Supremely Sweet

I just spent the better part of an hour beginning to craft a thoughtful, well-reasoned, articulate post on yesterday’s stunning Supreme Court decision to uphold the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. But I decided to scrap that and, instead, share my gut reactions and spare you the grievous long-windedness of which I’ve so often been guilty.

First of all, like most people, I think, I was shocked not only that the law wasn’t gutted by the reliably conservative-majority high court, but that John Roberts, the Bush-appointed chief justice, sided with the court’s four liberal justices. Sure, he labeled the individual mandate a “tax,” and sure, Mitt Romney and the Republicans will place that word front and center in their continuing efforts to repeal the law and defeat President Obama this fall. But make no mistake, affirming the constitutionality of the act is huge, and augers well for its continuing and complete implementation.

Second, the wildly improbable Roberts-led 5-4 decision led me to fancifully speculate on what might be next on a court suddenly so unpredictable. Might the pugnacious Justice Antonin Scalia abruptly resign to follow jam-band Phish on tour, announcing that he’d been only half-heartedly providing legal cover to religious zealots and rich people since Jerry Garcia died and the Grateful Dead disbanded? Would Justice Samuel Alito suddenly reverse himself on the right of private citizens to bear arms? Most shockingly, might Justice Clarence Thomas actually speak during oral arguments next term, if only to ask, “Um, could you repeat the question?”

Third, I pictured with glee the fury of the Right—from Republicans in Congress to commentators on Fox News—as they bitterly eyed the champagne that would not be uncorked, and stuffed the thundering speeches they’d prepared on the court’s “vindication” of the socialist “overreach” of “Obamacare.” (A term that always has struck me as being  the equal of “Democrat” Party in shrill, childish pettiness.)

Finally, once I’d cycled through the stages of amazement and Schadenfreude, I did consider what the high court’s ruling might ultimately mean for the millions of currently uninsured Americans who now have the promise of a medical safety net. This, of course, is what I’m most happy about today. But I’d have to say my mental images of guys like John Boehner, Mitch McConnell and the irrelevant but deafeningly loud blowhard Newt Gingrich losing their lunches yesterday still comes a shamefully but deliciously close second.

The Truth's Not Your Guide

A couple of decades ago, when I was a features writer at the Savannah Morning News, one of my colleagues wrote a story about the hideous inaccuracy of local tour guides. History drips from Savannah like Spanish moss from its trees, so every downtown square and building has a story—or, rather, many stories—of industry, infamy or intrigue. Our incognito journalist climbed aboard several different horse-drawn carriages, and maybe some horseless carriages, as well, to listen in on the tour guides’ narratives and later fact-check their statements. 

I don’t at this point recall any of the whoppers the ill-informed or just plain ignorant guides were overheard relating to gullible tourists. Suffice it to say, however, that names, dates, relationships and even basic logic, at times, were casualties of the need to fill dead air and to give moms, dads and grandparents the sense that their money was being well-spent. (The kids generally couldn’t have cared less, sitting there stupefyingly bored in those days before smartphones and tablet computers.)

Was it James Oglethorpe who’d founded Savannah in 1733, or James Otis in 1755? Who really cared? It was ancient history! Stories that were meant to kill time until the family proceeded down to River Street to lard up on fudge at the confectionaries.

Of course, we newspaper know-it-alls enjoyed scoffing at the stupid tour guides and feeling superior to them. Given that the only thing our college educations had gotten us to that point in our professional lives were poverty-wage jobs at a third-rate rag, we badly needed to redirect our contempt away from ourselves. We might never make it to the New York Times, we conceded, but we could assure any tourist that, no, Savannah’s Flannery O’Connor, the writer, was not kin to TV’s Carroll O’Connor, the guy who’d played Archie Bunker on All in the Family.

I got to thinking about all this recently, shortly after my friend Natalie Burt and her family debarked from the Washington, DC, area to return to their home in Henderson, Nevada, outside of Las Vegas. I worked with Natalie for a couple of years in Savannah. She’s now a high school teacher—I guess because, compared to print journalism, teaching at least is a stable low-paying, all-consuming, headache-producing occupation. Anyway, for years Natalie had been telling me that she, her husband Chris, and their two sons would come East for a family vacation in DC as soon as the boys were old enough to appreciate all the museums and whatnot, yet before they were old enough to realize that Washington is where our elected leaders come to bicker and posture and sit on their asses and not do the nation’s business. Earlier this month, the Burts’ long-promised vacation week finally arrived.

As it happened, they booked into a hotel that was just a few blocks from my office in Alexandria, Virginia. From there, they rode Metro each day into the District. Their schedule was very Smithsonian- and bird-centric, as 14-year-old Kyle is a natural history buff and avid birder. I checked in with them from time to time in the early days of their stay, and had a nice catching-up session with Natalie at the hotel one morning, while her family was upstairs sleeping and before I got to the office.

Anyway, I’m getting to the tour guides connection. We all decided that on Friday, near the end of their week here, I’d take the day off and drive the Burts to two rather far-flung venues not easily accessible by public transportation—Mount Vernon, the storied home of George Washington, located about a dozen miles south of Alexandria, and the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum’s Udvar-Hazy Annex, which is about 20 miles west of DC, near Dulles Airport. (The latter facility is huge, and houses such too-big-for-the National-Mall aircraft as the Space Shuttle Discovery, a Concorde, and this humongous black spy plane that used to fly over the Soviet Union at incredible speeds at a very high altitude.) The plan was, we’d spend the day at those two sites, then come back to my house for a great vegan meal that Lynn would prepare and that  the boys likely would hate.

The day went well. The crowd sizes were manageable, the weather was fantastic for DC in June (sunny and mild), and 9-year-old Ryan kept the whining to a minimum despite being at peak age for hating pretty much everything about enforced activities with adults. The boys did end up, in fact, pretty much loathing Lynn’s meal, but that was fine. Here's what brings me to this blog post, though. As the day’s events wore on, the number of tourist- and local interest-related questions from the Burts—queries for which I had incomplete, bluffed or no absolutely no answer—started piling up.

The worst moment for me came when we were driving away from Mount Vernon, up the George Washington Parkway toward Old Town Alexandria. Chris, sitting next to me in the car, pointed to a structure situated on a promontory in the distance, across the Potomac River from us, and asked, “What’s that fort over there?”

I responded with a pitying chuckle, “Fort?” Tourists see what they want to see, I thought. You’ve just come from the home of the guy who led the Continental Army to victory over the British during the Revolutionary War, so naturally you assume that any stone structure on the horizon must be a fort that protected the region back in Ye Olden Times.

“I don’t think it’s a fort,” I said in my kindest let-him-down easy voice. Except, when we got a little closer, it became clear that, damn, it sure as hell was a fort.

“I have no idea what fort that is,” I admitted, feeling a little humiliated and a lot stupid. Where had it come from? How long had it been there?

Well, that turned out to be just the first of many questions I’d get from various Burt family members that day that would give me pause. At this point, immersed again in their everyday lives in the Western desert, they might not remember they asked them. But I do. Being able to answer each query correctly, if belatedly, has consumed me. I've done a lot of research between then and now.

Before I get to the answers, though, I feel compelled to note that I did correctly respond, in real time, in the face of direct Burt family queries, that 1) George and Martha Washington had no children of their own together, that 2) William Henry Harrison was the American president who died of pneumonia after just a brief time in office because he’d been improperly dressed for the cold when he gave his really long inaugural speech., and that 3) Lynn’s birth state of Rhode Island is “about 45 miles” north to south (it’s actually 48 miles long, according to 50states.com). Also, when Chris asked me if DC has a “rainy season,” I answered “not really” based on years of observation, and the data back me up. Per “DC Weather Facts,” average precipitation here varies fairly little from month to month, let alone from season to season.

So, here, by geographic categories, are my original answers to various questions posed by the Burts, and my subsequent findings.

Virginia
The stupid fort that sprang up across the Potomac from Mount Vernon all of a sudden, making me look like an ignoramus, is, in fact, Fort Washington. (Actually, it’s located in Maryland, but Chris asked me about it while we were in Virginia.) The structure was built in 1809 to guard the Nation’s Capital. It was DC’s only line of defense during the Civil War until several temporary forts were constructed in Maryland and the District. Fort Washington also was a troop-staging area during World War I, and it housed some government agencies for a time after the Second World War. It stands now primarily as mute testament to the fact that you can drive up a parkway many times over the years without noticing a major landmark if you’re about as observant as is Mister Magoo. 

As far as the childless George and Martha Washington go, I might have added, had I known this at the time, that “it has always been thought that George Washington was sterile.” But then again, did the Burt children really need to know that the Father of Our Country was shooting blanks in the old featherbed with Martha? That tidbit probably was best left unsaid.

I remember asserting to the Burts that William Henry Harrison (who somehow came up in conversation while we were at Mount Vernon) had died after only two months in office. Oops. Let’s half that figure. Harrison gave his long-ass inaugural address (it dragged on for an hour and 40 minutes) on March 4, 1841, and he succumbed to pneumonia exactly one month later, on April 4. (I’m guessing he didn’t make it to his inaugural balls. At least I hope not, for the sake of his likely dance partners.)

Washington, DC
I’d been confounded by the Burt-ian question, “What’s a Hoya?” as in the Georgetown University Hoyas. I’d looked it up before, and I’d told the Burts that I didn’t believe there was a definitive answer. I'm vindicated in that response by HoyaSaxa.com, which notes, “The origins of the word ‘Hoya’ defy simple explanation.” A possible answer, I learned, is that a Georgetown student in the 19th century created the phrase hoia saxa from Greek and Latin, to mean “what rocks.” Whereupon fans of the school’s baseball team started chanting it, because it still would be more than a century until the British band Queen would issue the definitive pledge “We Will Rock You.”

OK, so, yes, I ‘d been right about Washington not having a “rainy season” per se. But Chris also had asked me how much precipitation we get annually, and how many inches of snow. I had no answer to the first question, and guessed “a foot” to the second. It turns out that DC gets an average of 39.35 inches of precipitation annually, and 17.1 inches of snow. In fact, since I’m a regular meteorologist when I’ve got a bunch of printed-out weather data right in front of me, I’ll go ahead and add that Washington gets precipitation on an average of 113 days during the year, and that Las Vegas, by contrast, averages only 4.49 inches of precipitation annually—spaced over 26 days—and a scant 1.2 inches of snow.

At one point Natalie and Chris and I were talking about how low-slung DC’s skyline is compared with that of Las Vegas because, by law, no structure in DC can be taller than the Washington Monument. While I went along with that statement because I couldn’t remember the real answer, I knew that the Washington Monument thing is a popular myth. Actually, the federal Height of Buildings Act of 1910 dictates that no residential building in the District can be taller than 90 feet and that no commercial building can exceed 160 feet, although there have been some exceptions to those prohibitions over the years. The law had come in response to the construction in the late 19th century of a hotel that Congress apparently thought was way too tall.

I found online a Slate.com blog post in which a guy named Matthew Yglesias argued earlier this year that DC needs skyscrapers so it can add jobs, lower hotel rates, and increase tax revenues. He scoffed at the notion that easing height restrictions might, well, Vegas-ize the city. To Yglesias, the need literally to raise the city’s profile is a no-brainer.

I’m not sure I buy his arguments. I do, however, see the height restrictions as yet another infuriating instance of  taxation without representation, with DC residents getting no say in an important local matter. It’s a gripe I recall having expressed to the Burts when we were driving past the odiously named Reagan National Airport. Never mind that Ronald Reagan never had many fans among the liberal electorate of the DC area, and never mind, too, that the Gipper, was, ironically, the president who fired the air traffic controllers. If Congress says our local airport must be named after “The Great Communicator,” that’s that.

Maryland
When we were driving parallel to the C&O Canal towpath on the Clara Barton Parkway that Friday afternoon, closing in on my house, the Burt boys were disgusted/delighted to report that everything suddenly smelled as if someone had farted in a particularly epic manner. Their noses had registered what long has been a major annoyance to we locals. The parkway ride is lush and beautiful, and the towpath is a wonderful a recreational resource , but the malodorous truth is, the entire area often smells like a rancid turdfest—because of an exposed sewer line, or something.

That had been my answer to the Burts—that it all has to do with a sewer line of some sort. That was as much as I could remember at the time. Mostly, I just wanted to quash any familial suspicion at that moment that their chauffeur had just Cut One for the ages. Subsequent research reveals that, yes, a 50-mile-long “gravity sewer” transports wastewater from Dulles Airport to a treatment plant in DC, resulting in “notorious odors” at vent locations along the canal path. Apparently construction has begun, however, on a series of six “ventilation buildings” along the route that are supposed to markedly detoxify things starting sometime next year. I really don’t understand the engineering of it all. But I’d truly love, in the future, no longer to recoil in nasal horror whenever I'm near the canal and the wind shifts. Or to be asked by gasping out-of-towners, “What died—and how big must it have been?”

One final Burt question I received before we made it to the house that day was, “What’s the story with the one-lane bridge?” The reference was to an impressive stone structure less than a mile from my home that connects the Cabin John and Bethesda/Glen Echo segments of MacArthur Boulevard, above the Cabin John Parkway. This query was particularly maddening to me because, while I remembered enough to be able to confidently inform the Burts that the bridge had been considered an engineering marvel upon its construction in the 19th century, I couldn’t reel in any of the specifics—or even name the structure.

So, here’s that story. It’s the Union Arch Bridge (informally known as the Cabin John Bridge). It was designed as part of the Washington Aqueduct and as a roadway bridge. Upon completion in 1864, it was the longest single-span masonry arch in the world. The bridge was designated a Historic National Civil Engineering Landmark in 1972 by the American Society of Civil Engineers, and a year later, was added to the National Register of Historic Places.

I also could have told the Burts, but didn’t, that the bridge is breathtaking to look up at when you’re driving along the Cabin John Parkway, and that its single, traffic light-regulated lane presents a monumental pain in the patoot when traffic backs up during the morning and afternoon commutes.

Miscellaneous
One last thing related to the Burts' visit came up when I was listening, the day after our day together, to Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, the weekly news quiz that airs on National Public Radio. Host Peter Sagal had author John Irving on the phone. Riffing off the name of one of Irving’s best-known books, The World According to Garp, Sagal was asking the acclaimed novelist a series of questions about gorp.

Now, I don’t think I’d heard the word “gorp” uttered since my Boy Scout days in the early 1970s—until, in the parking lot at Mount Vernon, Natalie offered her family a baggie stuffed with the venerable trail mix. I forget which of the boys asked, “What does gorp mean?”, but Natalie or Chris answered that it's an acronym for “good old raisins and peanuts.” That explanation sounded right to me.

According to Peter Sagal, however, that's a common misconception, and gorp actually is an Old English word meaning “to gobble or eat greedily.” (If you didn’t know that, don’t feel bad. John Irving got it wrong, too.)

Some other gorp trivia, courtesy of the show: In New Zealand, what we call gorp is known as schmogle, and sometimes scroggin. Also, in 1980 a movie titled Gorp was released. It was about “a mischievous camp counselor with a mad crush on a sexy waitress played by Fran Drescher.”

I’m going to stop now, so I can post this piece and e-mail the link to Natalie. Surely she and her family have been losing sleep over all the unanswered and under-answered questions they left behind on the East Coast, so I feel it’s my duty to enlighten them.

Then, sometime soon, I’m going to drive over to Fort Washington to satisfy myself that it’s not really all an elaborate hoax—a giant painted backdrop, propped against a hillside and legitimized by a fake Web site, constructed for the sole purpose of making me look like some clownish Savannah tour guide.

Grim-Reality TV

Whenever I run on Lilly Stone Drive, a hilly, well-shaded street about a mile and a half from my house, I think of Brad Bishop. I wonder if he’s still alive, and which of the tidy suburban homes I’m passing had once been splattered with blood.

On March 1, 1976, Bishop was a 39-year-old officer in the US Foreign Service, stationed at the State Department in DC. A Yale man, he was fluent in five languages. He’d previously been posted in Italy, Ethiopia, and Botswana. On that late-winter day, however, he’d learned he would not receive a promotion he’d sought.

Subsequent events would suggest he took the news poorly. The sequence later pieced together by law enforcement started with Bishop leaving work early, then had him withdrawing several hundred dollars from his bank, next had him going to a hardware store to buy a ball-peen hammer, a shovel and gas can, and, finally, had him returning that evening to his Bethesda-area residence, where he bludgeoned to death with a blunt object his wife, mother, and sons (ages 5, 10 and 14).

The next day, a forest ranger 275 miles away in North Carolina responded to a smoke alert and found five partially burned bodies and a shovel that had been purchased, according to its label, at Montgomery Mall in Bethesda.

On March 18, 1976, the Bishop family station wagon was found abandoned in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, about 400 miles west of the site of the grisly pyre. The spare tire well was covered with blood. Among the items inside the car was a box of dog biscuits; the family’s golden retriever was missing when police searched the crime scene on Lilly Stone Drive.

On March 19, a grand jury indicted Brad Bishop on five counts of first-degree murder. But where the accused was by that time—or where he’s been anytime since, for that matter—is anyone’s guess. Given such factors as his one-week jump on police before the burned corpses were linked to Maryland, his diplomatic passport, and the easiness of inconspicuous travel in those days before electronic tracking and terrorist threats, escape really hadn’t been that difficult for Brad Bishop. (This isn’t legitimately analogous, but I always think about how Dr Richard Kimble, The Fugitive of 1960s TV, remained successfully on the lam all those years simply by dyeing his hair and mumbling his way through a succession of blue-collar jobs.)

There’s a Wikipedia page for “Bradford Bishop,” just as there’s a Wikipedia page for everything. It features an age-enhanced photo from 1986, copyrighted by NBC News, depicting what the accused might have looked like 10 years after his disappearance. It notes that the case has been featured over the years on America’s Most Wanted and Unsolved Mysteries. It mentions that alleged Brad Bishop sightings included one by a former neighbor who could swear that was him on a train platform in Basel, Switzerland, in 1994.

Several years ago, the Washington Post interviewed the guy who then lived in the former Bishop home—without revealing the homeowner’s real name or the address on Lilly Stone. The guy said, essentially, that he’d gotten such a great price on the place, and that he liked living there so much, that he didn’t give a damn if the Holocaust had been perpetrated within the structure’s whitewashed walls. He allowed that he occasionally had to shoo away gawkers who knew the home’s history and wanted a look inside. (I never would be that rude. I’d just stare from the street. OK, and maybe ask the homeowner to pose outside for a quick snapshot, holding a hammer and shovel.)

Oh, here’s one other detail Wikipedia contributors turned up somewhere. Brad Bishop had complained to a co-worker that this wife and his mother constantly belittled him as a loser whose career was going nowhere. (So, case closed! Justifiable homicide, apparently.)

As you may have inferred by now, the Bishop case fascinates me—as do, to a lesser but still considerable degree, several other local crime scenes past which I run on a fairly regular basis.

There’s the idyllic Brookmont neighborhood off MacArthur Boulevard near the District line—a haven for kayakers that’s an easy walk to the Potomac River. That’s where Alison Thresher’s parked car was found in 2000. The 45-year-old divorcee had just started a new job as a Washington Post copy editor when she went missing without a trace. Police classified it a homicide. Years later she finally was declared legally dead, allowing her two daughters to collect Social Security survivors’ benefits.

A few miles south of there, on a handsome stretch of Reservoir Road NW across from the German Embassy, is a cute house I’d seen trimmed with crime-scene tape in 1999. It was the site of a murder-suicide in which an estranged husband blew out his romance-novelist wife’s brains (no wonder she took refuge in flowery prose) in front of the couple’s two young children. A “short time later,” according to a news account, the husband, a retired Marine, drove his jeep to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, put a shotgun barrel down his own throat and pulled the trigger.

Northwest, DC, in fact, for all its pricey real estate and leafy beauty, is fertile ground for tourists of headline-grabbing homicides. One of my frequent weekend runs, for example, takes me past not only the Rock Creek Park hillside on which former congressional intern Chandra Levy’s badly decomposed body finally was found more than a year after her 2001 disappearance, but also past the home near Chevy Chase Circle where, on July 16, 2003, a promising Indian-American poet named Reetika Vazirani stabbed to death with a kitchen knife her two-year-old son and then herself. That story was made even bigger by the fact that the home was owned by prize-winning novelist Howard Norman, for whom Vazirani had been house-sitting. (Presumably “No violent crimes!” subsequently was added to the tenant agreement, right after “Please do not use the good china.”)

I don’t listen to an iPod when I run, so that may be one reason these crimes have gotten so deeply inside my head. Speculating on how Brad Bishop’s conscience is treating him at age 75—or whether Reetika Vazirani was a sad caricature of the tortured artist, or if the guy ultimately convicted of Chandra Levy’s murder entirely on circumstantial evidence really did it—is a welcome distraction from my own cardiovascular distress as I huff and puff my middle-aged way over hill and down dale. I’m not a violent person, and I don’t romanticize violence. I’m not merely in favor of gun control, but of repealing the Second Amendment right of private citizens to bear arms. I’m opposed to the death penalty, feeling strongly that state-sponsored killing of murderers is simply an ugly case of two wrongs not making a right.

But here’s my dirty little secret: I am addicted to ID. As in Investigation Discovery, a four-year-old cable television channel whose market niche is all murder and mayhem, all the time. They’re all events that really happened, and the vast majority of the programming is original—put together at low cost by pairing law enforcement and eyewitness accounts with historical footage and an abundance of cheesy reenactments in which the actors are more physically attractive than were the actual victims and criminals. (This is particularly true of the actresses who play unlucky wives and the voluptuous chippies who fueled hubby’s murderlust.)

Actually, if ID is news to you, the following list of selected show titles gets straight to the telltale heart of what the network is all about: Blood, Lies and Alibis, Nightmare Next Door, Unusual Suspects, Deadly Women, Disappeared, Scorned: Love Kills, Who the &!$/ Did I Marry?, Wicked Attraction. (My dream job once was writing headlines for the New York City tabloids—the all-time classic there having been “Headless Body in Topless Bar.” But now my ideal employment might be naming TV series on ID.)

To say that this lineup has been a winning formula for parent company Discovery Communications is putting it mildly. I’m far from the network’s only fan, abashed or otherwise. ID advertises itself as “America’s fastest-growing network,” a claim that is dead-seriously accurate. The channel has added 30 million new subscribers since its changeover in 2008 from something called Discovery Times (focused, damningly, on culture). As of this February, ID was the third-most-popular network among women in the coveted 25-to-54 age bracket. (Their allegiance being a reward, no doubt, for ID’s excellent guidance on who not to marry, and on which crazy-bitch dames to bar from the book group.)

I’m neither a psychiatrist nor a sociologist, so I can’t definitively say why I and so many other Americans (a lot of them women, apparently) have fallen so hard for ID. (Talk about your wicked attractions!) But I’ve got some theories.

I found an article online in which Paula Zahn, the bona fide investigative journalist who’s worked for ABC, CBS and CNN, discussed her initial skepticism when ID wooed her to lend the upstart channel some credibility. The economy was in the tank, the public was depressed, nobody in TV was spending money on programming, yadda yadda yadda. Well, exactly! as it turned out. Zahn signed on to host a show anyway, and ended up being happy she did. Bad economy? What better tonic for underemployed and unhappy Americans than to feast on shows with such takeaway messages “At least no one’s murdered me!”, “My no-account spouse may be a worthless shit, but no he’s killer,” and “Ha! No gambling debts requiring extreme remedies in this house!”  Little money to spend on high production values? Who needs it? America loves cheaply-produced reality television, and you can’t get more real than true-life crime stories.

Not that fascination with violence is a uniquely American phenomenon, but I also think there’s something in this nation’s history—from the Second Amendment through the Wild West, the gangster wars of the Depression era, the Manson Family, Jonestown, even that horrendous killing of Afghan civilians by a US Army sergeant earlier this year—that somehow makes violence part of our DNA. We may embrace it or reject it, arm ourselves or rail against arms, seek retribution or demand preventive measures. But violence, whether we like it or not, is part of who we are as a people. It’s seductive to most of us in some way, even if only as a foil or a perverse entertainment.

But I don’t know. Maybe I’m unjustly sullying the reputations of millions of peace-loving Americans who’d never give ID the time of day. Perhaps I should be ashamed of myself for watching these shows, rather than just a bit embarrassed. But, do you know what? I hope my friend Kathy will forgive me here for implicating her in my own search for absolution, but she is one of the kindest, most loving people I know. She radiates such Goodness that I sometimes feel blinded by her light. Kathy wouldn’t be satisfied with just giving you the shirt off her back—she’d go into debt, if necessary, to buy you exactly the shirt you really wanted. Yet when I mentioned ID to her in passing a few months ago, her eyes lit up. Her peepers told me she was a fellow addict before her mouth did.

Maybe, too, I’m over-thinking all this. There’s something inherently compelling about stories of crazy passion and fatal consequences that in no way resemble our daily lives, but that aren’t so very far-fetched, either. I write that as a guy who lives in the safe suburbs, yet who, in the course of a single not particularly ambitious run, can encounter an array of sites that are associated with murder most foul.

The nightmare next door, indeed.