I hate a guy with a car and no sense of humor.
 
—Halloween (Dir. John Carpenter, 1978)
 


Soph texts me a picture.
It's a parked car at the end 
of her street. It's the exact
station wagon from Halloween 
Michael Myers steals to escape
the asylum where he was
confined during the years after 
he murdered his sister in a
psychosexual fit. My first car 
was a 1993 Volkswagen. The
speedometer didn't work
which was funny as in
it made me nervous, induced 
a fearfulness of the endless 
or undetermined, probably a latent
cultural prerogative's structural
trigger. How fast am I going 
and when will this be over?
It's easy to determine the horrific
motivations of monsters to violence.
They're often banal, clear
and resolved, a shape inexorably 
approaching at a determined
velocity. A friend invited me
over to their place for a drink.
Though we've been friends for a while,
as in we've exchanged logins
to a couple streaming apps, I've 
never seen the inside of their apartment,
but I know they live without roommates.
I imagined something reasonable: Ikea, maybe
a coffee table, a correlation with trends and 
aesthetics compounded through
capital's stranglehold on our
pataphysical relation to what
we imagine as signifiers of ourselves.
We watched an episode of Twin Peaks
(third season, which I'd already seen),
the one where the goblin in the box
shreds those two teenagers. I was
high and a little freaked out—less due
to Lynch than my own underlying
anticipation of a sporadic, structureless
panic—and walked home that evening,
nibbling my friend's water crackers. 
I used to suffer terrible anxiety 
attacks, existential terror
sirening through me and parking
in my collar, floodlights shining,
filling in the gaps between my bones. 
I still have them, but they are less frequent,
their mitigation a remedy of CBT and 
on-again, off-again analysis. I think
I need to relax. Should I relax?
Okay, I'm relaxing. Ben gave me
the password to his Shudder account. 
Zombi 2 (1979) and Tourist Trap (1979),
a camp classic double feature. 
A shark attacking the living 
dead and—up next—shambling 
mannequins who telekinetically torment 
stranded vacationers have a calming influence.
Their excesses, both gore and genre,
render its vehicle so replete each becomes
an antidote for any lesser dread.

[Brooklyn, 10/31/18]