In totality, his appearance lends Paul Durica a somewhat professorial air that is at once reinforced by his occupation (English PhD student) and the subject of his discourse (history), and belied by the marvelously unsavory nature of the precise event he is conducting. Durica is the sole proprietor of the recently founded Pocket Guide to Hell Tours, and on this day he is leading a small mob of deeply interested people on a 90-minute walking tour of the architectural sites associated with the planning, execution, and aftermath of the brutal 1924 murder of 14-year old Bobby Franks by two teenage University of Chicago students: Nathan F. Leopold, Jr., and Richard A. Loeb.

Two of the deeply interested people hanging on Durica’s every word happen to be me and Ross. The tour is—let me be frank—extraordinarily entertaining. Durica speaks without notes, but with his hands (despite the fact that they turn ever more red with cold each time he removes his gloves so he can gesture more theatrically). He inhabits the skin of his characters like a true obsessive (but analyzes their behavior like a literary theorist). And he perfectly paces the revelation of each bizarre detail: the strange substance the police found on Bobby’s naked body, the typewritten ransom note whose text was stolen from the pages of a detective novel, the chisel thrown out of the window of a moving car.

Apart from anything else, Durica is having fun. His voice, always rich with pleasure in his tale, often rounds with laughter—and his delight legitimizes our own. We are, the lot of us, like children at a campsite fire, leaning forward to catch the darkest detail of the horror story we aren’t supposed to hear. I am reminded of how I used to feel when I read Agatha Christie novels back to back at the age of thirteen, shivery and captivated and thrilled by the meticulous imagination of the murderous mind.

Paul Durica says he is planning at least three other tours on different topics, slated to appear in the spring and summer months of 2009: none of them, he promises, will rise above the seedy underbelly of Chicago’s history.

Did you say you yet needed another reason to come and see me soon here in this city? Now you have one.

Well, mentally and emotionally energizing, anyway. Physically it has kind of pooped me out. Of course, it is also possible that I am simply suffering a blood sugar crash after having consumed half a slab of Ritter Sport yogurt chocolate.

Therefore, forgive me for the lapse, and know that if you, yourself, consume half a slab of Ritter Sport yogurt chocolate tonight, and be sure to tell me if half an hour later your eyelids begin to feel like lead weights, you will be doing a great service by adding to my set of experimental data.

Das ist alles.

I think this picture of Ben makes him look like Byron in a tender mood, don’t you? He was here this weekend for a rather exciting* couple of days, and I am very fond of cutting people’s faces up into little bits. (Really; just ask Ross.)

Re: visitations in general—I have to confess it has been rather a steep learning curve moving to a city that everyone wants to visit. I think we’ve had ten sets of friends and family fly in to stay with us this year. BUT! It turns out that I must not be nearly as antisocial as I declare**, since I have loved seeing all of my dear, dear guests immensely, and naturally Ben was far from the exception. Therefore, here is his yummy, cut-up face, and my Romantic thought, to break the silence of the week.

*Well, there were a couple of exciting moments. But we did spend rather a lot of time walking around Hyde Park, which became quite suddenly terribly famous six days ago but continues to lack a certain density of development. I was worried that Ben was not getting to see as much of the city I keep raving about as he wanted. Still, the immediate neighborhood was in good form: chilly but crisply beautiful and absolutely papered in golden leaves. Ben—used to the buzz of the Village—claimed to have been enjoying the quiet because it helped him relax and think. I suppose it’s possible he might have been telling the truth.

**I spelled that “declaire” the first time. And then I wondered what exactly one would have to do to an eclair in order to turn it into a declaire, and I got lost in chocolatey dreams for a minute.

Click through to the photo page for what I has ‘ter say.

I have a post-election hangover, which I treated with coffee and a fried egg and ham on challah toast. VERY effective.

Now, somehow, I have to go get my teeth cleaned at the dentist. I think I might fall asleep in the chair. Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaawn.

See you tomorrow, my dear dears.

I’m incredibly tired, and my head hurts as much as my feet, but man. I think the Chicago Humanities Festival is a force for good in the world.

He’s heading to a Halloween party (I’m skipping it) dressed as a software bug.

After Ross came up with this idea, he almost rejected it for being too dorky, but then he decided that it would be okay if really he was going as the kind of supreme dork who would dress up as a software bug for Halloween.

I cannot decide if this is a more or less sophisticated approach to the whole costume problem than what he did the last time he dressed up for the holiday.

Edited to add:

No, I didn’t think so.

As I said while I was putting on my coat to leave Megan’s warm, good-smelling apartment, it has been a long time since I’ve had two girlfriends who not only knew each other but also (as Tina added, nodding in agreement) lived in close enough proximity to make joint hanging out possible. I’m usually a one-friend-at-a-time fanatic, but even I have got to admit that there is something marvelous about a small party of three kindred spirits.

Since then, I’ve been working pretty hard; I’m trying to get a few assignments out of the way before this famed big project I’m supposed to be starting actually gets going later this week. Yesterday, that meant researching the state of scientific evidence proving the benefits of various forms of arts therapy. Today, it meant writing about prokaryotes. Did you know that some bacteria move around only with the help of tiny bundles of minerals embedded in their cytoplasm, constantly orienting and reorienting themselves in alignment with the Earth’s magnetic poles? I did not. Now I do. I also learned a new word: magnetotactic. Try saying it. Go on. You’ll like it.

By all of which, I suppose, I mean to say that perhaps work isn’t so bad right now after all. And as you can see, play is pretty good too.