Reasons Baltimore Sucks
1) Weather. Here in Baltimore, we don’t have the typical 4-season rotation. We have seven. Autumn, first winter, Indian summer, second winter, fake-out spring, third winter, and heatstroke.
In other places, it rains for a few hours and then the sun comes out. Here in Baltimore, it just drizzles for 14 days straight. We used to get droughts every once in a while. I actually miss them. You can guarantee that the sun will be shining as long as you’re stuck indoors. The instant you want to go outside, the temperature drops 30 degrees and it starts to rain.
2) Traffic. Baltimore is such a ****ty place to live, no one wants to live in the city itself. To avoid doing so, they establish residence either near the Pennsylvania line, out west near the mountains, or south near DC. The result: obscene amounts of commuter traffic.
The Baltimore beltway is utterly unusable 7-9AM and 3-6PM. In the morning, it’s stopped from Belair Rd out to Providence because the highway passes through the Loch Raven valley and people here don’t grasp the concept that they have to accelerate to maintain speed going uphill. 795 to Edmonson is a write-off, as is 95 from White Marsh down to the tunnel. In the afternoon, the entire northern half of the inner loop becomes a parking lot. And don’t try the side-streets, either. Everyone knows about those. You’re better off sitting in beltway traffic.
Mass transit? Well we have the Light Rail…what, it’s broken down again? Oh well, there’s always the subway…no you CAN’T have an armed escort when you ride it.
And you’d think in a state that has the weather mentioned above in #1, people would learn to drive in the rain. Not so. The lightest drizzle grinds all traffic within a 75-mile radius to a complete halt. A good strong rain will have people flipping on their hazards in confusion. If you have to turn on your hazard flashers while driving, it means you are a hazard to other people and should not be on the road.
3) Crabs. Dredge up a bushel of the lowest bottom-feeding crustaceans in the sea. Dump them on a table covered with old newspaper. Smash them open with a wooden mallet, then pick apart the bits of shell and the nasty goo within to get at a few tiny scraps of meat.
Sounds like something out of the dark ages, huh? I’ve just described to you the keystone of Baltimore culture. You’re not a Baltimorean if you don’t engage in this barbaric ritual. It’s inherent to the “Baltimore experience”, if you ever (for some reason beyond my reckoning) come to Baltimore as a tourist. Which brings me to my next point:
4) Culture: Many cities have a large “dumb redneck” population. Baltimore is one of the few cities that takes pride in that image. To celebrate being from Baltimore is to celebrate one’s ignorance. “I’m proud t’be frum bawlmer, hon! Tew bad I ceein’t speek rite! I better goe warsh my dishes in da zink.”
Have you ever had a contest on Easter Sunday to see who could throw an 18” monkey wrench through a pane glass window blindfolded? Welcome to Baltimore.
5) Nightlife: Check out the nightlife in Baltimore sometime. The “hotspots” are all identical little clusters of back-alley bars. Each one offers the same form of entertainment, right down to the music being played. Go to a Baltimore bar…ANY Baltimore bar, and I will bet you money you will not get out of there without hearing some CD-DJ spin Bon Jovi, Journey, and Skynyrd. There are no real night-clubs to speak of in Baltimore…and if there are, they’re monopolized by lonely 40-year-olds.
6) Ugly people. I didn’t catch on to this one until I started traveling. Next time you go to an airport, look at flights to various cities. Some will have more attractive looking people than others, others will be about average. The outgoing flights to Baltimore…ugly, poorly-dressed, gloomy people.
Here in MobTown, chubby, poorly-spoken women are the norm. A Baltimore “9” is a “6” in any other town. And to make matters worse, they ACT like “9”s as well. Even the nastiest women in Baltimore think they’re prized material. The REAL 9s…forget about talking to them. They’re already dating someone in another county, if not another state. Most of the time, if you see an attractive woman in Baltimore, she’s an out-of-town college student. (Probably from New Jersey…don’t get me started on THAT hole)
7) Crabs…the other kind. I think at one time, Baltimore was STD capital of the world. And not the modern STDs like HIV and Hepatitis, but the stone-age ones like Syphillis. It was also the teen-pregnancy capital of the world. I guess condoms are taking a while to catch on here.
8) Crime: About 300 murders a year in Baltimore without blinking. It’s impossible to stay away from it, too. You can be in prime Baltimore real-estate one block and then a warzone the next block over. The city has given up on conventional solutions. They’re resorting to city-beautification projects now, hoping that seeing pretty flowers first thing in the morning will convince the drug dealers to stop shooting and stealing from rival gangs. MD also has the most restrictive gun-laws in the country…seems like all they’ve done is keep guns out of the hands of innocent, law-abiding citizens.
9) Property Values: For some reason, real-estate within the Baltimore city limits still commands a ridiculously high price. Even the nicest neighborhoods consist of dingy old brick rowhomes which sell for 500-700 thousand dollars. You can’t get a single home anywhere NEAR the city, even in the suburbs, for less than 250 grand. Hell, you can barely afford a CONDO for that.
10) Failing Economy: Baltimore is a blue-collar city. It’s based around industry. The problem is that most industrial jobs are being outsourced to other countries now due to cheaper labor costs and greater efficiency. We’re constantly shutting down old plants and factories, the biggest of which I can remember in recent times being a plant involved in the manufacture of GM vans. (isn’t that how Detroit turned into the hole it is today?) You can see abandoned warehouses and factories everywhere. The service economy has caught on to some extent in Baltimore, but has been stifled by the aforementioned high property prices and…
11) Maryland Taxes: For some reason, Maryland government can’t seem to reign in its spending. Many businesses are being chased out of state by our new governor’s latest tax package, including hiking the state sales tax to 6% among other things.
12) Sports Teams: The Orioles suck, plain and simple. The Ravens…well, they lost to Miami this year. Enough said. This is compounded by the fact that Baltimoreans live in the past when it comes to athletics. They’re convinced that they’re still in the year 2000, when the Ravens were the Super Bowl Champs and Hasim Rahman was the world heavyweight boxing champ. (Because Lennox Lewis was totally prepared for that fight…yeah, OK) Basketball? Hockey? Who would bring a team to this ****-city?
