This. Place.

This. Effing. Place.

I don’t think anyone necessarily should have seen it coming, but this is turning out to be a rather luckless location that I’ve moved to. Let’s review.

Before I moved here, Girlfriend did. I’ll give the area a pass on the sweltering heat in August, because it was August and actually pretty normal. I consider the real what-the-luck to have started with the earthquake on Girlfriend's second day of work. Then came the hurricane and the power outages, that very weekend if I recall correctly. Then the brawling teenagers in the driveway who broke down our basement door. The carbon monoxide leak.

This is all before I moved in, mind you. Things have been relatively low-key since then. The heat went on the fritz. The light fixture in the kitchen contrives to drip when I shower. While I understand that heat in the summer is the cost of doing business, I do hold it against the area that this winter there has been perhaps an inch of snow, total.

Last night someone was stabbed directly in front of my house. Directly. In. Front. You can’t see the blood on the sidewalk from the front door, because the two-foot hedge is in the way.

Okay. Before going further, I’ll let you know that the survived. He walked a few blocks until someone helped him. That’s basically all I know. I didn’t see anything.

Understanding that I am not remotely the person most inconvenienced by this, can I complain? Can I point out the maddening fact that this is the second time in six months that a stranger has bled on this property? May I point out that this is a row home, but these two incidents most emphatically happened in front of this house, not the contiguous houses on the left or the right of it? It’s not the neighborhood. I mean, this isn’t Medina, Washington, but we aren’t all averaging four assaults per street address per year.

I don’t know how awful it would have been to have seen that. There is something unsettling about having it happen within fifty feet of you and not finding out until a police detective knocks on your door and asks if you saw or heard anything. Answering “no” felt like a personal admission of failure. The callousness of me, the gall, not to notice a felony being committed through the bay window of my living room. Not to even be in the living room. What else could have been so important?

Ironically, the only one of us who saw anything at all was the one who wasn’t in the house. Beka had passed the victim and his good Samaritan a few blocks away while driving to the gym. I managed to feel somewhat useful by calling her up, and hooking the police up with her.

Of mild professional interest, last night was the first time I invoked the emergency clause of my contract and waived my unfinished requirements for the day. It was not quite the sort of emergency I had imagined when I wrote the clause, but I couldn’t concentrate.

Some days are better than others.