Baltimore sucks. If you haven't been there, it's a fairly quaint excuse for a city. (At the time I was there it was undergoing massive rehabilitation; an entire neighborhood by the waterfront was being 'restored' into a sort of red-brick and cobblestone theme park.) Bars close at 1 A.M. They start flashing the lights for last call at twelve-thirty. The permanent residents speak of New York and DC with strangely wistful expressions on their faces, as if they can't understand how they ended up here, rather than a few miles north or south, where there's a real city. There's an element of the
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