Returning to Baltimore

On Friday, I'm coming back. I don't know for how long, I don't know how seriously, I don't know how much I'll reach out to anyone while I'm there. It may be a week, may be a month, may be permanently (though I'll try mightily not to make it that). All I know is that however much all I do at Bethany Beach is listen to audiobooks and eat ice cream, I long not to return to Baltimore.

Good things are coming for individuals I know and love, great things, and like all of life, there will be all sorts of ups and downs and even if the river turns into rapids, even if it overflows its banks, the river flows broadly onward until it eventually, though hopefully not a while yet, each of our rivers empty out into larger bodies of water.

But oh my god what a toxic body of sludge my city is. In Baltimore, terrors of current American life are compressed and distilled, all the tragedies America now experiences have been daily life in Baltimore for fifty years. For half-a-century it's been a city where nobody's ended up who's successfully wanted better for themselves. If you're a successful person in Baltimore, unless you're in certain fields of medicine, you're generally there because you believe in something greater than self, and there's something extremely noble in that; that's what a lot of the world's best people believe - and believe it or not, some of the world's best people live in Baltimore.

But it would also be nice to have a different option. Since 1970, everybody from Baltimore who wants to make something of themselves leaves, they always leave, and they never return, and they take with them all their ambition, their ingenuity, their acquired skill set, and all their connections. Maybe it's best they all left, better they screw us all over early in life so we don't have to count on them when we think we can rely on them, but a city where ambitious people don't stay is a city incapable of realizing its ambitions.

I know I know, 'if you hate it so much why don't you leave?' If I had the ability to leave, I would have never come back, but I'm bound to that place by my own limitations, limitations of which I'm reminded every day of my life.

So for the moment, I've just stayed in Bethany Beach, a four month holding position, no progress, no regress, just watching as the entire world becomes more like us. For a long time, America was the exception to the world's tragedy. However bad things may have seemed here, they were worse everywhere else. But Baltimore is the rule within the exception, proving that even the most deserving places in the world can't be shielded from tragedy. The future is not that Baltimore becomes like the rest of America, the future is that the rest of America turns into Baltimore.