Don’t Run Away, It’s Only Me

Matthew Eng, Offbeat NOVA

When the COVID-19 quarantine began in the middle of March, Angela and I were faced with a number of new realities:

• How do we entertain a 4-year-old while still maintaining a relatively normal work schedule for telework?
• How do we maintain our sanity stuck at home for weeks on end with said 4-year-old who wants nothing else to do but go outside, see family, and play with others?
• What will we do with everything in between that will feel like fun, teach our daughter a few things, and keep us from going insane?

We could only do so much at once, so we spent most of March and April working on the first two of those problems. I will be the first to admit that it was very hard at first. It was hard for everybody. But we persevered after stumbling through the first few weeks to establish a good rhythm to our daily work schedule. But how would we control our “off time,” when we’re at home 24/7?

We did watch a lot of television at first. In some ways, it was nice to catch up on shows we either forgot to watch or always wanted to. Naturally, we watched Tiger King like everyone else. We took the opportunity during the episode where it was clear that Carole Baskin killed her husband to down a bottle of wine together. That was the first time that we allowed ourselves to relax during the entire quarantine. It felt good, but we knew it wouldn’t last. Watching lots of television got old real fast.

One of the other shows we watched during this time of quarantine was Mindhunter. I actually started it almost a year ago, but stopped after four episodes once Angela discovered that I had straight up Netflix-cheated on her. She wasn’t happy, but I remedied the situation, using the opportunity in quarantine to get Angela’s trust back. We started watching it in early May and blew through both seasons within a week and a half. The show got both of us thinking about what strange events and occurrences happened around our area. But how could we search those out in quarantine?

The one way we took back some of the freedoms we used to have without being an entitled asshole who thinks life should go on regardless (if you’re one of those people, thanks for reading but you’re a huge selfish asshole) was to get in our car and drive around. It’s something we both agreed would be both productive and let us “stretch our own legs” in relative safety. Most of the time, we would go into Washington, D.C. Angela loves to drive around the city and people watch. Only there weren’t many people to watch from our car. Once the tragedy of George Floyd happened at the end of May, much of the district was restricted (either by closed roads or a punk-ass wall around the White House). We had to look for other options.

We spent most of June driving around our neck of the woods in Northern Virginia. With such a big territory to cover (over 1,300 square miles), we had to start planning where we were going, so Angela sought out sites that drew her interest. I did the same. We found two or three places that each of us that we wanted to go, packed up our car with our daughter, water, and snacks, and hit the road.

With a car, we could go essentially anywhere to look for whatever clues we could about the area’s past. At first, these targeted drives were a sheepishly fun act of mild historical voyeurism. It was only when we got home that things really started to connect. At night, I would think about the places we went to our weekend drives, wondering how they might fit together in a story or video. When I stayed up at night looking at my phone, I was not chatting with good friends or being sociable. I was feeding my curiosity and secretly filing them away in Google Chrome tabs and scattered notes on my tiny 6.1-inch iPhone screen.

It turns out Angela was doing the same thing. This was the beginning of Offbeat NOVA.

Here’s what you can expect from Offbeat NOVA in the near future:

• A local legend that doesn’t get nearly enough credit for how creepy it is.
• There’s a tunnel in the heart of NOVA’s gentrified mecca with a dark and mysterious past filled with intrigue, abuse, and murder.
• What is it like getting a soda and Cheetos at the same 7-11 where police put John Bobbitt’s dick on ice in a hot dog container?
• Did you know that Northern Virginia had its very own theme park one hundred years ago?
• Just how many dead bodies are found in local area motels? It turns out…a lot.

Stay tuned.