Oh, and then there's the whole "rented house where there's been past trouble" thing.

One thing I find frankly off-putting is how the people on the lake gossip. There was a house last year (for all I know the same house and maybe my mom didn't rememeber she already had told me about it) that was reputed to be some sort of "drug house" (said in hushed, white middle-class tones) that everyone gossiped about. So whatever passes for a town authority and police decided to hang a streetlight near it. And then at least one resident would sit in his truck and surveil it. Believe it or not.

I dunno. There's things like this that sort of creep me out about Lake Waukomis. But, gosh, my mom and her husband are so hugely happy there. They're both very social people and things like parties with scavenger hunts boating on the lake are their bread-and-butter.

She'd probably kill me if I she knew I wrote this becaused she's so pissed at herself, but she was at a lake party two weeks ago when, somehow, the subject of gymnastics-type stuff came up. She and her husband, Gary (who was my dad's best man at my parents wedding, but that's another story) are over 60. Gary mentioned that he could walk on his hands. So he did. My mom has always been proud that she can stand on her head. So she did. Then fell, and injured her back. Now she's got a pinched nerve and is undergoing various medical procedures. I was like, "Mom, if you found out that me or Karli (my sister and I both have this bone disease from our dad) stood on our heads, you'd be furious. You're sixty, what were you thinking??"

That wasn't the best thing since, apparently, she's been in a self-recriminatory loop for two weeks now.

Those wacky parents, eh?

Oh that's horrible. It made me think of the movie A Place in the Sun, with Montgomery Clift and Shelley Winters. He takes her out late at night in a canoe to kill her (so he can be with Elizabeth Taylor) and then relents, and then they argue and she falls overboard and he lets her drown.

That's a really odd story. You're right, it suggests a LOT more than is actually explained.

It's unclear from the news story, but it seems likely to me that they took the canoe somewhere earlier, had too much to drink (or whatever), fought, then were maybe trying to return (PUI) in the canoe. That seems to make a little more sense than going out in the canoe after/during fighting.

So whatever passes for a town authority and police decided to hang a streetlight near it. And then at least one resident would sit in his truck and surveil it. Believe it or not.

I believe it. Damn, do I ever.

I spent a brief period last year in a non-gated planned suburban community where everything was fucking beige and most everyone kind-of knew each other, but undoubtably formed few lasting bonds. Very upper-middle-class, most likely very Republican.

Said McMansion housing development had it's own small team of rent-a-cops seemingly employed specifically for the intent of ferreting out any undue weirdness and Home Owners Association violations.

To the extremeness of actually noticing that my GF's car was parked on the actual street more than two days in a row. To the point of parking askew in the street and lighting it up with spotlights for a whole hour while also lighting up our bedroom window and - I guess - writing down the plate numbers, running them, and recording any other suspicious details and intricacies in the car, not excluding the possibility of photographing any number of subcultural self-adhesive vehicular stickers.

To the extremeness of following me around on bicycle rides around the neighborhoods and even out into the open desert, because God forbid only a dead-Red communist penguin fucker would ever even think of, say, riding out into the very near-by open and wild desert to - for example - sit in a leisurely fashion in a folding camp chair and enjoy the fucking scenery.

I swear to nun-fucking Cthulhu that the neighbors' heads just about exploded when I displayed the raw and outrageous hubris required to bicycle under my own power at a much too leisurely pace out of said housing development rather than tearing across it in at an unsafe velocity in an agressive, Earth-raping fashion whilst astride some gas-guzzling, smoke-spewing, overpowered and brightly colored foreign-manufactured motorized contraption.

What nerve! I must be totally insane.

That's the time you need a Harley with open pipes, Loq.

I simply can not understand the appeal of living in a walled city with identical crapboxes sidebysidebyside with no space, no mature trees, and no freakin' variety whatsoever.

Hell on earth, IMO.

I don't get it either, FFF. It freaks me out. All that sameness reminds me of Soviet state-sponsored housing. And don't get me started on the horrible cyclops windows people insist on plopping in the middle of a perfectly nice colonial. Lord, I HATE THOSE WINDOWS.

I once overheard two of my development-dwelling friends talking about my house. They agreed that the big old trees were nice, but lamented that they were "dirty" and full of bugs. They also thought living in an older house like mine was "gross" because you were living with "other people's dirt."

But, back to the topic at hand...they drowned 75 feet from shore? Could they not swim at all? And if not, why were they in a boat with no life vests?

Easier to drown when drunk, I'd imagine.

Well, the good thing about Lake Waukomis is that it's not one of those new, planned communities where people build McMansions. It's too old for that (50 years), and not nearly nice enough for that. The people there are the kind of middle-class people that want to live on a lake, they're not there for status. The houses are all decades old and not anything different than other KC neighborhoods that old.

So the paranoia isn't the kind you're talking about, more like small town paranoia. I think these people do form lasting bonds.

But still the paranoia does bother me.

And I think taz has the likely scenario.