Hamilton, as a whole, has a pretty shitty reputation in the Greater Toronto area. If I had to compare it to a city, I'd say it's a Canadian Philly. Not as built-up, though, but the same idea: steel town with crime issues and infrastructure that hasn't been touched since the 60's. There's two areas, essentially- Down the Mountain, and On the Mountain. The city is split in two, with the better parts of town up on the Niagara Escarpment, and the pollution and poor folk down below. My buddy just moved to Hamilton, and he did not move into the nice section.

So I spent yesterday cleaning out the basement of this low-rise that my hombre became the super of. He's doing his best to make it seem like a decent place for people to live- most of the crackheads are gone now, and there's a decent set of doors on the place. However, all the mailboxes are jimmied open and there's plenty of vandalism and old shit to deal with. He might be offering me subcontract work to help him.

So, anyways, to get to the point of this story, me and him and his woman were sitting outside the building after excavating the boiler room (who keeps 130 burnt out halogen bulbs?). She had bought some beer for us, and we were relaxing in the afternoon sun. So I'm looking around the 'hood. It's not nice...but I can see the argument for it 'just being old'. So I'm sitting there and I start looking around. Well what do you know...next building over has three apartments with the windows covered. Not blinds-covered, but cardboard and tinfoil. Then we started finding the stem pipes.

Stay classy, Hamilton. By the end of the day, we had found kitchen knives stashed all over, dime baggies, stem pipes, actual pipes, at least three Improvised Bong Mk Is, and a box of 8-tracks. I have to continue helping moving them in on Monday, but yeah. I'm starting to really wish I could carry, because it's not an area I'd want to be out after dark in. So all you Americans, give your pieces a little extra CLP tonight. Not all of us are so lucky as to be able to have tools for self defense on our persons.

Des