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We all have our own funny little murder house stories, apparently.

At the beginning of this year, Marie Jameson went missing, last known whereabouts; the liquor shop next to my house. This didn't really affect me - callous as it sounds, I didn't know her.

The part that really hit me was when the police, in their routine questioning of people in the area, asked me if I'd seen anyone suspicious.

Ahem.

My flatmates for a start, are some of the dodgiest motherfuckers to never be trusted with scissors that I've ever had the displeasure of having to spurn in favour of actual human companionship.

Then there is the army of people who, at the invitation of sundry flatmates, sporadically invade the flat to engage in miscellany less moral than it is legal.

Then there are the neighbours - I live above funeral parlour, which is next to a bar, a pornographic video store, another bar, a bottle shop, something that may actually be an art gallery - I'm not sure - and across the road from another bar. And this is to say nothing of the other bottle shop on the opposite side of the flat, the several low class strip clubs I can see from my bedroom window, the halfway house a few streets over, the graveyard down the road, or the high security prison slightly less than ten minutes walk from my front door.

And finally - When you live 15 minutes walk from the center of town, on the intersection of three of Auckland's more major roads, the foot traffic doesn't exactly restrict itself to a light, daytime scattering of well-heeled gentleman millionaires. I hear screams every night - The only reason I can get to sleep is that most (most) of the cries that echo through my window as I'm lying in bed sound like people who have just had too much too drink.

So, in summation, EVERYONE I've seen in the year I've been living in this area is suspicious. 'Suspicious' where I live is someone walking along the street looking like they DON'T have some horrible secret waiting to jump out and damn them.

"No," I muttered to the officer, because I hadn't, on the night of Marie Jameson's disappearance, seen anything any more unusual than usual.

So anyway, I was giving the preceding rant to one of my friends a while back (I believe she made the mistake of asking "How are you?"). Rather than the usual tactic of smiling, nodding, and running for her life often employed by the poor wretches I inflict myself on, she just smiled knowingly, and replied "Yes yes, we all have our own funny little murder house stories."

You see, in my own self interested raving, I had forgotten what happened with her last year. She didn't see her next door neighbours for a week, and thought nothing of it until she found out that the reason was one had been arrested for killing the other.

Now, how is it that we live in a society where "We all have our own funny little MURDER HOUSE stories"?

I try, I really try to believe that we live in a good world. A world that makes sense, a world that has rules, that runs on logic, a world that works properly. But you know, the longer I live here, the more I see that that simply isn't the case.

I think I'm a little frightened by the idea of a world totally without guidance, a world where you have no way of predicting what will happen next, a world where you could be ended in the space of a heartbeat, where everything you hold sacred, everything you are, can change with one event, one tragedy. I'm built to live in a world that's nice, predictable, straightforward, and strangely lacking in criminally insane lunatics lurking around the parking lot under my sitting room.

I'm sure that sounds to a lot of you like the antithesis of fun. But for me, fun is knowing where I am, and where I'm sleeping tonight. The idea that we live in a world where my belongings, my home, my self, all ride loose, tossed along on a turbulent sea of randomness, makes me feel very unstable.

I heard something once - 'In the land of the insane, the sane man is king'. There is no question in my mind as to the legitimacy of this statement. In fact, I only have one question at all -

Where's my fucking crown already?