The two men have guns. The men inside the row house have a large shipment of weed, which had arrived earlier in the day. The men with guns want the weed.

Oldest motive in the world.

The two men burst in and open fire.

And as kids play outside, and maybe wonder about what they were going to do this summer, two men are shot to death inside that Kindred Street row home. Two more bodies on the pile. Two more digits on the murder counter. Click. Click.

The shooters stuff the pot into plastic bags and take off.

Fortunately, a neighbor has called 9-1-1. The cops are on them. Fast. The alleged shooters only make it a block before police officers from the 2nd District do their jobs clean and quick and well.

I wonder, at this point, if the kids are still playing.

If they watched the getaway. Or the takedown.

These kinds of stories are fairly common in Philly. This appeared on page 8. Didn't really raise any eyebrows. It caught my attention because I live five minutes away. When I was growing up, I used to ride my bike through this neighborhood, wishing I lived here. It was a nice neighborhood.

And it still is. Neighbors care. They did the right thing. They called 9-1-1.

Still, there are two more dead bodies.

And a bunch of kids were there, playing, thinking about the summer.

I swear, when I sit down to write these letters to you, Dear Reader, it's not my intention to bum you out. There's so much I love about Philadelphia. I wouldn't trade it for any other city. And I worry that I don't write enough about that.

But I read that news story first thing Tuesday morning, which is the morning I write these letters, and I sat on the quiet El car about an hour later, feeling slightly numb. I moved to the Northeast for a safe place to raise kids, but I sometimes wonder if I'm going to be slowly chronicling the downfall of a neighborhood. Is this how neighborhoods go? How do you stop it?

Five minutes previous, I had told my wife what had happened. You should have seen the look in her eyes.

Our kids were in the backseat, playing.

OK, let me snap out of that for a second. After all, it is summer.

Here's something I love about this town.

The music.

As a guy who doesn't catch live music as much as he used to (babysitters are expensive, yo), I'm proud that City Paper has had the opportunity to bring local music to you in new ways. The first was Local Support, our twice-a-month podcast curated by Jon "The Human Radio Station" Solomon.

And now we're happy to present the CP Player (www.citypaper.net/musicstore).

"We're partnering up with the local dude at Apollo Audio to do this CP Player thing," explains special projects editor Brian Howard. "It's a pretty ingenious bit of Web-based software (meaning you don't have to download or install anything) that lets you stream entire albums right from our site. You'll have the ability to stream full albums of local artists we write about, as well as some of the local artists featured in Local Support."

And if you dig the album, you'll be able to click right through to the Apollo Audio site to buy it, digital or otherwise.

"It's just another way we're letting you hear the local music we think you need to hear," says Howard.

And not a single goddamned babysitting charge.

Finally, I'm not going to dance around it: We won an award, and we're damned proud of it. Our Choice Awards 2005 issue won a first place AltWeekly in the category of "Special Section" at the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies' convention last week. These awards are the Oscars of our particular industry, and I'm proud of our staff in a babbling, incoherent Sally Field-kind-of-way.