this new house
when both of these books find their way to your nightstand at the same time...



...you naturally find yourself wondering what the hell might have "happened" in your house prior to moving in.

then it hits you. your house was built in 1998. nothing happened. no heads in ovens. no nooses on rafters. no blood in the bathtub. no infant ghosts in the floorboards.
in fact, you probably don't even have any floorboards or rafters.

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up until six months ago, i may not have been living there, but i was paying rent on an adorable little cottage built haphazardly behind a pale yellow victorian stick house near downtown san diego. my landlord grew up in the big house, and thus, i had some glimpses into the history of the little shack.

i knew the cottage was built by hand by her family. i knew babies were born in my living room. i knew people died in the big house. i knew crimes happened in the alley, a foot from my door. police chases, attacks, robberies, rapes. names had been written by the children in the concrete pathway with fingertips or twigs decades ago.

this is the life i crave - something so rich with history that it may even make you a little afraid at times. at two in the morning you're awakened by nothing more than the air, thick with passion of former lives and former loves and former endings.

-

perhaps history, then, is why people pay $389,000 (current asking price) for something like this: