Edit: A friend of ours, Judd Blevins, is under attack by the usual suspects and could use some help in his fight. He is a good man trying to serve his community, but the freaks and weirdos are trying to ruin it. Here is his story and a way to send him a few bucks.

This week was the final escape from Lagos, which had been in the works for a few years but took off toward the end of last year. I am not a young man anymore, so I cannot just pack up and leave when the spirit moves me. Not only do I have commitments to fulfill, but I also have stuff. When your stuff fits comfortably inside the trunk of your car, moving is about waiting until the sun goes down. When you need a truck for your stuff then you have to put some thought into it.

Baltimore has been my home for twenty years. I lived there longer than anywhere else so despite the harms of Charm City, there are some things I will miss. The thing I will miss the most is the look when I say I am from Baltimore. One time in Ireland I told some locals I was from Baltimore, and they did not believe me. They had seen the series The Wire and could not accept that I lived in what they saw. I showed them my license and some photos. They were terrified of me.

There are other things I will miss, like the constant sound of basketballs striking the sidewalk at all hours of the day and night. I exaggerate a bit here, but the thud of a ball hitting the sidewalk is like a weird metronome to the place. So much so that I created a special filter for my podcasts to remove the sound. No matter when I record, there is, now was, that sound of a ball striking cement. Oddly, Baltimore produces few college basketball players, despite it all.

Another thing I will miss is the shouting. The first time I was in Copenhagen, I experienced an eerie feeling the first day walking around the city. It struck me that the reason for this is the relative quiet. No one was shouting. The Danes quietly go about their business on the streets. If they need to speak to someone, they go up close to them so they can talk without shouting. Even on public transport the Danes are quiet, not Japanese quiet, but never shouting or blaring music.

Baltimore is the other end of the spectrum. It is perfectly normal for a man to stop on one side of the street and scream at the top of his lungs at another man on the other side of the street. At first it is to get his attention, but after that they will hold forth like it is perfectly normal for two men to be screaming at one another on the street, because in Baltimore it is normal. People also scream at each other from their house windows, open car windows and even rooftops.

One reason for the shouting, but certainly not the only reason, is the constant sound of alarms from emergency equipment. This is another filter I have created for recording podcasts that I may never need again. It is not just the police sirens, which are common, but other sorts of emergency vehicles. Often, I would see the local fire department take their trucks out and blast the sirens for no reason, other than to make a racket and drive the things around the block a few times.

Probably the hardest thing to get used to will be locks. In a place like Lagos, anything not locked up or locked down will be stolen. Even if it is worthless someone will pick it up and carry it away. When we had an office in the city, we would leave old computers on the sidewalk, and they would vanish. The only thing that did not disappear this way was dead bodies, but the scenes from Haiti suggest that this is something that happens in the next stage of social development.

For the last week I have been locking doors after I pass, because it has become second nature at this point. Yesterday was a nice early spring day here in the hills, but leaving the door open to let the air in was too much. Instead, I opened the window of the office so I could keep an eye on things. Perhaps in time I will forget what it was like to live on guard every minute of your life. I may now understand how men who did long stints in prison feel when they get released.

Something I am not sure I will miss is the general stupidity of the place. The best example of this is car inspections. When I moved to Lagos, I had just bought a new truck, but it was registered in the prior state. I learned I needed a safety inspection before I could swap plates. Getting a safety inspection on a new car seemed weird, but how long could it take? It took all day. The guy crawled all over the thing and even wrote up some things that came from the factory as questionable.

I asked the guy why he was doing this as in other states a safety inspection is just a walkaround to make sure every important bit works. The guy told me with compete sincerity that the cars were safer in Baltimore. He could have said it was the law or that his boss required it, thus acknowledging the idiocy of what he was doing, but no, he was fully on board with the policy. Baltimore combines the mindset of the postal clerk with the intellectual dexterity of the population.

One thing that Baltimore has that I have seen no where else is street walkers, by which I mean people who walk in the streets rather than on the sidewalk. You see it the most when it snows and the cars are less controllable. The locals will walk in the middle of the streets. Even in the summer this is common. They will saunter along in the middle of the road without a care in the world. Of course, they jaywalk at a pace that suggests they take pleasure in holding up traffic.

Finally, the last thing I will miss is the tropical summers. Starting in mid-June Baltimore turns into a jungle. Jungle as in weather. It rains almost every night and is suffocatingly humid all day. Yeah, it is hot and humid in the South during the summer, but that weather in a city is a special form of miserable. Baltimore is below sea level, so it is a concrete heatsink in the summer. In fact, the Baltimore – Washington area is a giant metro area plopped into a swampy jungle.

Lots of people reading this will say it gets miserably hot where they live in the summer, and that is probably true, but hazy, hot, and humid in Lagos is unique. I have been in the South in summer. I have been in Texas during a heatwave. I have spent August in Florida and that is about as close as it comes to Lagos. The big exception is Florida has the beaches and lacks the haze. If you want to know what Hell is really like, spend a summer in Lagos and you will sin no more.

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