightly bucktoothed, weak-chinned, empty-eyed, with hollow cheeks that doubtless could hold a nut or two. Meathead is chatting her up while her warpig friend lays the moves on Friendzone.

I sit back and enjoy the slack-shouldered herbs trying to buy attention with drinks in a daisy-chain of cock-blocking. Sip on whiskey, smirk at the idiots, take another sip.

Of course, it turns out the warpig is actually Mrs. Warpig. Wearing a ring, and all but propositioning Friendzone (whose Rolodex of women has yielded not even a drunken makeout, much less an actual notch). Our intrepidly vapid blondes (they’re almost always blondes) are getting drunker thanks to the libations offered up by Neville Nonads and Billy Betas.

Squirrel wanders off fifteen minutes after she starts really slurring her speech. The bartenders have already called the both of them a cab. Warpig refuses to leave, and the cab drives off.

While Meathead wanders outside with Friendzone to look for her friend, Warpig starts cozying up to me. “You’re cute.” I keep my replies monosyllabic, but she persists until the bouncer finally throws her out.

Friendzone’s got to work early, so he heads out. Meathead sits back down at the bar with one of his neighbors to shoot the breeze.

And I’m sitting there, trying to see if the world looks any brighter through the bottom of a pint glass. A man sits down next to me–moved down from three states up to be with his girl.

She’d been cheating on him for the past year, and he’d forgiven her once already. Five minutes before, his one and only had unceremoniously dumped him for some uneducated unemployed shpos.

What can I really say? It gets better, especially once you’ve slept with a few younger, hotter women, but the long view is hard to grok when your universe has just come apart at the seams. In the end, no stranger nursing his beer can do much more than offer empty platitudes.

I hitched a ride home, and crawled into bed. It’s colder today than it was yesterday.

Talkin’ ‘Bout My Generation

Had a meeting with a financial planner last night. Cheerful fellow, telling me I should start saving. Yes, when I’ve got tens of thousands of dollars of student loans to pay off, and the only safe places to put my money don’t keep up with inflation, what I should really do is start saving for retirement.

Bugger that.

I’m not going to retire, I’m going to do research until I’m too senile to use a computer, or my heart gives out and one of my grad students finds me facedown on my desk. If I stay in shape, I might even live long enough to see things get better, but probably not.

Some of us can see that the world is sick, but we don’t know how to change it, because the rest of us are stumbling through a waking dreamscape of Internet porn, video games, and cheap ‘food’ that tickles our lizard-brains while slowly poisoning us.

My parents were married at my age; they dated long-distance in college for four years. My mother, just after graduating college, gave up a chance at a career to move cross-country with my father. I very much doubt any of the women my age would do something similar.

How many of us want to have families, and how many can afford them? Few and fewer.

Save up for a down-payment on a car, a house, whatever strikes your fancy. Just don’t expect to actually have enough money to retire, no matter how much you’ve saved. Inflation will worsen as the governments of the world try to print enough money to outpace their debts, and private citizens get in on the action.

With all my white, male, heterosexual, thin, smart privilege, I’ll probably be first in line for the noose when the apes in manpants finally break the back of Western civilization.

So maybe keeping up on cardio isn’t such a good idea after all.

Wrench Game

Irish fellow sitting down the bar from us says to the bartender (a 5, maybe 6, nice tits but not the prettiest face):

“Your eyes are like spanners.”

“What?”

“Spanners. You know, wrenches.”

“Okay… Why?”

“Because every time I look at them, my nuts tighten up.”

Good Advice

“…Save your bench rat days for your 40’s and your second marriage. Like my dad.”

Always allow more time for an experiment than you think it’ll take. Especially when a bitch like Sandy is breathing down your neck.

Dating Feminists

Don’t.

To elaborate: I lost my virginity to one. She was a dynamo in bed, but, in the end, I was just a meat-puppet to her. I, like the beta I was (and, by the Roissy scale, still am), did not take “I had a run of really bad life choices” to mean “I’m looking for a gentler spin on the carousel,” or as a sign that she was unworthy of any commitment on my part.

She was also a sociology major who didn’t understand how science works. I am a biologist by trade and nerdly obsession. This was frustrating, but I didn’t want the wellspring of sex to dry up.

The young feminists I know have been chewed up and spat out by ex-boyfriends, their families, and uncaring circumstance. Almost all of them are angry, and many of them justifiably so.

Not all feminists are wounded, seeking succor in an ideology which whispers away the pain with the saccharine lie that all women are suffering at the hands of men. But schadenfreude is a powerful drug, and I suspect it sustains the most embittered ball-cutters.

I have a friend whose greatest aspiration is to be a mother; she feels like a gender traitor for cleaving to her biological imperative. Small wonder that feminism is dying: the future belongs to those who show up.

Asking your boyfriend why he hates women when he says he’s not a feminist makes you a terrible long-term relationship prospect. So, too, does actively planning to focus on your career to the point where you die alone or surrounded by cats.

If you have decided to raise a family, feminism does not suit you. It’s okay to be skeptical of heuristic received wisdom (“spare the rod, spoil the child” comes to mind), but some of it is bang-on.

As a final note, all of the feminists I’ve slept with really enjoyed getting spanked. Make of that what you will.