When I was a teen-ager, my idea of hell was a housing development I’ll call Shangri-La. We didn’t live there, but friends did, and every now and then my family would get in the car and take the long drive out for a barbecue or dinner party or some other celebration.

The friends were nice. Their kids were nice. Their dogs were nice. The house was nice. But if it were a daytime event, and we lingered too long, and the food was consumed and the conversation petered out, the vaccuum that was Shangri-La would start to close in.

“Go out and do something,” one of the adults would say to us.

And so we would walk, block after stultifying block, past new, identical brick ranch houses with sliding glass doors and identical front yards planted with young, skimpy trees. There was no shade, no thick-boled live oaks or bunchy, low-branched magnolias, no spanish moss, no interesting wooden two storied houses with ghostly histories, no hills (this was Louisiana, after all), no bodies of water beyond square blue pools, no ruins to peek into and explore.

There was nothing, absolutely nothing for teenagers to do in that well-manicured, upscale, cropped green desert but sit on the monkey-bars and smoke pot at the deserted local school. And I hated pot. It made me feel stupid.

All of the teenagers we hung out with there seem to have grown into nice, law-abiding adults, but for years, I was convinced those suburban pools of sensory deprivation were hatcheries for incipient school shooters and serial killers.