From littering to homicide, our beloved city streets can feel like they are running on the energy of crime and that’s seriously messed up. Sure, it’s not unusual to have parked cars broken into in broad daylight when a forgotten iPod is left on the seat or a pile of parking change is visible— that’s the price of living and working in the city — but it begins to feels personal when a hooptie Honda with over 200,000 miles gets amateur crack-jacked and ends up with a screwed-up ignition. Thanks for trying. Don’t even get us started on the muggings, hit and runs, stolen bikes, burglaries, gun violence, and murder—crime’s in our lives and the lives of every person we know, it’s in our pages and on the television, and it wears us down. Baltimore, please, learn some respect for your neighbor, for property, for life.

The diverse crowd surrounding Lexington Market forces the dealers into a whispered poetry of ambiguity: They have to be clearly enticing while maintaining plausible deniability. “Zoom,” we’ve heard several men whisper recently. Zoom? And we swear someone just offered us “Betelguese.” It remains to be seen if the constantly renewed promise to “clean up” and renovate the area will disperse these whispercore poets. But for now, even with the cops around, it’s hard to go far without hearing their idiosyncratic calls. And by the way, for all the same reasons listed above, Lexington Market is not the Best Place to Buy Drugs.