dark saturday

Yesterday morning we went out for lunch. I had done some stinky painting and we needed to get out of the house for a few hours. We had walked around the block scoping for garage sales, thought about going to the park but it looked like rain. We finally headed up to the junk food plaza (Tim's, our pizza place and Subway) and here's where the day started to feel warped and unreal. All of the light fixtures and ceiling tiles in the Tim's were hanging crazily from the ceiling. Renovations, ok but for some reason I found it very unnerving. Then we saw two cruisers and yellow caution tape around a pair of sneakers and a pile of bloody clothing. They were big white sneakers, teenage boys sneakers. We distracted monkeyboy with food and headed home and on the way home saw that the park was also ringed with yellow caution tape. That morning a couple of 16 year old boys had been stabbed across the street from the park(our park) by another couple of boys, thrown into a stolen white Lexus and then thrown out again a few blocks later at a plaza (our plaza). They were taken to the hospital where one of the boys died. Sad, sad, sad.
All day even before I knew all of these details, I felt edgy, out of sorts, charged, but in a totally aimless, frustrating way. On the late news, this story was preceeded and followed by stories about traffic accidents - a huge one to the south of town that closed part of the 400 down for the night and another, small but fatal, just north of my parents house ( both of these pretty much at the boundaries of my existence right now). Nothing touching me directly but my whole personal geography bracketed and laid over with violence and death, the dark underbelly of summer's energy.